Upper west side B&N closes… The armageddon begineth

And besides closing it’s own major outlets, Borders thought this would be a good time to introduce a paid loyalty program… hey, Borders, how about getting people to show their loyalty by, I don’t know, SHOPPING AT YOUR STORES!?!?

Do you use online dictionaries? Better get started… Which one is currently best?

Staples sides with Amazon

Sony releases updated readers, apparently pink

A side by side comparison of Nook, Kindle, Sony and Kobo (this kind of thing is worth 20 articles of futzing over preferences…)

JFranz novel is the Cabbage Patch Kid of the lit world

Richard and Judy unveil eight books as part of their “comeback” show… Didn’t they just leave? Is this a comeback or more a “jump-out-of-the-closet-and-go-BOO”?

Did you miss getting Freedom for free from Amazon? Me too

Lit festival orgy

Dear Bookninja, What does a psychopath look like? Sincerely, Billy Jones | Dear Billy, This guy. Sincerely, Bookninja

Guardian first book award longlist

Random sales down, but profit up… me sees a lot of empty desks…

JK gives £10 million to MS charity, no word if donation was in cash or makeup products (I kid, I like her more every day, now that she’s rich and free and good with her money instead of just a mediocre writer)

Heart of Darkness, by the panels

For those of you who may not know, this coming Saturday, August 28, is the first annual celebration of International Read A Comic in Public Day. So grab your favorite comic book or graphic novel—whatever nomenclature suits you—find a public spot; sit down where everybody can see you and read. IRCIPD was created by Brian Heater and Sarah Morean, editor-in-chief and mini-comics editor respectively, at the Daily Cross Hatch, an excellent blog focused on alternative and independent comics and contemporary comics culture.

The two decided to organize a day for the public display of comic book reading after acknowledging an anomalous dark secret among the comics intelligentsia—a lingering and much suppressed embarrassment at being seen reading comics in public! Yes, it’s true, despite our love for this medium, many of us are still secretly worried that if we’re seen reading a comic book, people will think we’re stupid or the hot chick will notice and move to the other side of the subway car. So they proposed a day to encourage all comic book lovers to come out of the closet and show some comic book reading pride.

Writing about the past is something I’ve been quite stern about in recent years, just because – in this country, anyway – that activity so dominates the literary landscape. The preoccupation with history has always seemed to me to reflect a disdain for the present, as if the present were trivial or corrupt in some way. The fixation with the past as the only place of authentic feeling or significant action has always struck me as somewhat goody-goody and also romanticized. It’s possibly just a coincidence, but historical fiction does seem to be so often moralizing, or at least morally simple.

But now I, hypocrite, find myself, in moments like the Wal-Mart angst moment, flooded with the past and an intense urge to explain to everyone around me how everything used to be so different. Because I’ve only just realized it, in the past 10 years or so – how so many of the social signals and habits I grew up with are gone, how everything – and I don’t just mean how you make a phone call or type an essay – is so radically different. That realization creeps up on you. L.P. Hartley famously wrote, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” Like an immigrant from that country I am eager to describe its landscape to people who have never been there, to draw maps of its fantastic geography, to recount its strange vocabulary and customs.

Golems are compelling to writers both because they rely explicitly on words to give them life and because they’re simultaneously more and less than human – super-strong, sub-normally mute, manlike in form but crude and unformed in outline. Eternally patient and silent, these looming claymen have a greater dignity than sinister, prattling living dolls or self-moving puppets. But they are not without menace – left to themselves, they will continue to dig, to build or to fetch, as ordered, until they bury or undermine their task. Sometimes, too, they run amok.

All things must come to an end, but we humans have an endless fascination with the inevitable. Our September 2010 special issue and our web exclusives explore some of those endings. Writers and filmmakers, of course, have been tackling apocalyptic themes for decades, at times using them to highlight emotional aspects of sacrifice, heroism and dedication, to varying degrees of success.

Someone at Bloomsbury shifts slightly, scattering dust into the silent, musty air and startling awake the others who had been slumbering in their wingback chairs… “I say, old chap, do you remember that Henry Potter thing? What if we…?”

World Fantasy Award shortlist once again doesn’t include my fantasy, which involves Lisa Loeb, Janeane Garofalo, and a vat of Nutella… oh, and a time machine

On New York and Mark Twain

UK authors defend PLR… Don’t get any stupid ideas, James Moore… we will fuck you UP, son!

By continuing not to flinch from the difficult, PEN proves once again it’s one of the only effective author collectives in the world

Did you get your Booker Prize app? It’s actually very well done and smooth. Nice!

I don’t know why, but I kind of dig this animation of a single sentence from The Bastard, by Patrick deWitt, over at Electric Lit…

It’s a grey ethical area for writers. Memoirists are vampires and thieves, you might say: vampires and thieves with shards of ice in their hearts. However much McWilliam may want us to think about her story in terms of the sentences, of course we are also interested in the sense. In a prurient (or perhaps hope-filled) desire to read about how a famous novelist hit the bottle and rock bottom and then somehow got her life together again. Yes, of course that’s a deliberately clichéd version of her story and an unfair reflection of McWilliam’s rich writing. But it would be naïve to suggest the book won’t be read for that narrative.

It’s much more appropriate to draw a parallel between books and film. There’s a reason why movie theatres don’t show commercials in the middle of films: advertising jars you away from the narrative, like a boxing glove on a telescopic arm suddenly punching through the fourth wall. People go to the cinema, or slip in a DVD, to escape from the commercially saturated real world; much the same reason as they crack open a good book. Putting an ad in the middle of a book is a great way to kill a reader’s enjoyment of the product, and ensure they won’t buy another one.

And yet, and yet… advertising is a supremely powerful force. And its operatives are sneaky – managing to come up with ever more cunning ways to infiltrate movies with their sales pitches, much like Leonardo Di Caprio’s character does to his victim’s dreams in ‘Inception‘ (a rare movie, incidentally, during which a boxing glove to the face would have provided blessed relief). The most cunningly effective weapon in their arsenal is product placement: bribing filmmakers to ensure that their heroes and heroines are seen drinking a particular brand of beer or getting married wearing a particular designer’s dress. It’s the perfect crime: barely noticed when executed well, highly profitable and with the alibi of “adding realism” to modern characters.

And for precisely  those same reasons, it’s product placement – not straightforward, accountable, cordoned off display advertising  – that I  can see looming like a shadow on the publishing industry’s future x-rays.

The definition of what exactly is an “enhanced ebook” is up for debate. Generally speaking, it is a traditional text-and-image ebook that has been augmented — or “enhanced” — by the inclusion of audio and video, as well as exclusive supplementary material. All this — especially production and acquisition of rights — can only add to the cost of producing an ebook. Enhanced Editions’ own books range from €4.99 for Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father to £9.99 for more recent titles, such as David Eagleman’s Sum. They are by no means expensive, but certainly not as cheap as the £3 being charged for bestselling titles in the ongoing ebook price war in the UK.