A Little Circle of Kindred Minds: Joyce in Paris is a commendable introduction to the cultural scene and, most importantly, to the now virtually mythical stories that have been told about these modernist artists. Although not always exact as literary history, the stories are told with a contagious passion.

A Dubliner and former editor with RTÉ, Fennell has an enthusiasm for Joyce and other Irish writers in Paris that is apparent on every page. The anecdotal sketches are a pleasure to see recounted again and should encourage readers to pursue the memoirs and biographies that form the foundation of Fennell’s book. One could quibble with some of the facts, as well as with the generalisations and summary statements, but that would be to miss the point of the book, which is a broad exploration of some of the characters that helped make Paris “the centre of English-language Modernism”.

via Defining Dublin in the City of Light – The Irish Times – Sat, Jul 16, 2011.

Borders Group Inc., the bankrupt bookstore chain, said a Najafi Cos. unit bid $215.1 million for its stores and would assume $220 million of liabilities to kick off an auction to test for higher bids.

The agreement is subject to bankruptcy-court approval, Borders said in a statement. Any stores that aren’t included in the sale to Najafi’s Direct Brands unit will be acquired by Hilco Merchant Resources LLC and Gordon Brothers Group LLC and closed, the statement said.

via Borders Says Najafi Bids $215.1 Million for Stores and Debt – Businessweek.

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Some rights reserved by kzamani

Waterstone’s increased profit by £6.7m last year as like-for-like sales fell by 3.8%, according to financial results released today.
The HMV Group announced in its financial report that in the 52 weeks to 30th April 2011, Waterstone’s profit grew from £2.8m to £9.5m. During that time however, total sales for the high street bookseller dropped by £14.4m to £499.2m and like-for-like sales fell by 3.8%. In the same time period, sales at the HMV Group as a whole dropped from £2.02bn to £1.87bn and like-for-like sales plummeted by 11%. After tax and the disposal costs, HMV Group made a loss of £121.7m, an improvement on the £152.8m loss last year.
Profit up at Waterstones despite sales dip | The Bookseller.

The launch of A Little Circle Of Kindred Minds: Joyce In Paris took place on 13 June in the Irish Writers’ Centre on Parnell Square. It was a blast. We sold out of the book, the weather was smashing and the guests seemed to enjoy themselves.

Both the invited guest, Professor Declan Kiberd, and the author, Conor Fennell, gave excellent talks that inspired laughter and contemplation in equal measure.

All told, it was about the most perfect launch for Green Lamp Editions I could have hoped for. Thanks to everyone who has helped me get to this point, it has been a really excellent journey.
Eoin

I’ve been thinking about that for some time, thinking especially about the horrible pain that will have to be administered to bookstores and their workers if chains are to survive.

I’m not sure I know the answer yet:

The Norman family, owners of the Farmers department stores and a raft of Australasian jewellery stores, bought the 57 Whitcoulls and five Borders shops from administrator Ferrier Hodgson for a confidential sum.

David Norman told BusinessDay the company would almost certainly honour all existing vouchers and gift cards at full face value once the deal is complete.

He also confirmed that customers would not have to spend a similar amount to redeem their vouchers, which caused an enormous customer backlash shortly after the Whitcoulls, Borders and Bennetts bookstores were put into voluntary administration by their previous owners REDgroup Retail.

via Whitcoulls, Borders sold to Norman family | Stuff.co.nz.

The tidy chain discussed at the start begins to look, and will be in real life, a whole lot more complicated.  Instead of a publishing value CHAIN, we have something more akin to a value WEB. Different actors can work together on different projects depending on their needs at a given time. And that means title-by-title projects, agents taking on roles more akin to producers (or publishers or retailers or maybe all of them doing so but not on every title).

It’s about the publishing value chain, see what you think,
Eoin

Overall, however, I think there is a fundamental, longer term negative trend taking place here.I remember considering HMV as a value stock late last year. At the time it was at 45p. If I recall correctly it was on a price/earnings ratio of about 4 and had a dividend yield in double figures: surely it was just too cheap?But this value play has failed the test of time — as it happened, earnings since then have fallen, the dividend has been slashed, and the share price is now 15p. In short, HMV is a classic value trap. Every time investors think the company looks cheap, it gets cheaper.

via The High Street Is Crumbling – 04/04/2011.

In their minds backlists look like a cost sink rather than a potential digital profit centre. That’s because depending on who you talk to a backlist conversion from PDF to epub or .mobi will cost about €150-€250 and what’s more, it’ll be even more for a high-design title.

If you’ve been publishing say a modest 10 titles a year for ten years, then you’ve a back list of 100 titles and even at the most reasonable quote that might cost you €15,000 to convert. For a small company that’s a chunk of change equivalent to publishing a few new titles a year in cost terms.

Well to my mind, the first thing ANY publisher needs to do, even if they don’t have immediate plans for digital publishing, is stop making that backlist issue bigger and I’ve a pretty sensible strategy for how they can do that AND start preparing for digital publishing.

1) Stop only holding PDF files
Simple enough really, but if you are using in-house design programmes like Indesign or Quark, make sure you hold onto the Quark or Indesign files of your titles AS WELL as holding on to the PDF. If you are using out of company contractors, make it a condition that designers supply original files to you when they deliver the final files. Doing this means that you have files that are easier to convert then PDFs and will thus cost considerably less money when you decide to explore digital publishing and ebooks.
Cost to you: Nothing

2) Convert all new titles yourself
Many of the best in-house design systems offer conversion tools that publishers  can use to create epub and .mobi files themselves. There are other programs that allow you to create them from word files too, so this isn’t as difficult as it might sound. What’s more it future proofs your business going forward against the conversion fees I highlighted above. If you use an external contractor, make them convert the files at source and deliver the resulting files, this should not take them TOO long and for a modest cost at the time of origination you will be ready to sell ebooks.
Cost to you: Nothing to very modest

3) Audit your backlist
So you’ve stopped making the problem bigger and you’ve created files that can easily be converted to ebook formats of your choice. It is time to see just how big the problem is on the backlist. Go through your titles and find out what files you actually have for them. PDF, Indesign, Quark or Word. From an ebook creation perspective Word files and original design files are actually fairly easy to convert (with a little knowledge) so if you have those file types AS WELL as PDF files for your title, you are in a good place. Sort titles into two groups, those with ONLY PDF files and those with Word or Indesign/Quark files.
Cost to you: Time and frustration

4) Convert the easy titles
As I mentioned in 2 (above) in-house design suites will generally have plug-ins that enable you to convert your Indesign/Quark files and there are cheap commercial products that will convert word files. You can make headway in creating a digitzed backlist by converting the files in those formats before worrying about the PDF files. Likewise, external designers will charge MUCH less for converting those files then a PDF, if they don’t, they are probably over-charging you.
Cost to you: Nothing to modest

5) Start selling them
Of course this section requires some thought and strategic planning* before you forge ahead, but once you’ve done that and chosen the right path for your company, you actually have files in formats that can be uploaded to major ebook retail sites. Create accounts, add metadata and start selling them, or sign up with an ebook distributor who will do that work for you. Once the converted titles start to pay back some cash, use that to convert the tricky or PDF-bound titles.
Cost to you: Nothing to modest depending on the sales channel you chose

And there, in five easy steps, is a simple strategy for small and medium-sized publisher looking for somewhere to start on the digital publishing market but worried about their backlist problem.

*Which Green Lamp Media will be happy to help you with. We can provide strategic advice and planning, operations support or we can provide digital publishing services, depending on your needs.

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I ask because of the news that Europe’s largest retailer is now asking record companies to deliver their albums to it on a sale-or-return basis. This is a radical shift in an industry which had been able to bank on getting the lion’s share of its physical sales revenues up front from wholesalers.

Now the might of Tesco is pushing music companies to accept only an initial 50p per CD, rather than the £7 or £8 which up until now retailers expected to pay for them.

Return to sender could put HMV in heartbreak hotel

“Barnes & Noble is just a better-run bookstore. They have better locations, their stores are brighter and it’s better stocked,” says Bill Kavaler, a senior analyst at brokerage firm Oscar Gruss & Son. “And while there’s some discomfort with Barnes & Noble’s management, you can’t say they’re not trying to run a good book chain.”

But the question is how long Barnes & Noble can stay ahead of the gradual shift from print to digital. Barnes & Noble still has 705 bookstores in the U.S., and those locations are less profitable than they used to be, though that drop seems to be slowing. Worse, its online operation continues to lose money. Overall, Barnes & Noble’s profits in its most recent quarter, which ended in January, fell 25% from a year earlier to $60.6 million. In order to stem the losses, Barnes & Noble’s executives decided recently to stop paying stockholders a dividend and invest the money in its online and e-books division to boost growth.

via As Borders Closes Bookshops, Rival Barnes & Noble Survives – TIME.