OK, let’s see: there’s booksfree.com… BookSwim… Paperspine… and the newest “Netflix for Books,” NovelAction.com, which adds, ahem, a novel twist: instead of just sending them money and getting books on loan, you send them money and books. When I was growing up, there was something like that, but I forget what it was called.

Oh, yeah: a “used bookstore.”

Actually, the NovelAction concept, which I have admittedly only skimmed, seems to be that you’re trading books, and they’re making their money off the shipping fees. Given that used bookstores are an endangered species, it seems like an all right idea. But given that planes, trains, and automobiles (well, mostly planes and automobiles, and also ships) are prime culprits in global warming, I sure wish the trend were not toward Netflix models but toward neighborhood bookstores that were within walking distance.

But if you’re really the kind of person who doesn’t need to own books–who doesn’t mind reading something that someone else has read before giving it back and getting more used books–there’s a place that doesn’t charge you anything unless you’re deadline-challenged.

Oh, yeah: a “library.”

I hear tell they even have movies, too.

Seattle’s influence in the world of books looms large of late, but Nancy Pearl can’t take all the credit–no, she has to share it with Amazon, Starbucks, and Costco. In the New York Times (”Book Lovers Ask, What’s Seattle’s Secret?”), Julie Bick examines the retail giants’ bookselling strategies: microlevel, one-book-fits-all, and by-the-pallet. Perhaps because it’s Seattle, the executives speak of “ideals,” “an old-fashioned outlook,” and, in the case of Costco, “profit.”

Also from Seattle but at the other end of the spectrum, independent bookselling, Paul Constant discusses The Perils and Pleasures of Chasing Book Thieves (”Flying Off the Shelves,” The Stranger). Great intro, strong language:

In my eight years working at an independent bookstore, I lost count of how many shoplifters I chased through the streets of Seattle while shouting “Drop the book!” I chased them down crowded pedestrian plazas in the afternoon, I chased them through alleys at night, I even chased one into a train tunnel. I chased a book thief to the waterfront, where he shouted, “Here are your fucking books!” and threw a half-dozen paperbacks, including Bomb the Suburbs and A People’s History of the United States, into Puget Sound, preferring to watch them slowly sink into the muck rather than hand them back to the bookseller they were stolen from. He had that ferocious, orgasmic gleam in his eye of somebody who was living in the climax of his own movie: I suppose he felt like he was liberating them somehow.

Before this essay I had never come across the term “antisellers,” nor had I considered the “New York Times best-seller list of stolen books.”

More free-book madness. For the next month, you can read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods for free–as long as you don’t mind sitting at a computer with a live internet connection. On Boing Boing, Cory Doctorow (Overclocked) gives it a bad review (the interface, not the book). Gaiman responds to that and another charge, as well:

I was surprised by a few emails coming in from people accusing me of doing bad things for other authors by giving anything away — the idea being, I think, that by handing out a bestselling book for nothing I’m devaluing what a book is and so forth, which I think is silly.

…

This is how people found new authors for more than a century. Someone says, “I’ve read this. It’s good. I think you’d like it. Here, you can borrow it.” Someone takes the book away, reads it, and goes, Ah, I have a new author.

Libraries are good things: you shouldn’t have to pay for every book you read.

(Read Booklist’s review of American Gods.)

February must be Give Away a Book Month. Why, here’s another one: Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children (Random House). But is free publicity worth a potential drop in sales? And did I really just display their whole ad in my blog post? Why, it must be worth it!

Giving something away for free in order to help you sell it surely seems counterintuitive to publishing’s old guard, but we’re living in Seth Godin’s age of souvenirs now:

As he pointed out, he’s not in the business of selling books; the books are the souvenirs for the ideas people pick up from his blogs and his speaking engagements. But not everyone was convinced: As the guys behind me in the lunch line commented later that morning, “he’s not in the business of selling books, but we are.”

Poor James Patterson. His last book for young adults, Maximum Ride: Saving the World and Other Extreme Sports, only sold 192,000 copies. He doesn’t feel badly for himself, mind you–he feels badly for all the unfortunate youngsters who somehow didn’t get the opportunity to read his book. From the New York Times (”An Author Looks beyond Age Limits,” by Motoko Rich):

Mr. Patterson said that if he simply wanted to make more money, he would have developed another adult series. "I just am convinced that there aren’t enough books like this - books that kids can pick up and go ‘Wow, that was terrific, I wouldn’t mind reading another book,’ " he said of his "Maximum Ride" series. "The most important thing to me is that more kids read these."

Fortunately, his publisher has a plan:

As a result, Little, Brown has asked booksellers to commit to keeping the new "Maximum Ride" book - along with "The Dangerous Days of Daniel X," the first title in a new young-adult series, due out in July - at the front of their stores as long as Mr. Patterson’s adult titles usually stay there, in the hope of luring more adult buyers.

Here’s what makes me nervous–Little, Brown and Patterson have a point:

According to market research conducted by Codex Group on behalf of Little, Brown, more than 60 percent of the readers of the "Maximum Ride" series are older than 35.

So Internet use is allegedly dominating people’s time and causing them read fewer books. But an awful lot of people are using the Internet to buy books. (Although U.S. online shoppers don’t crack the top 10.) From BBC News (”Books ‘most popular online buy’“).

More books are sold on the internet than any other product and the number is increasing, research suggests.

Polling company Nielsen Online surveyed 26,312 people in 48 countries. 41% of internet users had bought books online, it said.

This compares with two years ago when 34% of internet users had done so.

Is the act of reading endangered or thriving? Experts will continue to disagree.

In Slate, Garth Risk Hallberg asks, “Who Is Grady Harp?”

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but I had imagined Amazon’s customer reviews as a refuge from the machinations of the publishing industry: “an intelligent and articulate conversation … conducted by a group of disinterested, disembodied spirits,” as James Marcus, a former editor at the company, wrote in his memoir, Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut. Indeed, with customers unseating salaried employees like Marcus as the company’s leading content producers, Amazon had been hailed as a harbinger of “Web 2.0″ - an ideal realm where user-generated consensus trumps the bankrupt pieties of experts. As I explored the murky understory of Amazon’s reviewer rankings, however, I came to see the real Web 2.0 as a tangle of hidden agendas - one in which the disinterested amateur may be an endangered species.

And, somewhere, Grady Harp asks, “Who is Garth Risk Hallberg? What’s that you say? I reviewed his book?”

For more on the subject, click here.

Before there was Radiohead, there was Jeff Kinney (”Crossover Dreams: Turning Free Web Work Into Real Book Sales,” by Motoko Rich, New York Times):

That a book derived from free online content has sold so well may allay some fears that giving something away means nobody will want to pay for it. It also encourages publishers who increasingly scour the Internet for talent, hoping to capitalize on the audiences that a popular Web site can deliver.

"I think books are still things, thank goodness, that people want to own," said Michael Jacobs, chief executive of Abrams. "The package of the book and the way it feels is something apart and separate from being able to read it online."

Don’t look at me–I’m ripping my library so I can play my books on a Kindle. Not sure I have the right kind of headphones, though. 

(Read the Booklist review of Diary of a Wimpy Kid.)

More news about Amazon. The French have found a distinctly un-American way of protecting small bookstores (”Amazon Ordered to End Free Delivery on Books in France,” by Peter Sayer, IDG News Service):

Amazon.com may not offer free delivery on books in France, the high court in Versailles has ruled.

The action, brought in January 2004 by the French Booksellers’ Union (Syndicat de la librairie française), accused Amazon of offering illegal discounts on books and even of selling some books below cost.

The court gave Amazon 10 days to start charging for the delivery of books, which should at least allow the company to maintain the offer through the end-of-year gift-giving season. After that, it must pay a fine of €1,000 (US$1,470) per day that it continues to offer free delivery. It must also pay €100,000 in compensation to the booksellers’ union.

Retail prices, particularly of books, are tightly regulated in France.

So, if you’re curious about where that handwritten J. K. Rowling book ended up, now the truth can be told: it’s on Amazon. Naturally.