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January Bookstore Sales Dropped 4.5%
Bookstore sales fell 4.5% in January, to $2.19 billion, according to estimates released by the U.S. Census Bureau. The decline was due in part to snowstorms in much of the North that hindered sales to both trade and college bookstores in the month. Sales to the overall retail market fared better, increasing 7.4%.
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Anderson's Named PW Bookstore of the Year; John Eklund Rep
In a clean sweep for the heartland, Anderson's Books, which includes Anderson's Bookshops in Naperville and Downer's Grove, Ill., ABCFairs, and Two Doors East, and Milwaukee-based sales rep John Eklund, with Harvard, Yale, and MIT presses, were named this year's PW Bookstore of the Year and Rep of the Year. They will be honored at a ceremony at BookExpo America and in Publishers Weekly's pre-BEA issue on April 25.
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Bookseller Nancy Landon Dies at 74
Nancy Landon, owner of the Brewster Bookstore in Brewster, Mass., and children’s book buyer for Toy Castle in Potomac, Md., and Toy Kingdom in Rockville, died on Wednesday, March 9. She was 74.
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Successful Transitions: Three New Indie Owners Stress Community
Three Northern California bookstores have successfully transitioned to new owners in moves that the indie community could take as a sign that bookselling is still a viable and attractive business.
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Borders to Decide Fate of 75 Stores This Week
In a brief conference call to vendors Friday afternoon, Borders CEO Mike Edwards said that the company will make a decision this week on whether or not to close 75 more stores, an option it reserved in its first-day filing to close 200 stores. If it decides to close more outlets, the stores will be selected from among Borders’s 285 superstores. "We do not anticipate closing our small-format stores or airport stores," Edwards said.
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Publishers Ask Borders to Return Inventory
As the Borders bankruptcy finishes its third week, some publishers are trying another tack to recoup at least part of their losses. Yesterday Source Interlink and Thomas Nelson Publishers filed motions of reclamation for the return of their inventory.
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Borders Gets Approval to Reject Unexpired Leases
On Friday U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Martin Glenn in the Southern District of New York cancelled a hearing on Borders’s motion regarding unexpired leases. Instead, he signed the proposed order enabling Borders to reject four leases and to abandon personal property within their premises effective February 16, with the commencement of the bankruptcy. The leases in Boise, Boulder, Minneapolis, and Grove City, Oh., were set to expire between 2015 and 2023 and together account for close to a quarter million dollars of the bookseller’s monthly rental obligations.
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Hub City Writer's Project Hums Along
In May 1995, journalist Betsy Teter and two other ambitious Spartanburg, S.C., writers had the idea to publish an anthology about their home, a blue-collar/college town of 40,000, as a first step toward establishing a literary community to help preserve the evolving city's sense of place and history.
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CAMEX 2011: Moving Beyond the Book
College stores may have taken the word "book" out of their name, but they still have a lot in common with their independent bookstore brethren. At this year's 88th annual meeting of the National Association of College Stores and Campus Market Expo many concerns shared with ABA stores, such as online competition and declining print sales, were evident.
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Court Rejects Burkle Appeal
The Delaware Supreme Court has rejected an appeal by Ron Burkle in a lawsuit challenging a poison pill plan adopted by Barnes & Noble. Burkle filed the original suit this summer after B&N instituted the poison pill provision in response to Burkle significantly increasing his stake in the retailer. A judge last year upheld the provision, prompting Burkle's appeal.
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Skylight Books in Raffle Promotion
In a bid to boost book sales, Skylight Books in Los Angeles is giving away raffle tickets for signed limited edition prints by artist Dan Clowes (Ghost World, etc.) to any customer that spends more than $40 on books during the month of March.
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Puchner, Skloot Among B&N 2010 Discover Award Winners
Kim Echlin and David R. Dow have won Barnes & Noble's 2010 Discover Awards, for fiction and nonfiction. Echlin, who is from Canada, won the fiction award for The Disappeared (Black Cat), and Dow, a lawyer, won the non-fiction award for The Autobiography of an Execution (Twelve). With the honor, Echlin and Dow each receives a cash prize of $10,000, along with a year of marketing support for their books from B&N.
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CAMEX Puts the Emphasis on Digital
Change was the theme of this year's 88th annual National Association of College Stores meeting and Campus Market Expo at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, which ended Tuesday. "If we don't change, we will not be viable. It needs to be significant change in a significant way," said Donald "Buz" Moser, executive director of business services for Wake Forest University Stores in Winston-Salem, N.C. Nowhere is change more evident than the NACS's digital initiative.
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Bloomsbury USA Has Best Year
Bloomsbury USA had its best year ever in 2010 with profits up 160% to 1.3 million pounds ($2.1million) before central charges of 200,000 pounds. Sales rose 1.6% to 19.1 million pounds ($31 million). Sales were led by The Finkler Question, backlist sales, three children’s bestsellers, right sales and e-books. E-book sales totaled $2.3 million for all of Bloomsbury with two-thirds of that coming from the U.S. In the first month Finkler was on sale in the U.S., 42% of sales were from e-books.
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Random House Switches to Agency Model For E-book Sales
Random House, Inc., the last of the big six houses still using the wholesale model for e-book sales, announced plans to adopt the agency model effective March 1 and the company has begun implementing the switch with accounts today. A Random House spokesperson said the company is making the change now because it is the right time. The adoption of the agency model is "part commercial motivation for our customers; part investment in their digital sales growth and ours; part ensuring our authors that their e-books will be even more widely available anywhere anytime," the spokesperson said.
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Distribution: Cadence at Five, Whitehurst & Clark Hits 75
Despite the economy, the Cadence Group in Cohoes, N.Y., which offers distribution as well as a la carte marketing, sales, and packaging services to small and start-up publishers, has doubled its business since last summer. This year book fulfillment house Whitehurst & Clark Book Fulfillment in Flemington, N.J., hit a different goal and added its 75th client, the Primary Research Group in New York City.
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B&N Looks for the Right Print, Digital Balance
Barnes & Noble's third-quarter results for the period ended January 29 shows the dilemma faced by companies making the transition from print to digital. In the case of B&N, while its fastest growth is tied to the sale of e-books and Nook digital readers, its most profitable business remains its bookstores.
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A World with Fewer Borders
As the bookstore chains grew in the 1980s and ‘90s, the number of independent booksellers fell dramatically, but those that survived expect little pop from the impending closing of 200 Borders stores as part of the retailer's bankruptcy reorganization.
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Ingram Expands Gift, Game Inventory
Encouraged by the response it received from its Christian bookselling accounts to its expanded selection of gifts, the Ingram Content Group is adding to the number of gifts and games it is stocking for the general bookstore market.
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