I want to thank the Florida bookseller who anonymously referred a customer to me today to buy a copy of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise. Thanks for the business of course, but thank you also for the short conversation I had with the customer — an elderly woman who told a slightly off-colored story from her childhood about innocently trying to break the ice in awkward social circumstances by asking about a vocabulary word she’d learned from an Oscar Wilde book that she’d borrowed from her father’s library.

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Partway through this post about movies and books, long time Beans for Breakfast commenter Klondike Kate, has some nice things to say about a recent Using Books order and about the speed of the postal service.

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Anirvan Chatterjee follows up one attendee’s notes on a Book Expo America panel called “Toward Quantifying the Used Book Conundrum” with his thoughts on the attitude of some segments of the publishing industry toward the used book market:

“The words “Used Book Conundrum” remind me of historical terms like the “Chinese Question” or the “Jewish Question,” in the way that the concept is defined as being inherently problematic, so as to confirm the interests and prejudices of relatively powerful or entrenched interests.”

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The Guardian today traces the life of a book — The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists by Gideon Defoe — from inception to publication.

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The AP is reporting on a May 31 court ruling that will require Borders’ online division to pay California state sales tax for internet sales that it made in 1998 and 1999.

Borders argued that it owed no tax because, though the parent company has more than 100 stores in California, its online division has no presence in there. But:

California’s 1st District Court of Appeal in San Francisco rejected that argument, ruling on May 31 that the Borders’ Web site and retail stores have been too intertwined to call themselves separate companies. The three-judge panel cited in-store advertising for the Web site, receipts that said “Visit us online at www.borders.com” and the ability of customers to return online merchandise at retail stores.

The article speculates on the implications for other retailers:

The decision could lead to similar rulings by the State Board of Equalization against New York-based Barnes and Noble Inc. and maybe even Seattle-based Amazon.com Inc., which handles online sales for Borders and other bricks-and-mortar affiliates, paying them a cut of the profits, said Lenny Goldberg, executive director of the California Tax Reform Association.

Barnes and Noble’s online business certainly seems at risk of receiving a big tax bill from California. Amazon seems exposed. Its Alexa and A9 divisions are both based in California.

If the same argument can be made in other states’ courts, Borders, Barnes and Noble, and other chain retailers with online sales divisions may end up owing back taxes elsewhere. Amazon only has a presence in a handful of states, so they’re likely safe unless a court rules that Amazon’s thousands of Marketplace and Zshops sellers (or Borders for that matter — their website has been managed by Amazon since 2001) can be called its “agents”.

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Jossey-Bass, 2003

Oxford University Press, 2004

Here’s the source photo at Getty Images.

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I’m charmed by this book’s title and its author’s cited credentials. If I had been ten years old in 1940, I would have had a well-thumbed copy of this. I would have wanted to draw cartoons successfully.

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The folks at The Millions have mined this Guardian article on world writers who are under-appreciated in the UK (and the rest of the English-speaking world) for another interesting reading list.

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