Booknotes

Last week at Politics & Prose, local book group members participated in an unusual opportunity. They were able to offer their own questions by Skype when Katie Couric interviewed Kathryn Stockett about her best-selling book THE HELP (Amy Einhorn, $24.95). You can see the broadcast of this interview by clicking below!

Exclusive offer for My Name is Asher Lev at Round House Theatre

Politics & Prose customers can get $10 off orchestra level seats at Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday performances of My Name is Asher Lev at Round House Theatre Bethesda. This stage adaptation of the Chaim Potok novel runs from March 17 through April 11. To receive the discount, enter code POTOK when ordering full-priced orchestra level tickets at www.roundhousetheatre.org or mention POTOK when calling the Round House box office at 240-644-1100. (Discounts may not be combined. Not valid on previously purchased tickets. Online orders subject to $3.50 per ticket convenience charge.) Round House Theatre is located at 4545 East-West Highway, one block from the Bethesda station on Metro’s Red Line.

The Academy Awards

The 82nd Oscars are on Sunday, March 7, and an overwhelming number of this year's nominees began in the pages of a book.

Hollywood borrowing from fiction and non-fiction writers is nothing new, of course, with one of the earliest Academy Awards for best picture going to All Quiet on the Western Front, a film based on the novel of the same name by Erich Maria Remarque. In honor of Hollywood's roots in the world of books, Politics & Prose highlights some of our favorite titles that have made their way to the silver screen. Click here for more recommended books - from this season and classics from years gone by - that were turned into movies.

- Lacey Dunham

About Winter Institute

by Mark LaFramboise

This year was my third time attending the Winter Institute.  And as usual I came away with renewed enthusiasm and insights into the changing nature of the book business.  It was also a great opportunity to become reacquainted with old friends, both booksellers and publishing people, as well as meet new ones.  Being in close proximity – staying at the same hotel and taking the majority of our meals together – encourages lots of one-on-one contact and makes it extremely easy to meet collegially.  Much of this year’s WI focused on technology subjects – everything from book store websites to electronic cataloging to, of course, the advent and spreading popularity of e-books.

In fact, this was the first time I had ever heard of regular books referred to as “p-books,” short I learned for “physical books.”  We really need a name for that?  Please. 

In one of the most talked about sessions of the event, an Ingram (the nation’s largest book wholesaler) spokesman talked about bookselling and publishing in 2012.  He said, and I paraphrase, “Anyone listening to something, watching something, or reading something, will as likely purchase it on-line as not.”  He showed graphs (ubiquitous power point) showing the rise of digital downloads for book sales that left many booksellers shaking their heads and muttering under their collective breath.  It was a sobering look into the future for a group of people invested in traditional ink on paper books. 

I attended an interesting session featuring three publishers commenting on how digital publishing has affected their companies.  David Young from Hachette (Little Brown, Warner, etc.), Madeleine MacIntosh from Random House, and Drake McFeely from W.W. Norton comprised a panel hosted by Barry Lynn, author of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction.

David Young, I think, was the most eloquent of the three and, of all of them, seemed to have the most historical perspective.  The digital form, he stated, enabled him as a publisher to get more feedback from potential readers before a book is actually produced.  It also decreases the lead time necessary to take a book from the idea stage to the finished product.  Mostly, though, he thought book publishing would continue to work as it always has with dedicated book publishers making real books sold by booksellers in bookstores. 

MacIntosh, in charge of Random House’s overall digital strategy, came to Random by way of Amazon and seemed ill-equipped addressing a room of independent booksellers.  She did not come down either way in the Kindle versus Macmillan debate over e-book pricing and offered little advice on how indies might be part of any future including digital publishing. Some booksellers I spoke with found her attitude infuriating and patronizing.  McFeely from Norton is a publisher but he is also their editor-in-chief.  He said he would much prefer editing Fareed Zakaria than plotting a digital strategy for his company.  With all of them, this much seemed apparent: yes, it’s a brave new world, but it’s only beginning and it’s not at all clear yet how traditional book publishing will be impacted.

The Winter Institute also offered lots of opportunities to meet authors.  There was a reception where booksellers came together over wine and hors d’oeuvres, and we had a chance to meet authors - like Brady Udall (The Lonely Polygamist, April), Greil Marcus (When the Rough Goes Riding – about Van Morrison, also in April), and Annie Leonard (The Story of Stuff, March – reading at P&P on March 14) to name just a few - and ask them to sign pre-release copies of their books. Later, many of us went to publisher-hosted dinners and got to spend more time with authors and folks from publishing houses. While that part is entirely social, like the rest of the conference, it is also focused on books, mostly forthcoming ones.  It really was a lot of fun.

The conference ended on Friday, and we bid our goodbyes. I couldn’t know it at the time, but I wouldn’t get home until the following Thursday night due to the snow in DC. That, however, is another story for another time.

- Mark LaFramboise

E-books and the impact of technology on the publishing industry were an important ongoing conversation at the Winter Institute for booksellers in San Jose, but I came away thinking that reports of the death of print are greatly exaggerated.

The week of the conference, Macmillan titles briefly vanished from Amazon’s shelves in a dispute over e-book pricing.  The writer Caleb Crain noted, "They're fighting to see who can lose more money. This is a very peculiar battle."  This peculiar battle has a very definite provocation with the appearance of Apple's new iPad.

Yet there are abundant reasons to be hopeful that creative, passionate people have not given up on print culture.  That same week we received our shipment of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern # 33: THE SAN FRANCISCO PANORAMA ($16)  The new issue of Dave Eggers's (always elaborate, often whimsical) periodical is enough to warm the heart of even the most cynical ink-stained wretch.  With writing and artwork from the likes of Andrew Sean Greer, Stephen King, George Saunders and Art Spiegelman it is the ideal newspaper as lavish, tangible object.

The medium is also the message in CODEX IN CRISIS (The Crumpled Press, $25), the scholar-of-scholars Anthony Grafton's meditation on the Republic of Letters in the 21st century.  Each copy is hand bound in Brooklyn, New York in a happening akin to a literary quilting bee.

Just as photography freed portraiture to be more than - or differently - representational, one can hope that Kindles and iPads will stretch the possibilities of the book.  One cause for hope is THE SELECTED WORKS OF T. S. SPIVET (Penguin, $27.95) by debut novelist, Reif Larsen.  There is no sense spoiling Spivet's wonderful American picaresque by exposition.  The cross country journey of its eponymous 12-year-old cartographer-hero is ingeniously interpolated with maps and diagrams integral to the plot.  It borrows equally from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.   It is, in brief, an utterly unique book.

~ Michael Allen

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