Borders, the bookseller that invented the chain superstore concept, has not found a buyer and will ask for approval to liquidate its remaining 399 stores (at its height, Borders operated 1,300 stores), reports the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The company plans to be out of business by the end of September. Nearly 11,000 people will be laid off.

CEO, Mike Edwards, did not blame a history of swiftly changing management and direction, but “the rapidly changing book industry, [electronic reader] revolution and turbulent economy.” (Shelf Awareness published a more insightful analysis of Borders problems in February).

Reuters reports, however, that Books-A-Million may buy some of the stores (fewer than 50).

The poster girl for self-publishing, Amanda Hocking (her ten YA urban fantasy and paranormal romances have grossed around $2 million since she began publishing them through Amazon’s CreateSpace last year), was profiled in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

But she recently abandoned her self-pubbed status for a major deal with St. Martin’s. Why? She tells the NYT Magazine that she wants “…to reach as many people as possible among the 85 percent or so of the population who don’t have e-readers yet. For me to be a billion-dollar author…I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart.” Also, there is a concern that major retailers will not want to stock books published by their competitor, Amazon.

St. Martin’s will publish Hocking’s Trylle trilogy (already in paperback by CreateSpace and on Kindle) in August, 2012. The original Watersong series begins Fall 2012.

Trylle trilogy

Switched 9781250006318; January 8, 2012 (currently available from CreateSpace, pbk, July 5, 2010; 9781453688939)

Torn 978125000632; February , 2012 (currently available from CreateSpace, pbk, Nov. 15, 2010, 2010; 9781456355791)

Ascend 9781250006332; April 2012 (currently available from CreateSpace, pbk, Jan. 11 2011, 2010; 9781456541286)

Watersong (exact pub dates not set for later titles in the series)

Wake 9781250008121; August 2012

Lullaby 9781250008107; (Fall 2012)

Tidal 9781250005663 (Winter 2013)

Elegy 9781250005670 (Spring/Summer 2013)

Yesterday, Amazon announced that another self-published author, John Locke, has joined their “Kindle Million Club,” for authors who have sold over 1 million paid copies in the Kindle Store. The author of mysteries and westerns, Locke publishes his paperbacks through self-publisher Telemachus Press and uses Kindle Direct Publishing for his ebooks.

If Amazon authors choose to do so, they can make their eBooks available to libraries through OverDrive; but neither Hocking nor Locke are listed on OverDrive’s database.

Our friends and former colleagues at Shelf Awareness have launched a new publication aimed at consumers, Shelf Awareness for Readers. The twice-weekly email newsletter focuses on books, with a dozen reviews of both adult and childrens books as well as features, and some stories from the six-year-old trade publication, now called Shelf Awareness Pro. UPDATE: The reviews will be licensed; Ingram has already signed up.

One feature that readers advisors are sure to love is “Further Reading.” In this issue, it recommends books to extend the experience after reading Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder.

This new version of The Shelf is launching with an extensive marketing campaign, so you are likely to hear about it from your customers.

Amazon, which recently added publishing to its businesses, just made a major, attention-getting step by hiring Larry Kirshbaum, former long-time CEO of TimeWarner Book Group (now Hachette Books), one of publishing’s “Big Six” companies, to head up their publishing operations in New York.

Amazon began making inroads into publishing with AmazonEncore, launched in 2009 to identify strong selling digital titles, many of them self-published, to re-edit, market and distribute in both eBook and print format. They quickly added AmazonCrossing, to translate titles into English and just last week announced a two new imprints, Montlake Romance and Thomas & Mercer  mysteries.

These moves worry many in the business; one unnamed publisher told the Wall Street Journal, that Amazon has an unfair marketing advantage;  “They can push their writers to the front and they have a decade of genre purchaser information.” Booksellers, who have long had issues with Amazon, have threatened boycotts of books by authors who publish through Amazon (thriller writer Joe Konrath’s takes strong issue with these tactics on his blog).

Will ebook versions of Amazon titles be available for library lending? Currently, that is a decision made by the authors; Konrath, for instance, recently made a deal to distribute 22 of his titles to libraries through OverDrive. One of the advantages of ebooks for libraries, says Konrath is that, “…unlike print, which wears out, an eBook is forever. It won’t get that crooked spine. You can’t rip the pages. The cover never needs to be replaced.”

Of course, some publishers and authors do not see that as an advantage.

“Publishing’s poor cousins” is how the Wall Street Journal describes some people’s view of paperback originals (we’re presuming they are talking about trade pbk originals) because,

1) reviewers see the format as a signal that the publisher isn’t expecting much from the book

2) unlike a title released in hardcover and subsequently in paperback, an original pbk gets only one shot at making it

3) because of the lower price, everyone in the pipeline, from author to agent, publisher and retailer makes less than if the book were published in hardcover

Occasionally, a paperback original does find success and becomes the exception that proves the rule. The WSJ explores the success of one such title, One Day by David Nichols, which took off, but only after it was announced that Anne Hathaway had been cast for the lead in the movie.

Tellingly, the follow up to One Day will be published in hardcover.

When Stieg Larsson died, he left an uncompleted fourth book in his Millennium series. Larsson’s long-time partner, Eva Gabrielsson, in a legal dispute with Larsson’s father and brother, has refused to make the manuscript available for publication.

The AP looks into what is know about the manuscript (not much) and its chances for being published (unclear).

On AOL’s DailyFinance blog, Sarah Weinman surveys the many devices and formats for eBooks in “How to Navigate the Confusing E-Book Landscape” and warns,

…device makers must be on guard that the constant confusion and lack of consistency may precipitate a crash akin to the Great Video Game Crash of 1983. The e-book market may be a lot more mature than it was a decade ago, but it still has a long way to go before it fully grows up.

On the eve of Julie Bosman taking over as the publishing beat reporter for The New York Times (Motoko Rich is moving on to covering the economy for the Times), Sarah Weinman analyzes book publishing coverage in various newspapers.

On the Huffington Post, writer and former book editor Jason Pinter argues that, contrary to the prevailing opinion, men will read, they’re just not being provided with the proper manly material (and, those ads for The Nook and The Kindle? They’d make any man run). Based mostly on anecdotal evidence, Pinter says the problem is that there are so many women in publishing (he says it’s “dominated” by women. That may be true in total numbers, but I’m willing to bet that an analysis of the numbers of women in top positions will show a different story. Among the “big six” publishers, for instance, Carolyn Reidy is the sole CEO).

On Salon, Laura Miller responds to the post and amusingly summarizes the 130 comments it brought. She accepts Pinter’s thesis and adds that men are not attracted to publishing because it “…increasingly resembles those ‘caring professions,’ nursing and teaching, where the joy of laboring selflessly on behalf of a noble cause — in this case, literature — is supposed to make up for the lack of profits and respect.”

You can’t help but wonder, though, over half the books on the NYT Fiction Best Seller list are written by men. Have they all been coerced by women editors into writing for the female audience?

I love this video created by Dorling Kindersley in the UK.

Trust me, watch the whole thing.

Proving the many nay-sayers in the press wrong, Reed Business has found a buyer for Publishers Weekly.

The new owner, George Slowik, is familiar to several on the PW staff; he was the publisher from 1990 to 1993.

Slowik outlined his vision for the magazine in interviews with Crain’s New York Business and the New York Times “Media Decorder” blog. He plans to digitize the PW archives, particularly the reviews (which now go back to 1997). The magazine licenses its current reviews to various companies such as Amazon and book wholesalers; he sees an opportunity in the older reviews when Google clears the way to publishing digitized OP titles. He also plans to sell versions of the magazine in other languages, using Google’s translation tool and some human intervention, to further reach the international audience.

He did not directly address whether the magazine would continue as both a print and digital publication, but presumably it will, since he said that all art and editorial staff will make the transition, as well as sales staff.

The magazine will be transferred to the new ownership beginning June 1 (UPDATE: The new ownership is effective immediately. Publishers Weekly will be moving to new offices effective June 1).

It’s been a long and tortuous road, but it was announced today that Library Journal, School Library Journal and LJ Hotline have been sold to Media Source, which also owns The Horn Book and Junior Library Guild.

Horn Book Editor-in-Chief, Roger Sutton celebrated the acquisition by posting a photo of himself and LJ/SLJ Editorial Director, Brian Kenney at MidWinter with a typically wry Suttonesque headline, Many men have tried to mix us up but no one can.

Kenney continues as editorial director of both magazines, with Francine Fialkoff as editor-in-chief of Library Journal. Ron Shank continues as publisher.

LJ and SLJ were originally put up for sale, along with 45 other magazines, by owner Reed Business Information back in 2008. Unable to find buyers, in what is widely considered a bungled attempt, Reed took them off the table. This past July, they announced they were trying it again. Since then, they’ve sold off several magazines, including Electronic Design News (EDN) and Broadcasting & Cable, and closed others, including Video Business. The magazines were formerly part of Cahners, which published over 150 magazines at its height.

Noticeably missing from the sale is sister publication Publishers Weekly. Some news sources see this as a sign that Reed has been unable to find a buyer for the magazine and predict it will be closed, a step Reed said they would take with any magazines they were unable to sell by mid-year.

It would be a shame if PW was closed, not just because it’s been covering the publishing business since 1872, or because I am one of the former editors-in-chief. Despite a drastic reduction in staff over the past few years, it still has the largest number of reporters and editors focused on all aspects of the business, from printing to bookselling. Several online publications have challenged PW‘s coverage, most notably Publishers Marketplace and Shelf Awareness (which, ironically, had its first incarnation as PW Daily for Booksellers; when the management laid off editor John Mutter and closed the publication, they effectively set up a competitor), but PW still does more original reporting than any of them. Successful PW online publications Children’s Bookshelf and Cooking the Books point to opportunities to create other niche publications.

And, with all the magazines Reed is trying to sell off, they simply may not have had the time to work with potential buyers of single publications. The outlook may be murky, but don’t write PW off just yet.

The NYT reports today that publishers’ “conversations with Google have taken a more flexible tone” since the unveiling of the iPad and Amazon’s concessions on e-book pricing.

Atul Gawande, author of the bestselling book, The Checklist Manifesto, appeared on the Jon Stewart show last night.

An ad for the book in today’s New York Times notes it’s “available at booksellers everywhere except Amazon.”

The Checklist Manifesto is published by Holt, a division of Macmillan. Last week, as a result of a dispute over the pricing of Kindle e-books, Amazon stopped selling all Macmillan titles. Print titles were still available on the site, but only through third parties. On Sunday, Amazon announced that they were “capitulating.” However, the titles are still unavailable and Amazon has remained remarkably silent on the issue.

Today, John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, sent a letter to authors and agents saying they have been in “constant discussion with Amazon” this week but that he “cannot tell you when we will resume business as usual with Amazon, and needless to say I can promise nothing on the buy buttons. You can tell by the tone of this letter though that I feel the time is getting near to hand.”