Bord Gáis Energy has launched a competition to find Ireland’s top bookshop.

The competition, The Bord Gáis Energy Book Shop of the Year, offers readers and members of The Bord Gais Energy Book Club the opportunity to vote for their favourite store.

The competition asks those voting to ask themselves:

• Does the book shop provide a wide range of books for you to choose from?
• Are the staff in the shop approachable, helpful and knowledgeable?
• Is it easy to find the book you are looking for?
• Do you trust that you will enjoy the books recommended by the shop?
• What is your overall impression of the shop?

Ten stores, (two from each of five regions; Leinster, Munster, Ulster, Connacht and Greater Dublin) will be shortlisted for the  award. The winner will be announced on 17 November 2011 at a Gala Dinner to celebrate the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards in the Convention Centre, Dublin.

The winning store will receive an honorary award as well as €5000 worth of gas and electricity from Bord Gáis Energy.

Votes can be cast here.

After a few weeks where sales seemed to be recovering for the top ten, this week dealt a huge blow with an over 15% drop in sales by volume. That nonetheless offered some bright points as Irish authors still held 4 of the top ten spots in the chart but the trend is disappointing.

The array of fiction is again broad, everything from commercial women’s fiction to children’s fiction with crime, literary and fantasy thrown into the mix. The strength of fiction might be more easily understood as the weakness of non-fiction in the first half of 2011 however, especially when the sales figures are so anemic.

All the same it is nice to see Maeve Binchy (why not listen to her talk about Minding Frankie here) in the number one spot.

1: Minding Frankie, Maeve Binchy, 1,573
2: Something from Tiffany’s, Melissa Hill, 1,475
3: A Game of Thrones Book 1 of a Song of Ice and Fire, George R.R. Martin, 1,109
4: Madeleine: Our Daughter’s Disappearance and the Continuing Search for Her, Kate McCann, 1,059
5: Let the Great World Spin, Colum McCann, 996
6: The Confession, John Grisham, 882
7: Miracle Cure, Harlan Coben, 818
8: Stand by Me, Sheila O’Flanagan, 790
9: Water For Elephants, Sarah Gruen, 780
10: Rodrick Rules:Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney, 683

Top Ten Dynamics
IPN is running a top ten dynamics section looking at the top ten with some data drawn out. Nothing too dramatic, but useful nonetheless.

Volume: 10165 Units
Decrease since last week: 1,873 units
% Decrease since last week: 15.56%
Average Units Per Title: 1017

~~
Fiction: 9 titles, 9,106 units or 89.58%, RRP £8.55
Non-Fiction: 1 titles, 1,059 units or 10.42%, RRP £14.99

~~
Authors: 10
Irish Authors: 4, 40%
Irish Published Books: 0, 0%

~~
Average RRP: £9.19
Decrease in RRP since last week: £0.60
% Decrease in RRP since last week: 6.13%*
*It is important to note that RRP does not reflect actually selling price.

Image Credit:

Colum McCann. European Graduate School, www.egs.edu/, Photograph by Hendrik Speck, www.hendrikspeck.com/, Source: www.flickr.com/photos/hendrikspeck/

Data Supplied by Nielsen BookScan taken from the Irish Consumer Market week ending 25th June 2011

Mr Husain insisted that there is a future for chains like his: “What is different about us is we dont rely on deep discounting. What we are trying to do is build on the service element and to mould each shop to the community.”

We also want to work with landlords as partners, with people who see having a shop like ours as an important part of a retail development rather than just wanting to fill a tenant.”

As such there are likely to be further openings to come. Despite this, Mr Husain said he was alive to the need to capitalise on the internet revolution which has done so much to shake up bookselling.

via Foyles bucks bad news for booksellers with latest branch at Olympics site – Business News, Business – The Independent.

The number of stores in the American Booksellers Association has again gone up. And they can thank, in part, the real estate bust.

“The soft real estate market absolutely works to our advantage,” says Oren Teicher, CEO of the booksellers association, which represents independent stores. ”

Landlords are far more willing to negotiate for new owners and existing stores have been able to renegotiate their leases.”In a reversal from a decade ago, Borders is shutting down stores, while independents are adding them. According to the booksellers association, membership increased by 102, from 1,410 to 1,502, the biggest jump in years for an organization that had been more than cut in half by superstores, the Internet and the economy. In 2010, membership edged up from 1,401 to 1,410

via The Canadian Press: Indy power: Independent stores on rise as booksellers convention nears.

Notice the emphasis on non-book products (“built around books”); as people buy more books on the internet, stores like Thalia must rely more and more on other products to turn a profit. So a Thalia is a bookstore where you might browse over the bestsellers, pick up the book you ordered on the internet, and buy some stationary or a toy. Or it’s just a place where you pick up some stationary and a toy.

E-book-news.de recently reported that Thalia’s e-reader, the Oyo sold unexpectedly well in stores, not online. People wanted to touch and try out the readers. But once those Oyo readers are in use, their sales will be exclusively online, and it’s hard to imagine their e-books won’t cut into store sales (you don’t have to go to a Thalia store to pick up your online purchase, which cuts out an important opportunity to buy stationary and a toy!), or that a more e-reader-educated generation might not be comfortable buying the readers online in the first place.

via Why Multichannel Bookselling is the Future | Publishing Perspectives.

The Dublin Book Festival has launched its full program in PDF and online.

Running from 2 March through to 6 March 2011, the programme opens with Dublin, Its Place I Literature moderated by Eileen Battersby and featuring Anthony Cronin and Dermot Bolger.

The programme also features discussions about; Ireland’s future with Mark Little, Shane Coleman, Justine McCarthy, Stephen Kinsella and Ken Foxe; Ireland’s crime problems with John Mooney, Barry Cummins, Abigail Rieley and Emer Connolly; Careers and personal finance with Colm Rapple, Brendan Foley and Jane Downes; a session on writing for young children with Sarah Webb, Kevin Stevens and chaired by Mags Walsh; and The Past is Now: Lessons for today from Ireland’s past, a discussion about Irish history with Ryan Tubridy, Diarmaid Ferriter and Susan Cahill.

The festival will also feature book launches for The Boy In The Gap by Paul Soye, The Last Irish Plague: The Great Flu Epidemic in Ireland 1918-19 by Catriona Foley and October Moon by Michael Scott

The Good Room in the Mercantile bar will feature a tea party extravaganza, Lady-dee nov’lists swanning about in all their glory, literary heads having cosy chats with cuddly writer Brian Leyden and Good Room games such as ‘Bring Your Girl/Boyfriend to Meet The Mammy’ and silent scrabble with the Child Who Can Be Seen and Not Heard. Irish Publishing News will host a Pecha Kucha session in the Good Room at 4pm on Saturday 5 March.

Even with the rise of e-books, and the struggles of some bookstore chains, all the anecdotal evidence we knew pointed to the book industry being on solid footing. But we wanted proof, so back in May of 2010, amidst some of the most dour prognostications about the state of the industry, we asked fifteen or so young researchers to look into the health of the book. Their findings provide proof that not only are books very much alive, but that reading is in exceptionally good shape—and that the book-publishing industry, while undergoing some significant changes, is, on the whole, in good health.

via McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: The State of Publishing..

Waterstone’s, which is part of the troubled HMV group,  is to close two of its Dublin Stores in a group wide restructure which will see 11 stores close.

The Daswon Street branch and the store in the Jervis Street Centre are scheduled to close on 6 February with the loss of 46 full-time equivalent* positions.

The company has now entered consultations with the affected staff and while some of them may be offered positions with the groups other stores, the likelihood is that most will be made redundant.

When the two stores close, no Waterstone’s branded outlets will remain in the capital city, though the Hodges Figgis store on Dawson street which is also part of the group will continue to trade and the Cork and Drogheda branches Waterstone’s will also remain in operation.

A spokesperson for the chain said that Waterstone’s were still committed to retailing in Dublin and while she refused to discuss the individual stores she said, ‘there were very specific reasons why we’ve made these closures.’

She also said that Waterstone’s continued ‘to look for another site in Dublin’ and if the right location came available the company would consider opening a new store.

The spokeswoman was unsure if there would be stock clearance sales at the closing stores.

The other stores closing are:
Colchester, Culver Square
Worcester, High Street
Guildford, North Street
Stafford, Guildhall
Hemel Hempstead, Marlowes Centre
Coventry, Cathedral Lanes
Tiverton
Luton
Chelmsford, Meadows

Images:

Some rights reserved by ell brown

*This metric, used by Waterstone’s includes a mix of full and part-time positions expressed as full-time positions.

So, I promised that I would launch two new free products in January 2011. One of them proved easier to iterate and roll out than intended, the second will not be ready until February.

The first is the new Directory of Publishers, Bookshops, Agents and Writers which you can find here. As you will note very quickly, it is not heavily populated yet, because sign up is FREE but subject to approval.

If you are interested in adding your bookshop, publishing house, agency or just yourself, go here and fill the details in.

Eoin
Editor, Irish Publishing News

The business recorded a turnover of £25.7m in the year to end-January 2010, but made a loss of £6m. However, m.d. John Simpson, who led a management buy-out of the business from private equity firm Endless at the beginning of last year, told The Bookseller in November that he hoped to return the company to profit in its next financial year. Simpson declined to comment when contacted this week by The Bookseller. Its website stopped taking orders last weekend.

A well-placed source said the bookshop owes around £10m to publisher creditors. Endless is also a creditor as 50% of the sale price to the buy-out team was in deferred payments. The source said: “British Bookshops needed inventory for these stores and the capital expenditure stretched their outflows. I think they opened a hell of a lot of stores and stretched themselves. If I’d have owned it, then I’d not have expanded.”

via British Bookshops enters administration | theBookseller.com.