Why Is It So Difficult for Barnes & Noble to Get It Right?

 I suppose I'm being oversensitive about the relatively new Barnes & Noble "Rewards Card" program, but my limited experience in the program screams SCAM very loudly. 

The basics: B&N pushes this heavily at checkout, and because it was a quick sign-up process (hand over an email address and get your new card in about two minutes) I went along with it. The program says that for every $10 spent, the customer will receive one digital "stamp," and that ten stamps will earn you a $5 store credit. So, effectively, you are getting a 5% rebate on every $100 spent...not much, but what the heck; it's more than I was getting before and it pays a little over one-half of the sales tax due on any given purchase. 

But here's the kicker: One day last week I bought a $35 book, and today I bought a $17 book. That's a total of $52 before sales tax, so I would expect to have earned five digital stamps at this point. But no way is B&N going to bother to keep track of actual spending. Instead they round down to 3 stamps on purchase number one, and one stamp on purchase number two, resulting in four stamps. The additional $12 spent earns squat. 

The main reason I find this so irritating is that it's just another sign of how stupid retailers believe their customers are. If B&N can keep track of how many stamps I have in my specific account, they can keep track of my true cumulative spending. It's the same process. As it is, the whole plan is borderline ridiculous, but this little trick of theirs to round down on every purchase definitely throws it into the "not worth the effort" category for me. 

Yep, I'm feeling cantankerous today...as I'm sure you can tell. 

Totally Frustrated and Saddened by What I Find at Barnes & Noble (And What I Don't Find) Nowadays

I very clearly remember the feeling of stepping into a Barnes & Noble bookstore with a feeling that I was certain to leave the store with at least four or five books in my arms. I remember just how much fun that was. The problem is I can't remember the last time it happened.

However, a quick look at Wikipedia tells me it was probably not too long after Elliott Management Corporation acquired the company for $683 million back in August 2019. B&N remains a wholly owned subsidiary of Elliott's to this day. Elliott also owns and runs the huge Waterstones Booksellers chain in the UK, and the problem is that the new owners decided to use the British bookselling model on Barnes & Noble rather than using the American model on Waterstones. 

That means effectively that everything sold in either chain is priced at the recommended list price that the publisher chooses or it is put on sale in one of those "buy one at full price, get another at 50% off, schemes that I seldom use (in effect, that means paying 75% of list for each book). I lived for several years in London and frequented Waterstones because it seemed to be everywhere I went, but I probably didn't make that decision more than a half-dozen times in all those years because the "second book" part of the deal was limited to just a handful of books similar to the one I really wanted at the moment.

That used to be not such a big problem at B&N (even in London), though, because of the always-arbitrary selection of bestsellers that they chose to discount in both hardcover and softcover versions. Look at this picture:

This is today's bestseller grouping from my local store. If there's a similar grouping for softcover books, I never ran across it. Now admittedly, there are a couple of books here that may actually be worth reading, but B&N has so obviously tailored the list to highlight the lowest common denominator of reading tastes that I hardly ever find anything on that shelf that I want to take home with me. If you're not into thrillers by the usual suspects, you're pretty much out of luck. (If there's a similar selection of nonfiction, YA, and children's books, I missed those, too, because I don't really shop those departments.)

Remember those fun displays of what I call "remainders" from major publishers that B&N used to place so prominently in their stores? Well, don't hold your breath until you pluck some current fiction or nonfiction from the chain's new, horrible Book Annex groupings. Clue: you're going to die first. Those displays are only made up now of stale, cheap reprint editions in the nonfiction area, and of classics in the fiction area. (That could very well be because publishers don't do the huge print runs like they used to - meaning that the remainders stock is limited from the source.)

I used to count on going into a B&N and walking out with five or six one-or-two-year-old previous bestsellers for about $40 and another two current books that I paid near full price for - along with a couple of magazines. All for about $80 or $90. And I did that every 60 days or so. 

Now look at these photos from the store this morning near noon and ask yourself what is missing from each of them:

If you guessed "people," you win the prize. There were actually fewer people in this large store today than there were workers (I think I counted four other people plus about 4 small children).

Don't get me wrong; I want to see Barnes & Noble do well. They are, after having effectively run all of the other bookstore chains either completely out of business or out of my area, now the only major bookseller available to me. I hope that the B&N braintrust figures out that their new marketing strategy is not going to work...especially during a period of hyperinflation like the one we are experiencing right now. If they don't, they are doomed just the way they helped make sure that all the competition was doomed.

The Sentence - Louise Erdrich

Even though I’ve been reading Louise Erdrich novels since sometime in the mid-eighties, her  latest novel, The Sentence, managed to surprise me in a number of ways. I did experience The Sentence as an audiobook rather than via its printed version, and I’m sure that’s a big part of this one seeming so different from the other Erdrich novels I’ve read. (Who knew — certainly, not me — that Louise Erdrich is such a talented audiobook narrator?) But there’s more to it than that. The Sentence just strikes me as being more personally revealing a novel than anything of Erdrich’s I’ve read in the past.

The novel’s central character, Tookie, is a young Indian woman who is conned into doing something stupid for a supposed friend of hers that ends up changing the rest of her life. She agrees to steal a dead body and carry it over to another state (crossing state lines is the truly fatal mistake here) to a different friend. Tookie is uneasy about the whole idea, but she really does not believe that she is doing anything particularly evil, or even seriously illegal. What she does not know, however, is that her friend has hidden drugs on the dead body that she’s persuaded Tookie to move for her. And after the whole fiasco falls apart and she is arrested, only Tookie will spend the next few years in prison. 

Tookie’s years in prison, though, end up setting her on the more positive course that she will follow for the rest of her life because, in order to maintain her sanity while incarcerated, she learns to read there “with murderous attention.” She reads everything she can get her hands on, is intimidated by nothing, and turns herself into the kind of literary expert that bookstore owners dream about. Now having been released from prison early, Tookie is happily married to the same cop who arrested her all those years ago and is, in fact, working in a Minneapolis bookstore owned by the fictional version of Louise Erdrich herself. 

But then, on All Souls’ Day in 2019 (when the novel actually begins), it happens. 

Tookie realizes that she and the bookstore are being haunted by a woman every store employee agrees has to have been their single most irritating customer ever. In life, the ghost woman wanted nothing more than to be acknowledged by bookstore employees as one of them: an indigenous woman. Flora worked hard to prove her case, and she used their indie bookstore for much of her research material. And now she refuses to leave the store, even in death. It will take Tookie a whole year to figure out why Flora seems to be stuck in the bookstore and how to free her spirit, and what a year it will be: the outbreak of COVID-19, the public murder of George Floyd by a rogue Minneapolis cop, and a surprise grandchild’s birth, included. It’s a rough year for Tookie and her friends, including bookstore owner Louise, but they make it through with lots of bumps and bruises to show for their efforts.

Bottom Line: The Sentence covers a lot of territory: what makes a family, the effects of sudden isolation, deep grief, the symbiotic relationship between booksellers and readers, race relations, wannabe Indians, and the long term impact of attempted genocide. Some of what you read will put a tear in your eye, some of it will make you laugh, and some of it may even make you roll your eyes a little. The one thing The Sentence will not do is bore you.

Louise ErdrichCredit...Jenn Ackerman for The New York Times

Books: Objects of Art vs. Reading Material

While out on an errand a couple of days ago, I made another quick stop at my local Half-Price Books. As a buyer, I've always appreciated the diverse offerings of Half-Price Books but, as a seller, there's no way I'm going to let them rip me off ever again. Anyway, it was only my third visit (second to this store) since early March - and I only allowed myself a window of 15-20 minutes inside while avoiding people as much as possible.

My desire to avoid other customers ended up with me spending more time than usual in the "nostalgia" section of the bookstore. That section is generally filled with over-priced and worn out books from the fifties and sixties, but it also includes a lot of special editions that are printed especially for collectors. Stuff from publishers like the Folio Society, The Franklin Library, Easton Press, etc. Some of the books are bound in leather, some come in slipcases, and most of them include some really wonderful illustrations on high-quality paper. They are, in fact, rather beautiful, little pieces of art.

And that leads me to my question. Do book lovers buy these limited editions only of the books they've read and admire or do they buy them more as collectible art objects? These books are generally pretty expensive, especially the ones that are signed by authors and illustrators. They can go for hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars each, especially when word gets out that a particular edition is almost sold out. 

As for myself, partially because my available shelf space is nil, I can't imagine buying a book I already know deep down in my heart I won't be reading - or at least aspiring to read. But out of curiosity, I recently joined a Facebook group called "Fans of the Folio Society" because the pictures being posted there are so beautiful. The group is extremely active and friendly, and I've really enjoyed my two weeks there looking at the pictures and learning about the books and the mindset of those who love them so much. 

I even came home with my first Folio Society book, one appropriately enough titled First Folio. It is a collection of the forwards to 15 of the First Folio books published in the 2000s, and a few of the forwards are written by favorites of mine such as Colm Tóibín, A.S. Byatt, Peter Ackroyd, Jonathan Coe, and Julian Barnes.It is my understanding from the group I mentioned that the book was a Folio Society giveaway to subscribers back in 2008 when it was published. And, believe it or not, I enjoy reading book forwards and never skip over them, so I do "aspire" to read this one someday. (And it helped that it only cost five dollars.)

I'm not exactly hooked on the idea of collecting this type of book, but I'm intrigued enough to consider adding a few, especially if I can find them in used-book bookstores. I own three others of the type, all three having been signed (Margaret Atwood, E.L. Doctorow, and William Styron), already and I find something especially nice about handling such high quality books every once in a while. But every one of these I would place on a shelf would mean another book being placed out of sight, and I struggle with that enough already.

So how about it? Do you collect books as objects, pieces of art, or only as reading material? 

First Visit to a B&N Bookstore Since Early March Was Depressing

 I've been very cautious about going places I really don't need to go during this whole COVID-19 disaster, but I decided to poke my head inside the door of a couple of local bookstores last week for the first time since early March. I figured I could judge by their parking lots whether or not very many people were inside before I ventured through the door myself. In both cases, the stores had maybe 10% of the number of browsers and shoppers I consistently found there in the pre-pandemic days.

Interestingly, one of the stores, Half-Price Books, looked exactly the way I remembered it looking last March. But the other one, a large one-floor Barnes & Noble, looked like someone had walked away with about 25-30 percent of the books they used to stock. Shelves had been moved around, there were empty wide-open spaces all over the place, and customers seemed to be doing nothing but browsing. I didn't see a single book actually being sold for the entire 30 minutes I was there.

This is what I mean. Look at the astounding amount of floor space being wasted. Back in March, space like this was utilized by rows and rows of shelving used to display books. The shelving, at least as I recall it, ran perpendicular to this pathetic little island sitting out there all alone. 

This is what's left of what was a substantial Fiction section in the store. It appears that more than half the old shelves are gone from this area. I did find a few remnants of the old shelves in other spots, but the number of books being carried by this B&N location is now pretty embarrassing. If you are looking for anything not brand new or on the bestseller list, forget it. That is unless it's the back catalog of such literary masters as Stephen King, James Patterson, Danielle Steele, or the like. 

This is a spot in one of the back corners of the store. This area used to house the store's nonfiction books, but it has suffered a fate similar to that of the fiction section I mentioned earlier. The one lone table, featuring a single book, highlights the emptiness and deterioration of the section. The history section is still pretty good, but not all of the nonfiction sections appear to have been so lucky. Lots of missing shelves, translates to lots of missing books from which to choose.

I put this photo here only to show that the store has decided to remove the benches that were on the green rugs before the pandemic changes. I do sort of understand that removing the seating in the store is probably a smart move until Texas gets its infection rate under control. The few remaining chairs in another corner of the store have also all been removed.

This just made me sad. Barnes & Noble has been struggling for years to survive the Amazon onslaught. B&N managed to help drive all the other bookstore chains out of business years ago, and then Amazon decided to do the same to them. But up until now at least, my local store still served as a place I could go into and come out of with some book I didn't even know existed until I spotted it on a shelf. And then, if I wanted to read something else by that surprise author, there was a chance that the store had at least another book or two by them.

Those days are gone now. Chances of finding something new and interesting at this B&N location are only slightly better than trying to wade through the Amazon dreck-haystack looking for something worth reading. In the Amazon case, it's a haystack so filled with utter garbage that good books get buried by the trash. In the B&N case, the haystack is now so small that the interesting stuff gets buried by the dreck written by the Kings, Pattersons, Steeles, and ghost writers of political books. 

These changes give me the impression that Barnes and Noble is hanging on by the skin of its teeth now. I certainly didn't enjoy my visit to this location, and I walked away empty-handed. Can't remember the last time that's happened. I entered all prepared to spend a lot of money on my first visit to a bookstore in over six months. I left without spending a dime - and that's B&N's fault, not mine.

I asked the store manager what was behind all the changes, and her explanation was that they were told to get rid of everything that "doesn't sell." For that reason, bestsellers and hack-authors now dominate the shelves. I even asked her if the "island spacing" had something to do with keeping customers more spread out during the pandemic. She looked at me as if I had just given her an idea of how to answer the question next time she was asked about all the missing books. But, no, she said this was the store's permanent new look.

And that depresses the hell out of me.

As did this book I found on display. How could Anne Perry, of all the people in the world, write a book with this particular title? This is the same woman who helped beat her mother's best friend to death with half a brick stuffed in a sock - the young mother who took the author into her home and included her on the very outing during which Perry helped murder her. The lack of personal awareness on exhibit here is astounding.

Drowning in Books on Not-So-Super Thursday

Tristram Fane Saunders

A little throwaway article by Tristram Fane Saunders in the Culture section of London's The Telegraph made me chuckle a little about the publishing industry's "Super Thursday" book drop in the U.K. According to Saunders, this is an annual event that happens every October there, but it came early this year. 600 books published on the same day, just in time for all the Christmas season marketing to kick in. What a nightmare that must be for publishers, critics, and retailers.

Arts critic Saunders reacted this way:

"I know, I know – every year book critics complain that there are just too many books. But this year, they might have a point. Won’t somebody think of the trees?

Burning the Books by Bodleian librarian Richard Ovenden (published today, and serialised as Radio 4’s Book of the Week) draws solemn lessons from conflagrations of the past. And yet, faced with today’s vast pile of reading-matter, its title sounds less like a warning than an alluring suggestion."

I imagine that publishing delays associated with the COVID-19 outbreak had a lot to do with so many books hitting the stores all at once, but I don't envy the professionals having to make sense of so many at the same time.

I know that we go through a similar marketing push in this country when dozens and dozens of new books all seem to hit the bookstores at the same time. I always find in amusing that so many books are hollering at the same time for a piece of my already-strained book-buying-money, but there they are anyway. I usually snap a picture of all the interesting ones that I know I won't be able to afford (or find the space for) so that I can request them from my library before too many others notice them first.

And the ones that I really want for my shelves, immediately go on a list of "bargain books" to watch for in the future. You can usually count on Christmas season books to be over-published, meaning that when the books reach the paperback stage of their life cycle, publishers will be practically giving away the hardcover remainders. Then I can celebrate as if it's Christmas all over again. 

Are Little Free Libraries Being Raided by Used-Book Bookstore Operators? Sure Looks That Way.

 

Photograph by Andrew Beaujon.who reported this story

I suppose it was always only a matter of time, and I doubt that this is the first time something like this has happened, but one Washington D.C. bookseller has been accused of raiding Little Free Libraries to help stock his own bookstore's shelves. 

According to this Washingtonian.com article, Don Alexander may have been caught stripping Little Free Libraries in his Alexandria Virginia, neighborhood of sellable books and replacing them with books he cannot sell in his soon-to-be-opened D.C. storefront.

"...Hodgins says she’s seen Alexander go through her Little Free Library several times, piling books on the roof of the library and then replacing them with books she’s unlikely to have stocked, including a Sudoku book. She has put more than $400 into building and maintaining her Little Free Library, which she fills with books from her book club as well as some by authors from her native Canada, that she’s purchased at full price with the expectation that they’ll be taken for noncommercial purposes."

Alexander denies that he has done anything wrong, even to mentioning that he has a Little Free Library in front of his own home. I may be a cynic, but his vehement defense, including his personal Little Free Library, just does not ring true to me. It defies common sense; what better way to acquire books for resale in your own shop could there ever be than a little baited trap at your own front door?

"It’s not illegal to sell books from a Little Free Library, though anyone doing so would defy the spirit of the program, which it describes on its website as “fostering neighborhood book exchanges.” In its FAQs, the organization encourages people who believe someone is taking books from their Little Free Library with the intention of selling them them to stamp books or mark their spines with a Sharpie to make them less salable. On its website, it shares the story of a Little Free Library “steward” in the Chicago area who successfully got the police involved with someone who was clearing out his box."

You decide. Go to the Washingtonian link up above for more details, including Alexander's snottily aggressive first response when challenged about what he was doing.  Personally, I'm betting that all that vigorous protesting of the anti-social charge against him is a whole lot of hot air. 

The bigger question, though, is how big a problem this is around the country? As the article points out, this practice is not currently illegal; but it sure as heck is unethical.

The Book Bus and How a Retired Teacher Lives Her Dream

Cincinnati's Melanie Moore retired in 2017 after twenty-five years in the classroom, and decided that it was finally time for her to open up her very own bookstore. Soon after, reality slapped her in the face, and Moore figured out pretty quickly that high rents and other overhead made it just about impossible for her to get a new bookstore off the ground all on her own.

That's when she remembered her husband's 1962 Volkswagon Transporter. As Rachel Kramer Bussel reports in a recent Forbes article, instead of renting a brick and mortar location,Moore decided to invest $5,000 in vehicle repairs and refurbishment, books, other merchandise, and licenses - and The Book Bus was born.

From the Forbes article:

While the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that Moore can’t sell books at public events for the time being, she’s pivoted her business, selling books online via Bookshop and audiobooks via Libro.fm, hosting a book club on Zoom she began in January, and renting out the bus for photo shoots and birthday parties. When she does bring books to sell at parties, she practices social distancing and uses contactless methods of payment, though 95% of her sales are happening online.

[...]

Using her business’s sales to fuel children’s literacy is part of Moore’s mission. “I have a passion for getting books into the hands of kids who need them most. I take all my profits and buy new children’s books for schools and organizations to help build their libraries. Every child should be given the opportunity to experience the joy of reading for themselves,” she said.

The entire Forbes article can be read here. 

I Really NEED to Visit a Brick & Mortar Bookstore - And Soon

I can't tell you how badly I want to get inside a brick & mortar bookstore right now - any brick & mortar bookstore will do. I want to want to experience again the immense pleasure that comes from picking up a book that I know absolutely nothing about, a book whose cover just reached out and grabbed me as I was walking past it. There's nothing like experiencing the crispness of a brand new book, the weight, the paper grade, the way the pages have been cut and bound, and best of all the new book smell that, for me, is rivaled only by the smell of a new car. 

I want to wander the shelves aimlessly on a Saturday morning, maybe taking the occasional coffee break along the way, and gathering up a few books to take home with me that I didn't even know existed on Friday night. 

I want to search the "Bargain Book" shelves to see if something by an author whose work I collect has recently ended up in the stacks of remainders there. 

I want to take a look at the magazines on offer to see if there's some new literary magazine I need to read or subscribe to. 

I want to listen in on the occasional bookish conversation between customers or between customers and booksellers that often make me smile to myself. (Sometimes, I even gather the nerve to worm my way into the conversation - even if a bookseller is part of it.)

 I want to browse all the bookish junk that bookstores place near the front of the store in order to tempt you one final time as you stand in line to check out (bookmarks, pens, journals, book-lights, bookends, bookstands, etc.).

I even want to look at all the puzzles, games, toys, and LPs on offer in so many bookstores today - a practice I've often criticized, so I must be getting soft.

The thing that scares me most about not being able to shop an actual bookstore is the possibility that I will forever miss out on dozens and dozens of books I would have otherwise discovered for myself by browsing shelves. 

And, I'm really getting tired of reading so many e-books. That's just not the same reading experience as reading a hardback or quality paperback, and it never will be.

Just writing this short post has made me realize that if I ultimately contract Covid-19, the most likely reason will be that I started shopping bookstores before it was really wise to do so. 

I can hold off on most other shopping without much of a problem because I didn't do all that much of it even before this mess began. And, as for groceries, I find that if you go early enough in the morning, and keep that cart moving, you don't run into all that many people anyway. So I'm not as nervous about grocery shopping as I was just a few weeks ago. 

No, it will be a bookstore that gets me, I'm pretty sure, if anything does. I can't imagine holding out until a vaccine is available in a year, or two years, or ever. I really need my bookstore-fix, and I need it soon.

Some Bookstores Are Delivering "Mystery Bags" of Books to Customers

While independent bookstores all over the world are struggling to stay solvent, the good news is that a lot of them are figuring out ways to generate at least a little cash flow while their doors are still locked tight. 

According to this Smithsonian Magazine article, some are delivering "mystery bags" of books to customers yearning to experience the surprise of going to a bookstore and coming home with something totally unexpected. Since they can't browse the shelves for themselves, they ask the bookseller to do it for them.

"Capitol Hill Books in Washington, D.C. began offering the service in mid-March at a customer’s request.

“Favorite email of the day so far: ‘If I give you guys $100 can you send me a mystery bag of books?’” the bookstore tweeted on March 21.

“Yes. Yes we can.”

By the next day, more than 50 people had contacted the store with similar orders, according to Mary Tyler March of WAMU. Prior to the mystery bag suggestion, Capitol Hill Books had essentially closed its doors, limiting opening hours to 60-minute slots in which four people at a time were allowed to wander the store’s narrow, book-lined aisles."

Bookstores in other states have followed suit, and at least one of them says that it is delivering about 125 mystery bags per week. From the sound of it, the booksellers are having as much fun with this concept as the shoppers, so this is one of those win-win situations for a whole lot of bookish people.

Click on the link up above for the entire article. It might make you smile a little today.

Bookish Odds & Ends for Those Long Coronavirus Nights

Time to share a few bookish odds & ends I've enjoyed reading in the last few days (complete with links back to the original source articles):

Capitol Hill Books

1. I suppose this is not "legal" in about 90% of the country right now because of all the "Stay Home" orders out there, but what a great idea this is. What used-book bookstore fan would not enjoy an hour inside a bookstore all by themself?Washington D.C.'s Capital Hill Books recently allowed its patrons to book one-hour appointments to do exactly that. To get an idea of just how great this would be, take a look at Slate's "One Last Trip to the Bookstore." 

"I started on the first floor - history, mostly. When I found a book I wanted to buy, I merrily tossed it to the floor; the store was mine, after all, and I didn't need to carry my growing pile along with me today. I ran my glove-clad finger across spines like a stick across a fence, stopping at each title that seemed even a little bit interesting."

2. How about a reminder of how good it was back in the good old days before the word "quarantine" was on the tip of everyone's tongue...you know, all the way back to mid-March 2020.  Bill Hayes describes heading downtown to buy a book. Can you imagine? Read "Walking in the City Before the Bookstores Closed" at this Lit Hub link. 

"No one was allowed inside - Troy was sequestered behind the counter and Miriam was on the floor, standing halfway from the entrance - but if you'd 'Just call out the title of the book' you were looking for (or the author, or the genre), they'd find it for you. And they did!"

3. One Michigan library figures that your dogs are probably just as bored as you are right now. After all, they are not seeing their friends either. To fix that, the Ann Arbor District Library hosted a virtual-park event for dogs last Saturday. Rich Retyl, the library's AADL communications manager put it this way, " I think dogs are feeling a little left out." (Honestly, I think they are all in dog-heaven right now, trapped inside with their owners almost 24-7 for the foreseeable future.) Here's the "videoconference for dogs" scoop from MLive.com.

4. From the Guardian, comes a gathering of novelists who want to help you choose "books to inspire, uplift, and offer escape." Contributors include Hilary Mantel, Marlon James, Kazuo Ishiguro, Mark Haddon, Ayòbámi Adébáyò, Colm Tóibín, and a host of others. If you're looking for something to read during our more-or-less national confinement, this is a good place to start: "Novelists pick books..."

5. Wondering how authors are coping with our new stay-at-home culture? Well, wonder no more because this article from The Bookseller paints a pretty clear picture for you. And it's not a pretty one. Click here for "Lockdown: the author's perspective."

"Many authors live in a perpetual state of anxiety. Anxiety our books won't sell. Anxiety we won't get a new deal. 
Anxiety our reviews will suck.

So it goes without saying the past few weeks have taken those anxieties to a whole new level."

I hope you find some of these links interesting, and that they offer a little bit of a change-of-pace to the rest of your day. Hard to believe this is just the beginning of the fourth week of all this voluntary house-sitting for our own houses. Keep reading. Keep smiling. Stay well.

Bookstore Sales Plummet and E-Books Are Saving Authors

While looking around the internet news sites this morning, two articles that seem to be flip sides of the same coin, caught my attention. The first piece is titled "Bookstore Sales Plummeted 5.7% in 2019" and the second "The Invisible Army: How E-Books are Saving Authors."

The gist of the first article is that brick and mortar bookstores in the United States fell almost six percent from 2018 levels, meaning that total bookstore sales were down about $600 million in the year-to-year comparison. The article says that the numbers were compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau. Interestingly, the article says that the only "huge" bestseller during all of 2019 was Where the Crawdads Sing, a book that continues to rank high on the bestseller lists well into 2020. (And now American Dirt may not be the bookstore savior that it was destined to be before the P.C. cops started squawking about it.)

Keeping in mind that these numbers do not reflect hardcover sales via Amazon or even the Barnes & Noble website, I'm not sure that this tells us much of anything about the overall health of the publishing and bookselling industries. But what it does say is that fewer books are being purchased at the brick and mortar storefronts - and that's not a good thing because it means that those locations will likely be carrying smaller and smaller inventories while trying to make up for lost book sales by selling all the other junk that already clutters up the B&N stores. 

The Invisible Nicola May

The second article is a longer piece written by Nicola May, a romantic comedy author from the U.K. who regularly tops the Kindle bestseller list. According to May, she could "walk into a roomful of readers, booksellers and authors" without any of them having any idea who she was. She calls herself a "lone field marshal in the invisible army of e-book bestselling authors." 

May's main point is that without Amazon she could not afford to write at all because the books chains completely ignore authors like her. Her secondary point is that not only are the chains ignoring authors like her, they are ignoring readers who love the books being written by e-book-dependent authors like her. May has been practicing her craft for 23 years, but would still be unpublished (other than her own self-publishing efforts) were it not for e-books. 

May does lament the fact that e-book-only authors like her get very little love or recognition from the powers-that-be for the huge sales many of them are amassing. No big book awards come their way, and she doesn't expect that kind of thing to change, really, but as she puts it, "...I'm still smashing it with readers and paying more than just the rent."

So there you have it. It seems like there are two separate bookselling worlds out there, one that pushes print-books out the door as quickly as possible, and one that sells a huge number of e-books written by authors who remain relatively anonymous to the rest of the world. The good news is that, at least for now, there seems to be room for both worlds to simultaneously exist, a fact that readers and writers alike should celebrate. 

Redesigned Book Covers for Black History Month Burn Barnes & Noble

Now Barnes & Noble management gets its turn on the Stage of Worldwide Humiliation because of one of the dumber marketing ploys any national bookseller has every dreamed up. 

Those of us in the U.S. are well aware that February is Black History Month, a month during which minority accomplishments are celebrated in the media, schools, libraries, churches, etc. all across the country. So how does the largest bookseller in the country decide to take part in this year's celebration?

With revised covers for literary classics, that's how. So what genius  thought it would be a good idea to use black faces to promote books that had few or no black people on the written pages?

Black Frankenstein, anyone? How about black Romeos or Juliets?

I literally flinched when I first came upon the story and saw this picture - and I had to wonder how so-called marketing experts  could possibly be this stupid. I wondered who would be most offended by this level of silliness, majority readers or minority readers. And about five minutes later the backlash began and I got my answer. Everyone, straight-across-the-board everyone, seems to be ridiculing the utter vulgarity of this idea.

B&N have now thought better of this marketing fiasco and the books are probably going to spend a lot of time sitting in warehouses before they are pulped or shredded (or, at the very least, have their covers ripped off them). But I will never understand how someone didn't see all of this coming. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot...this is how you do it.

The Bookshop - Penelope Fitzgerald

I was surprised to learn that Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1978, surprised primarily because the book is so short that it does not allow for its multiple characters to be much developed before the book reaches a quick ending. I should say, too, that I stumbled upon the well-received 2017 movie version of the book a few weeks ago and watched that film before reading the novella (it’s between 118 and 163 pages long depending on which edition is chosen). The movie was more depressing than it was sad, but even then I was intrigued enough by some of the characters that I decided to read the book in order to learn more about them and their motivations. But it turns out that the screen play does a better job of exploring the characters than the book does – and that’s not at all what I expected to find.

The Bookshop is the story of Florence Green, a middle-aged widow who in 1959 moves to the fictional English seaside village of Hardborough to open the only bookshop in town. It is only after she buys the Old House and opens the shop that Florence learns that one of the most influential women in Hardborough wants to close her down and use the Old House for her own purposes. It is no small accomplishment that the bookstore ever manages to open its doors in the first place, as the Old House is a damp old wreck when she moves in and is even haunted by the Rapper, a noisy ghost that refuses to vacate the property. 

Penelope Fitzgerald

Florence does manage to open the doors even though the only hired help she can afford is a ten-year-old girl who comes in on Saturdays and after school every day. Florence, though, gets lucky when the little girl turns out to have excellent organizational skills that can be put to good use in a bookstore – especially a shop whose owner knows so little about running such a place herself. And when Florence decides to feature Vladimir Nabokov’s brand new (to England) novel Lolita in the shop window and sales take off, it looks like she just may make a go of the shop after all. 

The ruthless Mrs. Gamart, however, never gives up her campaign to rid the Old House of its books and bookstore-owner so that she and those who think like her can convert it into an arts center. She is always there, more or less in the background, pushing others to do her will, and before long Florence is forced to take the threat seriously. Can she actually be evicted from the Old House despite the fact that it is both her only home and source of income? More importantly, will she?

Bottom Line: The Bookshop has an interesting story to tell but the sparseness of so many of its characters makes it difficult to believe. That Mrs. Gamart is an amoral woman whose personality intimidates her ex-military officer husband is obvious. What is not so obvious is why a seaside tourist village is filled with so many people just like her. I suspect that if that backstory had been explored in The Bookshop, I would have enjoyed it much more than I did.  

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore - Matthew Sullivan

I figured I was setting myself up for a huge disappointment when I let my enthusiasm about the cover of Matthew Sullivan’s Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore convince me that I really needed to read this one. That’s happened to me several times before when I chose a new book based solely on what I saw on the cover – especially, it seems, with books about, or set in, bookstores (a major weakness of mine). This one, though, did not disappoint. 

Lydia Smith is a bookseller at the Bright Ideas bookstore, a young lady who truly loves books and what she does in the bookstore. And her customers love her right back - especially the BookFrogs, an eccentric group of regulars who claim the bookstore as a second home (for many of them, it’s their only home) and spend whole days there browsing or napping among the books. But when one of the BookFrogs hangs himself in the store at midnight, just before closing time, everything changes for Lydia for good. She will never, ever be the same.

Matthew Sullivan

Lydia not only discovers Joey’s body, she also learns that he has bequeathed all of his possessions – what little there are of them - to her. She already suspected that she was Joey’s favorite bookseller, but because Joey had only recently started actually speaking to her about himself a little, Lydia was taken by surprise by his gesture. What Lydia finds in Joey’s apartment is pretty much what she expects to find: lots of junk and lots of books. But when Lydia starts taking a closer look at the books in the apartment she begins to wonder what Joey was up to before his suicide. The books have been defaced in an apparently systematic way, with dozens of little windows cut into their pages, and Lydia knows that the key to what was going on in Joey’s head is hidden somewhere in the books he left behind.

Lydia has bloody secrets of her own, things about her childhood that she has shared with no one in the world, including her live-in boyfriend, David. But when she finds something from her childhood in Joey’s possession, it doesn’t make sense. Just who was Joey Molina, anyway? And does she really want to know the truth?

Bottom Line: Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore satisfies on a couple of different levels. Fans of “bookstore books” will be pleased that so much of the plot takes place inside, or around the day-to-day routine of, the bookstore itself in a way that reveals lots about the quirky store and its often eccentric employees and customers. But this one is also a good mystery about a murderous rampage perpetrated by a villain so spooky that a whole generation of children would never forget him. It’s a mystery with enough solid misdirection in it that I did not solve it until the author intended me to solve it. My only gripe concerns the book’s ending (long after the mystery itself is solved), an ending that is really a little too abrupt to be much satisfying. 

Beautiful Signed First Edition of James Lee Burke's "The Glass Rainbow" - $2.99

I can't remember the last time before today that I purchased a book at a Goodwill Store - but today's buy was a doozy. 

I have been reading and collecting James Lee Burke's Dave Robicheaux books since the beginning. How long ago was that, you ask? Well, long enough for Mr. Burke to age rather gracefully from the photo on the back of the very first Robicheaux book (Neon Rain) to the Western cowboy look on the back of the 2010 book (The Glass Rainbow) that I purchased today. (If Mr. Burke's latest books feature recent photos, the man has not aged much since 2010.)

Author Photo on Back of The Neon Rain  (1987)

Author Photo on Back of The Glass Rainbow (2010)

Now for the best part. I already had a pristine first edition copy of The Glass Rainbow and I almost walked away from the store without even picking up the copy they had on the books rack. But curiosity got the best of me, as it usually does, and I decided to take a quick peek at it. And that's when I noticed that this one was a signed copy originally sold by Faulkner House Books of New Orleans on July 10, 2010. Inside the book was a bookmark from the store and the original receipt for $32.49, including $6.50 shipping to Houston. (Faulkner House Books is housed in the one-time home of William Faulkner and was opened on the author's birthday a few years ago.)

Dust Jacket

James Lee Burke Autograph & Store Bookmark

This is the best find I've had in a while but it makes me wonder why and how the book ended up being donated to a charity shop. I suspect it's another case of someone's children disposing of a parent's "junk," something I've run into several times over the years in these shops. The takeaway here is to document those things of value well enough that your children or other heirs do not destroy them or give them away because they appear to have no monetary or sentimental value. Books do not strike everyone as being things of value. We know that they are valuable for a lot of reasons not exclusive to monetary value; nonreaders don't have a clue.