The Observer staff combed the stacks to choose 10 enticing summer books:

Dear American Airlines, Jonathan Miles

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewsk

Rites of Spring (Break): An Ivy League Novel, Diana Peterfreund

Somebody Else's Daughter, Elizabeth Brundage

When We Were Romans, Matthew Kneale

Schooled, Anisha Lakhani

What I Talk About When I Talk About Running , Haruki Murakami

Pharmakon, Dirk Wittenborn

The Wrecking Crew, The Wrecking Crew

Waterstone' s up 3.3 on same-store sales:
UK chain Waterstone's reported sales for the fiscal year of 564 million pounds, up 3.3 percent on a same-store sales basis and 5 percent overall, while income remained flat at 16.3 million pounds. In the continuing process of absorbing Ottakar's, the chain took a charge of 4.6 million pounds to cover the closure of 11 stores. (Only one new store was opened during the year.)

The company says "the biggest single initiative to help build links with our customers has been the Waterstone's multi-channel loyalty card, which launched in September 2007, and now has 1.5 million cardholders." They also highlight "the successful introduction of new children’s departments and a high quality range of gift stationery into 100 stores, where these new ranges have performed well."

Lots going on but starting to notice how easy it is to add content to the blog now with all of the tools available. Does this mean more, better richer - No! Just observing.

Hey, Art!

What is new media?

Bankruptcy Results in Big Loss for Quebecor
-- Publishers Weekly, 4/29/2008 10:20:00 AM

Printing giant Quebecor World released its delayed financial results for 2007 this morning and as expected the company took a big hit due to its January bankruptcy filing. Quebecor recorded a net loss from continuing operations of $2.20 billion compared to earnings of $30.6 million in 2006. Revenue in the year fell 6.5%, to $5.69 billion. Charges associated with the bankruptcy, including goodwill impairment charges, impairment of assets, and restructuring and other charges amounted to $2.1 billion. In addition to the charges, Quebecor said profitability was depressed by lower volume, pricing pressure, underperformaning European assets (which Quebecor is trying to sell) and higher expenses. The decline in revenue was attributed in part to the closing of several older plants in North America.

In a statement, CEO Jacques Mallette said the company has made good progress in restructuring its operations. “I am pleased with what we have accomplished so far,” Mallett said. To finance its operation during the bankruptcy proceedings, Quebecor received $1 billion of debtor-in-possession financing earlier this year, and the company said it believes it has enough cash to operate until it emerges from bankruptcy.

To help with its restructuring efforts, Quebecor has hired Randy Benson as chief restructuring officer. Benson has worked with other large companies in bankruptcy, including Hollinger and Ivaco.

Google moves ever forward with Google Book Search. I think there new viewer API is very likely an attempt at viral acquiescence - the more people who link the less likely publishers will be able to find a toe hold. Library thing got on it right away.

Big Brother promise finally fulfilled? Interesting article in the Globe and Mail this morning about PVR's ability to track viewing habits.

Globe and Mail article

MySpace is now playing catch up. You have to love disruption!

Read more.

Steven Pinker's new book coming soon to a bookstore near you.

Really enjoying myself at BookExpo right now. The Devices and Desires conference was excellent. It is more fun for me than I had anticipated.

Just came back from a conference in New York that BISG organized It was sponsored by codeMantra and Vista.
It turned out to be a pretty interesting conference. However, the big thing for me was being in New York, downtown Manhattan, for my first time. I have been all around Manhattan but never there. Publishers Row, McGraw Hill, Simon and Schuster, Random House, all located in these huge beautiful buildings in Times Square.

Oatmeal for breakfast, thoughtful discussion about the digital revolution that is happening in publishing till lunch, and then a stroll to Greenwich village and back.

John Seed was in Guelph town on Friday and had some interesting observations to make about climate change. John is a student of Joanna Macy who has a book out called Coming Back to Life.

A couple of the big insights I took away were:

1. If the US reduces the speed on their highways from 70 to 50 mph then there would be a savings of a billion barrels of oil a year. That, said Seed would keep things like the Iraq war from happening. That is a phenomenal idea!

2. Ruminate animals cause more greenhouse gases than all the cars on the planet. We need to eat less of that kind of meat. It isn't surprising that our agri business is as bad for the environment as our industrial practices.

One of the attendees of the conference said that he had just been at an environmental trade show and that there was a vendor there with a label for products that indicated the ecological footprint that was involved in manufacturing that product. There is a cool idea, let people decide how they spend their dollars based on that kind of information.

And finally, I don't have the article but a bunch of people were talking about a great article by Paul Hawken. I've read a Ecology of Commerce by Paul and it was great so want to track down this article that everyone was talking about. Fortunately I can just go talk to Stan Kozak down the street from me and ask him what it was. He sent it around.

Maude Barlow in Guelph:

Went to a talk given by Maude Barlow last night organized by Guelph Water Watchers. It was a great talk if not a little of a downer.

Here are the keypoints:
Humanity (that is us) is affecting the hydrologic cycle so that the planet is losing usable water. We are polluting the surface water, sucking out the ground water and creating polluted water. It is the ground level equivalent of global warming.

Our investment in nanotechnologies means we stop putting our efforts into conservation and thereby create bigger impacts on the eco-system. Not only that but water becomes a commodity under corporate control. The plants are nuclear powered, dirty and then we have to buy back the water for exorbitant amounts. The rich are the only ones who can afford water, not the ones who really need it.

Maude talked about NAFTA, North American Security and Prosperity and the efforts being put forward by short sighted business leaders to deregulate everything under the sun, which is nothing new.

Check out Council of Canadians, raise your voice, protect a precious resource, join the fight against Nestle who is basically stealing the future. Also think about joining this group on facebook if you are using facebook.

Spent the weekend puttzing around with Facebook and attending the first year of Suzuki Strings concert. Also started watching Deadwood. I knew I would like it and sure enough I do. I started with the first episode of season two. I was on the train and it was rainy out. I just needed to tune out and wanted to watch some t.v. so I did. It was perfect! When I got home I raced to Thomas Video and rented the first season.

So I just had to say I was wrong for slamming the readers for not having The Road available because they do here at The Road

It may be telling that I have yet to pick up the Iliad and start trying to use it as a reader. It may be telling that I turned on the Sony reader almost as soon as it was in my hands and started to load things onto it...only a few burps with the install of their updates. I had to uninstall the software and start over and not apply the update. There is nothing I hate more than an update that makes the thing it is updating stop working altogether.

I have heard people say that the Iliad is hard to approach as a non-technically minded user. Even the somewhat technically are intimidated by it and say things like there isn't anything to load onto it.

Nevertheless, the Iliad sits on my desk for one reason or another. A $1000.00 experiment waiting to be tested.

Our blog has started on the BookNet site. Michael started it off with a bang. Now we're all too intimidated by the audience and the quality, never mind that we are all busily reading all that stuff you can't get easily with an electronic reader. For instance, is one of the highest selling fiction books, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, available on the Sony reader, or the Iliad?

So anyway, I am the perfect candidate for using one of these pocket electronic libraries. I commute an hour and a half to work and lug a lot of reading material - not to mention a laptop - back and forth 3 hrs every day. My pack probably weighs close to 30lbs. I love to read! My tastes are varied, I go through cycles. I will read business books, math books, poetry, fiction, science, science fiction, cookbooks, gardening books, spiritual stuff, political, books like Fast Food Nation, Botany of Desire, Pattern Language, How Buildingd Learn, The Ingenuity Gap, Envisioning Information, The Sparrow, The Road, and I am a follower of Earthseed. I love the confused persons dummie guides to Statistics! (oh yeah and don't forget all of those amazing computer books from Pearsons). So how do I fulfill my reading desires with one of these devices?

This weekend I swear I will start looking at the Iliad. But I can't do what Michael did and swear off the printed page for an extended stay in London. Just can't do it.

E-readers: preliminary report
We received our ereaders this week and just a couple of early observations. First off it cost a lot of money for the Iliad reader from irex. The total cost Cdn. was almost 1000 dollars! That is 3x the cost of the Sony reader. $120.00 of that was for shipping. O.K. that is too much. The sad part is that the handling fee was only $8 and gst and pst made up the rest. Ouch. It remains to be seen if the extra cost is actually worth it.

The Sony reader came with excerpts of books which is about as useful as reading the back of a book. I mean why bother. Include the whole text or nothing. I got a public domain copy of Vanity Fair and loaded that on and also loaded some word documents which so far has been the best use of the reader. Technical documents make a lot of sense on the readers.

I'm not crazy about the usability of the form factor for the Sony reader. There are things I want to do like scroll the page that you just can't do and it is frustrating.

More on the software and form factor later.

The conference happened and was a big success. It was fascinating to see so many people who are involved in Canadian culture gathered together thinking about the state of affairs. If only we could have had a social network mapping of the event so everyone could see how the nodes on the tree fit together... Want to keep working on that aspect of organization, the book trade social network map.

One of the things coming out of this conference is the purchase of an Iliad and Sony ereader. We are waiting on these devices so we can blog about usability and content etc. I will get to use it on my commute to Toronto and see if I can drop some weight from my backpack. I can't imagine I will have the same content that I currently have though. I use the library a lot and if I could get the library loan onto the reader that would be awesome. Automated checking in and checking out....

The blogging is going to happen over on the BookNet site so stay tuned.