For a staff that never really exceeds nine or so, we take our coffee very seriously...We don't want bookstores to die. Authors need them, and so do neighborhoods. So let's mount a book-buying splurge. Get your friends together, go to your local bookstore and have a book-buying party. Buy the rest of your Christmas presents, but that's just for starters. Clear out the mysteries, wrap up the histories, beam up the science fiction! Round up the westerns, go crazy for self-help, say yes to the university press books! Get a load of those coffee-table books, fatten up on slim volumes of verse, and take a chance on romance!
There will be birthdays in the next twelve months; books keep well; they're easy to wrap: buy those books now. Buy replacements for any books looking raggedy on your shelves. Stockpile children's books as gifts for friends who look like they may eventually give birth. Hold off on the flat-screen TV and the GPS (they'll be cheaper after Christmas) and buy many, many books. Then tell the grateful booksellers, who by this time will be hanging onto your legs begging you to stay and live with their cat in the stockroom: "Got to move on, folks. Got some books to write now. You see...we're the Authors Guild."
Enjoy the holidays.
Roy Blount Jr.
President, Authors Guild
From The Author's Guild, re-posted at the New England Independent Booksellers Association website.
Roy Blount, Jr. is the winner of the 2007 New England Book Award for Non-Fiction, awarded at the 34th Annual New England Independent Booksellers Association Trade Show in Providence, RI. Many of us here at Books, Etc. were lucky enough to be there, hear him speak, and snag a copy of his then-new book Long Time Leaving: Dispatches From Up South. His new-new book Alphabet Juice promises to be just as witty, informative, and funny as his earlier work.
Every year when the mistletoe goes up, the plea goes out from America’s dwindling band of independent booksellers: Please, people, keep us alive! Buy our books, give them as gifts!
For decades, small bookshops have battled the twin menaces of massive, price-cutting chains and the vast, easily browsed shelves of on-line retailers.
Many have failed. Not a month seems to go by without the lights winking out at yet another small store. Washington’s own Olsson’s closed in September after 36 years in the business.
Now, it’s a shame when any company folds, but the bleating from independent bookstores has often seemed rather tiresome. Why should readers conspire to make prices higher for themselves?
The sympathies of conservative book buyers are further strained by the seemingly inevitable lefty aura of independent bookstores. (Can you imagine Politics & Prose replacing its supply of mocking anti-Bush paraphernalia with, say, anti-Obama stocking stuffers? Neither can I.)
Yet now it’s no longer just precious, tweedy, bookstore-owning progressives who are in trouble. The book business itself has entered a new and frightening stage that even the arrival of mistletoe seems unable to forestall.
Barnes & Noble is forecasting fourth-quarter sales declines of as much as nine percent. In the last two weeks, major publishing houses -- Simon & Schuster and Random House among them – have announced sweeping layoffs that are taking down even some of the most commercially successful editors. Macmillan U.S. has just frozen wages; San Francisco’s Chronicle Books is downsizing.
Scariest of all for authors and agents was last week’s news that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has apparently stopped buying any new manuscripts. To say this sent a wave of panicky terror through the industry is an understatement.
Books, like automobiles, have a long production process. If a publisher doesn’t buy titles now, it won’t be in a position to deliver boxes of glossy new hardbacks to bookstores later.
“A ban like this is most worrisome to me for what it says about publishing’s bet on the market 18-24 months from now,” observed Publisher’s Weekly editor-in-chief Sara Nelson. “Will the market just be smaller—or nonexistent?”
Now, perhaps you don’t care whether bookstores exist, and maybe you are not, yourself, an avid reader. Still—don’t be indifferent. You live in a culture that since Gutenberg has been more open and free because of the wide availability of books. Even today, when we’re all inundated with reading material, books stand as a particular measure of liberty.
Societies in which books are a rarity are simply not as open or inquiring or free as those with an abundance of them. Consider: The UN’s 2002 Arab Human Development Report found that more books are translated for sale in Spain every year than have been translated into Arabic, for sale in the Arab world, in the last thousand years.
Books -- even bad ones, even cheesy romances, even snooze-worthy political biographies -- don’t simply furnish a room, they furnish the mind.
Fine, you may say, but why should I give someone the gift of a lump of dead tree when they can read on their computer? And if I want to give them a book, isn’t it more hip to buy an e-book and a Kindle? One answer: Real books don’t need a power source. Another: The Kindle is sold out until 11-13 weeks after Christmas.
A couple of weeks ago, the publisher Random House launched an ad campaign with the message: “Books = Gifts.” It may be unabashed self-interest for a company to try to push the products it creates, but in the case of books it’s arguable that we all benefit.
So for the holidays this year, please, people: Buy lots of books. Wrap them up. And give them to the people you love.
Baruch Dayan Emet, meaning "blessed is the true judge" is the traditional Jewish response upon hearing of a death. As of this morning (Eastern time), it has been confirmed that among those dead at the Mumbai Chabad House, known as Nariman House, are Rabbi Gavriel Noach Holtzberg and his wife Rivka.
Falling firmly into the 'returning' category was Gail Straub on the 8th with her new book, Returning to My Mother's House. Eve Ensler, founder of V-Day and author of The Vagina Monologues said that it 
On the 20th we were thrilled to welcome Portland's own Colin Sargent. Colin is founding editor and publisher of award-winning Portland Magazine, as well as a board member of Maine Reads. He has been awarded the Maine individual artist fellowship in literature and earned a Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing. He is a playwright and the author of three books of poetry. Museum of Human Beings is his first novel, and tells the story of Sacagawea's son, Jean-Baptiste Charbonneau.
Last but certainly not least was Stephanie Kaza on the 21st. Stephanie is a Professor of Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, and has been actively engaged in campus sustainability initiatives to reduce waste, conserve energy, and promote environmental values. She has authored, coauthored, and edited innumerable articles and books on the environment and religious practice. Her newest work, Mindfully Green: A Personal and Spiritual Guide to Whole Earth Thinking draws upon her background in Buddhism, presenting a simple philosophy for engaging in environmental action in real, practical, and effective ways. 
