Borders Sales Fall 12% in First Quarter
By Jim Milliot
Borders Group managed to improve cash flow and cut its debt in the first quarter, but the bookstore chain continued to struggle with sales as total revenue fell 12.1% in the period ended May 2, to $641.5 million. Sale at the superstores, which now includes Borders.com, fell 10.7%, to $536.7 million with comp sales off 13.5%. Sales at the Waldenbooks specialty group fell 19.9%, to $76.9 million, due to a combination of 11 store closures and a 5.5% drop in same store sales. A series of one-time expenses ate into the company’s bottomline resulting in a loss from continuing operations of $86 million compared to a loss of $30.1 million in last year’s first quarter. On an operating basis, the loss was $15.9 million down from $30.5 million in the comparable period in 2008. Read on »

May is “Get Caught Reading” month. We (me and Sarah from Open Books) went to Millennium Park and up and down Michigan Ave. in Chicago earlier today to catch people reading — and we found more than 20 in a couple of hours.

Now, get your camera and go catch people reading — you can enter your photo(s) in the Open Books Get Caught Reading photo contest to win of several FABULOUS prizes when the winners are named the first week of June!

- Edward P. Morgan

That doesn’t count the who-knows-how-many hundreds of other outlets, in addition to used-book stores, that resell used books along with other secondhand stuff. Because they go by so many different names — thrift stores, resale shops, consignment shops, secondhand shops, Goodwill, Salvation Army, Marklund Resale — it’s difficult to get an accurate number. Each weekend, add to that at least four to eight library or AAUW book sales — PLUS the hundreds, soon to be thousands, of garage sales going on in the ‘burbs.

Essentially, on any given Saturday there are easily 3,000 places to find used books… would that I could visit every one of them every weekend!

The very thought sends chills down my spine, not to mention the spines of the 4,00 or so treasured books I already own. Just today after returning from not one, but two Goodwill stores, I told myself that I’ve really go to put a stop to my used-book buying. There isn’t enough room in the house for them all, even with the addtion of a second floor to our home, which houses my library.

If I start to get rid of a few (don’t faint, if you’re a bibliophile — if I part with them, they go to Open Books to stock its bookstore which profits will fund literacy programs in Chicago), I tell myself, “Yes, but when I open my used-book store, I’ll need all those books for inventory.”

The bookstore wish has little, if any chance of becoming true… but then again… do I really want to take that chance?

Of course not!

A BOOK is a set or collection of written, printed, illustrated, or blank sheets, made of paper, parchment, or other material, usually fastened together to hinge at one side. A single sheet within a book is called a leaf, and each side of a leaf is called a page. A book produced in electronic format is known as an e-book.

Books may also refer to a literature work, or a main division of such a work. In library and information science, a book is called a monograph  to distinguish it from serial periodicals such as magazines, journals, or newspapers. The body of all written works including books is literature.

In novels, a book may be divided into several large sections, also called books (Book 1, Book 2, Book 3, etc).

A lover of books is usually referred to as a bibliophile, a bibliophilist, or a philobiblist; more informally, a bookworm.

The word book comes from Old English, “bōc” which comes from the Germanic root “*bōk” which is cognate to “beech.” Similarly, in Slavic languages “буква” (bukva) — “letter” — is cognate to “beech” so it is believed that the earliest Indo-European writings may have been carved on beech wood.  Further, the Latin word codex, meaning a book in the modern sense (bound and with separate leaves), originally meant “block of wood.”

Blook, a recent neologism, is either an object manufactured to imitate a bound book, such as an online book published via a blog, or a printed book that contains or is based on content from a blog.

SIZE MATTERS

The size of a modern book is based on the printing area of a common flatbed press. The pages of type were arranged and clamped in a frame, so that when printed on a sheet of paper the full size of the press, the pages would be right side up and in order when the sheet was folded, and the folded edges trimmed.

The most common book sizes are:

• Quarto (4to): the sheet of paper is folded twice, forming four leaves (eight pages) approximately 11-13 inches (ca 30 cm) tall
• Octavo (8vo): the most common size for current hardcover books. The sheet is folded three times into eight leaves (16 pages) up to 9 ¾” (ca 23 cm) tall.
• DuoDecimo (12mo): a size between 8vo and 16mo, up to 7 ¾” (ca 18 cm) tall
• Sextodecimo (16mo): the sheet is folded four times, forming sixteen leaves (32 pages) up to 6 ¾” (ca 15 cm) tall

Sizes smaller than 16mo are:

• 24mo: up to 5 ¾” (ca 13 cm) tall.
• 32mo: up to 5″ (ca 12 cm) tall.
• 48mo: up to 4″ (ca 10 cm) tall.
• 64mo: up to 3″ (ca 8 cm) tall.

Small books can be called booklets.

Sizes larger than quarto are:

• Folio: up to 15″ (ca 38 cm) tall.
• Elephant Folio: up to 23″ (ca 58 cm) tall.
• Atlas Folio: up to 25″ (ca 63 cm) tall.
• Double Elephant Folio: up to 50″ (ca 127 cm) tall.

The largest extant medieval manuscript in the world is codex sigas measuring 92 × 50 × 22 cm. The world’s largest book made of stone is found in Kuthodaw Pagoda, in Burma.

The bill was $90 so I know that I found about 90 books that I couldn’t live without, including the 9-10 that were inadvertently placed back onto the sale tables after I had piled them on the floor and wandered a little too far away to stop a diligent library volunteer from doing her job. I was distraught for a half-hour while I furtively scoured each table looking for my missing books; after my fourth pass, I found them replaced in their proper category (pets — they were books about cats).

How I missed them the first three times I searched that table, I don’t know. Likely in my distress that some evil book snatcher (who also had to be fellow cat-lover, which caused further distress)  had taken my books, I didn’t seriously think I would find them.

I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I even followed another shopper out the door to the checkout to see if he had them in his box under what I was certain was a cloak of fake selections on top of MY books. Though he didn’t look like a cat person, I was convinced he was the culprit. What I would have done had I seen my books pulled out of his box at the checkout, I don’t know, but I was relieved when they weren’t.

I arrived at the sale a few minutes after it opened. The books I look for — books about books, authors and linguistics,  photography collections, and cats — are not necessarily popular categories with the typical library book sale patron,  so I usually don’t have to elbow my way through too many other shoppers. It seems most people come looking for fiction, and mostly paperback fiction. There seem to be many readers, my sister-in-law one of them, who have inordinate amounts of time to read (she was a police dispatcher working the graveyard shift for many years and was allowed to read while on duty; the community for which she worked was pretty small and she got maybe 1-2 calls a night/morning).

After a few minutes I became aware of how quiet it was, quieter than I usually find such venues. It was quite peaceful which is probably what contributed to my staying there for no less than six hours — not including the stroll I took to a local bank’s ATM to get more cash. The first three hours I tried to limit my selections to total no more than the $50 I had allotted for the day’s adventure.

About lunchtime, though, I determined I wasn’t going to let a relatively minor consideration like money dictate how many books I could have. So after that all bets we re off, as they say, and I picked up anything that remotely caught my attention. What a buck when it comes to a book?!

The other delightful aspect of this book sale was that the Friends of the Library do not allow shoppers to use scanners, cellphones, laptops or any other digital device in the sale room. In fact, they don’t even allow people to take stacks of books to a separate area to sort through what they do or don’t want, as used to happen before the days of handheld scanners.

It’s the first book sale I’ve been to in a few years that has such policies. I welcome and applaud the Arlington Heights FOL for stipulating them, and believe it is what contributed to the calm and quiet I alluded to earlier.

The online booksellers who come barreling into library book sales with their devices attack the sale tables or shelves with a vengeance that creates a certain tension. It’s one thing when readers are anxiously looking for a few particular titles they want to read; it’s an entirely different ambiance when others are grabbing as much inventory as they possibly can before a competitor overtakes them.

It makes for what I believe is a ripe milieu — and I have read of such — for punches to be thrown over a recent copy of a bestseller that one party simply wants to read, the other to profit from…. and whom do you think is the more aggressive in such a confrontation?

I don’t begrudge anyone a living, especially these days. I do begrudge the profiteering book hunters’ lack of courtesy, annoying scanner beeps, throwing (not quietly placing) books into their collection boxes,  pushing other shoppers aside to geet to the “good” categories, and just generally taking most of the fun out of  used-book sales.

Some of the digital devils are owners of independent used-book stores. But, I recognize those ladies and gentlemen, for indeed that’s what they are. They’re not rude or pushy, and carefully look at a “beeped” book before PLACING it in their collection bin. In support of their ongoing success and operation, I will happily share the aisles with them.

So that’s my soapbox.

Following my six-hour safari yesterday, I am of course faced with the where-to-put-them-all dilemma. Oh, they’ll all readily fit on the shelves in the library — but then, where to put  the other 700-800 books down in the “sorting stacks” (my 23-year-old-son’s former basement bedroom)?

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