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
Hello and welcome to June! The huge book this week is Scott McClellan’s What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. McClellan was George Bush’s White House Press Secretary, and his book is full of fodder for the pundits. Though this was a predictable bestseller, it’s bigger than expected. Even Amazon is out of stock until June 21.

Other big books this week include fiction by Lee Child, Robert B. Parker, W.E.B. Griffin, Clive Cussler, David Guterson, Eileen Goudge and several more. In nonfiction, besides McClellan, we have new books by David Sedaris, Lewis Black, and Lynne Spencer’s Touching History, the story of what happened behind the scenes with air traffic professionals on 9/11. As always, scroll down to the next blog entry for the complete list in our weekly feature called New, Noteworthy, and No-Brainer.

The topic of our Under the Radar list this week is Paranormal Romance. Look to the right hand column for that one, which is right below our Most Wanted Mashup. New to the Most Wanted list this week is Scott McClellan’s book as well as new ones by Patricia Cornwell, Dean Koontz, Chuck Palahniuk, and Garth Stein, to name a few. Check our three lists as well as this Run Down every Monday morning to be ready for your week.

And now, on to the RA news of the week.

New Poll of Book Buyers
A new poll done by Zogby and Random House was released this week. The “extensive survey explores how and where readers shop, what makes them buy, and their reading and book-buying habits.”

Here is a preview:

*Most book buyers head to the bookstore with a purpose – but are often tempted into unplanned book purchases

*Most admit to judging a book by its cover

*Nearly one in four are reading more – but slightly more said they are reading less than usual

The full report is available online and has implications for libraries as well as bookstores.

Number of Titles of Books Published Shows Staggering Increases
Another stat released this week is from Bowker, which shows that 411,422 books were published in the US in 2007! About 135,000 of those were on demand titles—short run printings—many of which could be self-published titles.

Announcing a New Blog Feature
I’ve often thought that we librarians are somewhat isolated. We’re inside our buildings and we talk to library users and each other all day, but we don’t always spend enough time looking at what’s going on in the world outside. So beginning today and continuing on each Friday, we’ll feature a column called Trains, Planes and Lanes. We have our RA Online spies deployed on commuter trains, in airports and on buses watching to see what the public is reading this week. We’d love to know what people in your area are reading, so please comment and help us include your area in the list.

So, this week our spies have spotted the following books (in rough rank order):
Emily Giffin – Love the One You’re With - 4
Scott McClellan – What Happened – 3
Muhammad Yunus – Banker to the Poor
Tom Rob Smith – Child 44
Finesse Mitchell – Your Girlfriends Only Know So Much
Robert Kiyosaki – Rich Dad, Poor Dad
Dennis Cooper – The Sluts

Borders Takes Its Website Back from Amazon
After seven years of outsourcing its e-commerce function to Amazon, Borders relaunched its Borders.com Web site under its own control. The site includes something they call the Magic Shelf, which is basically new titles shown face out. You can choose various ways to look at the titles, though, including Bestsellers, New Releases, and Coming Soon, so it’s kind of handy for browsing.

Who Will Take Our Place?
Publishers Weekly has an interesting article about the future of management books, but in reading the article about how there will not be enough managers from Generation Y to take the place of retiring baby boomers by 2012, I couldn’t help thinking of the generation of readers’ advisors who will be retiring. “Companies that are sitting back thinking that leaders will arrive are wrong,â€? says Susan Williams, executive editor of Wiley’s Jossey-Bass imprint. The solution? Identify promising young talent and cultivate it. Are we doing that in the RA world?

Yiddish Policemen’s Union To Be a Movie
The Coen brothers, who have several successful, if quirky, movies to their credit including Fargo, Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski, will be taking on Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Union next.

You Can’t Even Have One?
A new law in Indiana, due to take effect July 1, requires bookstores that have any “explicit” books to pay a $250 license fee and register as an adult bookstore.

Best Audio Book of the Year
The Chopin Manuscript was chosen as the best audio book of the year at the Audie Awards Gala at BookExpo. The choice is unusual because it is an original serialized thriller created exclusively for audio by several well known thriller writers.

Lists
James Tait Black Literary Prizes for Biography and Fiction Short List
The Ten Best Cookbooks of Summer
Anthony Award Nominees
Barry Awards
May BookSense Picks

Authors
Robert Asprin Passes Away
Julian Rathbone Obituary
Ian Fleming’s 100th Birthday

This entry was posted on Monday, June 2nd, 2008 at 12:34 am and is filed under RA Run Down. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.