The fire this time

• Missouri bookseller Tom Wayne is burning books.

No, it's not what you think -- not exactly, anyway. Books get pulped every day, and Wayne's approach -- torching books he can't sell or give away -- isn't a political statement per se, although others have spirited takes on the event:

The idea of burning the books horrified Marcia Trayford, who paid $20 Sunday to carry away an armload of tomes on art, education and music.

"I've been trying to adopt as many books as I could," she said.

Dozens of other people took advantage of the book-burning, searching through the books waiting to go into the flames for last-minute bargains.

Mike Bechtel paid $10 for a stack of books, including an antique collection of children's literature, which he said he'd save for his 4-year-old son.

"I think, given the fact it is a protest of people not reading books, it's the best way to do it," Bechtel said. "(Wayne has) made the point that not reading a book is as good as burning it."

The great big "if"

• Julie Bosman examines pre-publication book tours in The New York Times.

What a tease this must be for all concerned.

"Hi, I wrote a book that might sell."
"Hi, I'm a bookseller that might sell your book."
"My book might be worth your time and energy."
"I certainly hope so. If not, my business might suffer."
"I might not be around to apologize."
"I might not either."

This is social networking, not business.

This is the pre-publication book tour, a ritual an increasing number of authors are enduring so that their books can have a fighting chance in an industry that issues, by some estimates, more than 175,000 titles a year.

Unlike the postpublication book tour, which focuses on publicity and public appearances, the pre-publication tour is meant to win the hearts of the front-line soldiers in the bookselling trenches, and more and more publishers are finding it an indispensable part of their marketing plan.

While major decisions are left to the bookstore chains’ influential buyers, the people out in the field — the store managers and the clerks — can wield considerable power over how long books continue to be displayed on prime tables at the front of the store, and therefore over the what their customers choose to buy and read.

More good news for a change

• Teenagers are buying more books than usual, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Credit a bulging teen population, a surge of global talent and perhaps a bit of Harry Potter afterglow as the preteen Muggles of yesteryear carry an ingrained reading habit into later adolescence.

Not only are teen book sales booming -- up by a quarter between 1999 and 2005, by one industry analysis -- but the quality is soaring as well. Older teens in particular are enjoying a surge of sophisticated fare as young adult literature becomes a global phenomenon.

All of which leads Cart to declare, "We are right smack-dab in the new golden age of young adult literature."

Dropping like flies

• The Wall Street Journal reports on the decreasing number of book sections in newspapers.

Egon Spengler said it back in 1984: "Print is dead."

In an era of targeted marketing, publishers say the best time to reach readers is when they are in the stores with money in their pockets looking to make an immediate purchase. But with a sea of titles in the stores -- the average 25,000-square-foot store in the Barnes & Noble Inc. chain now stocks between 125,000 and 150,000 titles -- the only way for publishers to stand out is to pay for real estate in the front and pile those books up high.

"You want to see your books in prominent places," says Tom Perry, associate publisher of Bertelsmann AG's Random House Publishing Group. "Such co-op advertising is where marketing dollars are going that might otherwise have been spent on advertising." However, Mr. Perry notes that Random House on occasion advertises in the New York Times Book Review when it is searching for what he described as a "traditional book buyer."

One publisher says that chain bookstores can charge $1 or more per book to stack titles in desirable locations, such as on a table at the entrance or in a display featuring new nonfiction titles.

Even those who say they still support book-section advertising say it's only effective as part of a larger marketing effort. Michael Pietsch, publisher of Lagardère SCA's Little, Brown imprint, says advertising in book reviews can help drive sales if the author is well-known and if it's done in conjunction with online campaigns.

Another one bites the dust

• The Los Angeles Times examines the decline of independent bookstores.

Old news, for the most part, and with the umpteenth unwelcome citing of Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" theorem for the requisite academic flavoring, but still worth a read.

THIS is the paradox of modern bookselling. Even in an entertainment-saturated age, people still buy books. But the casual reader has many other places to get bestsellers and topical books, from warehouse stores to the mall. Meanwhile, book nuts — the ones who simply must buy several volumes a week — are lured online. Few businesses can survive that lose customers from both ends of the spectrum.

In 1995, anyone seeking a book that was the least bit uncommon had to have a store special order it from the publisher. If it was out of print, the would-be reader needed to trudge to the local secondhand shop, which would run a classified advertisement in AB Bookman's Weekly, a magazine that circulated among book dealers. It was a hit-or-miss proposition.

AB Bookman's Weekly went out of business in late 1999, an early Internet casualty. There are now half a dozen major Internet search engines that specialize in books. On one of them, AbeBooks.com, there are 44 copies of "The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop."

It's hard for any single used bookstore to compete against this bounty, just as it's impossible for any shop carrying new books to rival the electronic plenitude of Amazon. Because the Internet retailer doesn't have to pay rent for display space or charge sales tax, its books are almost invariably cheaper too.

Which books are we selling, exactly?

• The New York Times looks at the trend of blind book sales.

This smacks of a CYA move on the part of the publishers (particularly those who thought O.J.'s kinda-sorta confession was a great idea), but it's still an interesting look at how the business side of this whole writing thing operates.

Blind sales are increasingly common in the publishing industry. Many booksellers pointed to Oprah Winfrey for popularizing the trend, as bookstores must order boxes of each unknown “Oprah Title” before she announces the book club selection on her show. The blind sale of the Simpson book was initially reported by Publishers Weekly.

“A number of these books are flash in the pan, and you need to get it right away,” Leslie Ryan, an independent bookseller in Colorado, said in discussing why many dealers felt obligated to order books blind.

However, most booksellers said that the complete lack of information surrounding Mr. Simpson’s book was unusual even for a blind sale. Publishing companies often use blind sales for a new John Grisham or Oprah Title 48, said Kelly Justice, the manager of Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Va., “and you have a pretty clear idea of what an Oprah title is.” But, she added, “this was totally blind, with no information provided other than publisher and price.”

Indie booksellers, rest in peace

• Tyler Cowen thinks the loss of the independent bookstore is no big deal at Slate.

Alas, much of this piece is spot-on, even though it stings to admit it:

The real change in the book market is not the big guy vs. the little guy, or chain vs. indie stores. Rather, it's the reader's greater impatience, a symptom of our amazing literary (and televisual) plenitude. In the modern world we are more pressed for time, and we face a greater diversity of cultural choices. It was easy to finish Tolstoy's War and Peace when there were few other books around and it was hard to find them. Today, finishing it means forgoing many other options at our fingertips. As a result, we tend to consume ideas in smaller bits, a proposition that (in another context) economists labeled the "Alchian and Allen theorem." Long, serious novels are less culturally central than they were 100 years ago. Blogs are on the rise, and most readers prefer the ones with the shorter posts.

This and other corresponding stories were brought on by the news of the closing of Cody's, a venerable independent bookstore located in San Francisco. The nice thing about independently-owned and operated stores is, yes, having a personal contact at a brick-and-mortar establishment who knows a thing or two about what the store sells and can point inquisitive customers in the right direction, or, alternatively, turn them on to something they might not have thought about or heard of before.

Given the advent of the Internet, however, specialized knowledge of literature -- and books, in general -- has become almost a moot point. Word-of-mouth is one of the strongest selling points of any book, simply because it depends largely upon an interpersonal recommendation: when someone whose tastes you respect mentions a book in a positive context, you're more likely to seek it out. Cowen is smart to point out that forums on the Net -- reader reviews at Amazon, for example, as well as litblogs -- have taken this idea into a new medium. If someone over at Bookslut or Conversational Reading can make a good case for reading XY's new book, then, well, why not check it out?

Yes, e-commerce will probably be the death of the traditional independent bookstore. I'm probably like most people who like to read: my budget is limited, so I'm more likely to buy used books, or shop online for the discounts. It's extremely rare for me to pay full cover price for a book I'm looking for, be it at an independent OR chain bookstore, simply because it doesn't make a whole lot of fiscal sense to do so. It would seem, then, that the alternative to putting more money in the pockets of the behemoths is to apply the same philosophy that spurs you to shop outside the mainstream to e-commerce, as well: buying books from individuals on Amazon Marketplace or eBay, or shopping at independent online booksellers like Powells or discount retailers like BookCloseouts.com.

Cowen is right: there's more out there now, meaning more avenues to explore and about a fraction of the time to explore them. Specialized knowledge of books and literature could either become a blessing or a liability; there was a widely-circulated piece in the May 14 New York Times Magazine called "Scan This Book!", by Kevin Kelly, a writer for Wired, that suggested the future of books would be not unlike that of an MP3 playlist. Knowledge of books, Kelly suggested, would become highly compartmentalized; subject matter could be cross-indexed to death, which is fine if you're looking for scads of information on one particular topic but, as Scott Esposito pointed out, could have the backlash effect of reducing the scope and vision of a particular book to a mere collection of loosely-associated parts. Probably the most appealing thing about a well-written book of any type is its potential to compress the world in all its contradictory glory between two cardboard covers; to contain multitudes. In a world driven and governed by soundbites, that's harder and harder to accomplish.