A rainy day visit to the Politics and Prose Bookstore

On a very rainy day (uh, note to weatherpeople, what was that about? Not in your prediction!) took a trip up to the Cleveland Park neighborhood in Washington with the goal of visiting the Peirce Mill historic site. Got to see a bit of the mill, but then trooped back to Conn. Ave. to have some lunch and do some browsing/shopping at Politics and Prose.

P&P doesn't need any introduction to Washingtonians (or viewers of C-SPAN), but it it is one of the best (and few remaining?) independent bookstore in the U.S.A.

I'd not been there in a while (in fact, not since the new ownership took over. A great selection as usual, and some needed and well done renovations underway. They also had installed "Opus", an Espresso Book Machine. One of the interesting uses of Opus was to print new (or reprints) of books by local authors. In essence, the bookstore is now the publisher. Brilliant idea. The next step is to offer a free e-pub version of the book along with the paper copy.

And, because there are so few places to browse more obscure books, I ran into a neighbor seeking poetry books for her reading club. Got to spend some time klatching in the poety section. Wallace Stevens? (me, yes, her NO!); Billy Collins? (yes and yes); Rilke? (me: Duino Elegies; her, early work); William Carlos Williams (yes and maybe). But what she was looking for was the poetry of Herman Melville. A hard thing to find!

QotD: "Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles" Tom Waits

 "They have removed the struggle to find anything. And therefore there is no genuine sense of discovery. Struggle is the first thing we know getting along the birth canal, out in the world. It's pretty basic. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you'd go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that's gone." - Tom Waits (The Guardian, 22 Oct 2011)

Wow, Waits is so right ... I used to spend so many hours combing through record and book stores. Trying to find that known or unknown book or LP. 


There was a certain rush of actually finding something, or maybe it was something that was in the hunting and not the actual finding that made it such a special event. 


(insert here the memories of slightly damp cardboard from those funky used record stores around the country; the ramshackle packed shelves of weird old used book store; the smell of ink and paper in new stores)


Not quite the same thing as typing in a search box and pressing click to order. There was a sense of wonder the first time I found with just a few clicks a used copy of Holger Cahill's The Shadow of My Hand, something I'd been searching for in used book stores for years.


Now that I've moved mostly to ebooks and online music (see EMusic for some great deals and community - but they don't have Waits' new album yet, just the single), most of the hunting is reserved for waiting for things like Gravity's Rainbow to get released in epub).

Why bookstores are relevant, Nikki Sixx signings

Barnes and Noble, Washington,  DC

Velocity of Change

Velocity, a photo by martin_kalfatovic on Flickr.

Velocity is the measurement of the rate and direction of change. To measure velocity, you need to know both the magnitude and direction if you want to assign a value.

The current report on e-books from the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), released on 28 April 2011 has a lot of interesting information that can help to measure the "velocity of change" in the book industry as it relates to epublishing. BISG gives us a number of measurements on the magnitude (increased sales, higher percentage of readers) and direction (upwards). Taken together, I think it's safe to say that the velocity of change (in the ebook field) is rapidly increasing.

I'll note:

• 13% of print book buyers have downloaded an e-book
• 66% of respondents have moved mostly to e-books
• book sales have INCREASED in the past six months

A quote from Scott Lubeck (BISG Executive Director):

"This is a market in fast motion and identifying trends early is the key to gaining a competitive edge," said Scott Lubeck, BISG's Executive Director. "This on-going BISG baseline study of consumer behavior toward e-books and e-book reading devices is essential to understanding both the velocity of change and its significance to every stakeholder in the book industry."

Carrion Comfort: Borders Books out of business sale

Why do I have Gerard Manley Hopkins on the brain?

Carrion Comfort

NOT, I’ll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;
Not untwist—slack they may be—these last strands of man
In me ór, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;
Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.
But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on me    

Thy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scan
With darksome devouring eyes my bruisèd bones? and fan,
O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee?

Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.
Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod, Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chéer.
Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fóot tród
Me? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that year
Of now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.

Ebooks sales surpass paperback on Amazon

Kindle
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

As reported on TechCrunch

Has the pixel to print tipping point been reached? Last July we reported that Amazon’s Kindle eReader books had surpassed hardcover books in terms of sales, selling 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books. Now that lead also holds for paperbacks as well with 115 Kindle books being sold for every hundred paperbacks.

The statistic for hardcover books itself has doubled, with three times as many Kindle books as sold as paperbacks in 2010. Free Kindle books are excluded from this number or it would be much higher.

The Kindle store now has over 810,000 books, with over 670,000 of them priced at $9.99 or less. This number includes 107 New York Times bestselllers.

Because of its aggressive focus on digital Amazon had its first ever $10 billion quarter. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos predicted this digital to print milestone would happen in the second quarter of this year, so it has come ahead of expectations but, in any case, was inevitable.

QotD: "in desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox"

Today, I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, well, not really, but today we can celebrate, honor, Howl. The first performance of Howl was at the Six Gallery in San Francisco on October 7, 1955. Later, it was published by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti of the famed City Lights Books in North Beach (picture at right).

If we looked out the window City Lights Books, further down Columbus Ave., towards Green Street, you'll find Club Fugazi (but not in that "desolate Fugazzi’s, listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox") which later inspired a fabulous little punk band from here in Washington, DC but which is not the Fugazzi (two ZZ's) of the poem.

Downtowne Books (Riverside, CA)

2007-07-23-dscn0086
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic

Nice used bookstore near the Mission Inn in Riverside, CA. Good selection of books on a variety of topics. Friendly staff (no cat seen on premises, but a variety of owl figurines scattered about)

How many issues in a volume?

DSCN5919
Originally uploaded by martin_kalfatovic.

Biodiversity Heritage Library members and Internet Archive staff discuss the difficulties of seriality