As you can imagine, Lemurians have been reading a lot about changes in book selling. Sometimes it can be overwhelming, but there is one theme that comes up again and again: relationships.

“Madeline MacIntosh, who is Random House’s president for sales, operations, digital, has worked for both Amazon and book publishers, and finds the two strikingly different. ‘I think we, as an industry, do a lot of talking,’ she said of publishers. ‘We expect to have open dialogue. It’s a culture of lunches. Amazon doesn’t play in that culture.’ It has ‘an incredible discipline of answering questions by looking at the math, looking at the numbers, looking at the data . . . That’s a pretty big culture clash with the word-and-persuasion-driven lunch culture, the author-oriented culture.'” (“Publish or Perish” by Ken Auletta, The New Yorker, April 26, 2010)

Jane Friedman, formed CEO of Harper Collins, has opened up her very own e-book company. Despite her shift to the e-book, she still recognizes the importance of developing relationships with authors as well as the concern that Amazon could take on a wider role as publisher: “An author needs a publisher for nurturing, editing, distributing, and marketing. If the publishers are cutting back on marketing, which is the biggest complaint authors have, and Amazon stays at eighty per cent of the e-book market, why do you need a publisher?” (“Publish or Perish” by Ken Auletta, The New Yorker, April 26, 2010)

Laurence Kirshbaum, a New York Literary agent, echoes Jane Friedman and Random House’s Madeline MacIntosh: “‘Writers like Anne Tyler and Elmore Leonard have to simmer quite a bit before they are going to boil. Publishers no longer have the patience to work through multiple modest successes . . . There is a real danger these people could be lost today.'” (“Authors Feel the Pinch in Age of E-Books”, The Wallstreet Journal, September 26, 2010)

However, there seems to be no lack of patience and nurturing in Amy Einhorn’s relationship with the up and coming author Siobhan Fallon. Read what Fallon wrote on her blog in November: “The Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I received an email telling me that I was going on a “Pre-Pub” trip to meet some important indie booksellers. Denver, Boston, Seattle, LA. . . . Here we all are worrying the publishing industry, and yet the very savvy publicity people at Putnam have decided to send a very un-savvy first-book-of-short-stories-writer (short stories!?!) off on a little cross country adventure, with drivers waiting at airports, nice hotels, and restaurant dinners booked. You must think I am delusional. Yes, shake your head and tell me again that this kind of stuff just doesn’t happen in today’s publishing world. But, by some incredible miracle, this is all about indie bookstores. Indie bookstores are making my writing dreams come true.” (Read full blog here.)

Publishers establishing and maintaining good relationships with authors helps independent bookstores. The more authors and publishers work together, and the more publishers and independent bookstores work together the more books we can sell. There is a series of neurological connections created here–passed from author to publisher to bookseller to reader–resulting in an experience for the reader. You see the beginning of this in Siobhan Fallon’s case.

A book is a rather long term commitment. You don’t read it in 60 seconds. You spend days, weeks, maybe even months with this author, this physical book. And once you have finished reading, it stays with you forever. I think our society may have reached the end of its consumer binge. Many customers are waking up and they’re demanding community, customization and experience–not just a download, not just a cheap book. There is talk of Amazon opening their own brick-and-mortar stores to supposedly provide community, customization and experience. Which independent bookseller has already been doing this for years? It’s time for publishers and independent bookstores to do some serious work together.

The Bookstore Key Series on Changes in the Book Industry

Finding “Deep Time” in a Bookstore (March 8th) Reading The New Rules of Retail by Lewis & Dart (March 3) The Future Price of the Physical Book (Feb 18) Borders Declares Bankruptcy (Feb 16) How Great Things Happen at Lemuria (Feb 8th) The Jackson Area Book Market (Jan 25) What’s in Store for Local Bookselling Markets? (Jan 18) Selling Books Is a People Business (Jan 14) A Shift in Southern Bookselling? (Jan 13) The Changing Book Industry (Jan 11)

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Many textual purists are balking at NewSouth’s decision to publish Alan Gribben’s edition of Mark Twain’s “companion boy books,” The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. In his edition, Gribben, a Twain scholar and professor at Auburn, has replaced the offensive terms, both “nigger” (so prevalent in Huck Finn) and “injun” (Tom Sawyer), with the word “slave.”

Gribben told Publisher’s Weekly that his reason for “emending” the novels, especially Huck Finn, was simply to get the books back in schools; he’d encountered too many teachers who wished to teach Huck but didn’t feel they could. “For a single word to form a barrier, it seems such an unnecessary state of affairs,” he told the magazine. [read the article]

According to the American Library Association, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the fourteenth most frequently challenged book from 2000-2009. But of course it’s not a new thing to hear about Huck causing a ruckus; from the time of its publication the book has been under scrutiny. This is one of the earliest reactions:

“The Concord (Mass.) Public Library committee has decided to exclude Mark Twain’s latest book from the library. One member of the committee says that, while he does not wish to call it immoral, he thinks it contains but little humor, and that of a very coarse type.”
Article in the Boston Transcript, March 1885

While my first reaction to the new edition was, I admit, horror … well, I still am, really, horrified, if for no other reason than simply because the book that T. S. Eliot called a masterpiece, the book that all modern literature springs from, is going to be altered. I can’t get past the altering, though I do understand Gribben’s (and many other academician’s) frustration that a single word would keep readers from a book.

Yet there’s no single reason why the book is so often considered unteachable to students high school age and younger, and I have a hard time believing the changing of a word will magic any and all of them away. When Huck has seen through his dilemma of whether or not to turn Jim in, the moral climax of the book, he’s still so indoctrinated with the culture of slavery that he believes himself to be extremely wicked though he’s making the “morally right” choice. Calling Jim by another name will not change Huck’s prevailing belief system: that Jim is an inferior being because of the color of his skin.

In the eighties, John H. Wallace argued for an edition of Huck Finn sans the offensive word, saying, “Classic or not, it should not be allowed to continue to cause our children embarrassment about their heritage.” Well, our heritage is sometimes embarrassing, and the omission of a word won’t change that. There’s already too little discussion about challenging topics in our schools between teachers, parents, and children, and taking away a reason to have one doesn’t seem like the solution.

I’ll stop sharing my opinion now, though, to give you a few other interesting ones. The Huck issue is a thorny one, and my beleaguered attempt to think through it has caused me to respect those, like the author Michael Chabon, who have so thoughtfully expressed their reactions.

In an article in The Atlantic, Chabon writes about the dilemma he faced when reading Huck Finn aloud to his children, ages seven and nine. He had read them Tom Sawyer and, using Gribbon’s solution, substituted the offensive “N” word with “slave” in the handful of instances that it occurs, yet in Huck Finn, he knew that it was not only much more prolifically used, but also that “the word was going to mean so vastly much more, and less, than that.”

On the other side of the spectrum, check out Jon Stewart’s commentary; it isn’t PC but it is pretty funny.

Whether as a curiosity or teaching tool, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn: The NewSouth Edition will be published in February with a 7,500 first printing.

I am fearfully afraid this noise is doing much harm. It has started a number of hitherto spotless people to reading “Huck Finn,” out of natural human curiosity to learn what this is all about — people who had not heard of him before, people whose morals will go to rack and ruin now. The publishers are glad, but it makes me want to borrow a handkerchief and cry. I should be sorry to think it was the publishers themselves that got up this entire little flutter to enable them to unload a book that was taking too much room in their cellars, but you never can tell what a publisher will do.
Letter to the Omaha World-Herald, August 1902

As mentioned below Borders has been in the news a good bit in the last two weeks. It seems that they’ve had a great deal of trouble keeping in good standing with publishers. Well, the announcement came out yesterday that they are finally meeting with publisher representatives this afternoon – so we’ll be expecting an announcement, or some news late today.

In the same breath they announced that they are closing one of their distribution centers, the one in LaVergne Tennessee. Apparently the Tennessee distribution center is one of three or four – they have a large center in California another in Pennsylvania, but only the one in the south. Of course this sounds like bad news for Borders (and of course it’s horrible news for the 300 employees who lost jobs) but what does it mean to the larger book industry? And to southern retail bookselling? Well, two things, one: LaVergne is also the location of the major southern distribution center for Ingram. Ingram is one of the two big book distributors in the South. So will Borders be handicapped when it comes to getting books quickly from Ingram? But secondly, and more importantly, this means that Borders is severely handicapping their southern efforts – maybe even giving up the south. If they are planning to close more stores, and it seems almost guaranteed that they will, then does the closing of the southern distribution center mean that many of the closings will be in the South? Does this mean that Books-a-Million will be changing their strategy as well? How will this effect independent bookselling in the South?

The Bookstore Key Series on Changes in the Book Industry

Finding “Deep Time” in a Bookstore (March 8th) Reading The New Rules of Retail by Lewis & Dart (March 3) The Future Price of the Physical Book (Feb 18) Borders Declares Bankruptcy (Feb 16) How Great Things Happen at Lemuria (Feb 8th) The Jackson Area Book Market (Jan 25) What’s in Store for Local Bookselling Markets? (Jan 18) Selling Books Is a People Business (Jan 14) A Shift in Southern Bookselling? (Jan 13) The Changing Book Industry (Jan 11)

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January’s First Editions Club can be one of the hardest to pick, but it can also be one of the most rewarding. Think about it, there are so many books coming out in the three months before Christmas, holiday sales etc., that January turns out to be somewhat of a dry month for publishing. So, very few books being released equals very few choices for the First Editions Club. The good news is January is the month where we have to work a little harder and dig a little deeper, and usually come up with something unique and fun. Often the pick is a first time author or an author for whom we really have to pitch a tour stop to the publisher. (all of the First Edition Club authors come to the store for a signing – it’s part of the deal) For instance Kathryn Stockett, Stuart Dybeck, Mary Ward Brown, and William Gay have all been January FEC authors.

January 2011’s First Editions Club pick is You Know When the Men Are Gone by Siobhan Fallon. You Know When the Men Are Gone is the first book of short stories we’ve picked since Grisham’s Ford County in 2009 and before that, Pia Ehrhardt’s Famous Fathers, but we didn’t pick it because it’s short stories, (although I do love to promote the short story) no, this pick came about purely from reading and enjoying a book.

You Know When the Men Are Gone is a collection of somewhat connected short stories. This isn’t one of those books where each story has the same characters, or where the stories can be pieced together into a sort of loosely hinged novel, no, these stories are more connected in theme. Each is about spouses, children, or parents of soldiers in the Middle East. There are stories that delve into the soldiers perspective, but for the most part the stories are mainly from the perspective of the wives of soldiers. But no worries, this is by no means a limitation, neither is the “wartime” theme – although readers may be concerned that they won’t like the book for those reasons – as Lisa says here, “Fallon transcends the politics and gets to the heart of the matter: the families who serve our country. Besides that, she is a great writer, worthy of reading no matter what the theme.” And isn’t that why we’re here? To find that reading experience that offers that sort of transcendence?

Siobhan Fallon’s collection, published by Amy Einhorn books, is due out on January 20th. She will be signing (5:00) and reading (5:30) at Lemuria on Tuesday, February 1st.

reading…there’s not much out there that compares to it.  getting totally lost in a book is an amazing thing.  one aspect of being a book lover that some people don’t partake in is the collecting of books.  i don’t understand these folks.  why wouldn’t you want to walk by your bookcase and be reminded of an absolutely amazing book that you read a while back?  i would and do quite enjoy being reminded of the great reads of my life.

take for example the particular sadness of lemon cake by aimee bender.  simply put, i love that book and anything that aimee bender writes.  while looking for signed firsts of her books for a customer, joe came across a slip cased signed limited edition of lemon cake and asked if i was interested.  was i ever.  it’s gorgeous and every time i walk down my hall way i see it and remember just how much i loved that reading experience.

i may take book collecting to the extreme in that i don’t share my books with anyone.  my boyfriend and i moved in together about a year ago and i won’t let him put his books on my book shelves.  sorry love.

books are not just about what you read in them.  they are also about that certain feel and smell and sensation you get from holding a book in your hands and touching each page.

by Zita