BookFinder.com Journal

BookFinder.com Report near misses

So now that the BookFinder.com report has been available online for a few weeks, I wanted to mention a few of the interesting books which we were forced to cut from the list.  By this I don't mean all of the thousands of in print books but rather books which nearly made the cut, I mentioned one such book in a post way back when I first started researching this years Report but there were many more.

One example is Dead in Dixie by Charlaine Harris which is technically out-of-print however after a short discussion we decided to leave this one off the list.  You see the book is an omnibus edition of the first three novels in Harris' Sookie Stackhouse series.  All three books are still available and a boxed set  as well as individual editions so we decided that Dead in Dixie failed to qualify.

Perhaps more interesting was The Essential Woodworker by Robert Wearing.  This book was last published in 1998 and is most definitely out-of-print, but was only ever printed in England.  So even though buyers in the US are eagerly looking for this book, and there are no new copies being printed, technically, we could not include in the list as it has never been in print in the United States.

The title which I was the most displeased with having to leave off the 2009 BookFinder.com report was Mother of the Children of the Holocaust: the story of Irena Sendler by Anna Mieszkowska.  This would have been our number one Biography however this book was also never printed in the US. 

The book details the work of Sendler who was a social worker who served in the Polish Underground during the German occupation and saved 2,500 Jewish children by smuggling them out of the Warsaw Ghetto.  Copies are very hard to track down and at the time of writing this post there are no copies available on BookFinder.com.  If you like you can keep checking back here, but unless we see a reprinting I would not hold my breath

Outside of the great story within what made this book so interesting was that despite the fact it had never been printed in the US it was adapted into a "Hallmark Hall of Fame production", titled The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler and broadcast on CBS April 19, 2009.   With that kind of press and huge search volume, I think a publisher could do well with a North American reprinting.

Google Book Settlement on hold

It's been hard to keep up with what's happening with the Google Book's settlement, but US Department of Justice recommending against the deal might have been the straw that breaks the camel's back. There is now a new deal in the works.

Banned books and challenges

It's Banned Books Week very shortly and as a ramp up I was looking at some material about which books had been banned or challenged in the past few years, which is where I came across this map.  I think it's really interesting to see, partly because I thought I might see a state or region pushing ahead in the number of bans, but in reality it almost looks like the population distribution.  So much for my conspiracy theories.

Strangely enough no one found anything shocking enough to challenge in Las Vegas, go figure.

BookFinder.com Report 7 released

We have released the 2009 edition of the BookFinder.com Report.

The Report tracks the most sought-after out-of-print books in America, breaking down demand for popular out-of-print titles in ten different genre categories.

As usual this edition features a number of books with very interesting stories:

• Cop Without a Badge by Charles Kipps, had a sudden spike in demand after a run in with The Real Housewives of New Jersey
• The Recently Deflowered Girl by Edward Gorey, got a second wind on the back of an internet meme
• Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins, a conspiracy theory propped up by the economic collapse

There are many more so go ahead and read the whole 2009 BookFinder.com Report

Also if any of you are interested I will be on CBC Radio One tomorrow (September 17th) on the All Points West program between 3:30-4:00pm PST.  I will be talking to Jo-Ann Roberts about the BookFinder.com Report.  If you like you can listen online here.

BookFinder.com OpenSearch plugin

If you ever wanted to add a BookFinder.com OpenSearch plugin the option is now available.

If you are about to ask "What's OpenSearch" it's that small search box to the right of the URL display on your browser.  Here you can automatically search on your favorite website (obviously BookFinder.com, right?) without having to first enter their URL. If you want to add BookFinder.com as one of your search options It's very easy to do. 

In Firefox simply go to the BookFinder.com homepage and then click on the small downward facing arrow like so:

From here just click the "Add "BookFinder.com" button and voila, instant BookFinder.com searches from anywhere on the internet.

In Internet Explorer the procedure is the same and the screen should look like this: 

Now whenever you want to compare prices with BookFinder.com you can immediately do a keyword search from wherever you happen to be on the web without having to load our homepage.

Ebooks environmental?

A study was released this week proclaiming that ebooks were the magic bullet solution to greener reading.  The Cleantech Group (who commissioned the study) claimed that the carbon emitted in the life cycle of the ereader was fully offset after a year of use, or 22.5 books. 

The report indicates that, on average, the carbon emitted in the lifecycle of a Kindle is fully offset after the first year of use.

The report, authored by Emma Ritch, states: "Any additional years of use result in net carbon savings, equivalent to an average of 168 kg of CO2 per year (the emissions produced in the manufacture and distribution of 22.5 books)."

In the United States, Amazon currently holds a 45 percent market share of e-reader devices, with one main competitor Sony trailing at 30 percent.

The Cleantech Group forecasts that e-readers purchased from 2009 to 2012 could prevent 5.3 billion kg of carbon dioxide in 2012, or 9.9 billion kg during the four-year time period.

The Daily Finance, however, published a rebuttle yesterday suggesting that these figures may be a bit of an exageration.  They suggested that many "average" readers would read less than the suggested 22-23 books a year, and that if you compare ereaders to digital music players most consumers upgrade or replace their device well before the four year lifecycle that the study suggests.

I think the takeaway is that of course an ebook is going to reduce the amount of paper waste, but you also have to take the impact of whatever electronics you use to read it into account as well.  And  if ebooks are not for you then there are always used books!

Books that should not have been written

This morning Wired listed the top 5 Science Fiction/Fantasy books which were written by great authors but were awful books.  You can check out Wired's reasoning by clicking though but the general theme seems to be that these are the books where each author lost sight of what made their writing or their series great.

1. To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert Heinlein
2. Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer
3. Narcissus in Chains by Laurell K. Hamilton
4. Tarnsman of Gor by John Norman
5. MasterHarper of Pern by Anne McCaffrey

So have you ever come across a great author that you loved, except for that one absolute turkey of a book they wrote.  Either email me (my name at bookfinder dot com) or add a comment with your thoughts.  This can be any genre, and doesn't necessarily have to just be science fiction or fantasy but you have to like the author, just not this book(s).

[Now Reading: The Van by Roddy Doyle]

Sony Reader to adopt ePub format

The New York Times is reporting that Sony will be selling ebooks for their reader in the open ePub format only.  This means that they will also be scrapping "proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied."

This means that books purchased after the change will be able to be read on a variety of other ereaders, opening up options for consumers.

“There is going to be a proliferation of different reading devices, with different features and capabilities and prices for a different set of consumer requirements,” said Steve Haber, president of Sony’s digital reading unit. “If people are going to this e-book shopping mall, they are going to want to shop at all the stores, and not just be required to shop at one store.”

Sony opening up to a common standard creates a very different playing field in the ebooks market.  As Charlie mentioned last week Sony just came out with a cheaper version of its ereader, and the Times suggests that a reader with wireless capability is also on its way.  It seems the ebook wars are far from over.

(Thanks to GallyCat for the tip)

Booker prize betting baffles bookies

Having just gotten back to the office after a week away I'm catching up on my news, so my apologies if this is old hat for you. 

When the Booker Prize long list was announced the other week the usual guessing on who would win started to take place.  The bookmakers all posted their odds and the punters began dropping their bets like usual.  However, as the Telegraph reported last week, betting patterns have been anything but ordinary with 95% of all bets being placed on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

"It's almost like an unspoken psychic rumour has gone round that this will be Hilary Mantel's year," spokesman Graham Sharpe said, as the odds were cut from 12/1 to make it the clear 2/1 favourite.

"We'll lose a five figure sum if the support continues. It is as though a tip has gone around the literary world telling everyone that Mantel is a certainty.

In the last couple years the odds on favorite has not won, however there has not been this level of interest in Booker Betting since 2002 when Yan Martel's Life of Pi was bet on as if it were a shoe in. 

"Quite a lot of them (people placing the bets) are what we would describe as literary insiders," he said.

"Nobody quite seems to know why."

But he ruled out the notion of any foul play, saying: "It would be unusual for the judges to know who they were picking as the eventual winner already. I would be very, very surprised if the judges had already decided.

"It's not in the realms of crying foul or anything like that, it may be just a case of a lot of people deciding on the same one at the same time."

He added it was "very, very rare to see this type of gamble" and said it was "definitely the biggest Booker gamble since Life of Pi was backed as though defeat was out of the question a few years ago".

William Hill's latest 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction odds are:

:: 2/1 Hilary Mantel - Wolf Hall;

:: 4/1 Colm Toibin - Brooklyn;

:: 4/1 Sarah Waters - The Little Stranger;

:: 6/1 JM Coetzee - Summertime;

:: 6/1 James Lever - Me Cheeta;

:: 10/1 AS Byatt - The Children's Book;

:: 12/1 William Trevor - Love and Summer;

:: 14/1 Ed O'Loughlin - Not Untrue & Not Unkind;

:: 14/1 Simon Mawer - The Glass Room;

:: 16/1 Adam Foulds - The Quickening Maze,

:: 16/1 Sarah Hall - How to Paint a Dead Man,

:: 16/1 Samantha Harvey - The Wilderness;

:: 16/1 James Scudamore - Heliopolis.

I'm not a betting man but if I were I would put my money down on AS Byatt, I think she's the dark horse in this race (it should be known I have failed to call every booker I have atempted).  How about the rest of you Journal readers, who do you think will win this years Booker?

Sony's new ebook readers

There are so many ebook readers out these days it's hard to keep track. There's no doubt though, that Amazon's Kindle has garnered the most attention. Sony though, is fighting back with two new ereaders.

In fact, both actually rather remind me of an ipod in terms of design. The pocket edition looks like an traditional ipod, the touch...well...looks like sortof like an ipod touch. Styling aside though, the pocket edition seems to be trading on it's low price, it's only $199, while the touch is able to highlight and save notes. As hothardware notes, this seems to aim directly at the college crowd. Now, both still lack any built in networking like the Kindle (no wifi or cellphone), but oooh..they come in pretty colors.

School books get a little greener

Because I like to start my day out with some good news.  Here is a neat article about a company in the UK who are making school exercise books out of a sugar cane byproduct rather than conventional wood-based pulp, and the best feature is that the books are no more expensive.

From the BBC

Ms Teal said using agricultural crops rather than wood gave the added advantage of reducing deforestation, and helped protect fragile ecosystems that would otherwise break down as a result of logging in forested areas.

"In this instance it costs no more to buy an eco-friendly green product than a conventional wood-based paper product," said Ms Teal.

"The Consortium is the first supplier to source this product and with sustainability becoming increasingly important in the classroom, we think that once schools have tried these exercise books, there will be no going back."

I hope the project has legs, if it works out well we may see publishers start producing textbooks from this material as well.

Anirvan: saying goodbye

I've been working on BookFinder.com for almost 13 years now, but even the most amazing experiences come to an end. I'll be exiting BookFinder.com in August, heading out on the very best of terms, and after years of planning to ensure that our users aren't impacted by the transition.

BookFinder.com started off as my class project in 1996. My best friend Charlie built the 486 computer that it ran on, and we teamed up in 1999 to rewrite the software and run the site as our small business. We've been together every step of the way, designing, building, and managing BookFinder.com (and debating books and politics over lunch every day). I'm delighted to be able to pass my role on to him; the site's in incredibly good hands.

I've been planning to step back for several years now, to work on other projects, travel, and explore new opportunities. Please stay in touch:

• via my homepage and weblog
• via email, to anirvan (at) chatterjee (dot) net

I'm deeply grateful to the bibliophiles, booksellers, and marketplace operators I've worked with over the years. I've heard some pretty amazing stories, and I always promised myself that when I had some time, I'd try to collect and share them with others.

That's why I'm launching the Online Bookselling History Project, an effort to collect first-hand accounts of the online bookselling trade before 2000. If you were involved with the trade pre-2000, then I want your stories: bookseller BBSes, UIEE conversion nightmares, changing cataloging practices, the bricks vs. clicks debates, etc. You can help put together a patchwork history of our trade during a time of great transition. More on this soon.

— Anirvan Chatterjee

P.S. Thank you to everyone who's been part of BookFinder.com since 1996 -- Alison, Asok, Barbara, Boris, Bryan, Chaitee, Charlie, Christine, David, Fredrik, Garner, Giovanni, Hannes, Scott, Shaku, Shauna, Thomas, Tushar, Vanessa, and Wendy. I'm lucky to have friends like you.

[Now Reading: Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh]

Australian publishing, ebooks and pricing

I have been busy this week and thus unable to post as much as I would like.  I will however leave a short round up of news from the past week. 

Australian Publishers
Australia has some of the most strict importation laws in the world, when it comes to books.  Currently Australian bookshops are banned from importing overseas editions of a book if an Australian publisher has produced their own edition within 30 days of its foreign publication.  Opponents to the law say that this allows publishers to charge significantly more for books in Australia.  Proponents of the law, including Australian writers Peter Carey and Tim Winton, claim that it preserves cultural diversity and that without the added income publishers receive from these rights local authors would be up a creek.

Earlier this week the Australian government began to re-evaluate the usefulness of this law, much to the chagrin of Authors and publishers.

The Productivity Commission, which the Australian government had asked to review the law, recommended that the restrictions should be removed, with the industry given three years to adjust before the changes take effect. "One of the Commission's concerns is that consumers pay higher prices for books, regardless of their cultural significance," said the Commission's deputy chairman, Mike Woods, announcing the results of the study (it found that last year Australian books were on average 35% more expensive than US editions). "A second concern is that these costs to consumers generate greater benefits for overseas authors and publishers than they do for our local writers. In effect, Australian consumers are subsidizing foreign book producers,"

Full details in The Guardian

ebooks: when to publish
The current publishing format has been in place for many years.  If you want to read a book when it comes out you must buy it in hardcover, and to save a few bucks you can wait for the paperback, with super budget editions of the biggest bestsellers trailing months or even years down the road. But the question that publishers are asking themselves now is, where does the ebook fall into this mix.

The New York Times took a look at the dilemma for Dan Brown's publishers when The Lost Symbol comes out in September.

No topic is more hotly debated in book circles at the moment than the timing, pricing and ultimate impact of e-books on the financial health of publishers and retailers. Publishers are grappling with e-book release dates partly because they are trying to understand how digital editions affect demand for hardcover books. A hardcover typically sells for anywhere from $25 to $35, while the most common price for an e-book has quickly become $9.99.

Ebook Pricing
And while publishers fight the concept of the $9.99 ebook, which is at risk of reducing their profit margins, critics at Slate are suggesting that losing the price war might be the best thing to happen to them.  Their theory is that should publishers win and increase the price of ebooks cusomers will turn to pirated versions placing literature in the same boat as record lables.  They say all that it will take is a better reading device

What has kept illegal e-books from taking off? First, all the electronic reading gadgets on the market are subpar, if you ask me, making the reading of books, newspapers, magazines, and even cereal boxes painful. The resolution is poor. The fonts are crap. The navigation is chunky. Not since the eight-track player has modern technology produced such a heap of garbage. If you're looking for the reason e-books constitute just 1 percent or 2 percent of all book sales, stop the search. Second, the hassle factor is too great. Only a student or a deadbeat with a lot of time on his hands is going to want to search the Web and scour the torrents for, say, a free, bootlegged copy of A.J. Liebling's The Telephone Booth Indian. It's as tedious as fishing! Third, not all bootlegged e-books are created equal. On finally finding that free book you so desire, you may find yourself wishing you had purchased the legal edition: Your bootleg may be filled with typographical errors, thanks to the slipshod application of optical character-recognition software. If a nicely produced Kindle version of The Telephone Booth Indian that doesn't have to be monkeyed around with can be easily nabbed for $9.99, which it can, why bother breaking the law to obtain an inferior edition for display on a rotten device? It's like using an acetylene torch to loot a kid's piggy bank.

What do you call a group of booksellers?

It's Friday, so here is something fun.

Sheppard's Confidential, a really great newsletter for booksellers out of the UK, has taken suggestions for a new collective noun for book dealers. (working off the same concept as a murder of crows or troop of gorillas).  They came up with the following:

A whinge of bookdealers (contributed by someone who wishes to remain anonymous!)
A quire of booksellers (C.S. Griffin, DoolinDinghy Books)
A ream of booksellers (C.S. Griffin, DoolinDinghy Books)
A case of bookdealers (Pierce Roche, Dunphail, Moray, Scotland)
A ring of bookdealers (Pierce Roche, Dunphail, Moray, Scotland)
A commission of bookdealers (Pierce Roche, Dunphail, Moray, Scotland)
A mildew of used booksellers? (Ken Brinnick, New Gloucester, ME USA)
A doze of booksellers (John Underwood - judging by the number fall asleep at fairs!)
A shuffle of bookdealers, (Joanne, Proseworthy Collectable Books, Cape Town)
A chapter of bookdealers, (Joanne, Proseworthy Collectable Books, Cape Town)
An eccentricity of bookdealers (Pierce Roche, Dunphail, Moray, Scotland)
A madness of bookdealers (Pierce Roche, Dunphail, Moray, Scotland)
A reduction of bookdealers (Pierce Roche, Dunphail, Moray, Scotland)

At first I was thinking it should be "a shelf of bookdealers" but after reading this "chapter" is definatly the way to go... "a chapter of bookdealers".

Books as a social pursuit

It came to my attention that I have been neglecting those of you who who have absolutely no desire to learn about ereaders so today I promise this is the last you will hear about them from me.  Today instead I thought I would share two articles about reading and how it can effect your social life. 

If you belong to a book club you may be happy to learn that and an an increasing number of authors are jobbing their way around various book clubs to discuss, with their readers, what they thought of the novel.  I think it might take away from the whole book club process if you bring the author in right away but after a discussion about the book, getting to actually ask the author questions about the text could be a really neat experience, and a good reason to read and coming authors. 

From The Daily Beast:

There is a thing authors do, nervously, when they think no one is looking. They check out their numbers—online sales figures, ratings, rankings, reader reviews. Not long ago, Joshua Henkin, a professor of creative writing at Sarah Lawrence and Brooklyn College, was doing just such a thing in his home office. He was scrolling through Goodreads.com, monitoring the reception of his new novel, Matrimony. A user named Shelley had given him a mixed review—three stars out of five. Henkin clicked on her name and decided to email her, offering to attend her book club, if she had one. She did—that very evening—and, after several exchanges, Henkin was set to call into it.

And then moving from from friends recommending a good book, to books recommending a good friend.  LibraryThing.com and the aforementioned Goodreads.com have shown that this works pretty well but The Guardian thinks that relationships based on books should stay at the friend level.  The British paper takes a pot shot, in a fairly amusing article, at Boarders launching its dating service for bibliophiles suggesting that looking for love based on reading tastes can only lead to heartache. 

Oh, the first couple of dates would go fine: you'd huddle over coffees or beers, discussing with animated, shining eyes your love of, say, Haruki Murakami. Then, as things progress, you might go for a weekend away, perhaps walking hand-in-hand down the narrow streets of Hay-on-Wye. Reclining by a roaring fire in a country pub, something like pride would flutter in your breast as you watch the way your new love's lips move slightly as they read. Then the rot would set in. "You thought Wind-Up Bird Chronicle meant what?" "Actually, I did discover Murakami three years before you." "Yes, but I read Norwegian Wood in the original Japanese …"

And before things started to go publicly, horribly, harrowingly wrong, imagine how dull a couple who were both into the same books would be. You might just about put up with your friend's constant evangelising about Patricia Cornwell, but what if she turned up with a new beau who spouted the same hero-worship? And what if our couple were to take the plunge and move in together? Does any home really need two copies of everything on their bookshelf? Whose editions get sent to the charity shop?

Introducing Ditto, yet another ereader

Last Friday I told you about Boarder's launching a new ereader in the UK and today we have yet another reader coming to the fold, The Ditto (or Digital Interface Total Text Organizer).

From the Publishers Weekly report it sounds that The Ditto is much like the Cool-ER reader which debuted at BookExpo this year: costs about the same, has similar features (6" screen, reads txt, pdf and mp3, upgradable memory, etc).

One thing the Ditto does have going for it though is that it supports the epub file format.

As I said on Friday, if some of of this sounds like Greek to you, check out our ebooks FAQ page.