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This article in The Economist (@TheEconomist) summarizes the state of publishing right now.

To see how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome — anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

In the first five months of this year sales of consumer ebooks in America overtook those from adult hardback books. Just a year earlier hardbacks had been worth more than three times as much as ebooks, according to the Association of American Publishers. Amazon now sells more copies of ebooks than paper books. The drift to digits will speed up as bookshops close. Borders, once a retail behemoth, is liquidating all of its American stores....

Perhaps the biggest problem, though, is the gradual disappearance of the shop window. Brian Murray, chief executive of HarperCollinsPublishers (@HarperCollins), points out that a film may be released with more than $100m of marketing behind it. Music singles often receive radio promotion. Publishers, on the other hand, rely heavily on bookstores to bring new releases to customers’ attention and to steer them to books that they might not have considered buying. As stores close, the industry loses much more than a retail outlet. Publishers are increasingly trying to push books through online social networks. But Mr Murray says he hasn’t seen anything that replicates the experience of browsing a bookstore.

Efforts are under way. This week a British outfit called aNobii (@aNobii) released a trial version of a website that it hopes will become a Wikipedia-style community of book lovers, with an option to buy....

Read this in full.

See also the CNN (@CNN) extended essay by Todd Leopold, "The Death and Life of a Great American Bookstore."

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you navigate these publishing white water rapids.

Journalist Vicki Barker (@vickibark) reports on NPR (@NPR) about the closing of The Travel Bookshop (@travelbookshop), made famous in the movie Notting Hill. The founder of the shop says people are more interested in taking the store’s picture than coming inside to buy a book.

Read and hear the report in full.

Reporter Anita Wadhwani says in The Tennessean (@tennessean), “In the past 12-18 months, the religious publishing category has seen its sales jump faster than those of almost every other category of books. The book publishing industry overall has remained relatively healthy during the recession, with a nearly 6% annual growth rate from 2008 to 2010, according to the Association of American Publishers.”

“It’s a great time to be a Christian publisher,” said Byron Williamson, a 20-plus-year veteran of the Nashville Christian publishing industry who has published best-sellers by Newt Gingrich and Max Lucado and launched Worthy Publishing (@WorthyPub) last year.

Independent Christian retail stores, although feeling some pressures from big chains such as Walmart selling religious products, remain a “pretty vibrant” outlet for sales, with 1,500 stores currently selling 30% of all Christian retail products, including music and books, said Greg Bays, senior vice president of sales and marketing for EMI CMG Distribution, a division of EMI Christian Group, a recording company that is now teaming up with Worthy Publishing to distribute books.

The recession may actually have benefited the religious publishing industry, publishers say.

Read this in full.

Do you agree with this rosy outlook? Comment below.

This article in The New York Times (@nytimes) says, “The publishing industry has expanded in the past three years as Americans increasingly turned to ebooks and juvenile and adult fiction, according to a new survey of thousands of publishers, retailers, and distributors that challenges the doom and gloom that tends to dominate discussions of the industry’s health.”

BookStats, a comprehensive survey conducted by two major trade groups that was released early Tuesday, reveals that in 2010 publishers generated net revenue of $27.9 billion, a 5.6% increase over 2008. Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1% increase since 2008.

The Association of American Publishers (@AmericanPublish) and the Book Industry Study Group (@BISG) collaborated on the report and collected data from 1,963 publishers, including the six largest trade publishers. The survey encompassed five major categories of books: trade, K-12 school, higher education, professional, and scholarly.

“The printed word is alive and well whether it takes a paper delivery or digital delivery,” says Tina Jordan, vice president of the Association of American Publishers.

Read the story in full.

Also see coverage by Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly), “Industry Sales Rose 3.1% in 2010; Trade Ebook Sales the Big Winner.”

Follow all the news about publishing by using SomersaultNOW, our free online dashboard of articles and RSS feeds from more than 300 media sources.

ICRS (@ICRShow) (#ICRShow) met in Atlanta July 10-13. Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) says, “CBA — the association of Christian stores, which produces the show — reported total attendance of just under 5,000, a 6% increase over last year’s convention in St. Louis. The association itself has seen some growth through new memberships, but store attrition continues. Most publishers say the show is still an important place for them to have a presence, even if scaled back, but they are approaching it with new strategies.” Read the full report.

In another article, PW says, “There was less doomsday talk this year from exhibiting publishers--as with BEA, they have accepted that the show no longer has the same purpose, but most say it is valuable for reasons other than selling books. Read the full report.

Christian Retailing (@ChristianRetail) writes, “Given the economy and other factors affecting retailing in general, ‘I’m very encouraged that so many retailers found this show to be beneficial because this is a time when you need to go to this type of event to challenge yourself,’ said CBA Executive Director Curtis Riskey.” Read the full report.

On the CBA Industry Blog, read Riskey’s “Message to honored guests after successful ICRS.”

US Director of CLC (@clcusa) Dave Almack (@davealmack) wraps up the show with personal reflections on his FaithLit blog:

1.    Less Panic

2.    Less Hype

3.    More Collaboration

4.    More Innovation

5.    More Productivity

Read the blogpost in full.

See photos from ICRS. 

If you were at ICRS this year, write your comments about it below.

Here are images from the International Christian Retail Show (@ICRShow) (#ICRShow, #ICRS, #ICRS2011) in Atlanta, GA. Wish you were here.

The Business & Books (@businessnbooks) section of the International Business Times reports on "Harry Potter" series author J. K. Rowling announcing she will release for the first time the Harry Potter works in ebook form.

Ordinarily, that would not be big news, an author releasing traditional books in ebook format. But Rowling is taking a different path, releasing and selling the books herself through a new website she named Pottermore (@pottermore). In other words, Rowling, one of the bestselling authors in the history of the world, is bypassing not just one traditional channel with her plan but two -- the publisher and the retailer…. Rowling will be bypassing leading ebook distributors Amazon and Barnes and Noble with the direct, do-it-herself model.

All of Rowling's 7 "Harry Potter" books will be released on Pottermore.com in the fall. She's even giving fans who buy the digital books direct from her site a magical treat -- 18,000 more words that will be distributed throughout the series. So it's not just the Harry Potter of old she's selling, but also the new and revised Harry Potter fans can find at Pottermore.com.

Read this report in full.

Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) says "Although some are likely to see Rowling's decision to be her own publisher for her ebooks as a significant one for the industry at large, Potter is a unique franchise. 'Everything is different with Harry,' says one person involved with the Potter books."

Read the Publishers Weekly article in full.

Shelf Awareness (@ShelfAwareness) reports what other media and booksellers are saying. And Fast Company (@FastCompany) has this Infographic about the Potter empire.

Mike Shatzkin (@MikeShatzkin) says, “It never took me much time to find what I wanted to read next until I started reading ebooks.”

Just about every new book I’d want to read is available for my device of choice (the iPhone) and the digitization of the backlist just carries on going deeper and deeper into publishers’ repositories.

But the merchandising, at least for somebody who shops on the iPhone (it’s a bit better through the ereading devices or PCs), leaves a lot to be desired. My shopping experiences are actually a bit of a random walk. I ask my ebook retailer to show me books by category and, since my categories don’t change much (and haven’t since I was a kid) I tend to see the same books over and over again, far too many of which I have already read....

A short time ago I was shopping for my next read on the iPhone. I started out shopping with Kindle (@AmazonKindle) and then Nook (@nookBN) and a few minutes on each of their mobile sites didn’t turn up anything that moved me. Then at Google Ebooks (@googlebooks) I found Making of the President 1968 by Theodore White. That was definitely one I wanted to read. I bought it and I’m in the middle of it.

There is no particular guarantee that I’ll find my next book on Google. I haven’t found any clear pattern yet among the four stores I shop regularly (Kobo (@kobo) being the fourth). Obviously, if I know I want to read another James Patterson or John Locke thriller, any of them would deliver it to me quickly and painlessly in response to a search. It is when I am hunting by subject that the search returns seem to be pot luck. I’m probably not making it any easier on the retailers by spreading my shopping around; if any of them actually did have a good engine to take my purchasing and reading profile and make the next great recommendation, I’d be screwing it up by spreading around my data.

All of this underscores how difficult is the challenge being faced by Bookish in the US and aNobii (@aNobii) in the UK, two “find what to read next” sites financed by major publishers. And they join a long line of sites that have tried to build recommendations and community conversation around what people are reading: Goodreads (@goodreads), Shelfari (@shelfari), LibraryThing, (@LibraryThing), and the new ebook platform, Copia (@TheCopia).

Read this article in full.

Other book sharing websites Mike doesn’t mention, but you may want to check out, are BookRabbit (@thebookrabbit) and ShelfLuv (@shelfluv).

What are some ways publishers and etailers should help consumers effectively find ebooks?

According to Amazon.com’s (@amazon) list of the Top 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America, Cambridge, MA is at the top for the most books, magazines, and newspapers purchased per capita of any city in the United States. After compiling reading material sales data in both print and Kindle (@AmazonKindle) format since Jan. 1, 2011, on a per capita basis in cities with more than 100,000 residents, the cities are:

1. Cambridge, MA                11. Knoxville, TN

2. Alexandria, VA                 12. Orlando, FL

3. Berkeley, CA                    13. Pittsburgh, PA

4. Ann Arbor, MI                    14. Washington, DC

5. Boulder, CO                      15. Bellevue, WA

6. Miami, FL                          16. Columbia, SC

7. Salt Lake City, UT             17. St. Louis, MO

8. Gainesville, FL                  18. Cincinnati, OH

9. Seattle, WA                       19. Portland, OR

10. Arlington, VA                    20. Atlanta, GA

Read the news release in full.

The Religious Booksellers Trade Exhibit (RBTE) will be held next Tuesday through Friday at Pheasant Run Resort and Convention Center in St. Charles, IL. Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) explains what it’s all about:

Back when independent bookstores dotted the landscape like churches, religion publishers represented only a fraction of the overall number at ABA's annual trade show. Apart from a few large trade houses that published the occasional book in the category, publishers whose focus was religion had other avenues to reach their audience. Their primary sales channels were not trade bookstores but denominational or larger chain religion outlets or independent evangelical Christian stores....

Then, in the early to mid-1990s, America's interest in religion mushroomed, and religion publishers responded with books that ranged over diverse topics, from angels and pyramids to the debates between religion and science, new archeological discoveries, interreligious dialogue, critical readings of sacred texts, and the recovery of ancient religious traditions—not to mention faith-based fiction.

Burgeoning reader interest coincided with the rise of the chain bookstores that pushed many independents out of business, and religion publishers began to see what had by then become BEA as a way to reach a wider audience by expanding their sales and marketing channels to include general trade and chain bookstores, using the show to gain exposure and publicity as they moved into the retail mainstream.

Read this article in full.

UPDATE: See exhibit wrap-up coverage by Publishers Weekly, "Smaller Liturgical Booksellers Trade Show Hits 20 Years."

One of the featured titles at this year’s RBTE is the Common English Bible (@CommonEngBible & @VersesForToday), the newest translation by the largest number of biblical scholars & church leaders in words 21st century readers use every day, balancing academic rigor with modern understandability, proven through extensive field-testing with, and acting on feedback from, hundreds of readers. It’s the only Bible to include National Geographic maps and to extensively use contractions where the text warrants an engaging conversational style (not used in divine or poetic discourse). This translation is necessary to clearly communicate God’s Word because 9,000 new words & meaning revisions are added yearly to the English lexicon. Professional communicators (preachers, professors, speakers, leaders, etc.) who use this authoritative translation (not a paraphrase) will be great communicators, effectively reaching their audiences with biblical text their audiences readily understand because the text is written the way they naturally talk.

See the website for more information.