Interesting NY Times Article

via nytimes.com

No Big Hits, but Bookshops Say They’re Thriving

by Leslie Kaufman

Last year, there was a clear winner among books for the holiday gift of choice: “Steve Jobs,” by Walter Isaacson. This year, despite a lineup of offerings from literary heavyweights, many of whom have commanded strong sales in the past, there has not been a breakout hit for the holiday season, booksellers say. 

Books like Bob Woodward’s “Price of Politics,” Tom Wolfe’s “Back to Blood” and Salman Rushdie’s “Joseph Anton” have each sold well under 100,000 copies by the end of last week according to Nielsen Bookscan. (In contrast, the Jobs biography sold 379,000 copies in the first week after its release in October 2011.) 

While Bookscan does not include e-books and covers only roughly 75 percent of retail outlets, this year’s figures provide a snapshot of the fragmented holiday sales picture as a whole: independent bookstores report that a range of books are moving nicely, but there are mixed numbers from Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain, and solid but not stellar growth in digital sales. Independent bookstore owners say they are thriving even without that surefire best seller because of a wide array of options this year: everything from Barbara Kingsolver’s “Flight Behavior” (list price $28.99) to Chris Ware’s expensive graphic novel “Building Stories” — which comes with 14 components, including bound volumes, a board and a tabloid newspaper ($50) — to attractive impulse buys like “I Could Pee on This: And Other Poems by Cats” ($12.95). 

Peter Aaron, the owner of the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, said sales were up 15 percent over the Thanksgiving weekend and tracking well for December. In addition to “Building Stories,” he said other surprise sellers were “Dear Life,” by Alice Munro, and “Why Does the World Exist?,” by Jim Holt, a treatise that combines cosmology and philosophy. “It is not an easy book, but it is doing really well,” Mr. Aaron said. 

There are many reasons bookstores point to for their successful holiday season. President Obama, they note, set the stage when he took his daughters, Sasha and Malia, to One More Page Books in Arlington, Va., on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, where he snapped up 15 children’s books.

Small bookstores report that they are also benefiting from the popularity of Kobo e-readers, which were designed for independent bookstores and allow customers to buy e-books through the independents’ Web sites, as opposed to say, Amazon. 

Steve Bercu, an owner of BookPeople in Austin, Tex., said sales were up 10 percent over last year. He said that shoppers were buying coffee-table books but were also snapping up Kobo devices.  “I was a naysayer,” he said, “but they are buying the actual devices, which surprised me.”

Becky Anderson, the owner of Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Ill., said: “Our Black Friday and Small Business Saturday sales were up considerably over last year. That includes hardcovers and purchases made over the Internet, which we either ship or that you can pick up at the store.”

Ms. Anderson’s was a familiar story across the nation, according to the American Booksellers Association, a trade group for independent bookstores. Dan Cullen, a spokesman for the association, said that in-store book sales for November, which includes Black Friday and the start of Christmas shopping, were up 10 percent compared with 2011 figures. 

“And while we expect to see some leveling off in the year-over-year numbers in December — due to the fact that December 2011 was a pretty strong month — sales for the indies are continuing strong,” Mr. Cullen said. 

Barnes & Noble, by contrast, reported a slight decrease in retail sales over the Thanksgiving weekend from those a year before. The company said the decrease was expected because its sales last year were bolstered by the closing of many Borders stores after that chain went out of business.

But Barnes & Noble’s sales of its Nook digital readers doubled in that period compared with the similar period last year. The company cited “promotional activity at channel partners, particularly Wal-Mart and Target,” for the increase. 

Sales of digital books themselves are a more complicated equation. E-book sales are growing, but at a less rapid pace than in earlier years, said Madeline McIntosh, chief operating officer of Random House. Typically, the holiday spike in e-book sales starts on Christmas Day as people who receive digital readers for gifts begin loading their devices. But this year the post-Christmas picture is less clear, Ms. McIntosh said. 

“We have some questions about the post-Christmas sales dynamic,” she said. “In the first years people were getting just e-readers. This year they will be getting multifunctional tablets. You can put a lot of other media besides e-books on these, and that may somewhat diminish the ultimate focus on e-books.” 

But she said Random House saw another positive trend for e-books. “We are starting to see readers accept some more complex layouts in digital form,” she said. “Ina Garten has done well” for example, with her new book “Barefoot Contessa Foolproof.” 

One thing independent bookstores seem to have going for them is the close bond they retain with their customers. Bank Square Books in Mystic, Conn., was flooded with six inches of water from Hurricane Sandy, but  Annie Philbrick, an owner, was able to open for the holiday season because neighbors had helped pack crates of books and move them to safety and back again. “People would come to our door and say, “What can we do to help?’ ” she said.

When the store reopened in mid-November, sales were stronger, she said, than they were for the whole month of October. In response, when she put together her annual list of book recommendations for Christmas, she put “Help, Thanks, Wow,” a spiritual book by Anne Lamott, at the top of the list.

“It was our way of saying thank you,” she said.