Author Celeste Fremon talks about the prospects for an eleventh-hour turnaround with former LAT Book Editor Steve Wasserman at her Witness LA blog. Freeman also cites some key facts about why keeping the Book Section is a smart business move.

Curious as to where Los Angeles stands as a book buying market, yesterday I called the people at Nielsen Bookscan, which is the primary collector of book sales data in the US. They told me that, in 2007, Los Angeles was second only to New York (with which it often trades places). Last year, New York had 8.5 percent of national book sales. Los Angeles followed with 5.5 percent. San Francisco was third with 3.7, followed by Chicago, 3.5, and Washington D.C. had 3.4.

Also, just to remind you, the LA Times Festival of Books, which draws 140,000 people to the UCLA campus each year, is the largest book fair in the nation.

So, yeah, LA residents are interested in books, a fact we demonstrate with our feet and with our wallets. So why doesn’t ZellCo understand that? Forget the cultural damage to Los Angeles that cutting the Book Review both signals and actually accomplishes, it’s a bad business decision. A pullout Books and Opinion section gives many of us an excuse to subscribe to the paper. Without it, our reasons for that expenditure are rapidly vanishing.

Read more here.

Over at LA Observed, Kevin Roderick (like me, a former LA Times editor) has done an exhaustive job chronicling the terrible toll of massive layoffs, resignations, and despair at a great newspaper fighting for its life. So has Tell Zell, the blog created by an anonymous Times staffer. Today, Tell Zell recaps last night’s going away party for Editorial Page Editor (and California author) Jim Newton, an evening that “overflowed with restrained, though passionate, anger.”