A Publishers Weekly story by Calvin Reid reports a “computer glitch” late last week caused Amazon.com to sell “hundreds if not thousands” of very high-end comics and graphic novels at unbelievably low discounts. The result: Amazon.com’s Top 100 bestseller list was suddenly filled with graphic books.

The news broke on the comics news blog Bleeding Cool. The PW report tells what happened next:

news of unbelievable bargains spread quickly on Twitter, and readers flocked to Amazon to place orders for graphic novels at wild discounts. Prices included high end boxed set hardcover collections, really priced at more than $100 but suddenly offered for $14.99 or less.

A source at Diamond Comic Distributors, which supplied the comics to Amazon, said the mispricing was a data error and that it was being fixed. It is unclear how many items were ordered during the period of mispricing although there is speculation that there were thousands of orders.

However, the PW story cites one disturbing possibility: That it “is also unclear how many—if any—of the orders Amazon will honor.”

Apparently, last Thursday was “Black Thursday” for employees at Borders stores around the country. As a Publishers Weekly report by Jim Milliot details, “expected cuts in the store workforce at Borders began last week in what employees on various blogs are calling ‘Black Thursday.’ The number of cuts its unclear, and the retailer had only a vague response when asked for clarification of how many jobs were eliminated. ‘Borders is always looking for opportunities to improve performance and profitability. Any recent changes are a continuation of our efforts,’ a Borders statement read.”

A report on Publishers Lunch yesterday (subscription only) reported “Many individual posts have been made by people who held training supervisor and inventory supervisor positions who say they were let go.” Publishers Lunch also cited a quote “said to be taken from an internal announcement”:

We made the decision to eliminate the training supervisor position so that we could allocate more hours to the sales floor. Training remains an important function in our stores, and the responsibilities of the training supervisor will be redistributed among the leadership positions. Additional supervisor- and manager-level positions were eliminated in some stores to align with the appropriate structure based on sales volume, and a few BSR stores made changes to align their leadership structure with their volume levels as well.

As a previous MobyLives story reported, Borders laid off 10% of its corporate workforce barely a month ago.

Edward Jay Epstein, author of The Hollywood Economist: The Hidden Financial Reality Behind the Movies, talks with Bloomberg’s Betty Liu about the role of film libraries in the financial health of movie studios and the outlook for independent filmmakers.

Author Steve Stern

Steve Stern, author of the Melville House novella North of God –which Sadford Pinsker praised as “a Jewish-American classic” — is back again, but this time he’s taking a page out of Charles Dickens’playbook, serializing his forthcoming novel The Frozen Rabbi in postings on Tablet Magazine, a daily online magazine of Jewish news, ideas, and culture. The book comes out in May from Algonquin, but not before the eager masses get a sneak preview of it at Tablet.

So, not to give anything away, but … there’s this rabbi who gets frozen, see, through the ages, see, and at one point he thaws out in 1960’s suburban America …. In other words it’s pure Stern — funny, bizarre (really bizarre) and brilliant! And did we mention funny?

Matt Taibbi

When Vanity Fair contributor James Verini approached Rolling Stone reporter Matt Taibbi about his work on the shuttered Russian newspaper The Exile, Taibbi suggested that Verini consider killing the story. As he wrote in an email: “In the end nobody really wants to read about a couple of overgrown suburban teenagers writing about anal sex and the clap and then calling themselves revolutionaries when some third-world dictator gets bored of letting them stay published.”

But Verini persevered and Taibbi agreed to a lunch, though he again tried to talk the reporter out of the story, stressing that the story of the newspaper was best told in his 2000 book, co-authored with Mark Ames, The Exile: Sex, Drugs, and Libel in the New Russia.

I told him yes, that was true, but the book had been published in 2000, and, frankly, I didn’t think it was very good.

“The book wasn’t good?” he said.

“No, I didn’t think so,” I said.

“My book?” he said.

“Yes, the Exile book. I thought it was redundant and discursive and you guys left out a lot of the good stuff you did,” I said.

At this, Taibbi’s mouth turned down and his eyes narrowed.

“Fuck you,” he snarled, and then picked up his mug from the table, threw his coffee at me, and stormed out.

Visitors at the Riyadh International Book Fair

According to an Associated Press report, “Saudi security forces confiscated books of a well-known reformer and critic of the royal family from stalls at the kingdom’s annual international book fair. The Saudi Civil and Political Rights Association said in a statement that Saudi security officers stormed a book stall at the Riyadh International Book Fair on Thursday and confiscated all of the works by Abdellah Al-Hamid.”

Sony's version of Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos

The onslaught of ereading devices expected in the wake of Apple’s iPad launch has begun. As a Wall Street Journal story by Daisuke Wakabayashi and Yukari Iwatani Kane reports, “Threatened by Apple Inc.’s growing stable of portable devices, Sony Corp. is developing a new lineup of handheld products,” including “a portable device that shares characteristics of netbooks, electronic-book readers and handheld-game machines. The device is designed to compete against multifunction products such as Apple’s coming iPad tablet ….”

Heather Reisman

Amazon’s application to open a warehousing business in Canada (see the earlier report from MobyLives) could mean the end of Chapters/Indigo — or at least, so says one anonymous commentator on the INDEX//mb website (”Ideas on Publishing Books in Canada (and other attempts to write good)”).

For one thing, says the INDEX//mb commentary, “it means Amazon could dominate on-line sales of general merchandise in Canada.” So even some non-book-related businesses would be “screwed.”

But what makes it “huge news,” says INDEX, is it gives Chapters/Indigo owner Heather Reisman …

…. the opportunity to sell her chain of ‘cultural department’ stores thereby, dodging the bullet everybody knows is coming.

Think about it.

The chain has too much square footage and it inherited some bad leases during the Chapters merger. It is in a sector with low margins and insane returns. Attempts to diversify have been mixed –  toy sales have been successful but Pistachio has failed. The online book business has been hemorrhaging money. And the digital wave hasn’t even hit yet. If Tower Records and Blockbuster are any indication, big-box bookstores need to prepare themselves for the day when the customers don’t come in anymore.

If Reisman wanted to sell (she isn’t getting any younger) no Canadian in their right mind would buy. The chain is an extension of her personality so the price would likely match her sense of what things are worth rather than what they really are, and her shoes would be too big to fill. The place basically operates in her image. None of her peers would take that on. That leaves foreign investment or a sale.

And getting out now would be perfect timing. EBooks are still less than 10% of publishers sales. The iPad has yet to land. Canadians are still reluctant online shoppers. Indigo is probably worth the most it ever will be right now.

John Edgar Wideman: He's had it with publishers

“In an unusual move for an established author, critically acclaimed novelist, memoirist and National Book Award finalist John Edgar Wideman is teaming up with self-publishing and print-on-demand service Lulu.com to release, Briefs, Stories for the Palm of the Mind, a new collection of his short stories,” reports Calvin Reid in this Publishers Weekly story. Previously, notes PW, “His books have been published almost exclusively by Houghton Mifflin for years.”

Wideman seems to be reacting to his experience with a big publisher, according to the report:

Citing changes in the publishing business and a desire for more control over the publishing process, Wideman said, “I’ve been thinking about alternatives for a long time. I like the idea of being in charge. I have more control over what happens to my book. And I have more control over whom I reach.” Wideman also noted his “distaste” for what he called mainstream publishing’s “blockbuster syndrome”–the tendency for large trade  publishing houses to focus their resources on books with bestseller potential.

Wideman said the emphasis on blockbuster bestsellers, “has gotten out of hand. Unless you become a blockbuster, your book disappears quickly. It becomes not only publish or perish, but sell or perish.” The book is being published as part of Lulu VIP, a new customizable service aimed at luring established authors to the self-publishing service. Wideman is also making several of his backlist titles available for sale through Lulu.com.

The house where Dickens wrote Great Expectations

A wooden house alongside the Thames in which Charles Dickens wrote some of his most famous works but that is now unsafe to enter is the subject of an urgent appeal for funds, according to a report from the Telegraph.

The small, Swiss chalet-style house has an unusual history in that it

… was a present to the writer from French actor Charles Fechter. It arrived at Higham railway station in 1864 in 58 separate boxes.

Dickens wrote much of A Tale of Two Cities, Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend and The Uncommercial Traveller in the chalet, which was accessed via a specially made tunnel under the main Rochester to London Road at Higham.

He was writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood in the chalet overlooking the River Thames and countryside the day he died.

John Knott, head of the Rochester and Chatham Dickens Fellowship, tells the newspaper his group “hopes to raise £100,000 to complete the work prior to 2012, the bicentenary of Dickens’s birth.”

The report does not clarify what the secret tunnel was all about.