Time magazine this week asks “Is Amazon Taking Over the Book Business?”

The conclusion?

Only partially.

Those clever guys at Unshelved may have just topped themselves. For BEA, they’ve put together “Publisher Confidential,” an ebooklet of pet peeves from librarians, booksellers and readers.

Such as:

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For more on the project, check the Unshelved blog.

Reminder: if you don’t suffer from the above problem and are actually looking for catalogs, you can get PDF’s of publishers catalogs from our links to the right (under “Download Publishers Catalogs”).

Who but a cataloger could imagine that someday a “cataloging error” would make headlines?

That’s what Amazon is claiming as the cause of nearly 60,000 titles, many of them gay and lesbian-themed, being stripped of their sales rankings, rendering them difficult to find in searches and creating a PR nightmare.

The Seattle Post Intelligencer reports official responses, as well as one from a former Amazon employee saying that,

A guy from Amazon France got confused on how he was editing the site, and mixed up ‘adult,’ which is the term they use for porn, with stuff like ‘erotic’ and ’sexuality.’ That browse node editor is universal, so by doing that there he affected ALL of Amazon.

Seattle PI business reporter Andrea James has been updating her Amazon & the Business of Online Retailing blog as the story develops.

The errors have now been fixed, but at least one author is not satisfied, feeling Amazon has not apologized sufficiently, nor have they promised to establish safeguards against this situation happening again:

Craig Seymour, “Craig’s Pop Life” blog, My Response to Amazon’s Statement

While I was at Midwinter, I learned the news of the astounding number of layoffs at Publishers Weekly, where I was, until four years ago, the editor-in-chief and a few others at Library Journal, where I was once the editor.

In the process, RBI has also shut down Críticas, “The English-Speaker’s Guide to the Latest Spanish-Language Titles.” I was involved in the launch of Críticas, one of my most cherished projects, since it clearly filled a need. Libraries and booksellers needed help in figuring out how to buy Spanish-language titles and publishers needed a way to reach the market. Críticas served those functions.

We managed to hire a sparkling, talented young staff that put their hearts and considerable intelligence into making the magazine a success. 

So, I am particularly sad to see Críticas go. Hearteningly, Group Publisher Ron Shank, in an interview in Publishers Lunch about the layoffs, said ”the most response I have received personally is from librarians and others around the country who lament the suspension of Críticas…we do have plans to continue review coverage and feature coverage of Spanish-language publishing.”

Adriana Lopez, former editor of Críticas, who has been blogging on the Críticas site, encourages librarians in her latest post to email Ron, to ask him to reconsider closing Críticas, or a least to ensure this area gets the coverage it needs in the other magazine.

It’s also painful to see beloved former colleagues let go. When long-time staff leave voluntarily, their accomplishments are publicly lauded. Unfortunately, when they are laid off, celebrations are few.

Among those laid off, is Daisy Maryles who was at PW for over four decades. Many in the book business can’t imagine PW without her; certainly I can’t. Always an enthusiast for books, she has a keen eye for titles that could take off with a little nudge and she was there to provide the right nudge.

She recognized the rise in interest in religion books many years ago and developed PW’s outstanding coverage. In the process, she helped general trade bookstores, who were afraid to touch that area, become comfortable with titles that generated profits for them. You couldn’t help but get a kick out of seeing this observant Jewish woman navigating her way around the Christian Booksellers Show where she was much beloved.  

Daisy is the bestseller maven, with an amazing mental book database. After years of doing the PW bestseller list, she was always able to look at it in new ways and her annual roundups were an assessment of both popular culture and the shape of the business. She’s a prodigious worker, who never passed on an interesting opportunity because she was “too busy.” She’s also a great skeptic. I felt I had won the Pulitzer Prize when she reacted to one of my ideas with, “I’m not so sure that’s not a good idea.” 

This isn’t the first hit the staff of the three magazines have taken. According to RBI they are laying off 7% of their total employees, and that comes on top of earlier rounds of eviscerations.

Obviously, with this much-reduced staff, it will be necessary to reinvent PW. A community needs a newspaper, whether it’s in print or electronic, to bring it together. There’s still plenty of talent at PW; I know you can find a way to regain that role for the book community.

Sadly, the rumors that the Washington Post will no longer publish the stand-alone Book World section have been confirmed by the NYT Arts Beat blog. The reviews will be moved into the Sunday newspaper. According to Book World staff, the Feb. 15th issue will be the final one. 

The National Book Critics Circle mounted a campaign last week to save the section, to no avail.

There are now only two stand-alone sections, The New York Times Book Review and the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review. The LA Times section was closed in ‘07

The  article “Blockbuster or Bust”  in the Wall Street Journal is one of the few of the recent spate of articles on the book business to give some insight. Written by a professor from the Harvard Business School, it looks at the reason publishers pay so much money for certain titles.

Amazingly, it’s because, more often than not, these books end up making money.

This is not a new phenomenon. Over twenty-five years ago, The Blockbuster Complex, by Thomas Whiteside, shocked the general public by pointing out that publishers were paying big buck for books and doing large first printings. Why, Crown bought Princess Daisy by Judith Krantz for a staggering $50,000 and did a first printing of 150,000 copies!

If you can use downloadable video to promote a movie, why not use it for a book?

This is what Stephen King and his publisher Scribner are doing for his forthcoming short-story collection, Just After Sunset (pub date, Nov 11). Marvel Comics is turning one of the stories, titled N, into a 25-episode downloadable video, reports the Wall Street Journal. Downloads will be available through iTunes and Amazon beginning Monday. A pass for all 25 episodes will cost $3.99 (episodes will also be free on Monday to some cellphone users and on CBS.com. CBS is Scribner’s parent company).

Scribner will sell a special edition of the book that includes a DVD of the entire video series. The ISBN for that edition is not yet available.

Just After Sunset

Stephen King

• Hardcover: $28.00
• Publisher: Scribner (November 11, 2008)
• ISBN-10: 1416584080
• ISBN-13: 978-1416584087

If you didn’t see them already, two essays in the NYTBR are worth a look:

“I’m Y.A., and I’m O.K.” by Margo Rabb

“When is a novel for adults really a novel for children? When a publisher and its marketing department decide it is.” 

“Advice Squad” by  Virginia Heffernan

“A guided tour of the books on the self-help best-seller list.”

And, NPR discovers graphic novels:

“Americans Say Oui, Oui To Foreign Graphic Novels“ by Brian Mann, on All Things Considered, 7/19

Titles mentioned:

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

Monsieur Jean, Charles Berberian and Philippe Dupuy

Ever since the first mass market e-book was introduced (was the GlassBook first, or the Rocket eBook?), the media has debated whether these products meet the test of the “3 B’s”; usable in people’s favorite reading spots — the bed, the bathroom and the beach.

This morning, NPR’s Lynn Nearry and technology writer Rob Pegoraro took the Kindle to the beach (it would have been unseemly for them to take it to the bed or the bathroom). Unlike previous devices, it is not backlit, so it can be read in the sun. This is also true of its competitor, the Sony Reader. No lounging in a raft, however — it’s not water resistant. The major advantage over other eReaders is that 125,000 titles can be downloaded wirelessly.

The verdict? It’s good, “but not quite the iPod of eBook readers.”

The story concludes;

…if Kindle isn’t the future, you can see it from here: a better, cheaper product is sure to come along. And when it does, we may all be reading the classics electronically

Today’s NY Times may have a clue to that future; “flexible, foldable, even rollable…screens.” The article focuses on a new product, called the Readius. It’s not cheaper; when it is introduced in the US in 2009, it will cost more than the Kindle (now $359), but its flexibility makes more portable and therefore better.

You may not care so much about reading the classics on it, but imagine being able to carry a rollup device in your pocket and pull it out to check the catalog while helping customers in the stacks.

One of my favorite non-library blogs is “Kash’s Book Corner.” Kash is Arsen Kashkasian, the head book buyer for the Boulder (CO) Bookstore. He writes engagingly about daily life at work (how many of us can do that?).

I’m always fascinated to see the contrast between how libraries and bookstores buy. Kash doesn’t read prepub reviews (he’s already buying into ‘09) and placing orders doesn’t involve a computer.

Before you get misty eyed about how nice it would be to not stare into a computer screen all day, read his post from yesterday. He calls the current method of buying an “exercise in absurdity and futility…an antiquated, inefficient system that hardly takes into account the invention of the personal computer and completely ignores the existence of the internet.”

Kash is excited by HarperCollins’s recent announcement that they will soon make available an online interactive catalog. I’m excited, too. At this point, Harper doesn’t have their catalog available online in any form, not even as a PDF.

Here’s part of his dream of what an online publishers catalog should do:

As soon as a book has a new cover, I could see it on the site. When new publicity, like an NPR show, is booked, it would be updated online immediately. Never again would my rep and I have to waste time looking at outdated pages. Instead, our appointments could be used to quickly discover the best books for the Boulder Book Store and to determine how best to position those titles. Add-on sheets for late titles would be a thing of the past. Instead, those books would be up and ready to go on the website.

I always preach to libraries that publishers catalogs provide valuable additional information to prepub reviews. They show how the publisher is positioning a book and they list new editions and embargoed books that will not be reviewed. That’s the reason we have downloadable catalogs on Early Word; so you don’t have to troll around all the publishers web sites to find out where they’ve hidden the catalog. It’s frustrating that two of the largest publishers in the business — Random House and Harper — don’t post their catalogs at this point.

Take a look at Kash’s post. I’d love to see librarians weigh in on this. What’s your dream of an interactive catalog?

The Wall Street Journal today breaks the news that the new head of Random House, to be announced tomorrow, is expected to be someone totally unknown to American publishing, Marcus Dohle, the current head of Bertelsmann’s worldwide printing group, Arvato (the article includes a long string of official “no comments”). UPDATE, 8:36 a.m. — PW Daily says the news was made official in a memo to the staff this morning and Dohle will take over beginning May 31st.

The WSJ article (available only to subscribers), emphasizes that the 39-year-old Dohle has made his career by being entrepreneurial. He added cell phone repair, call centers and billing systems as well as pharmaceutical storage to Arvato’s traditional print business. This is credited with turning Arvato into a “major growth engine for Bertelsmann”, according to the Journal.

As to what Bertelsmann head, Hartmut Ostrowski is thinking, the WSJ states:

Mr. Ostrowski wants to introduce Arvato’s aggressive diversification drive to other parts of the company, including Random House, which is struggling to retain consumers increasingly drawn toward videogames, the Web and other forms of digital entertainment. One area of interest that Mr. Ostrowski already has flagged is education services.

Interesting, since many trade publishers divested their educational divisions in the ’90s. Random House never had one.

The online media gossip site, Gawker (which also runs a photo of Dohle, who is not pictured in the WSJ piece) gives their succinct take on the story with the headline, “New Random House Chief to Make Publishing Even Less Sexy.”

Further update, 9:30 a.m.: For those deep into Bertelsmann-ology, Publishers Lunch has links to download the various announcements to RH staff:

Ostrowski’s letter
Ostrowski’s in-house interview
Peter Olson’s letter to employees

Technology plays a large role in kids lives, but how should it be presented in children’s books? Does it make sense to show corded phones? Can kids relate to a clacking typewriter? Is it better just to stay low-tech, so picture books won’t become date?

A slide show in today’s Slate, “I’m Talking to You, Corded” by children’s book author Erica S. Perl (Ninety-three in My Family and Chicken Bedtime is Really Early) takes an enjoyable look at those and other questions.

A climate impact survey put together by the Book Industry Study Group and the Green Press Initiative, reveals that 60% of publishers have, or are working on, an environmental policy, as reported by the AP. Publishers are taking a range of approaches, from “Hyperion switching to soy-based ink, to Penguin Group (USA) using wind power, to Scholastic, Inc. printing the deluxe edition of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on 100 percent post-consumer waste fiber. Simon & Schuster and the Hachette Book Group USA are among those using e-book readers instead of paper manuscripts. The Random House Publishing Group is experimenting with sending books online to media outlets.”