BTW News Briefs

Businesses Owners Call on Amazon to Drop Sales Tax Fight

Kepler’s Books owner Clark Kepler has joined with other Silicon Valley small business owners in an effort to ensure that California’s newly leveled sales tax playing field stays that way.

“I am an independent business owner and as such compete with these giant online retailers — Amazon being the biggest gorilla of the group. I collect sales tax and Amazon has not and that gives them an unfair advantage,” Kepler told the Palo Alto Daily News. “It’s just time for Amazon to stop being a tax evader and step up and be a real corporate citizen.”

Kepler and the other business owners gathered at a local bicycle shop on Tuesday to call on Amazon and other online retailers to abandon a multimillion-dollar effort to repeal the law and start collecting sales tax.

The Daily Show Pokes Fun at Bookstores

Bookstores and booksellers were the butt of a very funny skit on the August 16 edition of The Jon Stewart Show. Stewart and John Hodgman poked fun at bookstores in light of the Borders closings. In response to Stewart’s question about how “beloved bookstores” can compete with Amazon and digital downloading, Hodgman suggests they can replace books with “downloading pods,” which offer the “fun and isolation of home” along with a 20-minute car ride.  And to Stewart’s question about the “human element” in a physical bookstore, Hodgman quips, “Bookstores employ a very special class of condescending nerds,” who, if bookstores fail, will become a “wandering snarky underclass.” The skit is also available on HuLu.

Sony Rumored in Deal for Potter E-Books

The U.K.’s the Register reported this week that Sony has an exclusive deal to sell Harry Potter as e-text on its e-reader. “The deal could leave the Amazon-dominated e-reader market spellbound,” said Fast Company, which noted that Sony has sponsored J.K. Rowling’s  Pottermore site, which  went live in limited beta testing this week, from its beginnings.  At this point, details of the possible deal are rumors, which Sony would not confirm.  If they are true, the e-texts would go live as an “online reading experience” with the launch of Pottermore in October, and in November they would appear as a bundle of all seven e-books, along with other materials, including a letter from Rowling and a themed carrying case. The digital parts of the bundle will be pre-loaded onto an upcoming and unannounced Sony Reader, according to Fast Company, which noted that the millions that Sony paid for the deal would go to a charity for learning disabled children chosen by Rowling.

Sales of Potter e-books through Pottermore won’t happen until 2012, according to the Register.

NAIBA Names Books of the Year

The New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Association this week announced the following winners of its 2011 Book of the Year Awards:

Fiction: The Tiger's Wife, Tea Obreht (Random House) 

Nonfiction: Blood, Bones and Butter, Gabrielle Hamilton (Random House)

Trade Paperback Originals: Extra Indians, Eric Gansworth (Milkweed Editions)

Picture Book: Children Make Terrible Pets, Peter Brown (Little Brown)

Middle Reader: Forge, Laurie Halse Anderson (Atheneum)

Children’s Literature and YA: Revolution, Jennifer Donnelly (Random House)

The winners will be honored at the NAIBA Awards Banquet on September 21 at the regional’s fall show in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The NAIBA Book Awards recognize an author who was born or lived in the New Atlantic region, and/or a book whose story takes place in the region. Books must have been published between June 1 and May 31 of the award year.