The readers’ advisory librarian’s weekly update, from a scan of more than 100 blogs, newsletters, magazines, newspapers and television. This blog is brought to you by the Reader’s Advisor Online, the subscription database based on Libraries Unlimited’s Genreflecting Advisory series. We’d love to hear from you. Feel free to comment on any of our posts, or contact us here.
By Cindy Orr
This Week In Books
We have still more spring releases that we have noted as no brainer hits for this week. Scroll down to the next entry to see the complete list, which includes Nevada Barr, Jim Butcher, Jimmy Carter, Susan Wittig Albert, and lots more. As usual, we have our Most Wanted Mashup to the right—our picks of the most sought after books of the week, and for our Under the Radar list this week, we have great recent short stories you may have missed.
In other news this week, watch for blog entries on readers’ advisory related programs from last week’s PLA conference in Minneapolis. The first two have been posted, and can be seen below if you scroll down. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank our cadre of reporters who scouted out the most relevant programs and agreed to share them with those of us who didn’t have the chance to attend the conference.
March Madness for Librarians
Don’t forget to check out the Tournament of Books to see which title wins after competing head to head for a spot in the finals.
Publishers Scramble for New Books on the Economy
Just a year ago, one of the bestselling business books was Find It, Fix It, Flip It: Make Millions in Real Estate — One House at a Time. Uh oh. Guess that title won’t sell many copies this week. Now, publishers are looking for more books like Stephen Leeb’s Game Over: How the Collapsing Economy Will Shrink Your Wealth by 50% Unless You Know What to Do. One problem is that books contracted now won’t appear until 2009. In the meantime, some companies are looking for gloom and doom titles that they can reprint and get out quickly. The Los Angeles Times has the story.
OverDrive Breaks the iPod Barrier for Downloadable Audiobooks
Library Journal broke this story just before the the PLA conference where OverDrive debuted the product. OverDrive MP3 Audiobooks will go on sale in May at Borders.com and should be available to libraries by the end of June. This will be followed by the release of the OverDrive Media Console for the Mac. All downloadable audiobook companies have been stymied by the fact that the Apple software is proprietary and they’re not interested in sales to libraries. This is a huge breakthrough which will allow libraries to promote their services to iPod owners, not just those with Windows MP3 players.
Amazon.com Tells Print on Demand Publishers “Let BookSurge Print Your Books, or Else”
Amazon purchased BookSurge, a small print on demand publisher in 2005. Guess we now know what the plan was. Customers are basically being told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the “buy” button on their Amazon.com book pages will be “turned off.”
The book information would remain on Amazon, and people could still order the book from resellers (companies that list new and used books in Amazon’s Marketplace section), but customers would not be able to buy the book from Amazon directly, nor qualify for the coveted “free shipping” that Amazon offers. Here’s the rest of the story.
Publishers Court Michelle Obama
The New York Observer reports that Michelle Obama has hired an attorney to field calls from “over a dozen” publishers eager for her to write a book. So far she hasn’t agreed to write the book, but the same attorney got her husband a three book deal. According to CNN, Barack Obama’s tax returns posted on his website show that he made $507,000 in royalties from The Audacity of Hope and Dreams from My Father in 2006. In 2005, he earned more than $1.2 million in royalties. Might be a little difficult to turn down that kind of money.
The End of Customer Service?
It began at a Piggly Wiggly grocery store in Memphis in 1919. Customers were amazed that instead of telling a clerk what they wanted so that he could get it for them, they could wander the shelves themselves. Businesses (and libraries) have increasingly moved toward a self-service approach which puts the burden of selecting products and checking them out onto the consumer or patron. But now, technology makes it increasingly possible to do this from a remote location. Time magazine wonders if we’ll ever have to see a clerk in person again.
Author Interviews
Susan Choi
Dee Dee Myers
Jodi Picoult
Richard Price
Authors No Longer With Us
Jon Hassler, who “suffered from a longtime neurological disorder,” died Thursday at the age of 74, according to USA Today, which noted that, despite his deteriorating health, the author of Staggerford and other novels about small town life continued working on his book, Jay O’Malley, until his death. In a 1995 AP interview, Hassler said he wrote about misfits because ”You can’t write a novel about somebody who’s perfectly happy.”
Lists
That’s all for today, folks. Don’t forget to check back often for first hand reports of PLA RA programs.
