InBerkeley

Overheard today on the Twitterstream:

andilygrrr: Fat raindrops on my windshield, navigating through Berkeley, R.E.M. crooning through the speakers. Love it.

debaoki: Totally overdid it at Berkeley Bowl again. now have more food than 2 people can reasonably eat in a week.

TrendologistK: Berkeley’s Thai Temple Sunday brunch was so delicious, I can’t wait to go back for more authentic dishes. What a great community event!

honeybuzzer: First the Bay to Breakers crackdown, now How Berkeley Can You Be canceled. The War on Fun continues…

Berkeley Tweets, General

Does anyone care that the How Berkeley Can You Be? parade has been cancelled?

I know not everything in a city needs to be or should be family-friendly, but I am put off by a daytime event that includes stuff that I wouldn’t want to take my kids to. I know it’s designed as a counter to political correctness but I’m not really keen on public nudity and throwing cigarettes to kids in the crowd.

Or is it just me?

Photo by Jutta from Flickr

Events

“We keep doing it because we’re stubborn.”

Christina Creveling, co-manager and a partner in University Press Books on Bancroft just below Telegraph, is frank about the difficulties her jewel of a bookstore faces. An idle observer would think that Berkeley — with 35,000 students and a population filled with academics and literary types — should be a haven for bookstores. Indeed there was a time when that was the case. But in recent years book lovers in Berkeley have seen the peregrinations and eventual closure of Cody’s, the closure of Black Oak Books and even the closure of Barnes & Noble on Shattuck. Are we cursed?

I hope not. University Press Books is celebrating its 35th year and, for all the struggles, is a fantastic bookstore. It stocks 16,000 titles, about 70 per cent of which are the academic works that give the store its name. The other 30 per cent are so-called trade books, such as you’d find in any ordinary bookstore. The stock is a superb mix of books you might read about in The New York Times Book Review and more arcane volumes (very much to my taste) you could uncover through TLS or review pages in academic journals.

According to Creveling, University Press Books has been hit by a number of factors. The rise of Amazon.com and other web-based booksellers has hurt bookstores everywhere. In academic books, there are additional problems. Most books are sold to bookstores at a discount of around 40 per cent. That’s the bookstore’s potential for profit. In academic books, however, more and more books are now sold on “short discount”, only 20 per cent off. Sales are made directly to libraries and university courses. There’s insufficient profit at that discount for stores like University Press Books. Creveling also recognizes that the store faces particular difficulties with its location. Many potential customers no longer come to the Telegraph Avenue area to shop, even though stores like University Press Books provide parking validation.

So what can the store do? Creveling and her colleagues have been innovative. The store has launched a Friends of UPB program. An annual donation of $35 gives members 10 per cent off on one day’s purchases as well as an invitation to a members-only party. Lifetime memberships are $350 — ten people have signed up for lifetime memberships so far. Additionally the store has a program for local authors: donate two copies of your book and University Press Books will display one copy for at least a month and commit to always reordering copies of the book should it sell, so that one copy will remain in stock.

University Press Books is precisely the kind of store that Berkeley needs to support and retain if we want to keep some of the best aspects of the city’s character. I hope it’s here to celebrate its 70th anniversary.

Books, Business