The Northwest Explorer checks out, in great detail, the Oro Valley Public Library, near Tucson, Ariz., which is completing its 25,000-sq.-ft. new building, part of which opened in 2002. The new facility, which reflects the evolution of many libraries into community centers, includes more space for community programs, meetings, book club gatherings and classes; a coffee and snack area; wi-fi service; a Friends of the Library bookstore; a Teen Zone that resembles a university student union, with places to study, post announcements, use computers, listen to music and watch movies; and an expanded children's section with an open layout with books at the center.

Many of the additions and changes were made in consultation with adults, teens and children. "They wanted a community space, and it's our goal to bring the community in," librarian Cheryl McCurry told the paper.

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Hobbit Hall children's bookstore closed on September 30 and is holding an "inventory sale," according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. If no one buys the store by October 16, it will close permanently. Owner Kim Dickie, who bought Hobbit Hall in 2002, said the store had been hurt by its "remote location" and competition from large bookstores. Pregnant with her third child, Dickie added that "it's not feasible for me to be there as much as I'd like to be."

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Noted: in Stuart, Fla., a fitness center has opened in the renovated building that housed one of the Books-A-Million stores severely damaged in hurricanes a year ago, according to TCPalm.com. The company retains stores in Vero Beach and Jupiter.

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While we try to be less New York-centric than some other book world publications, we want to publicize one very worthy venture in the Big Apple that is supported by many in the book business: the 19th annual New York Book Fair. The fair is organized on behalf of the Goddard Riverside Community Center and will be held Saturday and Sunday, November 19-20, at 593 Columbus Avenue (at 88th St.). All profits from the fair benefit the community center and its programs that serve youth, older adults and the homeless at 16 sites on the West Side and in Harlem.

Before the fair, "meet the author" dinners will be held on November 11 in homes around the city. For more information on these, contact Annette Pousson at 212-873-6600.

On Friday, November 18, a Book Bash will be held at the community center on the eve of the fair. Local restaurants will serve their signature dishes; an auction will feature trips, dinners and tickets to various events; and books will be sold at a discount. Tickets are $125 in advance and $150 at the door. For more information about the fair, contact Elizabeth Coxe at 646-307-5563, Barry Kaplan at 212-873-4448 or go to Goddard's Web site.

Book TV airs on C-Span 2 from 8 a.m. Saturday to 8 a.m. Monday and focuses on history and political books as well as the publishing industry. The following are highlights of this coming weekend's programming. For more information and a full schedule, go to Book TV's Web site.

Saturday, October 8

7 p.m. Encore Booksnotes. In a segment first aired in 2001, R. Kent Newmyer talks about his book John Marshall and the Heroic Age of the Supreme Court (Louisiana State University Press, $42.95, 0807127019).

8 p.m. After Words. Chris Whittle, founder and CEO of Edison Schools, discusses the state of the country's schools with information from his new book, Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education (Riverhead, $24.95, 1594489025). Whittle is interviewed by Jay Mathews, education reporter and columnist for the Washington Post and author of the book about Los Angeles math teacher Jaime Escalante, Escalante: The Best Teacher in America. (Re-airs on Sunday at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.)

Sunday, October 9

1:15 p.m. History on Book TV. In an event hosted by the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., David Murphy discusses his new book, What Stalin Knew: The Enigma of Barbarossa (Yale University Press, $30, 0300107803), in which he examines Stalin's rejection of intelligence reports about Germany's intention to invade the Soviet Union in 1941. For the book, Murphy drew on Soviet Archival Material, including two newly discovered letters from Hitler to Stalin in which Hitler states that Germany will never invade the Soviet Union.

2:05 p.m. Public Lives. During an appearance at a Barnes & Noble in Atlanta, Ga., Price Cobbs talks about his journey as a black person in America as recounted in his memoir, My American Life: From Rage to Entitlement (Atria, $24.95, 0743496191).

Today on the Today Show, Elizabeth Marquardt discusses her new book, Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce (Crown, $24.95, 0307237109).

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Today on KCRW's Bookworm, George Saunders speaks about his new book, The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (Riverhead, $13, 1594481520). As the show puts it: "The author of The Very Persistent Gappers of Fripp decided he'd try to write another satire-fantasy. How does Saunders handle subjects like tribal warfare and ethnic cleansing and still maintain the lightness that fantasy requires?"

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WAMU's Diane Rehm Show hosts Bruce Feiler, who recollects his travels through biblical locations in his new book, Where God Was Born (Morrow, $26.95, 0060574879).

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Yesterday Talk of the Nation took a trip with Mary Roach, author of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (Norton, $24.95, 0393059626), who talked about her search, which took her to rural India and Cambridge University, among other places.

Opening tomorrow:

In Her Shoes, directed by Curtis Hanson with a screenplay by Susannah Grant, based on Jennifer Weiner's novel (Washington Square Press, $14, 0743418204). Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette star in this chick lit story of sibling rivalry, betrayal and reconciliation.

In a sign of the electronic times, in May the National Association of College Stores appointed a fulltime digital content strategist. He is Mark Nelson, who has a Ph.D. in information science and MBA in marketing and has worked for 15 years in "almost every area of information technology," as he put it in a recent conversation with Shelf Awareness.

Nelson has been a programmer, done IT management, led several enterprises and engineering projects, was "quasi CIO" for a corporation, consulted and for the past five years was a professor at the Lally School of Management and Technology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. He is an expert, he said, in "how an organization or institution absorbs technological change," which lies at the heart of his job with NACS.

Appropriately in the digital age, which has helped usher in telecommuting, Nelson lives in Albany, N.Y., and works from there.

Nelson was hired, he continued, because "a lot of people in college stores are so occupied with day-to-day activities and day-to-day issues and lack a certain technical expertise to be able to look at digital content delivery and see how it will impact us all in five to seven years," Nelson said. On behalf of the industry, he is researching "a range of issues and retail technologies" to identify "opportunities and potential impacts for college stores."

For now, the position is "still formative," Nelson said. "In the first few months, I've been focused on getting up to speed on the industry, meeting people, learning what's going on." Soon he said, he will begin to develop "special strategies and program we can pilot and try to establish better partnerships with certain stores and other organizations to address the issues."

Be prepared. Within a decade, depending on how long it takes to resolve several technological and organizational issues, most texts and other educational course materials will be digital, he predicted. But print lovers take heart: "There will probably still be residual paper products," Nelson said. Still, the push to digital delivery will come from younger students who "don't prefer to learn in a linear fashion."

E-book E-volution

But the course of e-development remains murky. For now, for example, e-books seem simultaneously dead and the wave of the future. The main problem, according to Nelson, is that the technology hasn't yet reached its full potential. Many people still don't like to read e-books, he said, so that at the moment, e-books are used mainly for reference uses. And a recent study showed "a fair amount of student sentiment against texts in electronic format," Nelson said. "For linear sitting down and reading, even when they're technologically capable, people don't want to read a whole book from the screen." Since printing out a full book text costs more than what a book would cost, "it's probably cheaper to buy the preprinted book."

However, "when the technological barriers are overcome" and improvements, including versatile e-ink, low power usage and new types of highly portable, highly readable displays, are introduced, "the willingness to accept e-books will go up." And presumably as the youngest, nonlinear generation grows up, it will find e-books "natural."

There is more to digital content delivery than e-books though, and college stores have opportunities to play a major role in the various ways digital content is delivered and managed on campuses. For now, libraries and private-sector organizations are "far ahead" in looking at digital content delivery and management, Nelson said. On campuses, libraries and IT units are potential bookstore competitors.

College stores need contribute to the process and "add value," as Nelson put it. One "viable business model" he mentioned is that of the University of Queensland in Australia, whose press and bookstore operate a major POD center that quite profitably prints everything from student homework to photos to excerpts from texts and other books and the Internet--all while respecting copyright. In this model, content is sent to the store digitally from publishers, although the customer receives a printed version. Ever faster, cheaper and better quality printers are making this approach more attractive, Nelson noted.

There are other possible models that allow the store to have a place in the supply chain and distribution process. Ideally Nelson would find a model that has advantages for students, faculty, stores and publishers. "It's too early to tell, but there should be opportunities for each group," he said.

As usual with emerging technologies, Nelson said, the initial focus is on consumers and what they want. But eventually, there is a major impact on the supply and production, which in turn has an effect on consumers in ways that weren't obvious initially.

Nelson is also concerned that access to digital material be made available to everyone equally.

Digital Prep

How college stores prepare for that and other technological shifts will be key, Nelson said. In many organizations there is a resistance to change, he said. "It's not an unwillingness," he explained. "It's an unpreparedness." When people aren't comfortable with technology and worry what will happen to them, "they want to slow down to control the process. It's fear of the unknown." Particularly after the disruptive changes caused by digital content delivery in the music and film industries, the book world is understandably "much slower to allow intellectual property in digital form to be shared too quickly."

For now, Nelson plans to discuss these issues at CAMEX, CONTEXT and other NACS conferences. He may also organize a special conference on the subject. Education will be important. "We need to start changing and prepare people for change without terrorizing them," he said. "Typically in the face of fairly dramatic technological change, people become scared and go back to old ways. When that happens, the likelihood of them surviving change decreases. We want to make people interested and excited and ready for change."