The monster that is Amazon
Booktopia chief executive Tony Nash this week fired a bullish broadside at Amazon as it prepares to enter the Australian market via its Book Depository arm. This has come as the online retailer announced a 20 per cent jump in net sales last year from $US89 billion ($A125 billion) in 2014 to $107 billion. In its US home market Amazon now controls 75 per cent of online book sales. No wonder that author Doug Preston described the online behemoth as a "monopoly in absolutely every sense of the word" at a panel session about Amazon's influence in Washington DC last week. According to figures released at the time, the share of book sales in US bookshops has plummeted from 72 per cent in 2010 to 33 per cent today.
A bird in the hand is costly
AbeBooks, the online dealer in old and rare books, sold a copy of a Natural History of Birds, the five-volume illustrated 1765 Italian ornithological survey for $US191,000 ($270,000), making it the site's most expensive sale ever, beating the previous $65,000 paid for a 1937 first edition of Tolkien's The Hobbit and Milton's Areopagitica. Second most costly book was the 1856 Pangeometrica by Nikolais Lobachevskii at $34,245 followed by a first edition of Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at $25,000. Other more recent books that fetched a handsome price were first editons of Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ($15,000), Faulkner's As I Lay Dying ($12,500), the Feltrinelli Russian-language first edition of Doctor Zhivago ($11,000), and The Colour of Magic ($9663), the first of Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, published in 1983.
Jay and her Edgar
Adelaide writer Charlotte Jay (real name Geraldine Halls) was egregiously overlooked in last week's item about Australian crime writers and the Edgar awards. Her 1952 novel Beat not the Bones won the inaugural Edgar for best novel that year.
Betancourt's blue book
You may remember Ingrid Betancourt, the former Columbian presidential candidate who was kidnapped by FARC guerillas and held captive for six years in the jungle. She wrote a remarkable memoir, Even Silence has an End, that came out in 2011 and has now produced a novel, The Blue Line, about "oppression, collective subservience, and individual courage and ... the notion that belief in the future of humanity is an act of faith most beautiful and deserving". She told Bookmarks that in the jungle she discovered that she was not what she thought she was. "I could not be the strong, heroic person that I thought I was because in my previous life I had to deal with so many issues against corruption that I thought I had the drive of the fighter. Then I discovered other things that were not right. Reactions, pettiness, selfishness. It's just confronting who you really are." What became essential to her survival was the realisation that "you cannot change some situations that life confronts you with, but how you face them. That's the power you have."
Better late than never
There's a local, slightly belated launch for The Best Australian Poems 2015 taking place at 7pm on February 18 at Watsonia Library, Ibbotson Street. Among those taking part will be editor Geoff Page and poets such as Jordie Albiston, Peter Bakowski, Lisa Gorton Alex Skovron, Chris Wallace-Crabbe and Petra White. Entry is free. Bookings: 9435 2397.
