Nancy Pearl and Amazon.com have struck a deal to republish some lesser recognized titles that are favorites of the Book Lust author and librarian hero.
However, not everyone is thrilled with the idea. As reported in The Seattle Times:
…Overnight, this 67-year-old Seattle grandmother has become a greedy betrayer of the small, sometimes-struggling, bookshops that so supported her. “Yes,” says J.B. Dickey, owner of the Seattle Mystery Bookshop about such an assessment. “By aligning herself with Amazon, she’s turning her back on independents. Amazon is absolutely antithetical to independent bookselling, and, to many of us, truth, justice and the American way.”
If things sound like they’ve gotten a little heated over Pearl’s latest project, they have.
On Wednesday, Amazon.com announced it was issuing “Nancy Pearl’s Book Lust Rediscoveries series, a line of Pearl’s favorite, presently out-of-print books to share with readers hungry for her expert recommendations.”
About six books a year would be published in versions that include print books and eBooks, says the Seattle-headquartered merchandising Goliath that in 2010 had sales of $34 billion, or about $1,077 per second.
I love bookstores that censor
>>In the Seattle Mystery Bookshop, Dickey isn’t much for making peace with Pearl, and his shop will carry nothing issued by Amazon.
I love bookstores that censor books.
Who should she publish with?
Who would it be okay to publish with?
The big six? (Penguin, Hachette, MacMillan, HarperCollins, Random House, Simon and Schuster)
If she tried to get another publisher and they turned her down would it then be okay to publish with Amazon or should she just throw her books away?
Why is this line in the article – ” Seattle-headquartered merchandising Goliath that in 2010 had sales of $34 billion, or about $1,077 per second.” If the significance is that Amazon is to big to do business with would someone draw the line so I know who I can do business with?
Blog post with more info
Here is a blog post that has more info about the project and some additional commentary:
Nancy Pearl’s Amazon Expedition
Excerpt: The series begins with Merle Miller’s A Gay and Melancholy Sound
, which looks like one of those sprawling novels about coping with alienation in post-war America—you know, the kind where you wouldn’t be surprised if Douglas Sirk or Vincente Minelli had turned it into a Technicolor blowout—and was first published in 1961. (But, hey, for $5.99 on the Kindle, I may well wind up giving it a try.) Then there Rhian Ellis’s After Life, a psychological thriller published in 2000. So, from the onset, it seems like Pearl is doing exactly the sort of thing I praised her for in that previous post: She digs just that much deeper to come up with the cool book you haven’t heard about, and now, with Amazon’s backing, she’s in a better position than ever to both call people’s attention to that book and make it easier for them to read it.
Public library does not have
I just looked on Worldcat and none of the public libraries around me have this book. (A Gay and Meloncholy Sound) Like usual the public libraries have done a good job of weeding.
KUOW.org
Nancy Pearl Signs Publishing Deal With Amazon
Story on KUOW
http://www.kuow.org/program.php?id=25658
Get MP3: http://www.kuow.org/mp3high/m3u/News/20120112_AR_books.m3u
Excerpt: Vladimir Verano is the head of Third Place Press, the printing wing of the independent bookstore Third Place Books. He says Pearl is the highest–profile writer to sign a deal with Amazon Publishing so far.
What Mr. Verano fails to point out is that Nancy is not publishing her books on Amazon. She has a publisher, Sasquatch Books. She wants to publish other people’s books that are out of print. To get this done she needs to have some financial backing. Sasquatch probably did not have the means or interest to tackle this project. If they did I bet Nancy brought the idea up with them first.
Seattle Mystery Books
More from the owner of Seattle Mystery Bookshop.