Much has been said about the reasons for the demise of Borders, but Raymond Rose's article in last week's Publishers Weekly really hit the nail on the head for me. He writes,

"My sorrow isn't for the death of this company but for its employees. They're the real victims here. In my store, we had an amazing group. There was the elementary school teacher who worked every weekend and made the most magical children's recommendations; the young woman who could guide both newbies and skilled knitters alike through the needlecraft books; the tattooed graduate student who could talk your ear off about Thomas Hobbes... or Batman, your choice; and the spitfire supervisor who could hunt down the perfect mystery novel. That's just five people in my store. Imagine the number of original, talented people in the other 600-plus stores that have closed or will close later this year...

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Millions of people live in shantytowns across the world, many in corrugated-iron-roofed shacks with no windows. This leaves the residents with the choice of living in complete darkness or running expensive electric bulbs (if electricity is even available to them).

Liter of Light has a solution which is so mind-bogglingly simple that it is pure brilliance:

Step 1: Take an old soda bottle and fill it with water, add a couple of drops of bleach to prevent algae and screw the lid back on.

Step 2: Snuggly fit bottle into custom-cut hole in roof and the plastic bottle will refract the sun's rays into the room below, delivering about 55 watts of light per bottle for up to 5 years!

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Every week seems to bring news of more bookstores closing, not least this week with the news that Borders will definitely be going into liquidation and many of its remaining stores will close. So here to brighten your Friday is a happy little time-lapse video of a new bookstore going from empty to open in less than 80 seconds.

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Update: 7/16
Austen's manuscript ended up selling for £990,000 (US$1.6 million)! It was purchased by Oxford University's Bodleian Library.

Original Post: 7/13/2011
The Watsons, an unfinished manuscript by Jane Austen is to be auctioned by Sotheby's tomorrow and is expected to sell for over $330,000. Apparently, Austen worked on The Watsons in 1804, after she'd drafted Sense and Sensibility, but abandoned it the same year.

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According to Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively, e-books are for "bloodless nerds". Considering her somewhat advanced 78 years, one might assume that this was simply a reaction to new technology, but Lively owns an iPad (although she "wouldn't dream of reading a book on it" unless she was traveling or in hospital) and, for what it's worth, thirteen of her books are available as ebooks, including Moon Tiger (which won the Booker Prize in 1987).

To be fair, although the "bloodless nerd" soundbite is being quoted far and wide today, her full comment was, "It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd." Do you think she has a point? If a person's entire literary collection was contained within an electronic device, might their experience with reading be a tad soulless? Or does the written word rise above the confines of the media containing it?

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Effective June 29, Amazon has cancelled its contracts with about 10,000 California-based affiliates after Govenor Brown signed a law that requires large out-of-state retailers with affiliates in California to collect sales tax on purchases made by their California customers.

California is the latest state to pass a law to push back against the exemption that allows out of state retailers to not collect sales tax - an exemption made by the US Supreme Court decades ago, in favor of the mail-order industry, based on the constitutional premise that one state may not tax another.

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As you probably already know, journalist and book reviewer Meghan Cox Gurdon unleashed a firestorm in the world of teen literature with her recent Wall Street Journal article in which she wrote of the "explicit abuse, violence and depravity" in many of the YA books published these days. The general gist of her argument seems to be that reading violent literature may lead to violence in the reader: "it is ... possible - indeed, likely - that books focusing on pathologies help normalize them and, in the case of self-harm, may even spread their plausibility and likelihood to young people who might otherwise never have imagined such extreme measures."

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London's Southbank Centre is planning a huge "Poetry Parnassus" to coincide with next year's Olympics.

Members of the public are invited to nominate up to 3 poets from any of the 205 Olympic competing nations. The organizers will select one from each country who will be provided with airfare, accommodation and visa so they can attend the event to be held in London in late June/early July 2012.

The first World Book Night was held in the UK on March 5, 2011 and saw 20,000 people give away one million copies of 25 specially printed books in one day. The event was considered a great success.

In 2012, a second event is scheduled to take place in the UK, but the day will move to April 23, which is recognized as the International Day of the Book; and, according to today's news, other countries, including the USA, might take part. The Day of the Book originates in Catalonia (an autonomous region in the north of Spain). Catalonia has long celebrated April 23rd as the Day of the Rose, because it is the day they celebrate their patron saint, Sant Jordi (St George), whose symbol is a rose. Then, back in 1923, an enterprising bookseller started to promote the holiday as The Day of the Book, because it was on that day in 1616 that Miguel Cervantes (author of Don Quixote) and William Shakespeare both died (Inca Garcilaso de la Vega is also recorded as dying on that day so sometimes he is included in references to The Day of the Book).

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All 42 of Mary Higgins Clark's books to date have been bestsellers, she's spent a collective 355 weeks on the New York Times best-seller lists, sold more than 100 million copies in the USA, and many more millions across the other 33 countries where her books are sold, including 24 million in France. Her latest book, publishing in time for Mother's Day, is predicted to sell at least 3.5 million copies.

But Ms Clark and her publisher now face a quandary. At 83 years of age, the doyenne of the wholesome thriller (no unmarried couples living together, no swearing and no graphic scenes), who collected 40 rejection slips before her first story was published in 1956, is facing the question of how to maintain her brand in the "twilight of her career" (as The Wall Street Journal puts it) and after she's gone. The same question must be very much top of mind for her publisher, Simon & Schuster, who've been able to rely on their top-selling author to help keep them in the black for many a year.

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