The Booksellers Association in the UK doesn’t like the free ebook lending idea

Stephanie Myer to release sparkly vampire novella free online

Ebooks will never replace the stink of rotting paper

Don’t fear the ereader, a view from Libertaria (thanks to FTC)

Apple iPad drama:

The predicted sales for release have already gone far beyond Apple’s early estimates

Will Apple stores be radically altered by the iPad marketing team?

Wonder why they didn’t include things like multitasking and flash…? Here’s your answer: Apple will charge for iPad OS upgrades

The condemned building of information in which squatteth the news that hath no other house, but with exclamation points of hope!

Top 10 books by librarians—Could we get a top 10 back massages by librarians next, please?!

Today in Borders BS: we’re alive!

First winner of the new Ted Hughes award is Alice Oswald!

Ntl poetry competition in UK goes to last minute entry!

We can get 2000AD in North America now!

Chinua Achebe growing ashamed of Nigeria! (that one does’t work so well, does it…)

Bestselling authors line up to introduce classics!

Storytelling chain letter comes to Toronto!

JD Shapiro wrote Battlefield Earth and has owed us all an apology for 10 years. It’s about time, Mister.

Let me start by apologizing to anyone who went to see “Battlefield Earth.”

It wasn’t as I intended — promise. No one sets out to make a train wreck. Actually, comparing it to a train wreck isn’t really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch those.

It started, as so many of my choices do, with my Willy Wonker.

Now where’s the article apologising for “Willy Wonker”?

After trying its hand at market monopoly, extorsion, and several other forms of more generalized douchery, Amazon returns to its corporate roots: bullying.

But now the company has told the shops they cannot sell books cheaper anywhere else online, even on their own websites. It has issued an ultimatum saying that unless the stores sign up to a new agreement by Wednesday they risk being delisted.

Up to a dozen stores have now complained to the OFT that Amazon’s actions are unfairly restricting their ability to sell books to customers at lower prices.

Books typically sell for 10 per cent less on some alternative websites – as Amazon charges fees for its services – but the company says it has been forced to act to protect its low-price promise to readers.

What that’s so crazy it just might work, ah-yuk! Turns out kids want to read, they just don’t want to be told what to read. You’d think we’d have taken the clue from every other fucking aspect of life that kids don’t want to be told about.

For the past three years, Dr. Ivey has been involved with a project at a Virginia school in which 300 Grade 8 English students were allowed full choice over their reading with few strings or work attached, other than classroom discussions about shared themes and small group conversations if several students had read the same book. The goal was to get every student engaged in reading – the kind that you do in your own free time.

“It’s [about] the experience we have all had as adults when we forget to eat or go to the restroom because we are so into what we are reading,” Dr. Ivey says. “And that so rarely happens in school, and it certainly hardly ever happens with the whole-class-assigned novel.”

The results, she says, have been overwhelming. “We couldn’t keep up with the need for books,” she says. Even in classes with struggling readers, students read an average of 42 books over the course of the school years, some as many as 100. And even with their options open, students didn’t stick with Twilight and Gossip Girl series for long – as their appetite for reading grew, so did their interest in more challenging reads, coming to class for example to debate the ending of Walking on Glass by science fiction writer Iain Banks.

There’s a perception, Dr. Ivey says, that “when you give choices, they will choose something that’s not good for them. But that is not the case at all. We wouldn’t have kept kids from reading Captain Underpants. But quite frankly even our least experienced readers didn’t choose books like that.”

On the other hand, my boy would love to live on pasta and Pez, but I make him finish his spinach and oranges. Why? Because I don’t want his teeth to fall out and his body to waste/bloat away. It’s also why I dictate what we’ll read together (he can read Pokemon books on his own time): so his mind doesn’t end up looking like a McDonald’s patron. So where’s the line? For me it’s this: if you want me to read to you, or hang out with you, while you read, you don’t read tv tie-in shite bought at Scholastic. It doesn’t have to be high lit (we’re reading the Warriors series right now and it reads in parts like it was factory farmed), it just has to have a decent story and not lead to brand loyalty outside books.

Stephen King loves him some Kindle, hates him some iPad (is it just me or is the space between his upper lip and septum growing?)

Dear Borders, Please hurry up and die already so I can stop posting about your imminent demise. Sincerely, George

French publisher to sue Google

Does Wikipedia suck?

Roth and Grisham team up to smoke out scam artist

No, it’s “agency model”, not “model agency”… So go back to sleep. Is the agency model used by Apple a scam?

According to the email, sent to its authors, Apple has set maximum prices for iBooks based on the price of the print equivalent. For all print books published with a list price of $22 or less, the iBook cannot be greater than $9.99 during the first twelve months after publication. For other prices, a sliding scale comes into operation meaning the price of iBooks can rise to $19.99 for print books priced between $35.01 and $40. For hardcover books priced above $40, publishers can set their own price. If a book is not available in print, any price can be charged.

So it looks the model will never work, right? Kobo doesn’t think so…

Oh gatekeeper of the book, will you ever allow us in to your garden of mystery and delight? Wait, what does “epigraph” mean again…? Oh.

A good epigraph should be more than mere adornment. Better to think of it as a lens – or a sucker punch. Indeed, the very presence of an epigraph can make us question what lies before us. Playful or authoritative, omnipotent or throwaway, it acts as a kind of shadowy third figure, somewhere between the author and the audience.

With its privileged position at the gateway to the text, the epigraph is, of course, open to abuse. Authors may add random passages from the Bible in the quest for portent; Shakespearean couplets to add a little erudition; sections from Lewis Carroll to conjure that missing air of mystery. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using such favourites – just don’t expect to make up for what’s lacking further in.

I’ve just spent the last few days collecting epigraph possibilities for my new book. If used judiciously, they can be consumed deliciously (see what I did there?), but too often they feel like either a needless self-indulgent opening monologue or a strategic linking of the author’s name to someone smarter and more eloquent. (How can you hate my book?! I used Shakespeare as a epigraph! OBSCURE Shakespeare!) Anyway, I’d never given it much thought, but I think I’ve narrowed it down to two.

The Post looks at the history of Knopf Canada’s celebrated line New Faces of Fiction (that brought you Yann Martel and Ann-Marie MacDonald, as well as a host of Bookninja readers and friends) and follows it up with a “where are they now” list of who’s got what coming when.

As Dennys was gearing up for the spring of 1996, she realized Knopf was committed to publishing four first fictions. She went into a sales and marketing meeting and delivered the news, which was not enthusiastically received. Undeterred, she told them she wanted to publish them in hardcover, and all at the same time. “Let’s turn it on its head,” she says. “Just undercut all that nay-saying. Let’s turn what’s potentially a negative into something that is genuinely positive.”

Despite a tepid response from some booksellers, Dennys proceeded to publish the four books: The Cure for Death by Lightning by Gail Anderson-Dargatz; In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand; Self by Yann Martel; and Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, which eventually became one of the bestselling novels of the past 15 years.

“For someone to say, ‘We’re going to bring all the resources of this big publishing company to new Canadian literary voices’ was very exciting,” says MacDonald. “It was a commitment to Canadian authors. And I think [Dennys] wanted to announce that, and put it on the map. ‘Make no mistake about it: this is what we’re about, this is what we’re doing.’ And make a very strong statement.”

A judge for the Lost Booker that’s been making headlines, despite its dearth of Margaret Laurence, writes about the process of judging 40-year-old books. Can’t be that hard, can it? I’m almost 40 and I feel like I’m being judged all the time! Thank you! Thank you! You’ve been great. Give yourselves a big round of applause and remember to tip your waitress!

I love Ian McEwan but his memory sometimes plays tricks on him. In a recent interview, the writer talked about his early work, setting his books in the context of what everyone else was doing. The novels of the late 1960s and early 1970s were, he said, polite, and a little dull. Hmm. I am not at all sure he is right about this. As it happens, I have just read 21 novels, all of which were published in 1970, and while a few could be described as polite, none was actively dull. Two – Bomber by Len Deighton and I’m the King of the Castle by Susan Hill – were so exciting, I read them at one sitting, and one – The Hand-Reared Boy by Brian Aldiss – so filthy, I read it with the door of my office closed, as if afraid of being caught. You want camp and agonised? Try A Domestic Animal by Francis King. Feminist and experimental? The Circle by Elaine Feinstein. Muscular and sweeping? The Vivisector by Patrick White. I could go on and on like this. I even liked – or at least it had its moments – Melvyn Bragg’s sentimental tale of working-class life, A Place in England (”Ee, there’s dignity in work, lad!”). Only one book left me completely cold, and that was A Little of What You Fancy by HE Bates. I’ve never been keen on the bucolic Ma and Pop Larkin, and their continually rising sap.

The NYT looks at the jeremiad’s unique form of American expression. Ah, the insane marriage of Biblical zealotry with the all the cuddliness and founding principles of solipsism, fear-mongering, and the right to shout indescriminately at others. (And I say this as the loving writer of a jeremiad.)

If this drumbeat of “manifestos” strikes a false cultural note, perhaps it’s because Americans aren’t much known for writing them. The most memorable — Communist, Futurist, Surrealist — come from Europe, like the word itself. Of course, exceptions have proved the rule at other revolutionary moments in our history — “Common Sense” (1776), “The Bitch Manifesto” (1970), “The Cluetrain Manifesto” (1999) — but for the most part, the manifesto is not a native plant. We Americans tend to gravitate in another direction.

From the 17th century on, our writers have taken their cue from the biblical prophet Jeremiah and the particular form of Puritan sermon — at once lament and indictment of the community’s sins and exhortation to return to the true faith — that bears his name. Americans aren’t supposed to write manifestos. We write jeremiads.

In his classic study “The American Jeremiad” (1978), the Harvard scholar Sacvan Bercovitch put his finger on the distinctive shading our writers have given the ancient form: “American writers have tended to see themselves as outcasts and isolates, prophets crying in the wilderness. So they have been, as a rule: American Jeremiahs, simultaneously lamenting a declension and celebrating a national dream.”

From which gusheth the brackish news..

Waterstones to pull up socks after “stifling homogeneity”… all this failure and now homophobia too… shocking… simply shocking…

Scholastic advocates for global literacy campaign… I guess kids are too busy playing with the plastic crap and video games in their catalogs to bother learning to read…

Vanity Fair impressively manages to morph review of spring titles to horrific interactive infographic

One third of Yanks use library computers to get online

Will 3D/hybrid spreads save magazines? (video)

Pullman increases controversy and therefore sales of tries to defend Scoundrel Christ

Curious George authors gets own show at Jewish Museum

Children’s fiction competition at the Times

Are sales in the children’s lit sector poised to overtake (then presumably pile on and administer wedgie to) the adult market? Sparkly, pedophilic vampires in love with little girls lead the way… (I just know that’s going to lead to a really depressing stats page. Right now my analytics tell me the fifth most common search term leading here is “Giant cocks”. I can only imagine what it will be now…)

Book Marketing Ltd research into the book market in 2009 indicates that the children’s sector has defied the economic downturn with a rise in sales that has also out-performed the adult market.

Children’s book sales rose by 13% in volume terms last year, reaching 92.1 million units in 2009 compared to 81.7 million units in 2008. The value of the children’s market also rose by 4%, from £391m in 2008 to £405m in 2009.

In contrast, the total book market saw a 5% fall in spend, from £2,327m in 2008 to £2,208m in 2009. The adult market has also experienced a 5% decline overall in the number of books bought between 2005 and 2009.

The uplift in children’s sales last year includes a significant contribution from Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series but even when her sales are excluded, the children’s book market still saw a 7% increase in units sold.

You know you want at least one of these posters… (From DW’s feed) Original artist’s site here.

Part-time ‘Ninja and author Russell Smith argues that print publishing isn’t as behind the times as we all seem to think. I don’t disagree with much of this, but what really struck me as news here was that someone is getting invited to fundraising dinners. How do I get on that gravy train?

It is common for business folk to shake their heads at the print publishing industry and say we all have our heads in the sand, there’s no point in fighting change and we might as well embrace the immaterial, electronic world – but of course we are all stuffy elitists who probably won’t.

I have this conversation with some guy in black tie at every fundraising dinner. The issues seem quite simple to people who are not actually in the business.

In fact, two things: 1) The issues are not quite as simple as just turning every print book into an e-book, and; 2) far from having its head in the sand, the publishing industry is deeply preoccupied with these issues and conducting constant conferences and surveys to try to figure out the way to profit from the future.

So many articles on the future of publishing are sent to my inbox every day that I can’t read them all. So the image of the bespectacled fuddy-duddy in his dusty library is a straw man: I would hazard that print publishing experts are actually on the cutting edge of new media.

But not because of any smear campaign. My favourite poet, Geoffrey Hill, is now in the running for the seat. Good God/Great Googly-Moogly! Could there be a better person to fill the seat? (Provided, given his notoriously cranky reputation, he doesn’t actually kill anyone in the process.) He’s an utter genius. I want him in there just for the book of essays, if nothing else.

The row fitted into a long history of distinguished fallings out between poets. Ben Jonson reputedly took aim at Shakespeare, suggesting that contrary to the great scribe’s reputation for never having to erase a line of verse, he wished “he had blotted a thousand”. Thankfully, few have felt so impassioned as the French poet Paul Verlaine, who shot his lover Arthur Rimbaud with a revolver.

In the wake of last year’s debacle, Oxford University decided to let the post lie vacant for a year to allow the furore to die down and put in place a new system. The position’s intellectual cachet is worth far more than its financial reward – it offers a paltry annual stipend of just £7,000.

Rivals to Professor Hill, who cemented his early favourite status by gaining nominations from 49 serving dons when the signatures of just 12 Oxford graduates suffices, have until 5 May to enter the fray. Voting is carried out by the 300,000-strong Convocation – the university’s term for all its graduates.

Rather than forcing people to turn up in person to cast their votes, as happened previously the election will be on the internet over a three-week period ending on 18 June. The winner will be announced in time to take up the post in the autumn.

Cormorant books starts YA line (can’t remember if I reported on this before, and too lazy to check… sorry, if a repeat)

The Kirbys vs Marvel

Andrew Motion to write sequel to Treasure Island

Signed Orwell goes on block

World’s weirdest book title goes tooooo…..

Waterstone’s has new buying strategy

There’s a hole in the Canadian current affairs satire market that’s just been filled, by urNews.ca. Very funny stuff here.

Canada Quits

The 2010 edition of Canada Reads has come to an early conclusion with all five readers giving up on their books.

First to quit the CBC sponsored competition was Perdita Felicien who had mistakenly assumed her title, Anne Marie MacDonald’s “Fall On Your Knees,” was about track and field.

Michel Vezina left the book he was defending, “Nikolski” by Nicholas Dickner, on a bus and never bothered to obtain another copy.  “It was okay, I suppose, but once it was lost I couldn’t be bothered,” said Vezina.

Et tu, Brute? “The literature of betrayal” is as hard to resist as the urge to fall backward and grab and your larynx as a garrote wire is applied to your throat from behind and slowly cinched tight.

At its best, the friend-of-celebrity expose can be enjoyably trashy. At its mediocre worst, a la Pasternak, this subgenre of betrayal lit can be whiny and self-indulgent. Yet whether high-flown or lowdown, the spectacle of erstwhile intimates ratting out their betters–and doing it for money, between hard covers—is at once illicit and irresistible.

Why?

“There isn’t a single answer,” says MIT literature professor David Thorburn, “but we have a special fascination with the shenanigans of celebrities and literary figures—who, for some of us, are a kind of celebrity. It has to do with the intimacy we feel either toward a figure we admire or a writer we care about, so that we know them as people. Indeed, we know things about celebrities that we don’t even know about our ordinary acquaintances—and that carries over into our fascination with various forms of backstabbing and revenge.”

No Margaret Laurence for the Lost Booker Prize short list. Sigh. No love for the bombshell of Manawaka

The shortlist was announced at a special event at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival.

The six books are:

• The Birds on the Trees by Nina Bawden (Virago)
• Troubles by J G Farrell (Phoenix)
• The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard (Virago)
• Fire From Heaven by Mary Renault (Arrow)
• The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark (Penguin)
• The Vivisector by Patrick White (Vintage)

The shortlist was selected by a panel of three judges, all of whom were born in or around 1970. They are journalist and critic, Rachel Cooke, ITN newsreader, Katie Derham and poet and novelist, Tobias Hill. They chose the six books from an original longlist of 21 eligible titles which are still in print and generally available today.

The best read graffiti of them all? My personal favourite was in a library bathroom at the university where I did my worthless undergrad. Someone had written “Jesus Saves!” in all apparent earnestness, and another, presumably Muslim student had added “But Allah puts in the rebound!” Burn.

Quinn Dombrowski went to the University of Chicago because Quinn Dombrowski is a great big giant nerd. She is cheerfully geeky, insistently nerdy. Quinn Dombrowski is such a huge nerd she frets that the University of Chicago is becoming too social — that the university has been gently cultivating a more well-adjusted, outgoing student body, which clashes with its famously studious reputation, which is why she went there to begin with. She has been worrying a lot about this lately. For the past two years she has made a quiet project of studying graffiti at the Regenstein Library, the school’s largest library, and during that time she has noticed an increase in fraternity and sorority letters scrawled into its pale walls and wooden carrels.

She also has concluded, after careful “statistical analysis” of the more than 1,700 pieces of graffiti she has documented at the Reg since September 27, 2007 — and judging by the words and doodles she has found scrawled — that a University of Chicago student is 63 percent more likely to be happy than sad. How does she know this? Because she categorized student graffiti into a handful of topics such as sex, school spirit and advice; transcribed and interpreted each piece of graffiti; converted her findings into spreadsheet data; then, using simple math, she crunched and considered her data. But in general, according to their scribblings, students hate chemistry, finals, themselves, the University of Chicago, everyone, Obama — and that’s about it.

Will robots soon be researching and writing journalism? I thought they already were. Hi-YOOOOH!!!

Newly upgraded robot journalist, improvement from previous versions, including ambient anomaly detection ability for seeking of stories. Upgrade robot abilities including subject photographing and subject interviewing automatically. Further including abilities to publish stories to internet instantly.

(Note, the above was actually written by a robot.) I want to see one of these things interview Atwood through her Frankenhand device. At that point I will be able to say, Not only has the future arrived, it’s arrived just as I envisioned in 1978.

That which riseth from the bottom of the infomation icebox just before payday to becometh dinner.

Wanna bet how long before a book on the new health care is rushed to print? I’ll take one month…

Samsung and Kobo come out with new e-readers

Copy of Schindler’s list goes on sale

Katherine Zeta-Jones is perhaps one of the hottest woman alive, and she gets even hotter, despite the whole icky “Michael Douglas issue”, by reading Wordsworth

First ed. of Wind in the Willows sells for £32,400… dayum…

The sequels are shamelss: Aliens vs. Pooh (from Boingboing)

Politically fearless poet and professor, dead at 62. I studied her work in university and was charmed and bettered by it. She got her MFA the year I was born.

National Book Award winning poet Ai died unexpectedly of natural causes in Oklahoma on Saturday. She was 62.

Born Florence Anthony in Texas in 1947 of mixed racial heritage — said to include Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, African-American, Irish, Southern Cheyenne and Comanche — she legally changed her name to Ai, Japanese for “love.” She was raised in Tuscon and earned an MFA in creative writing from UC Irvine in 1971.

Reader Jess sends in this article from Charlie Stross’s blog about why novels are the length they are. Very interesting stuff.

The digital turning point is 18 months away, says one analyst. If you haven’t started planning for it, someone else will “eat your lunch”.

The tipping point for digital reading is 18 months away and publishers should prepare by starting a parallel business to their print one, media futurist Gerd Leonhard said last week (19th March).

If they do not, then venture capital-backed start-ups “will eat your lunch. This is not going to be linear and gradual. Once people have the devices, it will flick the switch. I’m not saying that publishers will become redundant — the opposite is true! It creates more pressure, you’ll need more people, but you may need fewer buildings or trucks.”

In related news, Moby’s eagle eye turns to collecting stories on why Amazon can’t be trusted.

Sherman Alexie takes PEN/Faulkner

British libraries geting it right

iPad mops up two more publishers as Kindle looks on…

…Note that neither of them are Random

Vote on which Seth piece should grace the cover of The Walrus

Trekkies vs the living dead

Hey, did you know there are Hans Christian Andersen awards? Sure enough

Robert Pinsky chooses some award winners as well (from Maud)

Margaret Atwood is $500G richer today…

Canadian author Margaret Atwood and lndian-Bengali novelist Amitav Ghosh have been awarded the Dan David Prize and will share the $1 million US award.

The prize is endowed by the Dan David Foundation out of Tel Aviv University and “recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms.

There are three $1 million prizes for past, present and future achievements awarded every year, with a rotating focus on the fields of sciences, arts, and humanities. Ten per cent of the prize is to be donated to graduate students.

Personally, I think she should donate the other 90% of her winnings to a youngish, relatively hot, first time novelist working a thankless day job as an arts advocate and blogging popularly by night under an invented, acerbic identity… Maybe someone bearded and redheaded, trending toward portly, whose life would be irrevocably changed by the kindness of of a wild-haired stranger… Someone who, between parenting, work, and the pressures of daily cataloging of ultimately meaningless news items, just can’t seem to find the time to get the goddamn thing written and it’s slowly killing him, killing him, I tell you… But I digress. Congratulations, Mme Atwood.

Canadian thinker and poet Christian Bök gets Wired.

Canadian poet Christian Bök wants his work to live on after he’s gone. Like, billions of years after. He’s going to encode it directly into the DNA of the hardy bacteria Deinococcus radiodurans. If it works, his poem could outlast the human race. But it’s a tricky procedure, and Bök is doing what he can to make it even trickier. He wants to inject the DNA with a string of nucleotides that form a comprehensible poem, and he also wants the protein that the cell produces in response to form a second comprehensible poem. Here’s a peek at the hellish task this DNA Dante has condemned himself to.

A Saudi woman appearing on Abu Dhabi’s “Poet of Millions”, an American Idol-style verse-off, is courting controversy, and likely violence, by simply being a successful poet in a society that wishes to oppress and silence women. Everyone involved in literature and women’s rights the world should be pulling for her to win and then offering her whatever help and/or shelter she needs to deal with the repercussions her win. (Thanks to pal EB for the link)

What, electing that dashing young brown fellow didn’t solve the whole racism and inequality thing? And now we’re stuck with healthcare? Great. Just great. Next you’ll tell me that women are still being paid 70c on the dollar despite that whole unfortunate period in the 80s when we made them wear football shoulder pads under their business suits.

“Terry McMillan said you have to sell books out of the trunk of your car,” Mr. Mosley said.

But in the age of President Obama, when successful black writers can be found across genres and a Nobel Prize winner, Toni Morrison, can be tapped to be the honorary chairwoman of the event, do black writers still need a conference to call their own?

In interviews, many black writers and editors, and others in the book world said yes. Black authors are part of the broader society’s struggles with the legacy of discrimination and exclusion, they said, and often need a more strategic approach to getting their work promoted, reviewed and sold.

The conference, expected to attract 2,000 people, is a chance for writers to study and celebrate one another and for readers to hear writers presenting their work and dissecting social and literary themes. Over four days of workshops and discussions, the participants can also grapple with issues like the value of black sections in bookstores, the paucity of black editors in publishing and how to expand the list of black writers taught in schools.

“Is a black writers’ conference still necessary? Absolutely,” said Mr. Mosley, an author of dozens of books of all kinds who has since retired the best-selling Rawlins series. “Black writers are still facing all kinds of questions about the world they live in and the battle they’re up against,” he said. “This is a chance for us to pay attention to each other and not take on the values of the broader society.”

When I was a kid, I remember one year there were five Jennifers in one of my classses. And I think there were three Aarons. Now my boy has several Hannahs, a few Liams, and the scattered Owen. Don’t let your book fall into the zeigeist naming trap.

The Swan Thieves. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky. The House of Tomorrow. The Surrendered. The Girl with Glass Feet. The Unnamed. Enchanted Glass. The Pregnant Widow … These are all more-or-less literary novels published in the last 10 weeks or so, and their titles are virtually interchangeable in my mind. If I went into a bookshop looking for one of these, the chances are high that I’d get confused and ask the staff for The Pregnant Swan Girl Who Surrendered Unnamed Glass Tomorrow. Then they’d start laughing at me, I’d be filled with shame, my lip would start wobbling and I’d flee the shop.

I suppose the old publishing game has become very stratified, and publishers are hell-bent on making sure their new product reaches an exactly targeted market. Therefore, they give each book the perfect title for that demographic. (Yes, I know it’s a sin to use words like “market”, “product” and “demographic” when discussing books, but such is the crass, grubby world we live in.)

This was once limited to what used to be – and probably still is – called genre fiction: Chick Lit, Mum Lit, Bloke Lit, Chicks With Dicks Lit, Blokes With No Dicks Lit, Zombie Novels, Zombie Crossover Novels, Zombies With Dicks Lit, the Tom Clancy oeuvre, and so on. Now, though, what still is – and will continue to be – called literary fiction has also caught the “samey title” virus.

A few links from the other side of the keyboard.

Did Viacom try to manufacture its dispute with Google? Sounds like Google might have hired Jake Doyle to investigate this one…

If Amazon learned anything from its paddling from Macmillan, it’s that when bullying doesn’t work, try MORE bullying

Why don’t more publishers say NO to Amazon? Personally, I agree. I don’t think there’s a single conflict that can’t be resolved with pitchforks and torches-style mob justice

Publishing’s “Copernican shift“… Remember that whole pesky “digital” thing we were discussing the implications of around here seven years ago? Well, just before the 12th toll of the bell, publishing is finally looking at it too

I’ve been twitching in a dark room with a cold cloth on my eyes. The cord came in the mail yesterday and my shakes are just starting to go down. I should be right as rain as soon as I figure out how to mount this USB port in my brain.

Atonement adapted … for the vocal chords of fat people

Part-time ‘Ninja Sheila Heti reads from her story at the Guardian

I hope to hear Ben McNally tell this story one day, preferably in the style of a late Victorian colonial explorer

Ted Hughes honoured at Poets Corner

The banana-clip-visored one has spoken, and his word is good

Borders on the edge… again? For real? Still?

B&N leadership changes afoot

Duffy’s Beckham poem as an example of why classics should be taught in school

Philip Pullman being threatened by religious zealots is almost not news… almost

One thing libraries/ans are good for? Skill building for patrons

Since news emerged that Big Bird cheated on Maria with a prop-room full of assorted muppets, and that she beat him senseless with a wooden model of Bert, sponsors have been dropping from Sesame Street left, right, and centre…

All your books are belong to us:

I’m sure there are  a few of you out there who have wondered, at one time or another, What would that OCD-riddled bookninja nerd do without his precious computer? Turns out the answer is: mostly sleep. Yes, I am still largely living without my compy resources because HP decided they’d make sure each one of their laptops required a different f’n AC adaptor, probably as a fail safe to keep them from mating and forming a race of super laptops which would destroy the world. Now, while I agree with that last, IN PRINCIPLE, in practice it means I can’t find someone to give me enough juice to get my bookmarks, half-finished assignments, and sundry shit onto a thumb drive so I can work on it anywhere. Lesson learned (if the lesson is I should bill HP for my downtime and lost income).

So check back here later today and see if my new cord and brick have arrived in the mail from a faceless eBay seller in Toronto. I know. I know. But don’t say anything. Like Kratos in God of War III, all I have left is hope.

A neat little video that’s been making the rounds.

What makes a bad book bad? I know what makes a guy bad: leather jacket with many zippers, a nose you could cut cheddar cheese with, and bits of tape on his fingertips. But I digress. The Guardian’s dreamy reporter Allison Flood looks at “bad” around a recent American Book Review top 40 bad books list, which was obviously designed to provoke these kinds of responses.

Laying into Ian Fleming because his Bond books “consist entirely of clichés” is hardly revolutionary, but the 007’s creator is not the only author to come under attack from a group of US academics asked to describe what constitutes a bad book for the latest issue of the American Book Review.

The Great Gatsby is, apparently, “incredibly smug about its relationship to the traditional realistic novel”. Women in Love reads “like someone put a gun to Nietzsche’s head and made him write a Harlequin romance”. Revolutionary Road fares little better: “I am as illuminated as I am by a college essay decrying drunk driving,” says its selector, while All the Pretty Horses gets Cormac McCarthy compared to Jackie Collins. He “wraps his characters in half-truths and idealised anecdotes, much like Jackie Collins does, only his are about the Lone Star state, the border, and its cowboy myths,” says Christine Granados from Texas A&M University, adding that “McCarthy uses clichés and derivative characters to sell millions of copies”.

This is all a bit say-something-controversial-for-the-hell-of-it for my taste. There’s such bad writing out there (do I have the energy to bring up Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer? No, not really) that it feels mean-spirited, even arrogant, to pick on the classics.

Today’s hand-wringing and electronic alarmism brought to you by the number 3 and that squiggly ~ mark in the upper left corner of your keyboard.

Bob Hoover reports sums up the e-book worries for the paper book crowd reading his paper

NPR wades in on the actual value (read: cost) of e-books

Moby examines the dangers of editable e-texts

The Orange Prize longlist is out, and the judges are complaining it was a miserable time going through the books. Oh, I see. This is just an English thing. Thanks for paying me to be a high profile arbiter of taste: you all suck. Got it. Here’s chair Daisy Goodwin complaining:

To book lovers, it might appear to be a delicious, if demanding, treat – the opportunity to devour more than 100 novels by women writers and award one of them the prestigious Orange prize.

But the chair of this year’s judging panel has launched a stinging criticism of the current “grim” crop of women’s fiction – complaining that female authors appear to have suffered a collective sense of humour failure.

“There’s not been much wit and not much joy, there’s a lot of grimness out there,” Daisy Goodwin, the author and TV producer, told the Guardian. “There are a lot of books about Asian sisters. There are a lot of books that start with a rape. Pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing.”

Reading the 129 entries to this year’s competition had sometimes driven Goodwin to despair, she said, as she revealed this year’s longlist. “I think the misery memoir has had its day, but there are an awful lot of books out there which had not a shred of redemption in them. I’m more of a light and shade person and there does need to be some joy, not just misery.”

“I was surprised at how little I laughed … and the ones where there was humour were much appreciated I can tell you.”

I’d like to point out than an old ‘Ninja friend, Laila Lalami, formerly of the Moorish Girl blog, is on the list for her book, Secret Son, which I haven’t had time to get into yet. My loss. But now there’s an urgency here. I smells a shortlist a-comin’.

My power cord started sparking under the desk yesterday and so I had to retire the old boy, Of Mice and Men-style. Of course, because laptop manufacturers are a bunch of money grubbing crooks, none of the other five or six AC adapters I have in the house will fit the damn thing. And my battery gets about five minutes of charge when not plugged in, so….. I have one on order from ebay, but it looks like I’ll be relegated to borrowing computers for a few days at least. This also means I don’t have my extensive list of links and sources at hand, so I have to go with addresses I can remember here and there. Mah. So here’s a roundup of what’s what, with other posts as I can, relying on the kindness of strangers. (Making cardboard sign that reads “Will blog for bandwidth/terminal time”)

Did you know that Mark Twain liked baseball? Oh, you did?

John Grisham’s staff complete work on ebook editions

My dashing grandpappy Dennis Loy Johnson interviewed

David Beckham injury gets poem from Duffy

Lambda lit awards include some Canadian titles (as usual)

Whither the bookplate?

Writers’ Day Jobs

Joe Hill (Stephen King’s kid) gets some love from the Globe

I’ve been thinking about this for a few years now. It’s long been an issue in tech circles that what seems like permanent data is in fact degrading slowly with each move. Further, the hardware, from drives to CDs to flash memory, is horrifically fragile. If you think your data is safe on one of those thumb drives, take a look at it again in a few years. Woosh. Then there’s the obsolescence of software to read old file formats. So now that writers are increasingly storing their archives digitally, and what with all this email shite, what’s going to happen down the road with their archives? For a while there, I was printing things out and storing them in boxes, but a combination of space issues, dead tree guilt, and the sad realization that no one will ever want my archives has made me invest in the massive free storage of Google. If the Goog goes down, I go down with it.

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

Imagine having a record but no record player.

All of which means that archivists are finding themselves trying to fend off digital extinction at the same time that they are puzzling through questions about what to save, how to save it and how to make that material accessible.

That which pooleth in the pit of information.

Signs of the Times: Wiley looking at job cuts?

Stephen King does vampire comic… Way to push the envelope, Steve! (Though I suppose we should give it a chance… he does surprise still, on occasion)

B&N will have an iPad app

Signs of the Times: Glenn Douchbeck still driving sales of lefty French book

Hollywood trade magazines in peril! Outraged, frightened protestors descend on Capitol Hill by the nothings!

Lost Shakespeare play no hoax

Mailer’s kid is into strippers… and self-publishing

Signs of the Times: New College Graduates To Be Cryogenically Frozen Until Job Market Improves

Salon is just picking up on this Atwood piece from a few years ago. But it’s a good time to remember how much fun it was:

As my grandpappy Moby used to say (like, this morning), “What would a day be without another scandal from Amazon?” This time it centres around tax avoision (it’s a word, look it up) strategies and general corporate douchery.

Following a 70 percent earnings increase last quarter, the company this week terminated its business relationships with its Colorado affiliates. The move was a response to new Colorado legislation compelling online retailers to either collect the sales taxes that every other business collects, or at least disclose that customers must pay the levy to the state themselves.

The bill was pragmatic, seeking to raise much-needed revenues as Colorado’s infrastructure and schools buckle under a $2 billion budget shortfall. But Amazon, indifferent to such emergencies, reacted with punitive petulance, sending a deliberate message to lawmakers in every other state: Make us play by the same tax rules as other businesses, and your state will be punished, too.

The company, you see, fears that most capitalist of principles: fair competition. It instead relies on a rigged market.

Here in Canada, one of Amazon’s pseudopods, presumably holding a shark with a bear and a laser strapped to it, has slipped across the border and surrounded the House of Commons. Will the Harper government let them in? Well, considering stupid evil* is a specialty of the entire Conservative party, one can only guess. But it’s not just government-spoon-fed slack-jawed yokels and predictably vitriolic Albertans/905ers that like the idea: some thinking individuals are on Amazoodle’s side too… Enter Michael Geist.

Amazon.ca is now well-entrenched in the Canadian e-commerce landscape and seeks to create its own Canadian distribution channel. The plan requires government approval, which recently led to predictable outcries from the Canadian Booksellers Association. The CBA wrote to Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore – who must decide the issue – to urge him to reject Amazon’s application.

It argued that Amazon’s entry would “detrimentally affect independent businesses and would raise serious concerns over the protection of our cultural industries. Individual Canadian booksellers have traditionally played a key role in ensuring the promotion of Canadian authors and Canadian culture. These are values that no American dot-com retailer could ever purport to understand or promote.”

The CBA’s attempt to cloak the issue as a matter of Canadian culture is unsurprising, but Moore should recognize this for what it is – a transparent attempt to hamstring a tough competitor that ultimately hurts the Canadian culture sector.

* Stupid Evil: that is evil that doesn’t involve violence or the direct ruination of others. Also known as “stevil”.

Granta’s latest issue is themed on “Work”, and the NYT asks, in the way the NYT is wont to ask, the same question Granta took an entire issue to flesh out, but in about 500 words and with a slight twist: Why is work missing from contemporary literature? Because work is, frankly, boring, and we get too much of it anyway?

The systems most white-collar employees are embedded in have gotten only more complicated since Kafka’s office days. And sometimes fact is more boring than fiction. Even when a profession seems promisingly rich with human implication, the full details can be awfully hard to explain. As John Lanchester argued in The Telegraph, television can get away with a “cartoon version” of a profession, but a novel cannot. “You can’t explain in fiction,” he wrote, at least “not at the necessary length” to convey the complexity of “modern working lives.”

Or at least you can’t in so-called literary fiction, if you want it to stay “literary.”

(Also important, and perhaps more relevant than any of these questions is George Murray’s non-work-related poem about snow on the Granta website. I mean, let’s be honest here, people.)

A duo of linguistic shizzle fo all-y’alls today, OMFG ROFL. First up, the NYT Magazine points out that despite the ad copy trying to sell you a new vocab program or dictionary, it’s not the size of your vocabulary that counts, it’s how you use it. Honest, honey. Your mono-syllabic grunts totally satisfy me.

Study after study over the past hundred years has tied vocabulary size to higher socioeconomic status, greater educational achievement and a host of other goods. Of all the benefits, real or imaginary, of a robust vocabulary, perhaps the most appealing is that vocabulary is heritable — that you can pass it along to your children like an acquired trait in Lamarckian evolution. The Educational Testing Service, which has been concerned with improving vocabularies since 1947, issued a report in 2009, “Parsing the Achievement Gap II,” which explained some of the benefits of an extensive vocabulary. Among the more notable benefits it cited was that children who are raised in higher socioeconomic brackets tend to have vocabularies that are remarkably larger than those who are raised in poorer ones. By the age of 3, children who are raised in a professional household know twice as many words as do children raised on welfare.

Yet before you set aside that copy of “Goodnight Moon” in favor of reading to your progeny from Merriam-Webster in the evening, consider that it is not simply the number of words but also how they are used that is important.

Next: what has Twitter done to our language, asks David Crystal? Same thing every other invention has done to it—simply changed it.

“The ethos of 50 years ago was that there was one kind of English that was right and everything else was wrong; one kind of access that was right and everything else was inferior,” he says. “Then nobody touched language for two generations. When it gradually came back in, we didn’t want to go back to what we did in the 1950s. There’s a new kind of ethos now.”

What has replaced it is something far more fluid – descriptive rather than prescriptive, as the terminology goes. In schools, appropriateness has replaced the principle of correctness. “Now, one looks at all varieties of language and asks why they are used, says Crystal. “We are rearing a generation of kids who are more equitable and more understanding about the existence of language variety and why it is there.”

This doesn’t sit easy with the traditionalists, of whom there are still many – as Lynne Truss’s bestselling Eats, Shoots and Leaves proved. That book was a dog-whistle call to all those who missed the old certainties of grammar textbooks. “It is interesting,” notes Crystal, his usually cool delivery tinged suddenly with a hint of exasperation. “What did Lynne do after Eats, Shoots and Leaves? She wrote Talk to the Hand [a book about rudeness and courtesy]. Anyone interested in language ends up writing about the sociological issues around it.”

Crystal calls this a “moral panic” over “mythologies” – his clearest example being the belief that text messaging is destroying children’s ability to spell. “It’s all nonsense, but people believe it.”

Given the obscene glut of stories, almost daily I find myself looking at the latest crop of e-book articles, wondering, “What can I leave out today?” Here are three I couldn’t.

Agents, publishers, and authors in Mexican standoff over e-rights for hybrid books

iPad’s text-to-voice feature may get the nads of publishers’ legal teams tingling

Will e-reader’s survive the coming of the tablet?

Does a room of one’s own really help the author write the great novel? A Guardian blogger asks us to put the glamour aside for a minute and look at some “realities”: the writers of our great books didn’t do their work at cushy author residencies or out in idyllic cabins. They wrote in whatever wee shithole they could find/afford/drag the squatting bums out of.

Here’s the thing: comfort breeds complacency; rural bliss breeds The Lost Symbol. In Dan Brown’s case, his enormous beach house has only worsened an already deep malaise: Robert Langdon jolted upright in his soft leather seat, startling out of the semiconscious daydream. He was sitting all alone in the enormous cabin of a Falcon 2000EX corporate jet as it bounced its way through turbulence. In the background, the dual Pratt & Whitney engines hummed evenly (chapter 1, page 1).

Real writers need frustration. They need embarrassment. They need cold, uncomfortable rooms, miles from a mobile signal. There should be an infestation of at least one parasite, a backlog of warnings from the Student Loans Company and just enough coffee for what Don DeLillo calls “an occasional revelation”.

Woolf wrote standing up at her desk. So did Hemingway, Dickens, Philip Roth. John Fante starved through Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Orwell coughed blood in the coldest winter on record to finish Nineteen Eighty-Four. “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle,” he wrote, “like a long bout of some painful illness.”

So, what he’s saying is we should trade the quiet romanticism of Tuscan villa/NE USA artist colonies in for the quiet romanticism of dank garrets and consumption. I get it.

China has denied entry to an HIV-positive Australian writer in what is pretty obviously a case of discrimination. Australian writers have responded with a sharply worded letter, which is about as deadly as our set can get.

COETZEE, Keneally and Tsiolkas are among almost 100 Australian writers who signed a letter saying they ”were dismayed to learn of the Chinese government’s refusal to grant a visa to the Australian writer Robert Dessaix on the grounds that he is HIV positive. We would like to express our support for Robert and to protest a decision founded on ignorance and prejudice.”

Down which slippeth and slideth the unfit-for-human-consumption portions of information’s chopped organ meat.

Canada Reads chooses a (yawn) winner… (the yawn is for Canada Reads, which is getting a little stale, no? I hear the book is quite good..)

Apple don’t want you to see her pear or his banana

Amazon UK launching author pages

January sales numbers up slightly

Text based video games making a comeback… Comeback? (You are in a room with a table and a flask. Exits are N, E, and W. Get flask… You cannot get ye flask… Use flask… You must get ye flask first… Get ye flask…  You cannot get ye flask… WHY THE FUCK CAN I NOT GET THAT GODDAMN FLASK!?!? Syntax Error…)

Doug Wright Award for graphica nominees include Seth and …. Doug Wright

In what may be, mathematically, the last possible permutation for an arts page wank fest on the question of who wrote the Shakespeare plays, Robert McCrum now asks actors—who everybody knows will go out of their way to try to answer a question without an answer because they live to hear their own voices, the vapid narcissists—for their opinions. Sorry. Former actor speaking. I’m still working through a few things. (Seriously, though, this article is better than most on this stale subject…)

Even in his own time, Shakespeare drove people mad with his modest Stratford origins. In 1592, rival dramatist Robert Greene made a deathbed attack on the “conceit” of the “upstart crow” from the provinces who considered himself “the onely Shake-scene”. For Greene, and every subsequent Shakespeare conspiracy theorist, there was something enraging about the poet’s genius. The explanation must be that Shakespeare was not original but an impostor “beautified with our feathers”.

Later generations went further. There was such an unbridgeable chasm between the complex brilliance of the plays and what they reveal about their author’s education and experience, on the one hand, and the bare facts of Shakespeare’s life, on the other, that a better explanation than “genius” had to be found. Unquestionably, said the “anti-Stratfordians”, as they came to be known, the recorded life of the man called Shakespeare could not possibly yield the astonishing universality and dazzling invention of the canon.

They had a point.