Reader Anita points to this Facebook group she formed to collect opinions from those opposing the Conservative government’s plan, as reported earlier, to cut funding to all magazines under 5000 circulation — ie, virtually every lit mag, dance mag, theatre mag, and art mag in the country. It would literally gut the literary sector. I can’t imagine this won’t be reversed. It reeks of a decision made by right wing suits without the slightest investigation or consultation. From the Facebook group:

Canadian literary and arts magazines publishing in either English and French are in danger of losing a key federal funding source.

On February 17, 2009, Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore announced in a speech he made in Montreal (http://www.pch.gc.ca/pc-ch/minstr/moore/disc-spch/20090217-eng.cfm) that the Canada Magazine Fund and Publishing Assistance Program will be merged to create the Canada Periodical Fund. Initiatives from this new body will come on stream in 2010.

Departing from his prepared remarks, James Moore indicated that eligiblity for funding could potentially be restricted to those magazines with an annual circulation above 5000. With notable exceptions, the circulation of virtually every Canadian literary and arts magazine, large and small, is below 5000.

We have to make sure this possibility does not become an actuality, for if it does, as April 1, 2010, these important and praiseworthy magazines will no longer qualify for funding that they have been receiving for years from the CMF and PAP despite the excellent work that they undertake for the readers and writers across Canada (and around the world)!

The Coalition to Keep Canadian Heritage Support for Literary and Arts Magazine feels strongly that to render these magazines ineligible for this support would be unjust. To quote Andris Taskans, editor of Prairie Fire, to do so would be “a slap in the face”—not only to the magazines themselves but to the many writers that they publish, many of whom began illustrious, international careers in these seminal if modest publcations. To do so would also be a “slap in the face” to the ordinary (and extraordinary) Canadians who read them.

By joining the Coalition, readers and writers everywhere send a strong message to the Honorable James Moore, the Department of Canadian Heritage, and the Canada Periodical Fund that we believe in our literary and arts magazines and feel that they should continue to do so by supporting them through well-deserved and sustained financial support.

To do so, would be the cheapest economic stimulus package the Government of Canada could initiate. Every single dollar granted to us or paid to us by a subscriber or a newsstand buyer goes back into the economy.

Hard Ticket to Hawaii. The greatest movie ever made. (after jump)

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Slate loves Kindle and thinks epaper is the future, so does Ray Kurzweil


A new Leonard Cohen “poem”

Dante’s Inferno, the videogame … um…. wow

Sign of the times? Used book sales up

End the building of presidential libraries

I’m suddenly covering Twitter stories now that I’ve broken the seal and joined. Yuck. But this one cuts close to heart, since someone took “Bookninja” as a user name (and doesn’t even use the account). Maya Angelou had been twittering up a storm, until people found out it wasn’t really Angelou. First clue? The dry platitudes weren’t all terrible. Oh, and it was a 20 year old guy.

The tweeting Angelou was revealed as a fraud today by her representative at Lordly & Dame, the Boston-based speaking agency. Her agent, David LaCamera, said he had reached out to Twitter when the bogus account first came to his attention a few weeks ago, but he received no satisfaction.

“It’s sad that this even goes on in our society,” LaCamera said.  “But anyone who reads it and knows her goes, ‘Who the hell wrote this?’ ”

Not so fast, sir. We are not all as intimate with High Verse as you. The less discerning eye may see no reason to be suspicious of such poetic tweets as, “I am very sad. My friends are few… but my words runneth over,” or, “I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself,” or even, “It is as important to love ourselves as much as the world around us.”

What did LaCamera have against any of those uplifting sentiments?

“Let’s put it this way,” he said. “It’s sophomoric versus doctoral.”

Really? You really want to say that? I mean, really? Because, you know… I mean, really? Even with the Hallmark thing, that’s where you want to go? REALLY?

Algonquin has gone ahead and given 100 book clubs copies of one of its books, ostensibly in hopes of creating that mythical word-of-mouth tsunami we’re all hoping for.

Rather than wait for book clubs to discover the Mudbound paperback, which includes an interview with Jordan and discussion questions, the Chapel Hill, N.C.-based press has decided to push the envelope by offering to supply 100 book clubs at independent bookstores around the country with free copies. “Obviously there will be an online campaign with readinggroups.com and other book clubs online,” said marketing director Craig Popelars, who stresses that this is not a contest or a sweepstakes. “This is a promotion we’re doing with booksellers. It’s a great reminder that it’s out in paper. We hope that by giving them one set of books, they’ll be selling four or five sets.”

Reader Matt S points to this relatively even-handed piece on the whole Authors Guild v. Kindle thing and outlines the future of text-to-speech.

The crux of Blount’s argument is that it’s critical to set a precedent now, because the text-to-speech is an audio performance of the book, and even if the digital vocalization is now lousy, it won’t always be.

Not surprisingly, authors who have more willingly entered the 21st century, such as Cory Doctorow, John Scalzi, Neil Gaiman, and Wil Wheaton, have attacked Blount’s argument with gusto. Wil even provides an amusing side-by-side audio comparison (MP3) of himself and the Mac’s “Alex” voice reading a section of his new book Sunken Treasure.

For Scalzi, Gaiman, and Wheaton, the crux of the argument is that Blount’s concerns are worse than silly, because nobody would mistake the text-to-speech for real voice acting. (Doctorow, as is his practice, focuses on the legal aspect of Blount’s argument, finding it more than wanting.)

My take on this? They’re all wrong (well, probably not Cory)… and they’re all right, too. That is, Blount is right about the technology, but wrong in his conclusions, while Scalzi/Gaiman/Wheaton/et al are wrong about the problem, but right about the proper response. The reason that Blount’s wrong is that he’s just trying to hold back the tide, fighting a battle that was lost long ago. The reason that the 21st century digital writers are wrong is that they’ve forgotten the Space Invaders rule: Aim at where your target will be, not at where it is.

Should the CBC consider selling off some of its assets and turn to Americans to weather the financial shitstorm? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Slow down, people. Isn’t it a little early for the desperate measure of prostitution? I mean, it might seem like easy money to sell your assets on the street to Americans, but those people are almost as kinky as the Japanese and will make you work for the buck-fiddy each time.

Lacroix refused to delve into specifics, noting the drastic step was just one option as the corporation struggles with a financial crisis expected to plunge the CBC into the red next year.

In his speech, Lacroix said he has requested a meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to ask for greater financial flexibility that would permit the Crown corporation to sell some assets. He’s also seeking immediate access to the next fiscal year’s funding for the CBC.

Lacroix stressed that he’s not asking for any cash beyond the $1 billion in public funds the CBC already gets annually.

“We are not begging for more money,” he told the assembled crowd. “We are simply trying to manage ourselves out of this mess, and to do that we have asked government to help us with some financial flexibility.”

So far, the federal Tories have appeared cool to the requests.

On Wednesday, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said the broadcaster already receives significant public funds.

Lacroix said Thursday that without financial help, CBC’s TV programming would likely take new shape. For one thing, he’d consider increasing the number of American shows on the channel.

Bing. And so another nail is driven in to whatever the hell it means to be Canadian.

File Under, Not Really Helping Anything: The slappably rich line up to pay ungodly sum for first ed. paperback of first Harry Potter

File Under, See Above: Seinfeld, Cage, other rich folk, compete for copy of Action Comics #1…

File Under, Depression Not so Great: Lonely Planet gets a little lonelier

File Under, Surprisingly Good: Community reviews of the Chindigo Shortcovers initiative are surprisingly good… as someone said to me last night, “I was positive they’d fuck it up, but so far it doesn’t look they have. They must have had it done out-of-house.” And hey, they even have some literature on it, which is a new market for Indigo.

File Under, I knew this day would come: Podcasts are better and more effective than real life… Mostly because you can lay a Blind Melon track down behind anything, I suspect

File Under, Man, 38, Found Crushed Under Books and Designer Couch: Living room bling

File Under, Howl Heard, Indies Unite!: Hodder backs down from Waterstone’s-only deal

Amount babies are read to turns out to be the biggest factor in toddler vocabulary. Of course, this coupled with data that suggests most parents (or in the case of this picture, childless models who look vaguely uncomfortable around larval beings) “don’t have time” to read stories to kids before bed, isn’t necessarily good news.

The stats emerged in a study of 2,000 parents was carried out by CITV to launch their new children’s show Bookaboo, which highlights the pleasures of books.

Worryingly, it also emerged only three per cent of fathers now find the time to read to the kids compared to 89 per cent of mothers.

Lucy Goodman, creator of Bookaboo, said: “It’s important development-wise that young boys are able to share a book with dads, granddads or male carers and it can be fun and rewarding too.

“Dads are just not finding time to do this but I hope in Bookaboo we’ve created a character who will inspire an appetite for books in both children and grown-ups.”

Of the dads who said they didn’t read to their kids 87 per cent blame work commitments while more than a third (34 per cent) said they were too tired.

Dudes, I’ve actually fallen asleep mid-sentence while reading and been subjected to viscious jabs in the ribs and exasperated “Ugh, DAD!”s… But I still make the time to read. (Once I even fell asleep on my back, Ninja Boy beside me, with my hands up in the air holding the book open. Ninja Boy thought it would be fun to wait and watch the book slowly slip from my hands and crack me spine-first on the nose. I woke to copious laughter and bright pain. I’m glad my lack of dignity and physical injury can provide some modicum of entertainment for my children.)

Make yourself a superhero. Like The Bookninja here.

E-book market may also be included at some point as well, I’m not sure.

“It’s like having a bookstore in your pocket – and more,” Michael Serbinis, Indigo’s vice-president of information technology, marketing and online business, said this week.

For its launch, Shortcovers is offering “a humongous” 50,000 book titles for sale, priced from $4.99 to $19.99, as well as individual chapters of books for 99 cents each. In addition, an estimated 200,000 sample chapters will be available free for potential users.

The takeaway messages here? Michael Serbinis sticks to the script carefully written by committee last week (I believe the construction of that sentence didn’t allow for the obligatory exclamation point after “and more”). Also, if you pay $19.99 for an e-book, you’re a stupid idiot.

Hearst is threatening to close the Chronicle, leaving San Francisco with the dubious distinction of being the biggest US city without a daily (and, one presumes, without a book section… one of the last two remaining).

The historic newspaper company says the Chronicle’s 1,500 staff must agree to deep cuts and at least scores of redundancies within the next few weeks if they want to save the paper.

The crisis in the US newspaper industry has accelerated in the past few weeks, as proprietors respond to a collapse in advertising revenue that has been compounding the longer-term problem of declining readership. Dozens of local titles are under threat of closure and two regional newspaper groups went bankrupt last weekend.

The San Francisco Chronicle would be by far the biggest casualty to date. It is the 12th most read paper in the US, serving the country’s 14th largest city by population. Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco mayor, warned of the consequences of its closure. “The Chronicle plays an important role in our civic life and we don’t want to see this treasured institution close its doors,” he said.

Former Gawker writer is getting paid 5 figures by HC for a book aggregating other people’s Twitter posts (called “Tweets”… the quotes protect me from having used that ridiculous term, I hope. Quotes are like condoms for stupid language). Someone please kill me now. I’m too apathetic and fascinated to do it myself. (Thanks, SB)

HarperCollins is paying Nick Douglas a five-figure sum for Twitter Wit, a book of the Gawker alum’s favorite Twitter posts. Is getting paid for aggregating other people’s “tweets” as lazy as it sounds?

Because it sounds somehow even lazier than making a book out of your mom’s email messages, a scheme hatched up, perhaps not coincidentally, by another Gawker writer.

Are Canadians turning to books for consolation as their investments and jobs disappear? Here’s hoping the vast majority fo the books sold here are not how to commit suicide with homemade fertilizer pipe bombs in a government lobby how-to’s.

“Considering the declines in consumer spending in other sectors, and the contraction of book sales in other countries, these numbers are a pleasant surprise,” says Michael Tamblyn, CEO of BookNet Canada. “In tough times, Canadian consumers continue to see books as a source of education, entertainment and escape.”

The market continues to move in the same direction. In the six weeks ending February 15, 2009, volume increased almost 9% while the value increase remained steady at 6%.

If you’re on Twitter and want to “follow” me, I’m at @georgemurray. I’ve taken to sometimes posting a few links there the night before they go up here under the header “On Tomorrow’s Bookninja.com”, so you can get a sneak peek, if you’re as desperate an info junkie as I suspect you are… (I couldn’t get @bookninja because someone took it and hasn’t used the account in two years. Please contact me, if you’re the one who took it and we can make the switch! I’ll send you a mug or something.)

Ah, I love it. The fruition of the mythical paperless office. Who would do this? And why? It would probably take you longer to find a page in the book than download the page. I’ve always thought the e-reader/internet experience was best suited to reference material, and was glad to see some of that weighty material headed there, where it’s searchable and easily accesible. Here’s hoping this gimmicky waste of paper fails miserably.

Custom-made Wikipedia encyclopaedias are to be launched in the UK as, according to Lightning Source, print on demand is “taken to the next level”. The p.o.d. firm will print the books in a partnership with Wikipedia and PediaPress, a German software company.

Imagine you were (likely) a vagrant that no one paid attention to who wrote a kung fu superhero story on the walls of an abandoned building and then left. Now imagine some kid takes a pic of it and posts it on the internet and your guerrilla story captures the imagination of the public. Here’s hoping this author gets some opportunity from this “publication”.

The epic thriller is penned on the walls of an abandoned cottage.

The writer – believed to be a vagrant but who has now disappeared from the house – covered every wall in the building in Chongqing, central China, with chapters from his kung fu super-hero adventure.

The story is entirely written in Chinese lettering and also includes illustrations.

Unfortunately however, no one knows who wrote the book, or why they did it.

Most creative writing classes start off with the grisled instructor telling those assembled to back out while they can. If you can do anything else, you should. But no one leaves. At least until the first critique comes back and that percentage that think they’re the next Jack Kerouac and don’t need to read or be edited throw a hissy fit and storm out. Anyway, Kennedy thinks it’s a waste of time, trying to turn people off “the writing life” (whatever the hell that is…) I agree. My suggestion is that we save our breath and slowly stockpile sarin gas for the day when we get them all assembled in one room and… wait, I’ve said too much…

Naturally, I don’t believe anyone will be deterred by my mad-eyed rantings. Once somebody wants to write it’s almost impossible to stop them without also killing them to some significant degree. Nothing beats that raging delight at three in the morning when sentence number 15 finally agrees to do what you want, and never has banging wiggly marks on to a computer screen seemed so heroic – even if you’re simply ensuring that the orthopaedic surgeon ravishing your senior nurse in the sluice room doesn’t seem implausibly limber and can meanwhile reawaken echoes of that summer afternoon with her funny uncle … And if you think you might actually be doing some good, amusing someone other than yourself – making them less lonely, more alive, more informed – well, you’re just not going to chuck that over in favour of crafting, long walks and a quiet life. Hence the number of regimes and leaders who have discovered that killing writers until they are entirely dead is a highly effective method of slowing literary output. And may angels and ministers of grace preserve the students and indeed myself from any shades of that. We may feel hard done by, but we’re not doing that badly – for individuals trapped in a society intent upon eating its own tongue.

Obamaisms (ie, correct, articulate use of the English language) get some attention over at Moby. Apparently the American media is startled (read, mildly disappointed) by the strange confluence of diction, pronunciation, and “straight talk” in a major politician.

The media attention to President Obama’s use of language may seem unprecedented, if only because his comparative eloquence follows eight years of an inarticulate and deliberately evasive administration. But George W. Bush got his share of attention. His utterances gave rise to a new word, “Bushism,” examples of which filled a series of popular books and confirmed Orwell’s diagnosis of political speech as “largely the defence of the indefensible. … Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.”

The New Kindle, as parsed by The Onion (I had hearty laughs at points three and five, especially)

Post 9/11 wins award (Dear Bookninja, Isn’t every novel written since then a post-9/11 novel? Sincerely, Confused in Brooklyn)

Not one, but two new Philip Roth novels…. pant pant pant…

I learned via Twitter last night that the mind-numbingly awesome part-time Ninja Richard Nash is leaving Soft Skull… To me this is akin to the dismay I felt when Martha Sharpe was leaving Anansi here in Canada… A big change is coming, but here’s hoping Richard will land on his feet and do something equally awesome

For those of you following, we’re back to Duffy being odds on favorite for poet laureate

UK’s foreign fiction prize long list

And speaking of literary translation, apparently it’s a viable business model…

Scholastic is taking a publicity shit kicking these days, between questions about flyer content (my Q appearance on podcast here) and now accusations of corporate theft. 

It started at the New York Toy Fair last week, when Scholastic’s Klutz division unveiled Invasion of the Bristlebots, a March 2009 book packaged with two tiny toothbrush robots. Bloggers at the fair noticed that the book failed to credit Lenore Edman and her husband, Windell Oskay, with popularizing and naming the Bristlebot. (Since December 2007, more than two million people have watched the couple’s “How to Make a Bristlebot” video on Youtube; many others have read the instructions on their Web site.

Immediately, bloggers from the so-called Maker and DIY (do-it-yourself) communities unleashed a flurry of posts. A typical one, on blog.makezine.com: “Sad to see something for fun take on evil overtones of corporate thought theft.” Others on the same site acknowledged the possibility of innocence: “Given how stressful publishing is these days, and how shoestring those types of projects can be, I wouldn’t be surprised that they were completely unconscious of the need to attribute.”

Science fiction giant, dead at 91.

A fish with a transparent head. (after the jump)

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The NYT has an Op-Ed piece by the Authors Guild president who’s saying the text to speech capability of the Kindle yadda yadda yadda. That tail is forever just out of reach, isn’t my puppies?

The Kindle 2 is a portable, wireless, paperback-size device onto which people can download a virtual library of digitalized titles. Amazon sells these downloads, and where the books are under copyright, it pays royalties to the authors and publishers.

Serves readers, pays writers: so far, so good. But there’s another thing about Kindle 2 — its heavily marketed text-to-speech function. Kindle 2 can read books aloud. And Kindle 2 is not paying anyone for audio rights.

True, you can already get software that will read aloud whatever is on your computer. But Kindle 2 is being sold specifically as a new, improved, multimedia version of books — every title is an e-book and an audio book rolled into one. And whereas e-books have yet to win mainstream enthusiasm, audio books are a billion-dollar market, and growing. Audio rights are not generally packaged with e-book rights. They are more valuable than e-book rights. Income from audio books helps not inconsiderably to keep authors, and publishers, afloat.

Moby was pointing to this piece about an apparently famous agent saying we need to change a few things.

“Real books aren’t going to disappear. The Kindle bestseller list contains contemporary novels of all sorts, but books that appear on the list are thrillers like James Patterson’s, which are sheer entertainment, and also romance novels. These are books that people want to read but don’t necessarily want to have a copy in their library. If you read a book on a Kindle or a Sony Reader, and you decide that you love it and you want a copy of it at home, you can buy it.”

Another issue that concerns her is book pricing: Amazon is breaking the market, she says.

“Amazon prices books at $9.99. Books in hardback cost $30.00, and the stores give a discount and the price goes down to $15.00. Amazon is not regulated the way retail outlets are, so they can do whatever they want.”

So they might wipe out the publishers. Are you fighting them?

“They can definitely wipe out the publishers. The problem is that the publishers need them. Amazon isn’t an easy company to do business with. It’s a very secretive company; they will not share any of their sales data.”

Are signs of the shaky economy already evident in your deals? Is it getting harder to get large advances?

“I think it will start affecting authors’ advances, and I think authors’ advances will become more in line with what their actual sales are. And that’s probably a good thing – we are just selling fewer books. The whole business needs adjustment.”

Altogether, she adds, “Too many books are being published in the states today, and all of them are in hardcover at ridiculous prices.

In an economic depression like this, if you aren’t watching a border, saving lives, making money, or pissing oil out your weeny, you’re no good to the world. So how will the Humanities survive? Same way it always has, I suspect.

Already scholars point to troubling signs. A December survey of 200 higher education institutions by The Chronicle of Higher Education and Moody’s Investors Services found that 5 percent have imposed a total hiring freeze, and an additional 43 percent have imposed a partial freeze.

In the last three months at least two dozen colleges have canceled or postponed faculty searches in religion and philosophy, according to a job postings page on Wikihost.org. The Modern Language Association’s end-of-the-year job listings in English, literature and foreign languages dropped 21 percent for 2008-09 from the previous year, the biggest decline in 34 years.

“Although people in humanities have always lamented the state of the field, they have never felt quite as much of a panic that their field is becoming irrelevant,” said Andrew Delbanco, the director of American studies at Columbia University.

The Telegraph on why Britain doesn’t need a poet laureate (which I hereby shorten to “loet”).

Like the awfulness of our National Anthem, the futility of the post of Poet Laureate is one of those running sores in our national culture which seem beyond healing. Every time the matter is aired, there’s a consensus that something ought to be done about it, and every time – because we ultimately prefer the comfortable slippers of tradition to the red cap of revolution – nothing ends up being done at all.

And now the debate resurfaces, as Andrew Motion reaches the end of his ten-year tenure, and a successor will be announced soon, through royal decree prompted by some mysterious cabal of Whitehall mandarins. Should the honour pass to a woman or someone of, er, diverse background? What’s the point, and does anyone care?

Three authors on their mutually supportive strategy to get the books written (including regular Ninja commentor Novik). You mean I don’t have to do this in depressing isolation? … … … Nah, I hate people too much. But whatever works for you!

We formed our group in 2002 after meeting at a writing workshop. When the workshop was over, we stuck together, determined to get our debut novels across the finish line. During those first years, we did a lot of critiquing. Our different backgrounds, ages, and writing styles made for broad-ranging, lively discussions. The last thing we expected was that it would take five years for the first of our novels to be published.

We were like moms taking their babies to parties and diagnosing their ailments, although really we wanted pats on the head for raising such gems. We quickly learned that blunt criticism was going too far. No mom likes to hear that. We came up with a name for it: the avalanche effect, when you’re too buried to dig yourself out. But shallow compliments weren’t helpful either. The solution was to ask questions. “Did you really want your child to pull a tantrum on page 36?” Usually, we got the hint.

Eventually, we found agents and editors to govern our unmannerly prose. Interestingly enough, they often questioned the very same behaviours, the ones we had been pig-headedly ignoring for years when we heard them from each other. Although it’s been tempting, we have never said, “I told you so.”

I’ve got too much shite on my plight today, people, so I’ll be fobbing off a roundup and a couple of comment-less post on you, and if I can find time maybe a few more links later.

Klein wins Warwick prize

James Patterson Word Factory Inc. (r) to publish “crowdwritten” novel … um, this is different from his other books exactly how…?

Oxford American mag gets mystery bailout of tax woes — $100G!

Dale Peck reminisces about his kneecapping of Rick Moody, back in the day

Custom books, the single passenger SUV of books, for those who are sick of sharing their reference base with the peasants

Orwell Prize longlist

Skinny on the street has it you should be watching the Colbert Report on Wednesday, March 4 for an appearance by a certain Celine Dion-loving Canadian author Go, CARL!

Wil Wheaton, yes, Wesley Crusher, who has been blogging up a storm since his days on TNG, writes on his decision to offer his book for sale in an e-format (thanks, Matt)

The NYT says the Kindle 2 is awesome, but Forbes thinks they’ve got to go open source to have any kind of future as a popular gadget.

In developing the business plan for the Kindle, Amazon was no doubt influenced by the great success of Apple (nasdaq: AAPL – news – people ) with the iPod: Proprietary hardware and proprietary file formats made Apple into the kingpin of the digital music industry. But what Amazon seems to have missed is the important role that “free” played in the success of the iPod. People didn’t populate their iPods solely with music purchased from Apple. It was easy for them to “rip” their own CDs into the standard mp3 file format and load their entire music collection onto the device.

While users can load some of their own documents onto the Kindle, there is no easy way to “rip” a book. But with epub-based readers, there are millions of free titles available, and books are available from many vendors, each able to experiment with new business models. Buy a print book, get an e-book free? Buy a print book and e-book for one low price? Buy one, get one free? Buy in multiple formats?

Apple has played the same game to perfection with the iPhone App Store. The Cupertino company seems to have a knack for balancing the benefits of both open and closed architectures that Amazon has yet to discover. While Apple maintains tight control over what goes into the App Store, there’s a loophole big enough to drive a truck through: Any Web page can act as an application for the iPhone.

Open allows experimentation. Open encourages competition. Open wins.

Provisions in the Conservative budget will force Heritage Canada CMF to drop funding for magazines with circulations under 5,000, which is essentially every lit mag out there, as well as a whole host of others. Go to it with the arguing, folks.

It’s hoped the new fund, which preserves the total level of funding now provided by the PAP and the CMF, will be up and running in the spring of 2010. Moore’s decision affirms an announcement Canadian Heritage made 13 months ago saying it planned to “redesign,” with industry consultation, both programs, which subsidize the delivery of domestic publications (PAP) and fund editorial content and business development (CMF) into one “modern, streamlined program” assisting Canadian magazines and community newspapers.

The new program caps at $1.5-million the amount that an individual title can receive in a fiscal year. Eligibility is expected to be determined by a formula based on the readership of each publication as well as a minimum overall Canadian content of 80 per cent.

One key eligibility element, Moore said, is that a periodical must have an annual paid circulation of at least 5,000. As a result, it’s expected some of the country’s largest magazines could see modest reductions in their annual allocation. In 2007-08, more than 230 commercial magazines, English and French, earned editorial content assistance via the CMF, with Maclean’s, Chatelaine and Canadian Living ranked as the largest recipients at $396,389, $228,769 and $205,308, respectively.

Alexandra Adornetto is a typical 12th grader in that she’s constantly having fantasies about the world…  The difference between her and every other teen is that she writes hers down and gets paid while the others just want to beat a certain guitar hero level in front of their friends on Youtube.

Although each of the books features wildly different plot twists, a persistent threat to childhood and innocence runs through them all. “Childhood is just this amazing place and in my books I was trying to express my concern about childhood being eroded,” Adornetto says.

“You have kids’ TV programs being interrupted by terrorist attacks, and kids are exposed to so much these days.

“Childhood is just so sacred, and when you grow up you have a whole lot of things you need to worry about but childhood is one of those times where nothing should ruin it.”

I see childhood less as being “eroded” and more as being genetically modified and factory farmed…But that’s just me.

Jessa points to an interesting piece wondering whether authors should have to disclose their views on the religion vs. science debate when they cover it and how that would effect the readership.

What can personal disclosure about religion add to the discussion? Does it enhance the communication of science? This question invites a look at the numbers, numbers we all know in some version: According to recent polls, 90 percent of American adults believe in God; 82 percent believe in heaven; 69 percent in hell. The devil is a fact to 68 percent of the population, while angels are slightly ahead at 77 percent.

These statistics suggest that the average American will be unlikely to find a militant God-does-not-exist, science-is-superior attitude a welcoming gateway through which to learn a bit more about science and how science may help us better understand religion.

Bronwyn Wallace Award shortlist for emerging writers

The recession, played in the many universes of popular comics (Spidey loses his job and ends up working at McDonalds, which is probably already home to several more radioactive pests than we want to know about… not sure what I think about feeling chronicling the plight of giga-billionaires Wayne and Stark becoming mere mega-billionaires…)

Harper Perennial will give away a story a week online

British Library buys Italian Futurist manifesto

Rushdie tries his hand at film criticism, mostly around Slumdog Millionaire

The recently pardoned author who was supposed to do some time in a Thai clink for insulting the local manifestation of god on earth says in an article adding to his publicity windfall that it wasn’t a publicity stunt

There are only two major newspaper books sections left in America: the NYT’s and the SFC’s, and they’re both pacing back in forth in their tiny cages, staring mournfully out at our gawking faces. It’s like watching the last of an endangered species die in captivity. We should mate them, quickly, and see if we can’t squeeze out a few puppies before they go. Or at least take a genetic sample and store it away for future generations. Maybe the latter is a better idea… I don’t know if we can coax the NYT to mount the SFC anymore. My husbandry skills could never overcome the famous “Christmas party ‘96 mailroom incident”…

One of the sad, little sidebars to the sad, big saga of the waning of American newspapers is the disappearance of professional, edited book sections.

One of the last two major, stand-alone print book sections died this past Sunday, when The Washington Post published its last edition of Book World. The paper will still review books, but only The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle will continue to run a full mini-magazine devoted to books. It is a heavy symbolic blow to readers, writers and publishers. And it is an injury to our collective literacy and, thus, to our wisdom and intellectual agility.

If that sounds snobbish, well, so be it. My mourning presupposes two things: Books have an especially high status on the great chain of media (higher than, say, columns, blogs, TV shows, magazine articles and Twitter tweets), and professional reviews with large readerships have virtues not shared by amateur, unedited or niche reviews, which are multiplying.

Are prolific authors necessarily better or worse? You think JCO is prolific? Try some of the people mentioned in this article, with near 1000 books in a lifetime. What drives them to do it?

Ultimately, we know that all writers do what they can and what they must. Truly extreme productiveness (like its opposite) is beyond the absolute control of the author. For the rest of us, the respectably rather than the manically productive, there are more practical explanations. Partly it’s the freelancer’s conundrum. Anthony Burgess (75 or so books in some 40 years) used to say he never turned down any reasonable offer of work, and very few unreasonable ones. This will be written on many of our graves.

But perhaps the real reason we keep writing is the hope, naïve perhaps, that we’ll make a better job of it next time. Unless you’re a genius or a fool, you realize that everything you write, however “successful,” is always a sort of failure. And so you try again.

David Orr, part-time Ninja and full time smart guy, writes on the concept of “greatness” and how we apply it to the poets of our era.

The problem is that over the course of the 20th century, greatness has turned out to be an increasingly blurry business. In part, that’s a reflection of the standard narrative of postmodernism, according to which all uppercase ideals — Truth, Beauty, Justice — must come in for questioning. But the difficulty with poetic greatness has to do with more than the talking points of the contemporary culture wars. Greatness is — and indeed, has always been — a tangle of occasionally incompatible concepts, most of which depend upon placing the burden of “greatness” on different parts of the artistic process. Does being “great” simply mean writing poems that are “great”? If so, how many? Or does “greatness” mean having a sufficiently “great” project? If you have such a project, can you be “great” while writing poems that are only “good” (and maybe even a little “boring”)? Is being a “great” poet the same as being a “major” poet? Are “great” poets necessarily “serious” poets? These are all good questions to which nobody has had very convincing answers. STILL, however blurry “greatness” may be, it’s clear that segments of the poetry world have been fretting over its potential loss since at least 1983. That’s the year in which an essay by Donald Hall, the United States poet laureate from 2006 to 2007, appeared in The Kenyon Review bearing the title “Poetry and Ambition.” Hall got right to the point: “It seems to me that contemporary American po­etry is afflicted by modesty of ambition — a modesty, alas, genuine . . . if sometimes accompanied by vast pretense.”
…
OUR largely unconscious assumptions work like a velvet rope: if a poet looks the way we think a great poet ought to, we let him or her into the club quickly — and sometimes later wish we hadn’t. If poets fail to fit our assumptions, though, we spend a lot more time checking out their outfits, listening to their friends’ importuning, weighing the evidence, waiting for a twenty and so forth. Of course, this matters only for poets whose reputations are still at issue. It may have taken Emily Dickinson 100 years to get into the club, but now that she’s there, she’s there. For contemporaries and near contemporaries, though, falling on the wrong side of our intuitions can mean trouble, because those intuitions give rise to chatter and criticism and scholarship that can take decades to clear away.

Seems like nary a weekend arts or tech section passes without some form of cheering or dire eschatological predictions about the effect of e-books on the literary world. Run for the hills, Ma! The robots is a-comin’ to done take our pipes and armchairs and put out our cozy fires!!

If we enjoy a book we like to recommend it to others. And we quite like others to see what we are reading, especially if the book reflects well on us. This is where I believe the Sony Reader and other electronic books will come unstuck. (Unless we don’t want people to see what we are reading, of course. If it’s a Jackie Collins, say, or a Dan Brown.)

I’ve thought of a couple more reasons to be suspicious of e-books. First, reading books is a tactile experience. The book has evolved over hundreds of years to be the perfect weight and shape to sit in your hand. Also you associate books with holidays. You associate screens with work.

Second, the Sony Reader, which can store 160 average-length books, is described as the gadget that will do for reading what the iPod did for music. Well what has the iPod done exactly?

Irishman who overcame CP to become an award-winning author, dead at 43.

File under “Sign of the Times”: S&S feeling pinch

File under “C’mere, Go away”: Margaret Atwood’s handwriting to attend Dubai festival

File under “Barf”: Condoleeza Rice get 3 book deal

File under “Where’s the Beef?”: Christian Cookbook

File under “This Story Has Long, Rotting Legs”: Jane Austen and zombies

File under “The Sheep Look Up”: Religious books put on the top shelf

File under “Babylon Falling”: 2,500 languages threatened by regional workers flooding cities

File under “Please, sir, may I have some more?”: The Orphan, a zine for unpublishable fragments (from BoingBoing)

Indy booksellers are still struggling for survival, but having adapted after the attack of the big box stores by carving out community-based niches, their problems are now much more in line with everyone else’s; the shitcanned economy more dangerous than competition. That said, the key to survival is staying connected to your local community, says this piece on the situation.

“This has been a terrible time for retailers in general, including bookstores,” said Avin Mark Domnitz, chief executive officer of the American Booksellers Association in Tarrytown, N.Y. “But the key for independent booksellers is to stay very tightly tied to their local communities, including the shop local campaigns. It’s very important for them to keep those ties.”

The ranks of these so-called “indies” nationwide have been sliding into the shadow of big-box discounters, such as Wal-Mart and Target, as well as growing e-book publishers or Internet-based stores, like Amazon.com.

About 5,400 bricks-and-mortar independent bookstores were around in the 1990s, when the Barnes & Noble and Borders boom hit. Today, about 1,800 remain. The loss of more indies is expected, just as the rough economy chips away at many industries, said Jim Dana, executive director of the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association, a group made up of 450 independent bookstores, authors, publishers and marketers.

“We’ve seen a decrease in our numbers and it’s a result of the economy,” said Dana.

Still, the chains are no longer the threat they once were. A survey of independent bookstores and other retailers by the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance showed that independent businesses nationwide saw the last holiday season sales decline about 5 percent, compared to the same period in 2007. However, the chains saw sharper declines: Barnes & Noble was down 7.7 percent and Borders was down 14 percent.

“Independent retailers in communities with active shop local campaigns have outperformed retailers in cities and towns without such campaigns,” Teicher said.

A pilot by day and best-selling children’s author “in his spare time”. For some people it’s just not enough to be awesome in one way. They need to go all out in several directions, thereby reminding you that you’re pretty much awesome in none.

“Writing this book is the thing I am proudest of in my life,” he says frankly, betraying a slight discomfort at being interviewed. “Other things in my life have had a set process, a mechanism to follow, whereas this is something I did on my own. You can compare it to learning to fly: there are times when something clicks, all of a sudden the information on the dials just falls into place and you think, ‘Wow, I’ve got this.’ Writing is a very similar sensation.”

Set in the 15th century, The Mapmaker’s Monsters: Beware the Buffalogre!, centres around Rupert Lilywhite, a Christopher Columbus aspirant setting sail in search of a new world, who enlists the help of Walter Bailey and his twelve-year-old nephew Hugo as the ship’s mapmakers. Needless to say, the mission veers into altogether different territory, leaving Hugo stranded on an island populated with bloodthirsty “buffalogres” and other prodigious creatures like Pigasus the Flutterhog, Delphina the water-breathing merphin and Savage, the intrepid mouse.

Where does that Rowling-esque imagination come from? “I have no idea,” Stevens laughs.

Um, I have some ideas, at least in terms of the names. But that’s neither here nor there. Sounds like a fun book.

Oxford is looking for a poetry professor to replace Christopher Ricks. Now that Andrew Motion has given the proverbial HELL NO, Ruth Padel is emerging as a front runner. I don’t know Padel’s work. Anyone?

Padel, author of six poetry collections, winner of the National Poetry Competition and former chair of the Poetry Society, confirmed that she would be nominated for the post, and that she was interested in taking it. She now needs to be nominated by at least 12 Oxford graduates before the end of April, ahead of a deciding vote on 16 May if more than one candidate comes forward

“I guess I value the anarchic-ness of the Oxford post,” she said today. “There are hundreds of chairs of poetry these days, in creative writing departments everywhere. But they are all tied into teaching, filling in forms, meeting targets etc. The Oxford post is what you make it.”

If she were elected to the post, Padel she would be keen to make links between poetry and science. “I have close links with people in zoology and astrophysics there, and would love to get poetry combining with them,” said Padel, who is the great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin.

“I love writing about poetry on the edge between traditional poetry criticism and the way a poet reads, carnivorously, learningly, to see how they can write better,” she added. “That aspect of it would be a challenge I’d enjoy.”

Received Pronunciation (BBC English) is how Britons are supposed to talk. But only 2% of them do so in this manner. Is it time to scrap it? (I personally think we should all go back to that international radio accent from the 30s and 40s.

Received Pronunciation, or RP for short, is the instantly recognisable accent often described as ‘typically British’. Popular terms for this accent, such as ‘The Queen’s English’, ‘Oxford English’ or ‘BBC English’ are all a little misleading. The Queen, for instance, speaks an almost unique form of English, while the English we hear at Oxford University or on the BBC is no longer restricted to one type of accent. RP is an accent, not a dialect, since all RP speakers speak Standard English. In other words, they avoid non-standard grammatical constructions and localised vocabulary characteristic of regional dialects. RP is also regionally non-specific, that is it does not contain any clues about a speaker’s geographic background. But it does reveal a great deal about their social and/or educational background.

Successful sci-fi author Rucker has no shortage of support from publishers but has chosen to self-publish some of his work. Why? Well, with the art, you might see why, but where will he go from here?

Self-Publishing Review: Tell us about some of the ways in which you’ve been getting involved in non-traditional forms of publishing.

Rudy Rucker:   For a number of years now, I’ve been posting documents online in the Acrobat PDF format on my Writing page.  I’ve posted a book-length collection of my collected interviews, and book-length writing notes for each of my last seven books.  Recently it’s gotten to the point where my writing notes are longer than the novels that I’m working on.

In an idealized writer’s paradise, I’d be able to publish and sell these books of writing notes to fans and devoted scholars, but in this real world, I’m happy to just give them away—although I do put copyright notices on them.  Publishing my real books is hard enough, without trying to find commercial publishers for my notes!

Recently I decided to get two of my earlier novels back in print, The Sex Sphere and Spacetime Donuts.  I’d hoped that Tor Books might reissue them under their Orb imprint, but they didn’t feel this was a commercially viable option—and I didn’t find much small press interest either.

I started doing some research on POD (print on demand) books, and ebooks, and I began thinking about possibly publishing my reprints in these formats myself.  If you’re handy with a computer, it’s not particularly difficult or expensive to do this, and, if you buy an ISBN (book ID number) and put the ebook into a certain format, you can get your title listed on Amazon.

The one thing that hung me up in terms of reprinting my two old novels was that I didn’t have them in electronic form, and I had the impression that scanning them through some OCR (optical character recognition) software would be fairly painful and time-consuming.  So I arranged for the company E-Reads to put The Sex Sphere and Spacetime Donuts into POD and ebook form, including the Amazon Kindle format.

Literary maven John Degen reports on Access Copyright’s seminars that explain the Google settlement to publishing types. If your book has been digitized, you should read all this stuff and get up to speed on what your rights are. Google’s page on it all here. Thanks for covering this, JD.

If you are a professional writer or publisher of books in this country, and are reasonably certain your books were available for sale in the United States (including through online services such as Amazon.com) before January 5, 2009, you are automatically part of the class in this class-action settlement. That means you are eligible for compensation if your works were digitized by Google as part of their sweeping library book scanning project. A minimum of $45 million in compensation (total) for this initial digitization will be paid out to authors and publishers at a rate of $60 per book, and $15 per insert (single essays, stories, poems, etc. within a larger work such as an anthology). Registration of claims for compensation will run until January 5, 2010. Once you have claimed and received compensation, you have effectively given Google permission to continue to use your digitized work in their Google Book Search service, but with some interesting and potentially lucrative side benefits for the copyright owners. Ad revenue for online texts will be shared with the authors and publishers, and Google will also provide a sales engine for online works.

File Under: Not Even Cold Yet — Updike biography announced

Translation awards handed out

Canadian Rivka Galchen in running for Young Lions award

Shortlist for odd titles award announced — my favourite: “Curbside Consultation of the Colon”, which sounds like it might involve a rusty abandonned car bumper

Danielle Steel goes digital to keep up with the Clancys

Harry Potter, covered — originals here

Some new rules for the Booker Prize, including a provision that all shortlistees are made available as e-books after the announcement of the list. This is a nice way to make sure people can, you know, actually get and read the books. If they have a computer. And high speed. And ibuprofen for when your squinting eyes reach the final chapters. All rules here.

The Man Booker Prize has halved the time period during which a former Booker winner can be submitted for entry to the prize, unless the past victor’s book is included as part of a publisher’s two other submissions. Booker’s administrators are also now insisting that publishers of any longlisted books must provide the RNIB with an electronic text version of their title in order to produce and distribute Braille, giant print and audio formats of the titles on a not-for-profit basis.

Booker is also requiring that all shortlisted books be made available as e-books by the publishers within two weeks of the shortlist announcement.

As before, UK publishers may enter up to two full-length novels published between 1st October 2008 and 30th September 2009 and in addition any new title by an author who has previously won the Booker or Man Booker prize may also be submitted. However this year only those books by an author who has been shortlisted within the last five years (ie since and including 2004) is entitled to automatic entry. It had previously been within the last 10 years.

Andrew Motion, soon to be headed back to actually writing (see below), has called for all children to be taught “the Bible”, whatever the hell that means these days. As an relatively atheist (I know, like being “a little bit pregnant”) poet, I agree. It’s just essential to understanding any history (and present) of Western culture. Just don’t do it the way it was done to me — Irish Protestantism translated to southern Ontario in a Baptist church in Brampton. I still shudder. I know that religious study is often part of successful secular private school (e.g. Waldorf) philosophies, but I wonder how practical it is to teach these things in a classroom setting over the years. Which religion do you start with in kindy and where do you move from there? Because the stories you start with will be foundational for imagination, won’t they? Further, what are you taking time away from? Hopefully not math or English. Or phys-ed or art or music… or or or…

Mr Motion said that generations of teachers with less and less knowledge of the Bible had left even the brightest students with a “sketchy” understanding of once familiar stories.

The poet, who describes himself as an atheist, called for an overhaul of the school curriculum to reverse the “depressing” trend which threatened to leave future generations unable to fully understand the works of Milton and Shakespeare or even more recent writers such as TS Eliot.

The solution, he said, could be to include study of the Bible and other religious stories into a new wider general studies curriculum as well as working it into everyday lessons.

I’ve decided to start the boy chronologically… so we’re doing a melange of Judeo-Christian, Greek, Egyptian, Norse, Chinese, etc right now and will move on up as time goes on. But my little skeptic is a tough nut. “Dad, I mean, HOW could two of every species fit on ONE boat? The boat would have to be as big as… as… as Earth.” Well, my son, have you ever heard of the word “parable”…? See, symbolically speaking…

Can the big stores (in this case Waterstones) squeeze the indies out by cutting side deals with publishers (in this case Sceptre) to get exclusive access to certain books? Cut through the spin here, folks, and consider the chances of any books being indy-only, and then consider (if it should happen) which books the publisher might choose…. Can you say “mid-list”? I knew you could.

Booksellers were mobilised after Sceptre’s James Spackman sent an email with information about the exclusive Waterstone’s arrangement late last week. Emails were then sent between booksellers, calling for “collective” action to protest against the move.

One bookseller said she would buy a copy of the book from Waterstone’s if she was approached by a customer for one, while another said they would source copies from US websites, such as Amazon.com or eBay.

Responding to criticism from indies, Spackman said that “this is the only Waterstone’s exclusive we have planned”, and “the idea of an independent-exclusive publication in future is far from out of the question, and I’d welcome ideas on that”.