Extreme Book Reselling

(Mural Outside of David's Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan)


Over the years, I've come to appreciate the pleasures, especially the monetary savings, involved with the purchase of used books. As many books as I go through in a year, if it weren't for sellers of used books, I'd be in debt up to my eyeballs. But one Michigan bookseller came up with a plan to restock his store that could see him spending a little time behind bars. According to the Ann Arbor News, the owner of David's Books thought he had it all figured out:

Edward Stephen Koster, who owns David's Books, was accused of hiring drug addicts to steal textbooks from competitors that he later sold.

...

Police describe him as the mastermind behind a scheme involving three heroin addicts who stole textbooks from rival stores over several months. Koster bought the books from them and then allegedly sold them over the Internet.

Police began investigating last summer, when a manager from nearby Ulrich's Bookstore discovered during an audit that nearly 300 medical textbooks were missing.

Detectives raided Koster's store at 516 E. William St., in November and seized more than 1,000 books, including 110 that were traced back to Ulrich's, court records show.

I only have one question. How could a rival bookstore not notice that it had lost 300 copies of the same book before performing a formal audit? That lack of control is almost as amazing as the fact that Koster actually believed he could get away with his massive book-stealing scheme, in the first place.

Tropical Storm Edouard Closing In

I suppose I should mention that, at the moment, it appears that Galveston, Texas, is the most likely landing spot for the tropical storm that suddenly seemed to appear out of nowhere this past weekend. Estimates for landfall are sometime around five a.m. on Tuesday morning. There is always the chance, some would say the probability, that the storm will turn to the east tonight just as Hurricane Rita did a couple of years ago. These things are just about impossible to predict.

I mention this only because I am about 75 miles almost due north of Galveston and there is a decent possibility that we will get enough wind, rain and broken branches falling on power lines to kill the electric power up this way. If past history can be relied upon, power could be down for anywhere from a few hours to a few days if that happens.

So if I disappear again, it's Tropical Storm Edouard's fault this time. It's not Act II for the infamous Blogger software that made this past weekend into a Lost Weekend for so many bloggers.

Bones to Ashes

Bones to Ashes is the tenth novel in the Temperance Brennan series but it is my first experience with the character and its creator, Kathy Reichs. As usual, when I jump into a series for the first time somewhere after its midpoint I have to wonder if my reading experience would have been different, maybe even a better one, if I had started the series at the beginning. At the least, I would have a better feel for whether or not the series is holding up nicely or is on the decline, something I still wonder about after having finished Bones to Ashes.

For those as uninitiated in the Reichs books as I was, Tempe Brennan is an American forensic anthropologist who splits her working days between North Carolina and Montreal, where she works for the province of Quebec to identify bodies, bones, causes of death, and those responsible for the murders she helps investigate. Along the way she has had a romance with Canadian Detective Andrew Ryan although, by this tenth book, that relationship has largely been replaced by the professional one they need to maintain as they continue to work cases together. Tempe also has an eccentric sister, Harry, whom she loves dearly but prefers to take in small doses (I agree with her).

Not long after receiving a skeleton from New Brunswick, Tempe manages to convince herself that the bones may very well belong to a childhood friend of hers, Evangeline Landry, a young girl who, with no explanation, was suddenly whisked back to Canada and out of Tempe’s life when the two were teenagers. At the same time that she is trying to unlock the skeleton’s secrets, Tempe is working with Ryan and others to identify the killers of several young women who have been abducted over a period of years.

Tempe’s desire to learn what happened to her long lost friend turns her investigation into something personal and, when she and Harry decide to visit Evangeline’s sister, they attract enough attention to place their own lives in danger.

For American readers, the fact that Bones to Ashes is set in Canada is both strength and weakness. On the one hand, Reichs portrays life in a part of Canada that few readers will have been much exposed to beforehand and her Acadian settings, characters and atmosphere are intriguing. On the other, the multitude of dead bodies and missing girls all have unusual French names, making it difficult to keep their individual stories clear from chapter to chapter. This inherent confusion makes it difficult for the reader to get emotionally involved in what has happened to any of these young women and they become almost indistinguishable from one another in the reader’s mind, something not helped by the sparse prose that Reichs often uses.

But Reichs does something that many series writers do not do for their main characters; she takes time to delve into their past histories so that new readers have at least a basic understanding of the characters and how they got to be the people they are. And, of course, the forensic science on display is probably the book’s strong suit since Kathy Reichs is herself a one of the better known forensic anthropologists in the world.

Bones to Ashes is an interesting book, especially for those drawn to the series because of the science that it features, but it is not an especially strong novel, suffering from a poor juggling of its multiple plotlines and its failure to make the crime victims into real and sympathetic characters. I am not sure that I want to read book eleven in the series, but I am curious enough now to go back and read the first one because I suspect it is better than Bone to Ashes.

Rated at: 2.5

Cell Phones and Bookstores

I realize that bookstores are not libraries and that the same limits on loud talking that govern well-run libraries do not apply to bookstores. However, since bookstores and libraries generally draw "customers" from the same crowd, common sense tells most of us that loud talking in the bookstore aisles is frowned upon by all but the rudest among us.

This letter to the editor of the Washington Post got me to wondering if that kind of thing bothers others as much as it does me. Apparently, it does bother the heck out of Rockville's Denny Freezer.

To Washington-area bookstore owners who may wonder why they're losing market share, I offer a suggestion: no discernible cellphone policy.

I love books, and I used to love the look, feel and smell of bookstores. But now, with the exception of some independent bookstores that do discourage cellphone use, it's no longer fun to look for books in a bookstore. It's very hard to get acquainted with a book when there's a constant stream of people roaming by while yakking on their cellphones.

Why they want to be in a bookstore anyway is beyond me; look around next time you're on Metro -- if you see someone reading a book, it's probably me. Most others have no need to carry a book because they're either yakking on their cellphones or carefully studying their screens for inspiration.

There are no cellphones to contend with when I shop for books on the Web!

DENNY FREEZER

Rockville

I know it's hopeless to expect that people who are oblivious enough to shout into their cell phones in public places will ever see themselves as the asses they are, but I do wonder what the rest of you "normal" people think. Does it bug you, too?

Banned Books = Increased Sales

It looks like the Korean Ministry of Defense is learning one of the laws of human nature the hard way. When you tell someone that they cannot do or have something, that object or action suddenly becomes very intriguing to them. They suddenly develop a consuming interest where none existed before the banning.

According to The Korea Times that is exactly what is happening to the 23 books that the Ministry has blacklisted as "subversive literature" not to be read by its servicemen.

It has banned its servicemen from reading and bringing them into barracks since July 22, alleging the books in question praise North Korea while criticizing the Korean government, Seoul-Washington alliance and capitalism.

Ironically, however, the blacklisted books have begun flying off shelves. Some on and off-line bookstores capitalized on the unprecedented ``frenzy'' by placing the publications at the forefront.

...

According to on-line bookstore Aladdin (www.aladdin.co.kr), ``Bad Samaritans,'' written by Prof. Chang Ha-joon, was selling roughly 10 copies a day but demand has increased in recent days to reach 457 copies on Aug. 1 alone.

``There was almost no demand for `Guerrillas in Samsung Kingdom' until recently but now it's selling very well,'' said an Aladdin officer Keum Jung-hyun. ``Some published in the past had almost no demand until recently. But the announcement sparked demand for them as well.''

Rather than killing off these books, the Korean government seems to have increased their sales by a factor of 40 or so. Now everyone in Korea is curious about why their government fears these books and they will be read by many more people than would have otherwise been the case if they had just been ignored by those in charge.

You have to love it.

The Big Lock-Out

The problem with Blogger's overzealous software-policeman seems to be almost over - at least for now. In an attempt to kill off spam blogs, Blogger unleashed a program that supposedly was capable of identifying the blogs and automatically locking them down. Unfortunately, there were hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of innocent blogs swept up into that net at the same time.

To Blogger's credit, the problem was resolved pretty quickly and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Book Chase is back under my control as of sometime this morning.

There does seem to be another issue out there, however, that is still affecting Blogger users, a conflict between Sitemeter, Internet Explorer 7 and Blogger that makes it impossible to open up the blogs via IE7. Sitemeter is the meter of choice for many bloggers, including me, so I'm hoping that someone is actively working on this problem. This one could actually turn out to be the bigger problem because there are three separate companies and pieces of software involved but I'm hoping that one of them takes the initiative to get this figured out soon.

It's a tough decision for Blogger users: delete Sitemeter and lose all the valuable feedback that comes from the service or limit the number of readers having access to their blog by keeping IE7 users shut out. It's kind of a no-brainer because readers are the most important thing to bloggers, but it is painful to lose Sitemeter even for a little while.

What a mess...

EDIT- As of ten p.m., Houston-time:

Although the Sitemeter site crashed a couple of hours ago, it does appear that they have now resolved the coding conflict they caused with IE7 sometime yesterday evening when they were doing some code revisions in their software. I think they took a pretty tough hit, both in reputation and number of users, because a whole bunch of Sitemeter users appear to have yanked their meter from their blogsites. It's a tricky business.