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Barnes & Noble Defends Strategic Process
Responding to assertions in Ron Burkle's letter to shareholders sent early Monday that Barnes & Noble chairman Len Riggio could very well make a low offer for the company and block other offers, B&N issued a statement defending the four-person special committee overseeing the strategic review, and added that numerous potential bidders were already involved with the review process.
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Final Push in Barnes & Noble Proxy Battle
Following a proxy battle that has cost millions of dollars and featured blistering charges and countercharges, the vote for three Barnes & Noble directors will be tallied tomorrow at the retailer's annual meeting set to begin at 9 a.m. at the Asia Society in New York City. The vast majority of votes will have been cast well before the meeting is held and Ron Burkle's Yucaipa Cos. urged shareholders to make sure they voted their gold proxy cards by midnight tonight.
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SIBA Tweets Up
The Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance 35th annual trade show, held from Sept. 23-25 at the Plaza Resort & Spa and Plaza Ocean Club Hotel in Daytona Beach, feartured a heavy dose of how booksellers can use social media to keep their stores relevant in today's fast-changing business environment. Even before the official show opened, a day-long panel on such topics as Finding Your Tweet Spot, was packed.
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ABFFE Marks 20 Years of Fighting For Free Speech
The story is now well-known: in 1988, Viking Penguin published Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses; almost immediately, it caused controversy because of what some Muslims considered its blasphemous references. The publisher received bomb threats, as did bookstores. According to some reports, the novel was unavailable in one-third of bookstores across the U.S.
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New Owners for Wellesley Booksmith
On Monday it was official; Wellesley Booksmith had new owners, local residents Bill and Gillian Kohli. The pair, who purchased the downtown Wellesley, Mass., store, were among the first to express interest in buying the business when it went on the market in March.
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NAIBA Takes a Gamble in Atlantic City
That the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association fall conference, held in Atlantic City from September 20 to 22, went on despite the recent deaths of NAIBA president, Joe Drabyak, bookseller at Chester County Book & Music Company in West Chester, Pa., and Workman sales rep Sam Herman spoke reams about the organization's ability to overcome hardship and loss. Still, the number of stores and exhibitors in attendance fell.
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Alibris Changes Name to Monsoon Commerce Solutions
Alibris Holdings, one of the first online marketplaces for used books, has changed its name to Monsoon Commerce Solutions to better reflect the range of services now offered by the company. The name change comes six months after Alibris acquired Monsoon Inc.
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Two Initiatives from Amazon
Today Amazon made two announcements, one about its Audible subsidiary, and another about its AmazonCrossing translation imprint. First, Audible has launched a new Mobile Store app for iPhone and Android, allowing customers to shop for and download Audible audiobooks directly on their wireless devices.
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Court Strikes Down Overly Broad Oregon Obscenity Laws
The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit this week found two Oregon statutes ostensibly aimed at preventing the sexual abuse of children to be unconstitutional and in violation of the First Amendment. The court found that a "furnishing" statute, which made it a crime to provide children under the age of 13 with "sexually explicit" material; and a "luring" statute, which criminalized providing minors under the age of 18 with "visual, verbal, or narrative descriptions of sexual conduct," to be overly broad and potentially in violation of free speech protections.
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B&N Finds More Support
Barnes & Noble is hoping that the support of three smaller proxy advisory services will outweigh the recommendations of the larger Institutional Shareholder Services that early Monday said it believes shareholders should support the candidates for the B&N board nominated by Ron Burkle. In responding to the ISS report, B&N said that in addition to Glass Lewis & Co., Egan-Jones Proxy Services had recommended that shareholders support the B&N-backed slate led by Len Riggio.
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Bargain Books in Transition
On the eve of the 20th anniversary of the Chicago International Remainder and Overstock Book Exposition (October 28–31), the biggest bargain book show in the country, the remainder book industry, like much of the book world, is in flux.
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Albuquerque's Bookworks Gets New Owners
Nancy Rutland, owner of Bookworks in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is selling the store to two employees. The new owners, veteran booksellers Wyatt Wegryzn and Danielle Foster, will assume ownership on Oct. 1.
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Fire Petal Opens Its Doors
With a $5,000 boost from an online auction, former Gibbs Smith associate editor Michelle Witte opened Fire Petal Books, a children's bookstore in Centerville, Utah, a suburb of Salt Lake City, at the end of July. The 1,400 sq. ft.-multi-room store is looking to social media like Groupon and Facebook to spread the word, along with some old-fashioned face-to-face events.
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NBN Launches New Division
National Book Network will introduce a new professional, academic, and reference division at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair. Aimed at helping publishers increase their penetration into the U.S. library market, the division comes after a year of planning, according to NBN senior management.
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July Bookstore Sales Dip
The downward trend of bookstore sales continued in July with sales declining 2.3%, to $1.08 billion, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. Through the first seven months of 2010, bookstore sales were down 0.7%, to just under $8.5 billion.
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Obituary: David Thompson
Veteran bookseller David Thompson, 38, assistant manager of Murder by the Book in Houston, Tex., passed away suddenly on Monday, Sept. 13. Thompson, who’d been an employee of Murder by the Book for 20 years when his wife McKenna Jordan bought the bookstore in Jan. 2009, was also publisher of Busted Flush Press, which specialized in publishing mystery novels and anthologies, as well as reissuing out-of-print thrillers and crime fiction. Thompson launched Busted Flush Press in 2005.
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NAIBA Announces Award to Honor Carla Cohen
The New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association has long planned to honor Politics and Prose owners Carla Cohen and Barbara Mead at this year’s trade show in Atlantic City for their impact on the organization and on Washington bookselling. Now, in addition, to mark Cohen’s contributions to NAIBA, the organization is launching an ongoing children’s book award in her name, the NAIBA Carla Cohen Free Speech Award.
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Manga Rules at Kinokuniya
When Kinokuniya opened its first U.S. store in San Francisco in 1969, the company intended to provide Japanese people living abroad with books and magazines and to introduce Japanese culture to the American market. No one could have predicted that Japanese manga would eventually take on the rock star popularity that the genre enjoys today at Kinokuniya.
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PGW Adds Seven
Berkeley, Calif., distributor Publishers Group West is adding seven presses this fall and winter, ranging from Bone creator Jeff Smith's Cartoon Books in Columbus, Oh., to Wise Parenting Press, a new book and audio publisher in Oakland, Calif.
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B&N Reccomends Paperbacks
Starting this month Barnes & Noble is extending its B&N Recommends program (www.bn.com/recommends), which it launched four years ago for bestselling hardcovers like Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows's Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, to include trade paperbacks.
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