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Space Chimps As regular readers of my blog will know I like to base my short stories around real events, places and animals. The story I sent to Writer's Forum magazine (no reply as of yet) was based on the true story of how chimpanzees were used at the start of the space programme. While watching Cartoon Network with my nephew at the weekend I saw a trailer for a new feature length animation called ' Space Chimps.' My story centre's on Enos, who was the last chimp used before NASA felt confident to send their first human astronaut into orbit. 'Space Chimps' the movie centre's on the fictional Ham III grandson of the first chimp blasted into space HAM. HAM the chimp The plot line is : "Two NASA chimps are sent to a galaxy far, far away. One chimp has 'The Right Stuff,' and the other, a good natured goofball, has 'The Wrong Stuff.' The two chimps find themselves on a strange, uncharted planet, where they embark on a fantastical journey to save its inhabitants from a tyrannical leader. Space Chimps is an intergalactic comedy that highlights the antics of astronaut chimps with the "wrong stuff." Ham III (Samberg), the slacker grandson of the first chimp blasted into space before manned spaceflight, joins two other astronaut chimps for a dangerous mission through a black hole to an inhabited planet. When they're stranded there, the chimps must help the inhabitants rid themselves of a tyrannical leader, and then figure out how to get back to Earth." The animation looks fun, with a voice cast including Andy Samberg, Cheryl Hines, Patrick Warburton, Omid Abtahi and Jeff Daniels. But the real story behind the use of chimps is a much sadder one. Vanguard Animation - which is headed by 'Shrek' producer John Williams - are currently working on another book written by William Steig, 'The Zabajaba Jungle' about a boy and his adventures through a mysterious jungle in search of his parents. They have also produced Valiant about a WWII messenger pigeon (another real event) and Happily N'ever After inspired by the Grimm Brother's fairy tales. For more information on Space Chimps the animation visit http://www.spacechimpspower.com/ and for the true story visit http://www.spacechimps.com/ * The winner of my second book giveaway is Charlotte Anne Braden who correctly answered that James Nesbitt played the dad in 'Millions.' Congratulations Charlotte.

It's not even blogging day (but I was gone Monday at the NAIBA meeting), so here are a few quick make-up links.

According to Shelf Awareness, "Bookstore sales last December were $2.113 billion, up 2.7% from $2.057 billion in December 2006, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. The year ended on a good note, with sales at $16.768 billion, up 1.1% from $16.589 billion in 2006. During the first half of the year, sales were below the previous year's levels, but stronger results in the second half of 2007 helped pull bookstore sales into the black for the full year." Hooray!

And yours truly is beginning a series over at the Bookshop Blog, telling the story of this crazy dream of opening an indie bookstore. There's lots more going on at BB, so if you get bored with the story of my life there's plenty of links, advice, and personality to keep you there.

I'm off to a morning meeting, then I gotta do some grocery shopping for V-Day dinner with the ALP. If you're in the city and looking for something to do tonight, making books is a nice (free!) option. Insider tip: collage is one of our book decorating options, and I've repurposed a bunch of beautiful publisher catalogs to be snipped up for the purpose. Should be fun. Enjoy the day, however you spend it, and happy reading!

Can I rant for just a tiny minute?

I guess I must have been actually reading back posts of my favorite blogs, because I came across this one on the blog of Lance Fensterman, conference director extraordinaire (BEA *and* Comic Con -- that's right, baby!) and generally funny and observant guy. He's got a link to this story in the MinnPost about Birch Bark Books in Minneapolis, owned by well-to-do and respected author Louise Erdrich but apparently not doing terribly well financially. Here's the opener:

Welcome home from Winter Institute, booksellers! From all I've heard already, this year in Louisville was just as invigorating a session as last year in Portland. Here's where you can find out more:

The lovely Lori Kauffman of Brookline Booksmith was live blogging from WI3 on her blog, Brookline Blogsmith; check it out for some impressions of Danny Meyer's opening presentation on hospitality vs. service, Gary Hirschberg's bit on saving the world while making a living, some bookseller/librarian conspiring, and Lori's pick of the galleys. And I suspect there's more to come -- the intensity of the programming can make it impossible to find time to blog, so sometimes it's all about the recap afterward.

Dan Cullen of the ABA was also live blogging on the ABA blog, Omnibus, and has posted exhaustive coverage of the whole thing, Thursday to Saturday, plus lots of pictures. Dan humbly admits the difficulty of finding time or a single perspective on a weekend that includes "24 educational sessions, 12 rep picks' sessions, 3 keynote addresses, an author reception... and a closing reception", but he also does a killer job of capturing a weekend of "flow", that state of concentrated bliss when you're working so well on the work you love that time doesn't seem to exist. (Here's one of my favorite pictures, of three of my Emerging Leaders Council cohorts: Susan Weiss, Sylla McClellan, and Sweet Pea Flaherty. I know Megan Sullivan was also there; can't wait to hear all about it, guys!)

And of course, today's Shelf Awareness has the first in a series of articles recapping the experience and lessons of WI3, written by John Mutter and Susan Weiss. Looking forward to vicariously absorbing those lessons through them.

(And yes, incidentally, there is a little bit about yours truly and my terrific Wednesday night in there too... thanks for the mention!)

Again, I'd love to get a bookseller or two to write here about Winter Institute: their overall experience, a specific session or topics, or even the people you met. Send me an email or leave a comment if you'd like to be a guest poster.


In the meantime, I was surprised and gratified to read an article in the New York Times this weekend that actually rebutted the "no one reads anymore" opinion -- in an article reviewing the Amazon Kindle. Apparently about two weeks ago Steve Jobs of Apple made an already infamous statement when asked about the Kindle and whether Apple would be looking to get into the e-reader business:

"�It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

In the Times piece, Randall Stross politely but thoroughly demolishes this absurdity, and ends with a challenge for those of us in what we now call "the book business". Here's the passage -- I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

To Mr. Jobs, this statistic dooms everyone in the book business to inevitable failure.

Only the business is not as ghostly as he suggests. In 2008, book publishing will bring in about $15 billion in revenue in the United States, according to the Book Industry Study Group, a trade association.

One can only wonder why, by the Study Group’s estimate, 408 million books will be bought this year if no one reads anymore?

A survey conducted in August 2007 by Ipsos Public Affairs for The Associated Press found that 27 percent of Americans had not read a book in the previous year. Not as bad as Mr. Jobs’s figure, but dismaying to be sure. Happily, however, the same share — 27 percent — read 15 or more books.

In fact, when we exclude Americans who had not read a single book in that year, the average number of books read was 20, raised by the 8 percent who read 51 books or more. In other words, a sizable minority does not read, but the overall distribution is balanced somewhat by those who read a lot.

If a piece of the book industry’s $15 billion seems too paltry for Mr. Jobs to bother with, he is forgetting that Apple reached its current size only recently. Last week, Apple reported that it posted revenue of $9.6 billion in the quarter that spanned October to December 2007, its best quarter ever, after $24 billion in revenue in the 2007 fiscal year, which ended in September.

But as recently as 2001, before the iPhone and the iPod, Apple was a niche computer company without a mass market hit. It was badly hurt by the 2001 recession and reported revenue of only $5.3 billion for the year. This is, by coincidence, almost exactly what Barnes & Noble reported in revenue for its 2007 fiscal year. In neither case did the company owners look at that number, decide to chain the doors permanently shut and call it quits.

Amazon does not release details about revenue for books, but books were its first business. And Andrew Herdener, a company spokesman, said that Amazon’s book sales “have increased every year since the company began.”

The book world has always had an invisible asset that makes up for what it lacks in outsize revenue and profits: the passionate attachment that its authors, editors and most frequent customers have to books themselves. Indeed, in this respect, avid book readers resemble avid Mac users.

The object we are accustomed to calling a book is undergoing a profound modification as it is stripped of its physical shell. Kindle’s long-term success is still unknown, but Amazon should be credited with imaginatively redefining its original product line, replacing the book business with the reading business.

Okay, I really intended to try to write up some book reviews today (it's been a long time, have you noticed?) -- but that may have to wait until next week, as time is of the essence as usual. But I can't resist pulling this data from today's Shelf Awareness:

Bookstore sales in November were $1.186 billion, up 7.5% from $1.103 billion in sales in November 2006, according to preliminary estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. For the year to date, bookstore sales have been $14.654 billion, up 0.8% from $14.532 billion in the first 11 months of 2006. This marks the fifth month in a row that bookstore sales were up over the same period last year--and the second month in a row that year-to-date sales have topped last year's comparable figures.

I just want to say thanks to all of those who have responded -- in comments, in emails, on the phone, and in person -- to my rather sad end-of-the-year post, and who have said, in essence, Buck Up. Reading's not in decline... you've done so much already... a bookstore is worth waiting for... you'll do it someday... etc. You're all awesome.

Your enthusiasm and optimism, and your confidence in me, is like fuel to a fire. It's so good to have that encouragement -- better even than money. Aside from finally getting over a lingering stomachache I had over New Year's, your comments are the only thing to which I can attribute getting out of the blue funk I've been in. I'm excited again, and ready to roll up my sleeves.

I've just rediscovered an old favorite, Arts & Letters Daily, that great clearinghouse for the ideas being tossed about in the world, and I'm adding it to my Google homepage. Serendipitously enough, today there's a link to the British periodical New Statesman, and an article titled "Why life is good." I'd like to give it to you, as a gift, returning your own encouragement. It's only occasionally about the book stuff, but it is totally about the need for both optimism and working together. You can read the article for the supporting studies and statistics, but here are some excerpts for the jist:

People are not generally negative about their own lives... In contrast, we are unduly negative about the wider world. As a government adviser, I would bemoan what we in Whitehall called the perception gap. Time and again, opinion polls expose a dramatic disparity between what people say about their personal experiences and about the state of things in general.

While we apparently thrive in our own families of many shapes and forms, as social commentators we prefer to look back, misty-eyed, to the gendered certainties of our grandparents' generation.... What is true for families is true for neighbourhoods: we think ours is improving while community life is declining elsewhere. We tend to like the people we know from different ethnic backgrounds but are less sure about such people in general. We think our own prospects look OK but society is going to the dogs....

And yet. There is a different story to be told about our world. It is a story of unprecedented affluence in the developed world and fast-falling poverty levels in the developing world; of more people in more places enjoying more freedom than ever before.... When you read the next report bemoaning falling standards in our schools, remember the overwhelming evidence that average IQs have risen sharply over recent decades. If you think we have less power over our lives, think of the internet, of enhanced rights at work and in law, or remember how it was to be a woman or black or gay 30 years ago....

Self-actualisation is the peak of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. There is evidence that more of us are trying to climb that hierarchy. It is in the crowds at book festivals and art galleries, in ever more demanding consumerism with an emphasis on the personal, sensual and adventurous. We want to enjoy ourselves, to be appreciated and to feel we are growing from the experience....

Today, there are signs of a yearning for new ways of working together. There is the growing interest in social and co-operative enterprise and the emergence of new forms of online collaboration... Despite the huge impersonal forces of the modern world, people are prepared not only to believe in a better future, but to work together to build it.

This is what we've got: in our indie bookstores, in our communities of readers. Ways of working together. The possibility of "self-actualization." An alternate story about the world. A good neighborhood. A better world.

(If you'd like more of that sort of thing, you might consider stopping by the bookstore to see Frances Moore Lappe on Monday night -- she's pretty compelling on that optimism and the working together stuff.)

Just when I needed a bit of cheering up about the ol' "decline of reading" hobbyhorse, my friend Mark sent me this great bit of opinion from John McWhorter's column in the New York Sun:

America in 1907 read more than most of us. But did America of 1907 read smarter than us? Transported back to America in 1907, would we savor a book culture less dumbed down than ours? Well, let's take a look at the bestselling fiction of 1907. All 10 were potboilers unknown today. The top seller was "The Lady of the Decoration" by one Frances Little. Others on the list included the likes of "The Port of Missing Men" and "Half a Rogue."

I've been feeling like a bit of a bad blogger lately. As my RSS feed clearly indicates, the blogosphere is filled with retrospectives, best-of lists, summaries of the year in reading, analyses of the state of literacy, bookstores, publishing, etc. in the year that's just ending. Last year I posted a list of all the books I'd read; this year I can't even do that, because I've lost track. (Resolution #1 for 2008: write down all books read, preferably on paper, so I can look back at them.)

While I find myself unable to offer a sweeping, overarching point on the year in books, I have been having, rather typically, some personal year-end sorts of thoughts – about where I (and things) have been, where we're going, why are we doing this again, etc.

(As Little Pete from Pete & Pete, the cult TV series of my youth, says in the New Year's Eve episode, "Everybody gets all wiggily on New Year's Eve thinking next year they're going to be better. But every year it turns out they're just a bunch of feebs." His frustration, if I recall, stems from his thwarted resolution to save enough money to buy a rocket pack, with which he planned to fly around and solve all the problems of the world.)

It's a tough time to be a dreamer. The vague somedays of your imaginings have suddenly thudded into the solidity of another year in which your dream has yet to materialize. All your momentum seems, if temporarily, to have petered out, leaving you, a little winded, wondering if it's worth getting up the energy for another run at it.

(In the world of bookstores, this may have something to do with the extraordinary amounts of energy expended in the leadup to Christmas, and the attendant stress and exhaustion, which can leave one longing to just get off the world for a while and let things take care of themselves.)

I'm thinking, a little, of Larry Portzline. As I've thought about his precipitous abandonment of the project of Bookstore Tourism – largely because he was unable to get funding from indie bookstores and trade organizations to fund his awareness-raising nationwide bookstore tour – I've come to somewhat agree with many of those who commented on my post on the matter. That is, it perhaps would have made more sense to seek funding from those with money to spend on cultural projects (for example "tourist bureaus and the Main Street programs" as Barking Dog Books suggests, or even benevolent corporate publishers, or traditional grant initiatives), rather than from the indie bookstores themselves, notoriously strapped for cash and hesitant to take a financial risk – or rather, another risk, since the store itself is a very risky thing to begin.

However, I sympathize a great deal with Larry's frustration and sense of rejection. To have put so much (unpaid) time into what is largely a philanthropic enterprise, and then to receive insufficient concrete support from those whom the enterprise is designed to benefit – it's enough to make anyone throw up their hands and walk away.

It's hard not to see myself in parallel. My own dream, of opening a really great independent bookstore in Brooklyn, seems sometimes further away than ever. I had formed a tentative mental timeline of opening by fall of 2008, but that's been scrapped in light of the ongoing, obvious problem of lack of start-up capital. (For the record, even if I win the grand prize in the wonderful Brooklyn Public Library competition, it won't be nearly 25% of my projected startup costs, the rule of thumb for personal assets required to get a business loan.) I do sometimes get frustrated at the world: that there's so much money out there getting spent on silly or failure-bound projects, but no one has recognized the inescapable genius of my idea and offered to pony up cash, no strings attached. More often, I get frustrated at myself. Something must be wrong with me, that I haven't yet found an investor I can work with, that I haven't been able to save up enough seed money yet to even ask for a loan, that I still have work to do on the business plan, that I'm spending my energy on so many other things rather than the one dream, that other people have managed to open bookstores and I haven't. Maybe I don't really want this enough; maybe it's just a prop to keep my pride intact while working in retail. Maybe I'll want it all my life, and never quite make it.

My last email from Larry was full of anger and frustration. On the one hand, it seems like a good thing for him that he's taking the time to work on a novel in progress, spend time with his newlywed wife, focus on other things. But he sounded hopeless about indie bookstores, and about booksellers, and about the future. He sited the NEA study about the decline in reading, and asked me how I could be among those to discount its ominous findings.

The world is full of problems, ain't it? And there are plenty of people and organizations and statistics and task forces to tell us what they are. There are those whose role it is to tell us what our weaknesses are, so perhaps we can combat them. There are those whose role it is to gather up the range of opinions and find a consensus, or represent the views of the knowledgeable few. There are those whose role it is to challenge our convictions, so that we're forced to think about what we really know and believe.

Turns out, I've staked out a little role for myself too. In the world of books, I'm not as important or influential as many of the people I've quoted and interacted with this year: as John Mutter, the editor of Shelf Awareness; or Judith Rosen, journalist for Publishers Weekly; or Avin Domnitz, CEO of the American Booksellers Association; or Lance Fensterman, director of Book Expo America; or Johnny Temple, director of the Brooklyn Book Festival; or Russ Lawrence, president of the ABA; or Jeff Bezos, head of Amazon; or Len Riggio, head of Barnes & Noble; or the owners of big, wonderful independent bookstores, like Carla Cohen of Politics and Prose or Rick Simonson of Elliot Bay or Sarah McNally of McNally Robinson; not to mention the authors who give us our work to do, this year, every year, like Michael Chabon of Yiddish Policeman's Union or Geraldine Brooks of People of the Book or Michael Ondaatje of Divisadero or Edwidge Danticat of Brother, I'm Dying or Kate Christensen of The Great Man, or….

I'm grateful to be able to talk to and read about and talk about these folks. Their art and their work have made a world I want to be a part of. Which is why I've taken on my little role, of being one voice of optimism about books and bookstores. There are plenty of voices talking about what's wrong, and why we must change, or even why we won't change or can't change. I want to talk about the joy and the hope part of things: the good things that are, and the potential for more good things on the horizon. It's not the whole picture. It's just the part I've got covered. No matter my occasional despair, I can't help coming back to the good things that I know and believe, from business success stories to wonderful reads to great technological developments to communities and relationships. It's one of the only things I know worth doing.

I certainly can't fault Larry in his decision to move on to other things – it seems to be the right decision for him, and he's planted the seed of an idea that is already bearing fruit through others who have picked it up.

But for me, I can't quit yet. Give me a day or two to catch my breath, and I'll be at it again. I want that bookstore, because I want to build something good and solid in the world. In the meantime, I can't help celebrating all the good and solid things that have been built by others. It's what I did last year. It's what I'll do in the year to come.

Maybe this year, I'll get a rocket pack. Either way, I'm going to keep dreaming. Luckily, there are a lot of other folks with rocket packs to cheer on.

Thanks for reading.

Forgive the lack of blogging around here lately. If you're a retailer, or a moonlighter, or a newlywed, you'll understand.

I'm working on Christmas Eve at the bookstore this year for the first time ever. Somehow, in seven years of working in bookstores in New York, I've always managed to get out of it, because I was flying cross-country to see family. This year it's the ALP and I in the city, so I'm on Christmas Eve shift.

I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to it.

Yesterday was nearly eight hours at the cash register, interspersed with running briskly with piles of books to restock in sections and tables. In the last hour and a half I started to droop a bit, but for the most part it was so fun. I've gotten some teasing for my incessant cheeriness, and for being the most "Christmassy" person anyone knows.
Apparently I'm a Christmas nerd as well as a book nerd.

I love looking forward to things. It's part of being an optimist. So Advent, the season of expectation, is my favorite. I'm looking forward to everything:

Today, Christmas shopping and a visit to old friends at Three Lives.

A few more days of chaotic, frenzied, joyful bookselling at McNally Robinson.

Sunday afternoon, talking with my mom and sisters in California, who will be celebrating their Christmas.

Christmas Eve, where we close the bookstore early when J.T. starts wandering the sales floor with a bottle of beer, to subtly give customers the idea that the holiday is beginning.

Christmas Eve service at our little Brooklyn church.

Christmas morning, and Christmas day with my adorable new husband.

Christmas night, joining friends in Harlem for a grown-up Christmas party.

And then a week of sweet nothing -- my first vacation since the wedding. Reading. Seeing movies (many made from books). Maybe even blogging.

What's not to love?

What are you looking forward to this holiday?