In the 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail, Meg Ryan stars as an independent bookseller whose livelihood is threatened by a behemoth bookstore chain owned by Tom Hanks.
Thats was fifteen years ago. Today, book selling is a different game, the pendulum having swung so much to the other side that it’s the few chains left who are fighting for survival against Internet book sellers and e-books.
In France, where bookstores are a common site along Paris streets, things are different than in the U.S., where bookstores are vanishing at a fast clip as the popularity of e-books increases. But in France e-book sales don’t threaten book sales, where less than two percent of book sales are e-books. The biggest threat to small booksellers in France comes from Amazon. And for now, small book shops are surviving quite well, selling books, not gifts.
NPR recently ran a segment about a French law that would go a long way toward ensuring the survival of bookstores. The French government has played a big role in fostering the bookstore-friendly environment and lately has accused Amazon of attempting to drive down the price of physical books, the opposite of what’s been happening in the States.
This month France’s lower house passed a bill that would prohibit Amazon from offering a 5 percent discount on books plus free delivery. Limiting discounts on books is one of the ways France is trying to ensure the survival of its independent booksellers. The French culture minister has also accused Amazon of spending several billion dollars on free shipping worldwide in order to gain a competitive edge.
One of Herman Hesse’s earliest novels, In the Old Sun (In der alten Sonne) was completed in 1904. The story is of novella length and comes long before the novels that were to make Hesse famous in the decades after World War II.
In his early years as a writer, Hesse turned memories of his childhood home of Cawl—called “Gerbersau,” after a favorite fishing spot on the Nagold River—into a steady flow of Novellen, which kept his coffers replenished; and the ranks of his reading public kept growing. “In der alten Sonne,” one of these recollective tales, was first published in Hesse’s Nachbarn (1908), a collection of five works of fiction about the natives of his birthplace.
The novel was first published in English in 1914 in Volume XIX of The German Classics: Masterpieces of German Literature by the German Publication Society. The twenty illustrated volumes in the series were edited by Kuno Francke. The publishing house, which was created specifically for this series, went bankrupt soon after the German U-boat sinking of the British ocean liner Lusitania in 1915. One outcome of the Great War was that America’s taste for German literature and culture dissipated overnight.
The translation by A[lexis] I[renée] du P[ont] Coleman is fairly modern. However, the text contains one slight error that merits correcting: the reference to one of the main characters, Heller, as a “sailmaker” is inaccurate; in the original German he is referred to as a Seiler, a rope maker. In addition to this correction, antiquated punctuation has been silently modernized.
Coyote Canyon Press is proud to bring back into print this “lost novel” by Hermann Hesse.
The Inside Random House series has released another video. This one gives viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the publisher’s offices as book designers explain their creative processes and the experience of creating covers for some of the world’s best-known authors. What’s great about this video is that we get to see some of the best book cover designers in the business, people like Chip Kidd and Peter Mendelsund of Knopf, Robbin Schiff of Random House, and Marysarah Quinn and Christopher Brand of Crown. Chip Kidd at one point picks up a manuscript and stresses the importance of a close reading of the text in order to understand how to approach its design. Aspiring designers can learn a lesson from the cover outtakes featured in the video, such as the multiple attempts required for The Dinner by Herman Koch; All That Is by James Salter; Salt, Sugar, Fat by Michael Moss; and Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff. The video is not only insightful but entertaining too.
Stephen King’s latest novel, Joyland, was supposed to be published in a print-only edition by Hard Case Crime. The move was roundly applauded because it demonstrated some real faith in traditional print publishing. It was also a savvy business decision driving sales sky-high.
But as soon as it was released in paper, the book popped up online as a pirated ebook. In response, Hard Case Crime publisher Charles Ardai had a few things to say about it in an interview with Jason Boog at AppNewser:
“We’ve seen dozens of websites over the past year purporting to offer pirated downloadable copies of JOYLAND, and so far they’ve all been frauds – if you try to download the file, you get malware or a virus instead. But inevitably the book will eventually be pirated for real, just as every best-selling book and popular movie or TV show or piece of music is. As a publisher, you try to prevent it or to stamp it out when you discover it, but it’s like the “war on drugs” – good luck. Seize a boatload of heroin, and what does it get you? There are more boats, there’s more heroin. . . . In the end you have to rely on the good behavior of the vast majority of the audience – I see no reason to think that pirates represent more than a small fraction of all consumers. That doesn’t mean we don’t care about piracy – we do. But it’s just one of the many punches you have to learn to roll with in the rough-and-tumble world of modern publishing.”
It’s hard to see though how some pirated copies have actually slowed Joyland‘s meteoric rise up the bestseller charts. The book is currently the number one selling book on Amazon and has been in the Amazon Best Sellers Top 100 for the last two months.
Of course this feat is not likely to be replicated by many other writers. As everyone in the publishing business knows, people buy authors, not books. And the King brand name, along with a splashy publicity campaign, created a momentum guaranteeing massive sales. I don’t think King is losing sleep over these pirated copies, unless he’s thinking of using the idea in yet another novel.
The opening of the Amazon facility at the former Norton Air Force Base has proven to be a boon for the city of San Bernardino, which is reeling from a recent bankruptcy filing and workforce layoffs.
The facility, which was completed Oct. 1, handles shipments of products purchased online. City leaders hope that the tax on sales will help turn the city around since California law allows Amazon to designate which city is a “point of sale” for sales tax purposes, thus allowing San Bernardino to pocket 1 cent on the dollar for all sales processed through the center.
The wages are also a big plus, averaging about 30 percent higher than most traditional retail work. Those interested in working for Amazon, can apply online.
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