Cork University Press

Cork University Press and Waterstones support local book offering

Earlier this year Simon Fox, HMV Group's chief executive, said that Waterstones would be repositioned as a more of a local bookshop. It would reduce the number of "big celebrity titles" that it sells, tailor its range to local communities, and reduce its reliance on chain-wide promotions. With that policy in mind Waterstones and Cork University Press have joined up to provide a local book offering in the Waterstones shop in Cork.

Cork University Press has an island unit in the Ireland section in addition to a face out shelf in the Irish Interest bay at the front of the shop. This is a win- win solution for both bookshop and publisher. Waterstones can offer a targeted local selection that would normally be the domain of a local independent bookseller and Cork University Press can display its range in depth. 

Books in the promotion include:

 

 

9781859183809    Atlas of Cork City

9780955226113    Jack's World

9781855942141    Truly Tasty

9780953535385    Cool Waters, Emerald Seas

9780955226151    The Last Days of the Cork Docklands

9781859184394    The Natural History of Ireland

9780953535309    Cafe Paradiso Cookbook

9781859184110    Blarney Castle

9781859184622    Aloys Fleischmann

9780955226144    Cornucopia at Home

9780953535316    Fish Stone Water

9781859184301    The Iveragh Peninsula   

9781855942110    Sisters

9781859183922    History and the Public Sphere

9781859184547    Out of the Earth

Further details on www.corkuniversitypress.com

Canadian used bookstore thrives

Patrick Hempelmann, owner of two used bookstores called BMV (books, music and videos) in Toronto, is opening a third, which, at 15,000 square feet and 200,000 books, will be much larger than the other two.

Interestingly he told the Toronto Star:

"The traditional concept of the used bookstore is basically dead: to wait for people to look for books that are out of print and hard to find, and therefore be able to charge a high price because of the rarity of what you are selling, that idea has been destroyed by ABE and by the Internet. There are very few books that are hard to find now.

"What still works," he continued, "is to sell good books, remainders, review copies, used and hurt books and sell them cheaper, much much cheaper, than you'd pay at Indigo or Chapters. In the U.S., the used book business is growing faster than the new."

From Shelf Awareness

Six million sign-up to Borders rewards scheme

Internet Retailer reports from its 2006 conference where Borders Group said that its use of rich media and an online loyalty program had attracted 6 million members in its first two months.

"Our mission is to be the preferred place for knowledge and entertainment," senior vice president, chief marketing officer and head of e-commerce Michael Tam is reported to have said. Borders wants customers to get the same level of shopping experience when shopping online from home as they get in a Borders store, he added.

From The Bookseller

HMV to Buy Ottakar's--Finally

HMV Group, owner of Waterstone's bookstores, will buy Ottakar's bookstores for 285 pence a share (about US$118 million), 35% less than its original 440-pence-per-share offer last September, Bloomberg reported. HMV said it already has control of 41% of Ottakar's stock, which could lessen the chance of a competing bid from WH Smith or others. HMV's original offer expired during the long period of review by the Competition Commission, which ultimately approved the sale.

If the deal is concluded, the "Wattakar's" combination would have 336 bookstores and represent 24% of the U.K. book market.

Under pressure from grocery store chains and Internet booksellers, sales at traditional bookstores in the U.K. have eroded in the past year. Last week Ottakar's said sales at stores open at least a year fell 8% in the 16 weeks ended May 20. Sales at Waterstone's in the similar period dropped 5.6%.

"The strategic rationale for bringing the two businesses together is stronger than ever," HMV CEO Alan Giles said during a conference call quoted by Bloomberg. Giles said that HMV will benefit from economies of scale and the consolidation of "administrative and head office functions."

From Shelf Awareness

Abebooks and Library Things

Abebooks.com  have bought a 40% interest in LibraryThing.com, launched last August by Tim Spalding. Spalding himself was 100% in the Abebooks booth and said that the site has some 35,000 bibliophile members who catalogue their books--either what they're reading or their personal libraries or both. Already members have catalogued some 2.7 million books.

Members can tag the titles in their catalogues and write reviews. Based on all this information, the site makes suggestions for members, and those selections can be books that were published long ago, an example of Long Tail theory in action. "They're deeper in time than Amazon," Spalding said. "They're not just what's selling now."

Spalding sees the site as a social thing. "Books connect you with others," he said. "You can relate with others who have the same interests, and if you find someone who has the same unusual book you have, it can be very striking."

A member's first 200 books can be catalogued for free. After that, fees are $10 a year or $25 for life memberships; most people choose the latter, Spalding said.

Abebooks intends to help LibraryThing by exposing the Web site to its customers, most of whom are also book lovers. "A lot of members already use Abebooks," Spalding said. "The overlap is very strong."

From Shelf Awareness

Custom-made books and DVDs have improved Amazon.com's selection

Custom-made books and DVDs have improved Amazon.com's selection without raising inventory costs and are becoming more important to the company's business, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos told shareholders at the company's annual meeting on Tuesday, the AP reported.

"As a customer, if you get a product from Amazon, you might never know it was printed yesterday," Bezos said. "I think we'll see more and more products created instantaneously."

Both BookSurge, the book POD company Amazon acquired last year, and Amazon's on-demand DVD subsidiary, CustomFlix Labs, have helped the company increase offerings 42% in the past year. Selection is one of the cornerstones of the company's business model, Bezos said.

From Shelf Awareness

Do Bookstores Have a Future?

Earlier this month the legendary Cody's Books in Berkeley announced that it was closing its doors for good. It's a grim if unsurprising development. The last decade has not been kind to the traditional corner bookshop. Battered by online discounts and chain superstores, the American Booksellers Association has crumbled from 5,200 bookstores in 1991 to 1,702 stores in 2005. So if you were to seek a summary of their dilemma, this one might sound apt: "The old-fashioned bookstore was a charming place, but charm alone will not solve the problem of modern bok distribution. . . . Hard though it may be to face the fact, the bookstore of today cannot primarily be a place for those who revere books as things-in-themselves."

An editorial about the opening of another Borders superstore crammed with lattes and Sudoko instead of Foucault and Zola? No. Try a Carnegie Corporation report . . . from 1930.

Chain superstores, notes Laura J. Miller's fascinating new study Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (University of Chicago Press), are the latest manifestation of a centuries-old struggle between bookselling Davids and Goliaths—a battle over where Americans actually shop versus stores with, Miller tartly notes, "a style of retailing that Americans at least profess to miss."

The battle is as much cultural as commercial. "It's almost as if there are two tracks of bookselling, the commercial and the literary," muses ABA president Mitchell Kaplan in an interview with the Voice. (Disclosure: As an author, I've read at many of these chains and indies, and my work has been promoted by ABA's BookSense.) The founder of the Miami-area Books & Books, Kaplan started from a sheer love of what the Carnegie report pronounced dead: books as things-in-themselves. "When you lose an [independent] bookstore, you don't just lose the place," Kaplan explains. "You lose the people. Knowledgeable book people are being lost from book culture."

Are we witnessing the extinction of that culture?

Is there any future for independent bookshops?

Is there any future for independent bookshops? Earlier this month, six went out of business in just one week. Those that still survive know they can never match the huge discounts offered by Amazon, supermarkets and chains such as Waterstone's. Yet when Stephen Moss toured the country to visit this 'dying breed', he found a group convinced it can fight back

How Reed Exhibitions secured a deal to run London Book Fair 2007 at Earls Court from under the nose of the Frankfurt Book Fair

Rumour has it that if you stay in the book industry long enough, events have a habit of turning full circle. By moving back to Earls Court in 2007, the London Book Fair will be returning to its first home in London, where it was opened by the Queen in 1965.

Many publishers and agents have warmly welcomed the London Book Fair's move back to central London, after what proved to be a hugely unpopular relocation to ExCeL in Docklands, east London, in March this year. Richard Charkin, Macmillan c.e.o. summed up the mood, saying: "I'm delighted that the fair will take place in central London, and this reflects the views of most of my colleagues at Macmillan and of publishers in general."

The 2007 show, run by Reed Exhibitions, will run from 16th to 18th April 2007, at Earls Court One in Kensington and Chelsea, near what was until recently its long-standing home in Olympia.

Earls Court One is spread over over two floors and comprises 42,000 sq metres of exhibition space. There is a Business Centre and separate Club Lounge, seminar and breakout rooms, strong technical and communications infrastructure, a range of catering options for lunch, LED and plasma screen advertising opportunities, banqueting facilities, and on-site parking for 1,630 cars. For those travelling by public transport, the site is served by the District and Piccadilly Tube lines, and Silverlink and Southern overground trains. Most importantly, it isn't in east London.

HMV ends Waterstone's link with Amazon by opting for own site

HMV is to terminate its Waterstone's partnership with Amazon, launching its own online service this autumn, which it says will "reflect better the brand's specialist bookselling credentials".

The news came as the group reported a further decline in sales and warned of a sharp fall in profits for the year just ended.

Alan Giles, chief executive, said the group expected profits for the year to April 29 to tumble to about £98m before tax and exceptional items. This is in line with analysts' current expectations, which range from £93m to £103m but is significantly below the previous year's figure of £129.3m. Mr Giles said he expected the figure to come out in the middle of the analysts' range.

Like-for-like sales at HMV remain in double-digit decline, falling by 11.4% over the 16 weeks to April 29. This leaves their fall for the full year at 10.8% and comes despite a strong performance from computer games, suggesting that sales of music and DVDs have been even worse.

At Waterstone's - where the founder, Tim Waterstone, dropped a brief £280m bid attempt last week - underlying sales fell 5.6% in the 16-week period, putting the decline for the full year at 5.8%.

Mr Giles said the difficult sales trends experienced earlier in the year had persisted. "The challenges we are dealing with were never open to a quick fix," he said but added that early results from the group's new pricing and promotional policy, on trial at six stores, had been "encouraging".

HMV has admitted that it badly underestimated the impact the burgeoning internet would have on its business but is now belatedly getting its online act together. "The Amazon partnership has been good but when we first entered into it we felt that online sales would not get to more than 10% of the UK books market. But now it's too important to leave to somebody else," Mr Giles said.

The chief executive is due to step down from the group at the end of this year and said yesterday that "good progress" is being made in the search for his successor.

On Ottakar's, he said HMV has not yet decided whether to launch a new offer for the specialist books chain when it receives final clearance from the Competition Commission.

This is due by May 22 but could come later this week and is expected to start a bid battle with its rival WH Smith, which is also interested.

Deteriorating trading at Ottakar's means HMV is unlikely to want to pay anything near its original £96.4m offer, although, if WH Smith enters the fray, the price could be forced back up. HMV said that once the Ottakar's situation was clarified, it would review its capital structure. This could lead to a return of cash to shareholders.

From The Guardian