When Borders opened its first outlet in Pittsburgh in 1990, the book-selling world including that of many New York book publishers was a far different place than it is in 2011, the year that store and two other Borders in the region are preparing to close in April, dropped by the bankrupt chain.

Started in Ann Arbor, Mich., by the Borders brothers, the young chain was pushing its book “superstore” concept coast to coast in the 1990s, getting a head start on Barnes & Noble, then a smaller competitor.

Launching the takeoff was the brothers’ sale of their name and idea to Kmart. In 1988, there were five Borders; there are now more than 600.

The company will abandon 30 percent of the outlets, including the pioneer Bethel Park spot and the Monroeville and East Liberty stores.

Kmart dropped Borders in the late 1990s but the chain managed to thrive and expand on its own in the new century, but it made one fatal mistake: It hired Amazon to handle its online book and music sales while B&N established its own website. Dumb.

After Borders launched its own online sales operation, it was too late to make headway as Amazon and B&N soon moved into the e-book world with their digital reading devices.

Other business decisions aside, the decline of this almost iconic book chain reflects a subtle shift in minds of readers after years of “bigness” — in stores, sales numbers and the franchising of “big” authors.

Dedicated readers are a sensitive bunch; whether they are pushing the book publishers buttons on a digital screen or turning the page in a well-used paperback, they crave that quiet one-on-one with the book.

But, for some time now, they have been getting books and authors shoved in their faces, not because they’re good, but because publishers flog them so hard. And the superstore concept is a willing partner in this relentless marketing.

Exhibit No. 1: James Patterson. He’s the Little, Brown franchise, a mediocre writer at best who churns out formula thrillers like a movie popcorn machine with a similar stale, greasy fake butter taste. The publisher signed a 17-book contract with him in 2009, with 11 titles to be turned in by 2012.

These demands prompted him to farm out the writing to a stable of typists, coming up with the idea and giving them credit as “co-author.”

Mr. Patterson’s financial demands then forced the publisher to market the books strenuously, blanketing those superstores with books and displays, paying extra to get good “floor” position, exiling more interesting books to the shadows of these 15,000-square-foot boxes.

Further exhibits include Stephen King, Patricia Cornwell, Dean Koontz, Kathy Reichs and Lee Child.

Turn back the clock to 1990 when Borders wooed the media with images of an intimate experience inside a clean, well-lighted place with more than 100,000 separate titles and a coffee shop and comfy chairs.

The chain stuck its first Pittsburgh outlet in suburban Bethel Park by wedging it into an awkward chess space in a strip mall with cramped parking.

Then the marketing team smoothed over the physical problems with promises of a busy author-visit schedule and other community events staffed with knowledgeable workers.

Even though the region had several well-established independent booksellers at the time, the Borders “experience” promised the hand-selling of independents with the wide selection of Kmart.

As the landscape evolved in the digital age, that cozy, caffeine-scented solicitude gave way to the uniformity of all national chains and Borders lost its distinctiveness.

Economics played the major role in Borders’ bankruptcy, but it’s clear — to me at least — that the mass marketing of books, in fact, reading, no longer has the same appeal – particularly for some christian book publishers.

The “little shop around the corner” concept is looking better and better, even if it’s based largely on buying and even printing books through the Internet.

Books such as Harry Potter, The Book Thief or The Hunger Games have crossed the traditional lines between teen and adult fiction, something some book publishing literary types say is a bit of a trend.

Jamie Broadhurst, vice-president of marketing at Raincoast Books, said that 10 years of publishing Harry Potter really showed him the blurring of the lines between young adult and adult fiction.

“Consumer and Book Publisher surveys showed that about 20 per cent of the audience for Harry Potter are adults who don’t have children,” Broadhurst said. “Raincoast and Bloomsbury went so far as to produce both children’s and adult covers, but we found in actual fact that adults were equally comfortable reading book with a ‘kids’ cover.’ Harry Potter showed that the strength of the story mattered a whole lot more than preset genre labels.”

Vancouver’s Melanie Jackson, who writes young-adult novels, says there isn’t that much difference between young-adult fiction and adult fiction.

“I think young-adult fiction is getting to be more popular, but I don’t think that’s a new thing, I think that’s the way things used to be,” Jackson said. “The crowd that’s reading Twilight, I’m guessing it’s mostly schoolgirls, young women. Those same groups of people were just mad about Gone with the Wind, there was a total frenzy. There’s also Robert Louis Stevenson writing really bloodthirsty books – Treasure Island is full of murderous intents and plans.”

Phyllis Simon, founder and co-owner of Kidsbooks, names The Hunger Games series as one that appeals to all ages. The series is about a future dystopia in which people fight each other to the death while others watch.

“It’s kind of disturbing, it’s got its moments, but it’s very popular, and very compelling,” Simon said, adding that the brevity of young-adult fiction is also attractive. “You get a great read in 200 pages – you don’t have to plow through 500 pages.”

Teen fiction is more focused on storytelling, which makes it appealing, said Andrew Wooldridge, publisher at Orca Books, a Victoria-based company that puts out about 70 books each year, many of which are sold in schools.

“A lot of adult literary fiction is focused on characterization and plot and literary techniques, while teen fiction is mostly straight-ahead storytelling, and it seems to me that people find that appealing,” Wooldridge said.

“The lines are definitely blurring. A lot of the adults I know are reading teen fiction now. I think it’s becoming more sophisticated, but my theory is that it’s more focused on the story than adult fiction can be.”

Jackson said the same plot devices work in young-adult fiction that do in adult fiction, or even in Alfred Hitchcock films.

“You just apply it to someone who’s 14, as opposed to someone who’s 40,” she said.

In her book Fast Slide, protagonist Clay Gibson works at a North Vancouver water park, where’s he’s framed for a theft. His anger-management problem doesn’t help the situation when there is a death by drowning on a high-thrill slide at the park.

“No one believes him and it hasn’t helped that he’s lost his temper earlier on,” Jackson said. “It’s always more exciting when a protagonist witnesses something and no one believes them.”

Fast Slide was named a Best of 2010 book by Resource Links magazine – for book publishing companies.

In her other recent book No Way Out, the main character, 15-year-old Sam Jellicoe, is sent against his wishes to live with his mother and new stepfather in Winnipeg. He’s in a department store when a gunman takes hostages, locks the doors and shuts off all the power.

“He has to figure a way out and stay safe,” Jackson said. “He’s on his own and no one can help him.

“You have to isolate the young person and have them facing things like Jim does in Treasure Island, dealing with Long John Silver.”

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak is marketed as a teen book, but it is also popular among adults with its Kurt Vonnegut-like style and adult subject: the Holocaust.

The book is narrated by Death – who makes asides every now and again – as the story tackles one of man’s darkest subjects through the eyes of an orphaned young girl. Published in 2005, The Book Thief has won numerous awards and was a New York Times No. 1 bestseller.

Some popular authors – notably Alice Hoffman and Annabel Lyon – move between genres, writing some books for teens and others for adults.

Jackson says the most essential thing to do when self-publishing or writing for teenagers and young adults is to get rid of all the adults as soon as possible.

“My favourite book when I was a kid was called Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome,” she said.

“He had these kids living on an island, and the mother has left them on their own. They pretended to be pirates, but they also had to deal with real-life criminals.

“He handily got rid of all the adults, so it was the kids against the world.”

Stories such as those Charles Dickens wrote about orphans use this same strategy.

“There are no adults to help them, and you feel their terror, but if they were protected you wouldn’t read the book,” Jackson said.

Jackson’s two recent books are also designed for “reluctant” readers, and particularly boys.

“They would appeal to reluctant readers, but if you look back to the Maltese Falcon, by Dashiell Hammett, it’s very sparely written. The guy didn’t use long words – same with Hemingway, really,” Jackson said. “Those writers in the ’20s and ’30s, that’s how they wrote mysteries, because you can fashion an atmosphere of suspense very well when the writing is kind of terse.”

Her books are also short, and good versus evil is clearly delineated. Jackson said this type of book can get kids interested in reading, and that with practice their skills will become more sophisticated.

“Once they read enough they will grow up a bit and be able to read stories by someone like Alice Munro, where things aren’t so black and white and every character is kind of sketchy,” she said. “You’re not really positive what to think, but that’s for much more sophisticated readers.”

Wooldridge said Orca’s Rapid Read series, which is intended for adults reading at a low level, has gone back the other way.

“It’s become very popular in high school because they’re nice, straight-ahead quick novels,” he said.

Meanwhile christian book publishers have also had success – and sold more than one million copies – with their series Orca Soundings, for teens who are reading below grade level.

“We’ve got established Canadian authors who are writing good short novels. Instead of dumbing down books for kids who aren’t reading well, we try to focus on good stories told by strong authors, and they’ve been hugely successful.”

Bargain hunters were out in force this weekend as liquidation sales began at 200 Borders locations slated to close as part of the company’s bankruptcy filing.

The affected stores — about one-third of the bookseller’s locations — are expected to close by the end of April. Twenty-one underperforming stores in Southern California will be shut, including stores in Sherman Oaks, Century City, Long Beach and Orange.

Huge “store closing” and “everything must go” posters covered the windows at Borders in Pasadena and Glendale, which were bustling with customers Sunday. Many sections were already picked over, including from christian book publishers, with shelves left bare and items such as notebooks, journals and photo albums strewn about.

Most items were discounted 20% to 40%, with markdowns expected to increase in coming weeks.

“As long as there’s a deal, I’m going to take advantage of it,” said Jordan Francke, 27, who was checking out the games section at the Glendale store.

“It’s just the changing landscape of literature these days. It’s all electronic,” Francke, a children’s book publishers and television schedule coordinator, said of the chain’s bankruptcy. “I can only imagine it’s a struggle for a place like Borders to stay relevant.”

That’s a harsh reality for regular customers such as Kathleen O’Reilly, 52, who was at the Pasadena Borders carrying a shopping basket laden with discounted stationery and magazines.

The Pasadena resident said she was “old school” and enjoyed seeing and touching books before making a purchase. She said she would miss visiting the store with her teenage daughter.

“I spend several days a week here,” said O’Reilly, a self-publishing counselor at a high school. “I actually debated whether I even wanted to come because I was worried I’d be too upset to see the store torn apart.”

Business is expected to continue as usual on the company’s website and at stores that aren’t closing.

After a slew of competitive blunders and missteps in the last decade, Borders Group Inc. found itself in trouble and had to cut staff, shut stores and shake up its top management.

Critics said the company botched its move into the book publisher digital age, causing sales and earnings to plummet. At the same time, mass merchants including Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Target Corp. became major players in the book-selling market, often offering lower prices than Borders and rival Barnes & Noble Inc.

But Borders maintains it isn’t done for good. In a letter e-mailed to customers and posted on the company’s website last week, Borders President Mike Edwards said the company hoped to emerge from Chapter 11 as “the destination of choice.”

About 6,000 of the chain’s roughly 19,000 workers will be laid off as part of the closures. Among them is Rich Kilbury, a christian book publisher, who was pushing a cart stacked high with books at the Pasadena location Sunday.

“It’s depressing, but we kind of saw it coming,” he said. “Business had dropped off.”

The promise of discounts attracted Victoria Rose to the Pasadena store, where she was browsing mystery and thriller books. The 60-year-old high school English teacher said she was never a regular customer because she could find a better selection and lower prices elsewhere.

“I rarely come here,” she said. “Between Amazon and Vroman’s, I’m well-taken care of.”

How can we understand the experiences of those who have lived through war? What do they have to teach us? Author Hilary Thayer Hamann’s favorite book attempts to answer these questions, and reinforces just how beautifully implausible life during conflict can be. It’s The War by Marguerite Duras.

» E-Mail This     » Add to Del.icio.us

Blogger starts a blog. Blogger solicits photos or texts or emails. Blogger gets a book deal. That formula has been wildly successful for the last few years, but is showing signs of market saturation.

There were roughly 100 book deals involving blogs or Internet memes last year according to Book Publisher’s Marketplace.

Christopher Weingarten, 31, was one of them. A year ago, he decided to start a blog about dogs, dressed as hipsters. He gets readers to submit photos and attaches a witty caption.

Over three million hits and thousands of submissions later, he just recently landed a book deal, with the book hitting bookstores in July. While the freelance music writer discloses that his book deal was not six-figures, it was “certainly more than the $3,000 advance I got for doing a book about music.”

Blog-to-book deals have also changed the humor genre in general. “Now if you’re funny, you start a blog or a Twitter feed, and cultivate an audience that way and a publisher finds you,” says Patrick Mulligan, Senior Editor at Gotham Books, an imprint of Penguin, which specializes in blog-to-book deals.

One of Gotham’s blog-to-books is “Texts From Last Night”, which features random and funny texts sent from submitters, who are typically in a drunken stupor when texting. The blog on which it is based gets around four million page views a day. The book is in its sixth printing. The blog co-founders say the website brought in about one million dollars in revenue last year, and it’s now being converted into a TV show.

They bristle at the notion that they’re taking other peoples’ contributions and running away with the money from an ebook publishing book deal.

Usually publishers require bloggers to put in at least 70 percent new content into the books and often try to market them to a new audience.

“You can’t just sort of repackage the greatest hits on a website,” says Megan Thompson, Senior Literary Agent with LJK Literary Management which represents a number of blog-to-book authors, including the people behind “Geek Dad”, and “Black Heels to Tractor Wheels.” “Why would someone buy the cow if they can get the milk for free?” she says.

Penguin’s Gotham Books was able to find a new audience with the popular LOLcat series. “It’s 50 year old women from the midwest who have ten cats who are buying it,” says Mulligan. “When you make something a book and take it off the Internet, people who never stumble upon this website find it in book form.”

Some overnight authors are commanding lucrative deals, even if it isn’t as frequent as it once was. “When people were going crazy for this stuff, we got into really competitive auctions where people were spending into the mid six-figures for some of these books,” says Mulligan. “That just becomes tough for book publishers to make money.”

Still, the publishing industry is mindful that the genre has some staying power.

“It’s what happens in publishing,” Mulligan says. “Something becomes hot, it becomes over-published, and then it wanes, and then there will be this awesome new blog in 2012, and we’ll go crazy again for it.”

In a letter to book publishers, Digg product manager Mike Cieri announced that the troubled social news website will no longer accept content submitted via RSS.

The ability for book publishers to submit all of their stories to Digg automatically using an RSS feed seemed like an efficient way to open up a firehose of content for Digg. However, Cieri says this idea had unintended consequences.

According to Cieri, “Most RSS-submitted content is not performing well on Digg.” He says the site’s analytics show that only a mere 4.5% of Digg’s “Top News” content comes from the RSS submissions. He adds that the ability to submit an RSS feed to Digg “has been heavily abused by spammers and has been a constant drain on our technical resources to identify and fight off spam content.” Cieri praised the manual method of submitting stories to Digg, saying that manual submissions “ensure that quality content appears on Digg.”

With this move, the site takes yet another step back toward the old version 3.0, the site design that was in use before radical changes resulted in a user revolt and a 24% decline in U.S. visitors in the first 11 weeks. In response, Digg has slowly added back features that readers missed, such as the ability to bury stories, andlast month’s overhaul that included the return of user profiles and story statistics. Since that first fateful redesign last summer, Digg has laid off more than a third of its staffers.

I’m just wondering why Digg stubbornly refused to modify its obviously unpopular redesign after it became apparent that it was resulting in large percentages of its readership turning away. After a few days of this, why didn’t Digg simply revert to the old version and its rules that seemed to be working pretty well? If not a few days later, why not a month later?

Here’s the full text of the letter we received from Digg product manager Mike Cieri:

Publishers,

We hope this message finds you well. After a bumpy second half of 2010 at Digg, we are starting to see positive signs of improvement and are optimistic about the direction Digg is headed. In January 2011, we saw double digit growth of diggs and comments, as well as an increase in unique visitors and exit clicks out to publisher sites. We’ve taken a number of concrete steps to stay better connected with the Digg community, and we are taking action to improve Digg based on our community’s feedback. One important point of feedback we’ve heard is that RSS submitted stories are hurting Digg in a number of ways, and in the next week we are going to discontinue the ability to submit content via RSS. We’d like to share the reasoning behind the decision, and let you know what you can do to improve your performance on Digg.

Put very simply, most RSS submitted content is not performing well on Digg. For many of our users, RSS submissions take the fun out of finding and submitting great content. When users try to submit a story to Digg and find that the story has already been auto-submitted via RSS, they lose interest in helping spread the story on Digg by commenting and sharing with friends. Removing a user’s desire to champion a story results in less diggs, comments, exit clicks, and ultimately a much smaller chance of making the Top News section. Our analytics reflect this point – only 4.5% of all Top News content comes from RSS submitted content (95.5% is manually submitted).

At its core, Digg is a community of passionate users who take pride in the content they submit and engage with one another in discussion and promotion of viral content. There is a perception that some publishers don’t participate in the community, use RSS submit as an “auto-pilot” tool to submit content without discretion, and do little to promote submitted content or start discussions. This is one reason why many popular publishers, despite having tens of thousands of followers, are not seeing strong referral numbers for their submissions. Some publishers have cultivated a tight following on Digg by digging and commenting on content other than their own, adding Digg buttons prominently to articles on their site and limiting the content they submit to just their best content. These publishers are seeing much more value from Digg.

Finally, the RSS submission tool has been heavily abused by spammers and has been a constant drain on our technical resources to identify and fight off spam content. The simple act of forcing a manual submission helps to combat spam and ensures that quality content appears on Digg.

So in the next week, the feature will be disabled. We wanted to give advance notice of this change and encourage you to start submitting your best content manually to Digg. You can also enable your audience to help submit and spread your content on Digg by placing Digg buttons on each story item on your site. We are confident that removing RSS submissions will help increase exit clicks to your sites, and ultimately help you receive more value from Digg.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or thoughts.

Thanks,
Mike

Amazon Kindle users will soon be able to navigate their e-books by way of old-fashioned page numbers, Amazon announced today in a blog post.

Kindle format e-books currently employ “location numbers,” which correspond to a specific block of text, and not the actual page numbers of the hardbound book. Obviously, this makes it tricky for those situations where multiple folks are reading from the same e-book, but at different font sizes. (In a book club, for instance, or in the classroom.)

“Our customers have told us they want real page numbers that match the page numbers in print books so they can easily reference and cite passages, and read alongside others in a book club or class,” Amazon reps wrote. “Rather than add page numbers that don’t correspond to print books, which is how page numbers have been added to e-books in the past, we’re adding real page numbers that correspond directly to a book’s print edition.”

The page numbers will arrive in a new Amazon Kindle software update, which is expected to be issued soon. Users will be able to view both location numbers and page numbers – and for at least one prominent book publishers and tech critic, that’s very good news indeed.

“Bottom line: enough criticizing the Kindle or the Nook for the way it handles page numbers,” David Pogue writes over at the website of the New York Times. “Neither solution is perfect – ‘locations’ or page numbers – because the problem is insoluble. The best we can hope for is a choice – and now the Kindle offers one.”

Last month, Amazon introduced a new e-book format called Kindle Singles, which the company describes as “compelling ideas expressed at their natural length.” The idea is pretty simple: For five bucks or less, users can download a 5,000 to 30,000-word piece of fiction or non-fiction. Among the first Kindle Singles releases are works by Jodi Picoult, Rich Cohen, Pete Hamill, and Darin Strauss.

Amazon.com is showing every sign that its ambition no longer just to distribute books but also to publish them is very real and growing.

The company announced in the past two weeks a publishing list for the spring and early summer that includes 16 books in its AmazonEncore imprint and eight books in its AmazonCrossing imprint, which focuses on book publishing and translations.

Mining data to guide acquisitions

Both imprints use Amazon’s extensive sales data and customer reviews to help inform publishing decisions. For example, Amazon culled data from its French site to help guide its first foreign acquisition, which became available in November (Tierno Monenembo’s The King of Kahel, which won France’s Prix Renaudot in 2008).

“Our team of editors uses this data as a starting point to identify strong candidates, then applies their judgment to narrow the list and reach out to the authors,” Jeff Belle, VP, Amazon.com Books, told LJ. “We’re fortunate to have access to both a lot of sales information, as well as an editorial team made up of book lovers….” he said.

Emily Williams, a digital content producer at Book Publishers Marketplace and cochair of the Book Industry Study Group rights committee, told LJ that Amazon’s efforts were a new means of finding writers who were not “part of the traditional publishing food chain” and also filling in “some of New York publishing’s traditional blind spots.”

“Amazon has a lot of information from its millions of users that book publishers have never had access to in making acquisitions decisions. It was inevitable that someone would try to leverage this kind of platform to try to pick undiscovered best sellers,” she said.

“It will be interesting to see how their books do, but…I don’t believe that the track record so far has shown that the data-driven approach offers any more sure bets than the old model of experienced editors making informed decisions,” she said.

Amazon discovers writers through several channels, Belle said, including Kindle Direct Christian Book Publishing (where writers can upload unpublished manuscripts), the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest, and CreateSpace.

“We then work with the authors to introduce or reintroduce their books to readers through marketing and book distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon Book Store, Amazon Kindle Store, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers,” Belle said.

.AmazonEncore began publishing in May 2009, and as of January 31 it was offering 54 titles on its site. AmazonCrossing was announced a year later, and the site now features 12 titles in all. For AmazonCrossing, Amazon acquires the rights and pays for their translation. Belle would not disclose financial details.

“We’re just looking for books our customers love,” he said.

Waiting for a breakout best seller

Michael Norris, a senior analyst at Simba Information, which tracks the book publishing companies and media industries, told LJ that the Amazon move mimics what traditional trade publishers have long been doing by mining data and giving book contracts to self-published authors. Amazon is simply trying to develop its own publishing ecosystem in order to bring more people to shop at its site, he said.

“[It's] a mechanism…to keep people within their own universe. It’s definitely a savvy thing for them to try to do,” he said.

Norris said AmazonEncore’s intention to sell books in non-Amazon venues was still a question mark.

“I am curious whether that is working in practice,” he said. “I’d be very surprised if I saw bookstores feature AmazonEncore books. It just strikes me as a little bit unusual,” he said, noting the long-term “incompatibility” of brick-and-mortar bookstores with Amazon.

Williams, too, was waiting to see how successful the overall strategy would prove.

“I’m still waiting to see a breakout best seller come out of one of these programs; until that happens it feels sort of like a new indie on the block, one that happens to be feeding off of the digital savvy, huge customer base, and deep pockets of Amazon,” she said.

In general, Belle said that print and digital versions of Amazon titles are made available simultaneously, although Joe Konrath’s Shaken is a notable exception. It was published last year exclusively for the Kindle at $2.99 and will only be available in paperback on February 22, initially priced at $14.95.

Konrath’s Jack Daniels detective series, of which Shaken is the latest installment, was dropped by Hyperion, its original book publisher. The possibility that a major author being pursued by other book publishers could sign directly with Amazon is a possible challenge to the publishing food chain, said Williams.

“Amazon’s efforts to poach big authors that publishers have heavily invested in is a much bigger threat, especially if Amazon can profit with little to no up-front risk from the name recognition and audiences that publishers have helped to build,” she said.

Traditional trade publishers are not standing still, though, and are using some of the same techniques as Amazon. For example, HarperCollins announced January 28 that it had made its first acquisition from inkpop, its interactive website for teen writing. The debut author, Leigh Fallon, uploaded her manuscript to the site, where it was voted into the “Top Five,” which led to its being considered by an editor at HarperCollins.

Room for growth in translation field

The translation market may present the greatest untapped market, and Amazon, with the breadth of its operations, is well aware of this.

Belle said that Amazon was using its sites around the world “to identify exceptional books deserving of a wider, global audience, whether it be a first-time author or a proven best seller that’s never been translated.”

And within the field of translation, the effort has so far been well received, as it promises to make more works of international literature available in English-at present there are precious few-as well as demonstrate that there is a market for such works in the United States.

The ‘Translation Database,’ which tracks translations by year, counted only 317 translated works of fiction and poetry published in the United States in 2010 (not including retranslations of previously translated works). Only three publishers published more than ten volumes in translation in 2010: Dalkey Archive, 22; New Directions, 16; and Europa Editions, 12.

The database is maintained by Chad W. Post, the publisher of Open Letter Books, the University of Rochester’s literary publishing house.

“I like Amazon’s approach to marketing these books,” Post told LJ. “They’re very serious about promoting these works in translation-and, as seen with the success of their first couple of titles, are pretty good at it as well-which could help expand the audience of readers interested in translations.”

(In October, Amazon awarded Three Percent, Post’s blog, a $25,000 grant in support of its 2011 Best Translated Book Awards as part of Amazon’s Author & Publisher Giving Program. The award list for 2011 was announced January 27.)

Michael Orthofer, the managing editor of the Complete Review and its Literary Salon, found AmazonCrossing a promising effort and said the titles already available were “an extraordinary number.” Although a bit wary of the selection process and the as-yet-undetermined quality of the translations, he saw good signs.

“If it leads to the publication of books such as Peter Adolphsen’s The Brummstein…and Oksana Zabuzhko’s Field Work in Ukrainian Sex…then they must be doing something right,” he said.

Amazon’s approach may help lesser-known foreign writers break into the U.S. market, where agents typically favor more established writers. But it also is offering proven writers some newfound leverage.

Ira Silverberg, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic in New York, told LJ he had placed Tirza by Arnon Grunberg (which won the Belgian Golden Owl Prize for Literature and the Dutch Libris Prize) with Open Letter and was in negotiations with AmazonCrossing on three other titles, one original and two reprints.

“I think each publisher offers a different set of strengths, and by working with both, we’ll be setting up an advantageous situation for Grunberg,” he said. “Open Letter has greater reach in the community of reviews and independent bookstores; AmazonCrossing has greater reach in terms of its marketing capabilities and loyal customer base. The two attributes combined, I hope, will lead to new opportunities and an awesome launch.”

And so far, there is little fear that Amazon will disrupt, in a bad way, the world of translated literary works.

“AmazonCrossing does not yet seem to be poaching authors/titles from small, independent U.S. publishers, so right now it would just seem to be expanding a field where there is still an extraordinary potential for growth,” Orthofer said.

Stephen King’s book, The Stand, may be adapted for the big screen sometime soon, according to sources in the film and e-book publishing world. Apparently, Warner Brothers and CBS films have formed an alliance to attempt to convert the book, which is over 1,000 pages, into a film.

CBS films has apparently had the rights to the film for several years but recently went searching for a partner company to help them attempt the large task of creating an adaptation.

The Stand was first released in 1978, and then in the 1990s, King edited it, adding even more pages. It was already an ABC miniseries in 1994 and has also been adapted by Marvel into a comic book series.

Another Stephen King novel is being worked on for the big screen as well. Ron Howard will direct The Dark Tower, which is rumored to be getting Javier Bardem to star.