Category Archives: Booksellers

Victoria’s Robinsons Bookshop apologises after owner’s call for more ‘white kids’ on book covers

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Susanne Horman’s comments have been ‘taken out of context’ and ‘misrepresented’, business says

Victoria’s oldest independent bookshop has apologised after its owner called for more picture books with “just white kids on the cover” and claimed that the chain would stop stocking “woke agenda” content that divided people.

Susanne Horman, the owner of Robinsons Bookshop chain, posted a series of tweets in December where she called for an “substantial shift” in Australian publishing, arguing the focus should be in line with public opinion, requests for books and “for what is good”.

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Alice Winn wins 2023 Waterstones debut fiction prize for In Memoriam

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Novel described as ‘truly stunning feat of fiction’ tells love story of two first world war soldiers

Alice Winn has won the 2023 Waterstones debut fiction prize for her novel In Memoriam, which has been described as a “truly stunning feat of fiction”.

The novel, inspired by archive clippings from a student newspaper, chronicles the love story between two first world war soldiers. It was announced as the winner at a ceremony in London on Thursday evening.

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Europe’s largest Middle Eastern bookseller to close

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Al Saqi Books in London, which was established in 1978, blames closure on rise in prices of Arabic-language books and ‘detrimental’ effect of Brexit

Europe’s largest specialist bookseller for Middle Eastern books, based in London, has been forced to close because of the hike in prices of Arabic-language books and because Brexit has been “detrimental” to its business.

Al Saqi Books in Bayswater opened in 1978, and sells books on the Middle East and north Africa in English, and on all subjects in Arabic.

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France sets minimum book delivery fee in anti-Amazon struggle

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€3 charge aims to gives independent booksellers a chance against e-commerce firms that use free delivery loophole

France’s crusade to protect independent booksellers against huge online retailers was stepped up on Friday as the government proposed a €3 (£2.66) minimum delivery fee for all online book orders of less than €35.

The government’s fixed fee for online deliveries is part of a quest to support independent bookshops against the domination of big tech firms, such as Amazon.

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‘More than wonderful’ … Gaza bookshop to reopen after unexpectedly successful global campaign

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After it was destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, Samir Mansour’s beloved book store has been rebuilt and restocked, as tens of thousands of books flood in from around the world

Tens of thousands of donated books have started to arrive at the new location of a Gaza bookshop that was destroyed by Israeli air strikes last year, and owner Samir Mansour now plans to reopen its doors next month.

The two-storey Samir Mansour bookshop, which was reduced to rubble last May, had been founded by the Palestinian Mansour 22 years ago and was a beloved part of the local community. Its destruction during the 11-day conflict, which killed more than 250 people in Gaza and 13 in Israel, prompted a campaign that raised $250,000 (£187,000) to help rebuild it, plus donations of 150,000 books. The Israeli military has said that the store was not its target, claiming that the building that housed it also contained a Hamas facility for producing weapons and intelligence-gathering.

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Sally Rooney novels pulled from Israeli bookstores after translation boycott

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Following the acclaimed author’s decision not to have Beautiful World, Where Are You translated by an Israeli publisher, two major retailers have removed her work from their shelves

Books by Sally Rooney will no longer be sold in two Israeli bookshop chains, after the acclaimed writer’s decision not to sell translation rights for her most recent novel to an Israeli publisher.

Rooney’s novels were previously available from Steimatzky and Tzomet Sefarim, but the books have now been removed from their websites, and will be pulled from physical shops too. The retailers have more than 200 branches between them.

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Advanced copies of Sally Rooney’s unpublished book sold for hundreds of dollars

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Uncorrected proofs of upcoming novels have been selling for large sums on eBay and Depop – despite the practice being banned by publishers

When advanced reading copies (ARCs) of Sally Rooney’s new novel Beautiful World, Where Are You were sent out in May, there was a flurry of social media posts. A lucky selection of editors, writers and influencers flaunted their copies; others bemoaned not having been granted one. Soon listings for proof copies (which are clearly marked “not for resale”) started to appear on trading sites such as eBay and Depop. One copy, listed on eBay by a seller in North Carolina, sold in June for $209.16. Even the canvas tote bag that Rooney’s publicists had been sending out with the ARC copies was fetching prices in the region of $80. And this growing market for unpublished novels is not just a product of Rooney-mania: Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads, which will be published in October, sold earlier this month on eBay for $124.

Advance copies of popular and classic novels have long been collector’s items. A rare proof copy of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, for example, or classics by authors such as Ernest Hemingway or John Steinbeck can sell for up to £30,000. But this high demand for ARCs of books that are yet to be published has only emerged recently, fuelled in part by the rise of book bloggers and influencers.

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Rausings targeted in protest against Berlin bookshop eviction

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Sigrid Rausing denies financial interest in building, as court orders booksellers Kisch & Co to vacate Kreuzberg premises

A UK-based Swedish multibillionaire family known for their philanthropic donations to literature, libraries and other arts, have become the target of angry protests in Berlin over the eviction of a community bookshop from a counter-culture neighbourhood.

The bookseller Kisch & Co, which has operated for the last 24 years from a historic building on one of the main thoroughfares in the Kreuzberg district of Germany’s capital, was told on Thursday by a criminal court to vacate its premises.

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Through gilets jaunes, strikes and Covid, Paris’s 400-year-old book stalls fight to survive

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With passing trade hit hard by the pandemic, the booksellers on the banks of the Seine are struggling

Usually, Sundays are good days for the bouquinistes. Legions of strollers – tourists, out-of-towners, Parisians – throng the banks of the Seine, and the open-air booksellers whose green boxes have lined the quays for 400-odd years do good business.

One recent Sunday, though, Jérôme Callais made €32. And there was a day that week when he made €4: a single paperback, he can’t even recall which. It has not, Callais said, sheltering from driving rain on an all but deserted Quai de Conti, been easy.

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Elena Ferrante names her 40 favourite books by female authors

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List by pseudonymous author of beloved Neapolitan novels includes Zadie Smith, Sally Rooney and several Italian classics

Elena Ferrante, the bestselling pseudonymous Italian author behind My Brilliant Friend, has named her favourite 40 books by female authors around the world, with Toni Morrison, Sally Rooney and Zadie Smith all making the cut.

The author, whose quartet of Neapolitan novels has sold 13m copies worldwide, has published her list on Bookshop.org, the online store that recently launched in the UK and gives a proportion of sales to independent booksellers. Ferrante’s UK publisher, Europa Editions, is returning their 10% sales commission from Ferrante’s list to Bookshop.org so it can be shared among the 300 independent bookshops that have signed up to the site so far.

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‘This is revolutionary’: new online bookshop unites indies to rival Amazon

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Bookshop.org, which launched in the US earlier this year, has accelerated UK plans and goes online this week in partnership with more than 130 shops

It is being described as a “revolutionary moment in the history of bookselling”: a socially conscious alternative to Amazon that allows readers to buy books online while supporting their local independent bookseller. And after a hugely successful launch in the US, it is open in the UK from today.

Bookshop was dreamed up by the writer and co-founder of Literary Hub, Andy Hunter. It allows independent bookshops to create their own virtual shopfront on the site, with the stores receiving the full profit margin – 30% of the cover price – from each sale. All customer service and shipping are handled by Bookshop and its distributor partners, with titles offered at a small discount and delivered within two to three days.

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‘We cannot survive’: New York’s Strand bookstore appeals for help

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Proprietor Nancy Bass-Wyden appeals to customers as literary landmark suffers the effects of the pandemic

The Strand Bookstore, a landmark of literary New York, is in serious trouble, appealing for customers to help it stave off closure amid the coronavirus pandemic.

Related: New York's Strand bookstore fights back over landmark status

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Ann Patchett on running a bookshop in lockdown: ‘We’re a part of our community as never before’

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The novelist reveals how the store she co-owns in Nashville is making, and remaking, plans to get books to readers who want them more than ever

We closed Parnassus Books, the bookstore I co-own in Nashville, on the same day all the stores around us closed. I can’t tell you when that was because I no longer have a relationship with my calendar.

All the days are now officially the same. My business partner Karen and I talked to the staff and told them if they didn’t feel comfortable coming in that was fine. We would continue to pay them for as long as we could. But if they were OK to work in an empty bookstore, we were going to try to keep shipping books.

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Norway’s hazmat booksellers: keeping Oslo reading during coronavirus – video

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Two Oslo bookshop owners choose to go delivery-only to keep their business afloat at the start of lockdown. Pil Cappelen Smith and Anders Cappelen deliver books wearing full hazmat suits and gas masks in order to raise local awareness of the seriousness of the situation. But as the global crisis worsens, they embark on one last delivery run before deciding to shut up shop completely

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Amazon investigates after anti-vaxxer leaflet found hidden in children’s book

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Mother alarmed after anti-vaccination propaganda found inside book bought for son, who is about to receive the HPV jab

Concerns have been raised that the anti-vaccination movement is targeting children via Amazon warehouses, after a Hampshire mother found a leaflet condemning the HPV vaccine tucked inside a children’s book she had purchased from the online retailer.

Lucy Boyle bought Ali Sparkes’ Night Speakers along with several other novels as a birthday present for her 12-year-old son at the start of April. He began reading the novel last week, “got a few pages in, turned over the page and there was the leaflet,” she told the Guardian.

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