Bertelsmann AG’s buyout of Time Inc.’s Bookspan, which includes the venerable Book-of-the-Month Club, prompts an examination of retail book clubs in the age of Amazon.com. From the Wall Street Journal (”Book-of-the-Month Club to Turn a New Page,” by Matthew Karnitschnig):

Book and record clubs have shown surprising resilience in the digital age. More than 20 million people in the U.S. — members are typically women in their 40s — continue to subscribe to the clubs despite the popularity of Amazon.com, iTunes and other online platforms. For consumers overwhelmed by the sometimes-bewildering array of choices on the Internet, the clubs offer simplicity and value.

A closer look at the “value” part shows that the book clubs’ offerings, which are “generally inferior to the retail editions,” aren’t necessarily cheaper. Why, then, are people sticking with book clubs?

“What you’re getting is editorial selectivity,” says Mr. Kirshbaum. “They cut through a lot of titles and present the ones you should consider. The History Book Club in particular does an excellent sorting job. They also find offbeat things, such as a pocket historical atlas.”

And how do the book clubs make their money?

Members who fail to make their own choices are automatically sent books from the catalog. These shipments can be returned, but most people don’t bother to do so, ensuring operators a steady revenue stream.

This business model, called the “negative option,” has sustained the clubs for decades. Bookspan, which includes 40 clubs such as Book-of-the-Month Club, Mystery Guild and Black Expressions, generated about $700 million in revenue last year and has about eight million members. Its operating profit margin was about 5%, similar to that of major book retailers.

When I was a kid I used to get LPs through the mail from the RCA music club. If I didn’t mail the monthly postcard back fast enough, telling them I didn’t want the new John Denver album, it was shipped to me automatically. Talk about a negative option.

Last night at the Chicago Theater, David Sedaris showed his awareness of the fact-or-fiction controversy by beginning his performance with a disclaimer. He noted that, indeed, not all of the details in the work he would be reading were true–one name had been changed to avoid confusing listeners, and a line of dialog had been rephrased for emphasis. Other than that, he said, everything else was factual.

Clearly chastened, he noted that:

When you play loose with the facts, people get hurt — especially when you’re writing a comic essay. 

I’m relieved to find that he’s taking this seriously. If his future work is less funny, at least we, his readers and listeners, will sleep more soundly knowing that his humor is grounded strictly in fact.

(I should note that, because I was holding a beer instead of a notebook, the quote above may not be entirely accurate. Sedaris may have said “truth” instead of “facts,” or even “humorous” instead of “comic.” Let the reader beware.)

I’m writing for the May 1 Mystery Issue today. So, without comment, here’s some absolutely worthwhile reading from TomDispatch.com – ”What They Didn’t Teach Us in Library School” — that’s not just for librarians:

We offer our staff hepatitis vaccinations and free tuberculosis checks. We place sanitizing gels and latex gloves at every public desk. Who would guess that working in a library could be a hazardous occupation?

In The New Republic, Alex Heard rakes the hot coals under our favorite elf (”This American Lie“):

Over the years, as I watched other nonfiction writers go down in flames–Frey, Stephen Glass, Jayson Blair, the “monkeyfishing” guy at Slate–I wondered why no one had checked on America’s favorite nonfiction imp. So I decided to do it myself. The trail was long and fascinating, and it led me to a larger question: whether “nonfiction” means anything when you’re talking about humor writers who admit to flubberizing the truth for comic effect.

A: No. 

I admit to sharing Heard’s concern that too many memoirs are made-up these days, but I’m flabbergasted to find David Sedaris in the same paragraph as Frey, Glass, and Blair. The distinction is that key word in the third sentence: humor. Yes, allowing people to make stuff up under the rubric of nonfiction when they’re making us laugh — but not when they’re making us cry – may lead to a sort of ”I know it when I see it” legal distinction, but it works for me. James Frey’s tawdry tale relied on the “true story” tag to hold our interest. Worse, Glass and Blair made stuff up and called it news. But if anyone’s using Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim as primary source material for school papers, they’ve got bigger problems than the author’s I’ll-call-you-sometime relationship with the truth.

What’s really startling is that Heard was surprised to learn that Sedaris’ exaggerations went beyond emphasis and dialog. Did he actually think that Sedaris’ real life is as crazy as a cartoon?

Of course it isn’t. Then why call it nonfiction? The nature of Sedaris’ humor relies on his ability to write in the first-person and to use his own life as the springboard — calling it fiction, even though we know it’s mostly made-up — just feels wrong.

(One could argue that making James Frey use a “novel” designator on his books would have robbed them of the urgency that made people want to read them, and one would be right: we don’t need them as novels or memoirs.)

In the San Francisco Chronicle (”Public’s taste for nonfiction has publishers playing fast and loose with labels“), Oscar Villalon writes that “there’s no excuse for calling a work containing chunks of fiction nonfiction.” Again, I think context makes a big difference, but I do agree with his conclusion:

All this legerdemain over categorizing books implies that there’s something second-rate about writing and reading fiction. It’s one thing if the public believes that, but it’s entirely another when publishers, agents and writers say as much through their actions. They need to acknowledge that’s the lie their “truth” is pushing.

I’ve had people tell me, “Oh, I only read nonfiction” — or words to that effect — as if saying, “Novels are nice if you’re the kind of person who likes fairies and dragons, but I prefer to educate myself.”

These people deserve a nonfictional punch in the nose. Clearly they haven’t read works like What Is the What, The Echo Maker, and Acts of Faith — all novels that are more challenging and thought-provoking than they are avenues of escape. (Not that there’s anything wrong with reading for escape, either.) Moreover, given the constant march of made-up memoirs, maybe theses nonfiction snobs should question their assumption that what they’re reading is factual.

If I hadn’t gone on so long already, I’d make a grand, sweeping statement about how the public’s appetite for nonfiction is tied to the reality-TV phenomenon, which is the result of a sucking emptiness at the center of many people’s lives and is expressed in the desperate desire to make connections with other people, any people, who are somehow perceived as more “real” than we are — but it’s late, so I won’t.

There’s room on my shelf for fiction and nonfiction, and if someone’s trying to make me laugh instead of trying to put one over on me, I don’t really care what they call it.

Pacific Rim Voices announced the winners of the 2007 Kiriyama Prize last week, and here they are:

Fiction

Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, by Haruki Murakami (Knopf)

Nonfiction

Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace…One School at a Time, by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin (Viking)

Interestingly, the subtitle of the nonfiction winner was different when Booklist received it in galley form: One Man’s Mission to Fight Terrorism and Build Nations…One School at a Time. (And that’s how both hardcover and paperback are cataloged on Books in Print; OCLC has the harcover as “peace” and the paperback as “terrorism”; Amazon has both as “peace”. Terrorism or peace? Make up your minds!)

And, ironically, it’s the first time that a Japanese national has won the Kiriyama, which “is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding books that promote greater understanding of and among the nations of the Pacific Rim and of South Asia.”

(Wait, is that true irony or mere coincidence?)

Notables included Cellophane, by Marie Arana (Dial); The Weather Makers, by Tim Flannery (Grove/Atlantic); and Mishima’s Sword, by Christopher Ross (Da Capo).

Surely you can’t prepare a book for shelving without opening the covers. From In the Bookroom via Galleycat (”Don’t You Dare Open That Potter“):

Tucked away in the Library Journal staff blog, there’s a small item about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, specifically about the embargo agreements Scholastic and Baker & Taylor required from potential vendors and librarians who wanted to place orders for the book last week. A sampling of the language reveals some pretty strict guidelines; if a library receives the book before July 21, and wants to process the book for its inventory, “only library employees who have been made aware of this Agreement may do so, and all such processing must take place within a secure environment… At no time may the book be handled for any other reason than to process the book for library shelving…” Man, if I were a public librarian, I’d be tempted to say, “Well, we’ve got to read it to see if it’s suitable for the children,” because that’s got to fall under processing, right?

At least they didn’t say you have to close your eyes when you’re processing the book.

I spend a lot of time announcing the winners of famous national and international literary awards, but today I want to mention a very important award that doesn’t generally make a lot of news. (Even I’m guilty of being a bit slow on this — Laurie Sundborg sent me the information two weeks ago and it kept getting crowded out by the PEN/Dave Eggers and whatnot.)

Be that as it may: Thomas Keneally has won the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award!

An annual award given by the Tulsa Library Trust, the PVH (as those of us in the know refer to it) gives recognition, “on behalf of the Tulsa County community, to internationally acclaimed authors who have written a distinguished body of work and made a major contribution to the field of literature and letters.”

And before you make some crack about recognition by the Tulsa community, consider this: they’re giving Tom (Mr. Keneally and I go way back) a cool $40k – even though he’s not a poet – and also a crystal book. The press release doesn’t say what the title of the crystal book is, but I’m going to recommend that Tom turn the pages very carefully when he reads it.

Past award winners include Joyce Carol Oates, William Kennedy, Margaret Atwood, E. L. Doctorow, David McCullough, Norman Mailer, Eudora Welty, John le Carré, Saul Bellow, Toni Morrison, and John Updike, so Keneally’s in good company.

The award will be officially given at the Tulsa Library on December 7 at a black-tie gala in the stacks (Tom! please don’t turn those pages with gravy on your fingers!) and then again the next day, unofficially, at an event open to the public.

So take that, New York and London and Stockholm. We know how to honor writers in the Midwest, too.

And they just keep coming. The 2007 British Book Awards finally bring the famous “Three G’s” — John Grisham, Ricky Gervais, and Steven Gerrard — together. It’s about time. If only they had all three been there.

Lifetime Achievement Award

John Grisham

Best Read of the Year

The Interpretation of Murder, by Jed Rubenfeld (Holt)

Author of the Year

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins (Houghton)

Biography of the Year

The Sound of Laughter, by Peter Kay (Century)

Book of the Year

The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Conn Iggulden & Hal Iggulden (Collins)

Children’s Book of the Year

Flanimals of the Deep, by Ricky Gervais (Faber & Faber)

Crime Thriller of the Year

The Naming of the Dead, by Ian Rankin (Little, Brown)

Newcomer of the Year

The Island, by Victoria Hislop (Headline Review)

Popular Fiction Award

Anybody Out There? by Marian Keyes (Morrow)

Sports Book of the Year

Gerrard: My Autobiography, by Steven Gerrard (Transworld)

TV & Film Book of the Year

The Devil Wears Prada, by Lauren Weisberger,

Writer of the Year

Wish I Was Here, by Jackie Kay (Picador)

For the complete, endless list of award sponsors, click here. Or better yet, don’t. The Independent has a wrapup with a headline that says it all (”Gervais triumphs over Pratchett in British Book Awards,” by Louise Jury) — yet goes on anyway:

Gervais beat established writers including Geraldine McCaughrean and Terry Pratchett to take the children’s book of the year honour with Flanimals of the Deep, the third in the series he has produced with the illustrator Rob Steen. Gervais accepted his award live on stage in Ipswich. “That’s fantastic … it’s the first one for my literary outputs,” he said, admitting his work had been described as “books about bollocks with eyes drawn on them”.

Boy, I’m out one day with a sick kid and all the news happens.

The American Booksellers Association (ABA) has announced the winners of the 2007 Book Sense Book of the Year Awards, “recognizing those titles independent booksellers most enjoyed handselling during the past year, as voted by the owners and staff of ABA member bookstores”:

Adult Fiction

Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen (Algonquin)

Adult Nonfiction

I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, by Nora Ephron (Knopf)

Children’s Literature

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak (Knopf)

Children’s Illustrated

Owen & Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship, by Isabella Hatkoff, Craig Hatkoff, and Dr. Paul Kahumbu; photos by Peter Greste (Scholastic)

The honor books (the complete list is on the ABA site) include the much-honored The Road, by Cormac McCarthy (Knopf); The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai (Grove/Atlantic); The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan (Houghton); and The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation, Volume One: The Pox Party, by M.T. Anderson.

Now it can be told: Neil McMahon’s new editor is — gasp – a guy from marketing. You’ll thrill to the immense respect that Carl Lennertz (Vice President, Independent Retailing) has for “real” editors – and to McMahon and Lennertz’s respect for one another. From Shelf Awareness (”The Author-Editor Duo Behind Lone Creek“):

Carl: Omigod, my respect for editors has gone through the roof. I had some sense that their weeknights and weekends were consumed by reading manuscripts on submission as well as editing upcoming books, but I had no idea how hard it would be just to balance editing one book on a series of deadlines with other work and with one’s home life. I have just the one book and it took up a dozen weekends of work: reading, rereading and then getting on the phone with Neil, going page by page, fine-tuning some dialogue here, making a character’s motivations crystal clear in a key scene, that sort of thing. That level of detail was fun for me, but I was lucky; how does a real editor balance dozens of current projects at one time AND acquire AND do their marketing advocacy in-house? Not enough hours in the day.

Well, it’s a great book, and, as far as I can tell, Lennertz edited with an editor’s eye, not a marketer’s. Except for that scene where a naked supermodel discovers a soda machine that dispenses nothing but free Mountain Dew. But I’m sure that has more to do with the plot than with product placement and twentysomething book buyers.