Thursday, Feb 18 at 6pm at Tattered Cover Colfax Avenue
There are so many great books being published, it can be difficult to decide what to read with your book club. We have the perfect solution for this admittedly good problem to have, Book Club Happy Hour! Join us as Tattered Cover staff members and publisher’s sales representatives offer their favorite choices for book club reading and discussing. Find out what other book clubs are reading and mingle while enjoying wine and light refreshments. There is no cost to attend, but reservations are required. Please call 303-322-1965 ext. 2739 to make a reservation.
Monday, February 15, 2010
Sunday, February 14, 2010
Attention Budding Artists!
The Tattered Cover Children's Bookmark Contest asks children to create a colorful bookmark on the theme of reading. The winning entries are printed and distributed to customers during the course of the year.
More information can be found here: http://www.tatteredcover.com/contests
More information can be found here: http://www.tatteredcover.com/contests
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Free Writing Workshop coming up
The Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers are offering a free writers workshop entitled "When The 'Tale' Wags The Dog From Old Yeller to Moby Dick: Developing Animals as Key Characters", led by Page Lambert. The workshop will be held at Bel Mar Library, 555 S. Allison Parkway, Lakewood CO on Saturday, Feb 20, 2010.
From their website:Where would Melville be without Moby Dick? Or Jack London without White Fang? Even Hemingway couldn’t have written “The Cat in the Rain” without the cat. And of course, there’s Black Beauty, and Flicka, and Sea Biscuit. The list goes on and on. But it’s not all pretty. What about Edgar Allen Poe’s The Raven or Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Daphne du Maurier’s novella The Birds? What is it about animals as characters that both charms us and repels us when they rear their lovely and sometimes frightening heads in the stories we love to read and write? Come to this two-hour workshop with award-winning author Page Lambert and learn how animals can be a storyteller’s best friend.
About Page:
Page Lambert writes from the mountains west of Denver, where she shares the landscape with elk, deer, coyote, fox, and the occasional gnarly mountain lion and scrounging bear. Reader’s Digest was so enthralled with the Black lab Hondo in her bestselling memoir In Search of Kinship, that they paid her $3000 to expand his story. If you’ve read her novel, Shifting Stars (finalist for the Mountains and Plains Book Award), you might notice that Turtle Women’s red roan mare bears a striking resemblance to her half-Arab mare Romie, and to the Denver carriage horse in All the Water Yet to Come. Facilitator of over 150 workshops and retreats, Lambert’s work is featured in dozens of collections, including Chicken Soup for the Dog and Cat Lover’s Soul. A recipient of two Wyoming Arts Council Literary Fellowships, her “River Writing Journeys for Women” were hailed by Oprah's O Magazine in 2006 as “One of six great all-girl getaways of the year.” To learn about her editing, coaching, and consulting work, go to www.pagelambert.com. Read her latest blogs about animals (including vultures) at www.pagelambert.blogspot.com, Connecting People with Nature, and Writer’s with Words.
Speaking of meeting authors...
Seven of the twelve short story authors who contributed to A Dozen on Denver, which started as a an unprecedented Denver anniversary project by the now defunct Rocky Mountain News and then became an absolutely beautiful book thanks to local publisher Fulcrum, were able to join us at Tattered Cover Historic Lodo Thursday night. Wow, what a panel of minds and opinions by a group who genuinely considers themselves friends of each other and lovers of Denver and books. Here are a few pictures we snapped that night:
Top to bottom, left to right: Sandra Dallas, Laurie Brock (one of the project coordinators), Robert Greer, Margaret Coel, Nick Arvin, Arnold Grossman, Manuel Ramos, Connie Willis
Signed copies are available at all three of our stores.
Top to bottom, left to right: Sandra Dallas, Laurie Brock (one of the project coordinators), Robert Greer, Margaret Coel, Nick Arvin, Arnold Grossman, Manuel Ramos, Connie Willis
Signed copies are available at all three of our stores.
Mike Shatzkin asks "Why Are You Killing Bookstores?"
Of course the book industry is struggling--EVERYBODY in this economy is struggling. It's just a bit (possible HUGE understatement) more for of a fight for bricks and mortar full of real paper these days with the swelling wave of technology that is the e-book. We sell those too, so we are far from anti-ebook. It's just, well, we'd like to stay in business. We like seeing our guests curled up in our antique chairs reading a book they discovered in our shelves, sipping a coffee and a look of intensity or delight on their faces. We love the noise and bustle of the children's sections as those under 3 feet tall squeal at the magic of a turned page. We love the passionate discussion of ideas at our tables and at our events. We love the 600+ authors we are able to introduce our guests and community to every year--shaking their hand can't be replaced by Skype. It just can't.
And we love Mike Shatzkin's "rumination", reprinted here with permission:
And we love Mike Shatzkin's "rumination", reprinted here with permission:
"No news from here today; just rumination.
Those of us in the book business have to choose which anti-social position we want to take.
Some people are for the most rapid possible adoption of ebooks. They can be cheaper. They don’t require paper which pollutes when you create it and adds carbon footprint every time you ship it around. They have much greater functionality, or at least the potential for it. They enable business models that don’t require capital-intensive infrastructure.
But have you thought about this? If you are for the most rapid possible adoption of ebooks, you are for killing bookstores faster.
Although there are probably few people reading this blog who expect bookstores to be around in 15 or 20 years (and those who do will undoubtedly leave a comment!), there are many who would like to keep them around as long as possible. There is a magic to being in a building surrounded by 40,000, 60,000, 100,000 different books. Bookstores are inherently community centers. They make possible the wide dissemination and promotion of great writing. They enable people to see heavily-illustrated books before they purchase them.
But have you thought about this? If you are for bookstores lasting as long as possible, you want to slow down the uptake of ebooks.
As individuals, which side you’re on is a matter of personal preference. Although I have mostly read ebooks for more than 10 years and haven’t read a printed book in two years, I am for bookstores lasting as long as possible. It’s a “health of society”and a “health of my industry” question for me. I think both will be much poorer when bookstores go away.
My societal preference isn’t enough to motivate a self-indulgent guy like me to inconvenience myself, so I read electronically, not on paper. But it does not distress me to remain part of a small minority. It helps keep bookstores alive.
Individuals decide this question on personal preference; businesses think about competitive advantage.
Barnes & Noble and the biggest legacy publishers clearly have an interest in slowing down ebook uptake. Even though B&N and the big publishers are now in the ebook business, their competitive advantage exists heavily on the print side. They recognize that they have to live in the ebook world to serve the authors and customers they’ve had for years, so they do. But I don’t think a single big player in legacy publishing could give you a convincing description of how they maintain their scale and power when digital becomes the rule and print the exception. Can that day possibly be more than 20 years away? Might it be 10? I know a man that will take a bet that it will be five.
Apple and Kobo and Google and a slew of new players clearly have an interest in accelerating the growth of the ebook business because that’s the only part of the book business they’re in.
Amazon sells mostly print, but they sell print online. As sales migrate from print to electronic, it is still good for the print business at Amazon. Reducing print sales drives bookstores out of business, one by one. They go out because their sales went down 10% or 20% or 30%. But the remaining 70% or 80% or 90% of their print book business is demand to be redistributed. When a store disappears, some of those sales migrate to online purchases. And most of that moves to Amazon.
And, as we observed on this blog nearly a year ago, Amazon’s position as an online print retailer would be much harder to dislodge than their position as a leading ebook retailer (particularly with a major weapon — discount pricing on hot new titles — apparently being taken out of their hands by Agency pricing.)
Even though I believe that ebook hegemony will be harder for Amazon to defend than their dominance of online print, their strategy of pushing the move to digital reading has paid big dividends so far. Amazon delivered the Kindle, which was the first really great catalyst to move people from print to digital. (The iPhone was probably the second.) It is clear that Amazon gained an enormous first mover advantage by doing that and succeeded in converting a large number of their best book-buying customers to digital.
Both Barnes & Noble and Borders have suffered same-store sales declines for the past two years. Lots of those Kindle owners might have stopped buying some of their books in stores because they switched to electronic reading. They’re locked in to buying from Amazon until either there’s another way to put books on their Kindle or they move on to another device. Amazon created high switching costs for many of the best bookstore customers in the country. So they now own business they used to compete for and, at the same time, diminish their brick-and-mortar competition driving more print book business to the web.
The big legacy publishers’ greatest strength is their unique ability to handle print book distribution. There really are only a handful of companies in this country (the Big Six plus a few distributors and a tiny number of other publishers) that can put a book into every brick-and-mortar outlet where a customer might buy one. Doing that requires capabilities and relationships that you either have now or never will.
Although the big publishers and big authors have been allies fighting Amazon’s selling policies because they want to preserve print-driven book pricing, in the longer run their interests diverge. As ebook sales keep rising as a percentage of the total, the big publishers’ position weakens and the big authors’ position strengthens.
The book business has always been one with very low financial barriers to entry. Ebook publishing makes getting into the game even cheaper. It is also going to bring increased competition to book publishers from content-creators outside publishing. None of this is appealing if your power as a publisher is the ability to control shelf space and get fast reprints.I don’t think anybody would want to be accused of being in favor of killing bookstores faster. And very few of us would be comfortable having it said we were trying to slow down the progress of digital technology, strategizing to slow down ebook uptake. But you are for one or the other, unless you don’t have any opinion at all."
See the original post from The Idea Logical blog here:
http://ow.ly/14qeHFriday, February 12, 2010
Love Is In The Air...and On The Shelves
The Indie Love and Romance Bestseller Lists
In recognition of Valentine's Day, we present the Indie Love and Romance Bestseller Lists. Based on sales in independent bookstores nationwide for the eight-week period ending February 9, 2010. (Courtesy of the ABA)
| 1. | The Five Love Languages |
| 2. | Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man |
| 3. | The Mastery of Love: A Practical Guide to the Art of Relationship |
| 4. | Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples |
| 5. | Dear Old Love: Anonymous Notes to Former Crushes, Sweethearts, Husbands, Wives & Ones That Got Away |
| 6. | What French Women Know: About Love, Sex, and Other Matters of the Heart and Mind |
| 7. | Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus |
| 8. | Us: Americans Talk About Love |
| 9. | The Brain in Love: 12 Lessons to Enhance Your Love Life |
| 10. | How to Be an Adult in Relationships: The Five Keys to Mindful Loving |
Romance, Fiction
| 1. | The Time Traveler's Wife |
| 2. | Knit Two |
| 3. | Outlander |
| 4. | Knit the Season |
| 5. | The White Queen |
| 6. | The Friday Night Knitting Club |
| 7. | Bed of Roses |
| 8. | Divine Misdemeanors |
| 9. | Dragonfly in Amber |
| 10. | Vision in White |
They're Making A Movie of "The Help"!!!
Chris Columbus fast-tracks 'Help'
His 1492 Prods. readies adaptation of Stockett novel By MICHAEL FLEMING
Tate Taylor has written the script and will direct; 1492 partners Columbus, Michael Barnathan and Michael Radcliffe will produce with Brunson Green of Harbinger Pictures.
The novel has been on the New York Times bestseller list for 35 weeks since its publication in February by Putnam imprint Amy Einhorn Books.
Taylor got involved well before it became a literary sensation for Stockett, a first-time author who was reportedly rejected by 50 agents. Taylor grew up with Stockett in Mississippi — his mother inspired one of the Mississippi matriarchs in the novel — and was so helpful to the author that she gave him an early peek; an option was made well before the book came out.
Taylor, an actor-turned-director who previously directed the 2008 feature "Pretty Ugly People," showed the book to Columbus, whom he met in San Francisco because Taylor's niece and nephew attended the same school as Columbus' kids.
Shingle 1492 is already meeting on financing; plan is to put the pic into production next spring in the South. The producer has the benefit of first-look relationships with India-based Reliance Big Entertainment and Korea-based CJ Entertainment, and Reliance has shown the strongest interest.Reprinted with permission from Variety. If you'd like to see the original article please go to: http://www.variety.com/art
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