Many Canadian authors either relocate or disguise their locales to make them more attractive to foreign markets (read: America). But here’s a novel that doesn’t. Andrew Kaufman’s The Waterproof Bible is unabashedly Canadian; which is bold, says Russell Smith. And apparently successful.

That naming of a real intersection is a daring act and one that is controversial in Canadian publishing. Here is the issue: When situating fiction in your hometown, you risk relying on street names as a kind of shorthand, a code for those in the know who will immediately situate the characters and action in terms of social class and ambience. But that relies on what’s called extratextual knowledge on the part of the reader. I know Queen and Broadview as rather seedy, for example. I have done this rather lazily in my own fiction: I have mentioned Yorkville, a shopping district in Toronto, as shorthand for rich, which is a message lost to anyone who doesn’t know Toronto. I have had editors suggest I take out street names to make the city a less specific one: If you replace College Street with “a street of cafés near the large university” you sum up the atmosphere of the place in a way that’s accessible for a foreigner.

But then you also lose a certain amount of pride. Let’s be honest: We all know the primary reason for such erasures. It’s to make the book more saleable to Americans. We all want our books and films and TV shows to be published in the United States, and we know a large proportion of their entertainment-consuming population is not interested in looking beyond their borders. The story might be set in Ottawa, and it might be recognizable to Canadians as Ottawa, but if the Americans think it’s a nameless northeastern U.S. city, they’re more likely to buy it, so let’s not scare them off by naming it.

What seepeth from city pipes into the basement of your awareness… (This introduction brought to you by my basement)

Margaret Atwood to sing in musical about hockey…

The Post interviews the new Paris Review editor about where things are going with the venerable magazine

Take a peek at the new iPad bookstore

Texas to rewrite text books to portray conservatives and Christians (redundant?) in better light

Build in your own bookcases? (Thanks, Steve!)

Beware the dangers of the internet

Michael Crummey wins the Commonwealth for his glorious, sweeping novel, Galore!

Friggin illegal immigrants Mantel, Holmes, and Athill take NBCC prizes away from hard working American authors

Lyon, Turner, Zieroth up for lucrative BC Book Prizes

Best translations awards announced, includes Melville House book!

Wired correspondent, and book collector, Brad Moon spent six months living and dying by the ebook. His verdict? Digital is the way to go. You distract him, I’ll circle around behind with the truncheon and burlap sack. Start the van.

My reading habits have indeed changed and, if anything, I’m reading more than ever. The eBook reader I have is compact enough that it literally slips into a pocket, so I have it with me everywhere. I can read serially on the run -flipping between books as mood or need dictates- with hundreds of books in hand and no worries about searching to find and sling around the novels I want to have handy. I’m buying books just as frequently, but they’re eBooks. Digital, taking up no space and pristine forever (although I realize that “forever” is as limited as any digital storage method can be). Like the iTunes Store and other counterparts opened up the record labels’ back catalogs and resulted in the release of thousands of albums that, for years, had been available only in used record shops, books that were once out of print are finding their way into circulation again, in electronic format. At the other extreme, I used to wait for new releases to complete their hardcover run before taking the plunge and buying a paperback version, but now I buy the book on release, usually for the price I would have paid for the paperback. Granted, that pricing seems to be on quicksand at the moment, but even if it falters, I’m no worse off than before. My eBooks are backed up, so a hard drive or device failure doesn’t mean my copy is gone. I buy ePub versions so I’m not locked onto particular device (unlike a Kindle, for example). No-one else in the household has an eBook reader yet, but when they do, there’s no fighting over the same book -we can all read it at the same time, if so inclined. I’ve even borrowed books from the library for the first time in many years. I can log onto my local branch, check out (or put a hold) on the eBook I want and a pristine copy shows up. The downside to the library aspect is a lack of titles and the still compelling need to accumulate my own library, because who knows when I might feel the immediate need to re-read Dune for the umpteenth time.

Is Penguin trying to rewrite history with it’s Popular Penguins program? Publishing Perspectives ponders potential possibilities.

You may have heard of it. Last year, in celebration of its 75th anniversary, Penguin launched a series of books dubbed “Popular Penguins” in Australia, New Zealand and India. Priced at just AU$9.95, they are a series of classic titles which are priced cheaper than a pack of cigarettes, the original notion when the very idea of a Penguin paperback was launched in the last century.

Much as I’m full of admiration for Penguin’s campaign, which has seen titles from its “Popular Penguins” series appear seemingly everywhere, dare I suggest there’s some mythologizing going on here?

The Penguin story is a great publishing story but, lest we forget, this latest campaign is less a celebration of a world-changing event and more a part of the ongoing battle for market share among the major publishers. It’s about selling books, and sucking up shelf space that would otherwise be taken up by Penguin’s competitors in the process.

There’s also a danger of history being re-written in two ways

But which one? Which saga are we updating today? Amazon: company of several concurrent, mildly embarrassing sagas. Today’s saga update involves the cheapo comic book saga reported earlier this week. In order buy themselves time to correct everything that’s gone wrong, they’ve had to take down the buy buttons from all comix distributed by Diamond.

In what is apparently an effort to correct the glitch that caused the wild discounting of graphic novels on Amazon.com, the online retailer has been forced to remove the buy buttons from all comics publishers distributed by Diamond Comics Distributors. Right now, graphic novels from Marvel, IDW, Dark Horse, Archaia, Image Comics, Top Shelf and others—comics publishers distributed by Diamond—cannot be purchased on Amazon.com except through resellers.

A source knowledgeable about the situation told PW that Amazon has been forced to temporarily take down buy buttons for all titles supplied by Diamond in order to correct the problem. According to the source, Amazon has to do an audit to figure out which customers got books and at what prices. While the situation is temporary, the source said, “there is no timetable for when this will be completed.” The buttons were still off Thursday morning.

In an update to one of its minor sagas, a group in Colorado is calling for an Amazon boycott because they closed down the associates program there.

Could Google translation get so good it puts professionals out of a job?

“What you see on Google Translate is state of the art” in computer translations that are not limited to a particular subject area, said Alon Lavie, an associate research professor in the Language Technologies Institute at Carnegie Mellon University.

Google’s efforts to expand beyond searching the Web have met with mixed success. Its digital books project has been hung up in court, and the introduction of its social network, Buzz, raised privacy fears. The pattern suggests that it can sometimes misstep when it tries to challenge business traditions and cultural conventions.

But Google’s quick rise to the top echelons of the translation business is a reminder of what can happen when Google unleashes its brute-force computing power on complex problems.

Into which falleth the 1up of news that just jumpethed over yon scorpion.

Would you pay $31 for an e-book?

Hillary Duff to write books for “tweens”, which I can only assume are some kind of hybrid vampire/wizard children

French indy collective launches portal

Financial numbers show Hachette and e-books up

If you’re in Texas and dig touring the graves of authors, you’re in luck! DFW archive to go on display

Google to Italy: grazie mille!

A mentally-handicapped (apparently) 28-year-old who was George Bush’s speechwriter is now his ghostwriter… I had no idea Bush was so inclusive in his staffing choices, but how else to explain those speeches? Christopher Michel not only overcame the limits of his condition to complete his schooling at Yale, he also used his extra-thick crayons to find  friendship, solace, and understanding in the mental arms of another retarded graduate of Yale. And together they ran the world. Sure to be a Disney movie soon.

At a reunion for George W. Bush’s administration on February 26, the Decider joked about his upcoming memoir. “This is going to come as quite a shock to people up here that I can write a book,” Bush said, “much less read one.” Of course, Bush is writing the tentatively titled Decision Points in the presidential sense—that is, he’s putting it through the word processor of a loyal aide. The aide is Christopher Michel, a 28-year-old former White House speechwriter. In a phone interview from Dallas, where he is knee-deep in the manuscript, Michel says, “The president is working on it pretty much constantly, and that means that I am, too.”

How Michel (pronounced Mi-SHEL) landed in Bush’s inner circle is one of the most intriguing untold stories of the last administration. He arrived at the White House as a fresh-outta-Yale rookie in 2003. Within a few years, without much of the public noticing, he had inherited the mantle once held by Karen Hughes and Michael Gerson—he was Bush’s voice.

So… seriously… how do you put that on resume? I was Bush’s voice. I suppose if you’re applying for a position at Fox or as a towel boy for Rush Limbaugh, but…

It goes way deeper than Harry Potter now, people. Apparently adults are reading all kinds of books for kids. I wonder if this is related to the increase in sucky, petulant 20-something adults living in their parents’ basement and whining about everything instead of doing shit… Nah. Couldn’t be.

Thanks to huge crossover hits like Stephenie Meyer’s bloodsucking “Twilight” saga, Suzanne Collins’ fight-to-the-death “The Hunger Games” trilogy, Rick Riordan’s “The Lightning Thief” and Markus Zusak’s Nazi-era “The Book Thief,” YA is one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak publishing market. Where adult hardcover sales were down 17.8% for the first half of 2009 versus the same period in 2008, children’s/young adult hardcovers were up 30.7%.

“Even as the recession has dipped publishing in general, young adult has held strong,” said David Levithan, editorial director and vice president of Scholastic, publisher of “The Hunger Games,” as well as of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, the series largely credited with jump-starting this juggernaut of a trend.

“You go on the subway and see 40-year-old stockbrokers reading ‘Twilight,’ ” said Levithan, himself a YA author. “That wouldn’t have happened five years ago.”

Ah, five years ago. A golden age. Truth be told, I’m kind of hooked on this book I’m reading with my seven year gold called “Warriors”. It’s about cats. We’re nearing the end of the first one and I went and bought the next two, just to keep us in stock. The writing is okay (certainly better than the Dan Brown/James Patterson set), and the story is action packed. The boy is mesmerized.

E-books working out well for academia… and, relatedly, probably trees too

Another print-won’t-disappear-because-it’s-beautiful article

NYT book review to be made available to e-readers

Boston to kill libraries based on complex mathematical formula

Nation Shudders at Large Block of Uninterrupted Text:

Unable to rest their eyes on a colorful photograph or boldface heading that could be easily skimmed and forgotten about, Americans collectively recoiled Monday when confronted with a solid block of uninterrupted text.

Dumbfounded citizens from Maine to California gazed helplessly at the frightening chunk of print, unsure of what to do next. Without an illustration, chart, or embedded YouTube video to ease them in, millions were frozen in place, terrified by the sight of one long, unbroken string of English words.

“Why won’t it just tell me what it’s about?” said Boston resident Charlyne Thomson, who was bombarded with the overwhelming mass of black text late Monday afternoon. “There are no bullet points, no highlighted parts. I’ve looked everywhere—there’s nothing here but words.”

Welcome, dear novelists, to what you call the “Do-It-Yourself Book Tour” and we poets call “The Book Tour”. So now that I know you’re sucking up your pride and slumming it on moldy basement couches like me, wipe that smug smile off your face when I see you at parties. And note to Michael Winter: soon you too will be wearing a “poor poet’s jacket” as you once refered to my PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE (if slightly frayed) blazer. Mark my words. Mark my words.

As the business of publishing changes, book tours increasingly look like bad risks. “In 99.9% of cases,” says Peter Miller, director of publicity at Bloomsbury USA, “you can’t justify the costs through regular book sales.”

Which is why when McSweeney’s published Cotter’s first novel, “Fever Chart,” and La Ganga’s prose poetry memoir, “Stoners and Self-Appointed Saints,” came out with Red Hen Press, neither publisher was able to provide more than moral support.

La Ganga, 41, a cake decorator, and Cotter, 45, a rare book dealer, relied on many kindnesses: Relatives bought them new tires, and friends gave them Starbucks and McDonald’s gift cards. They spent only one night in a motel, staying instead with family and friends and in the crash pads they found on couchsurfing.com. The benefits: shared meals, new connections and (mostly) friendly pets.

“I learned a lot doing the tour,” says La Ganga, who cold-called bookstores to set up readings. Indeed, with no advance publicity and no connection to local literary communities, it was, at times, a steep learning curve. In Pittsburgh, the pair arrived at a Borders store to discover that the staff, unaware of their event, had turned people away. “I’m going to call it ‘tuition,’ ” she continues, “the money we spent on it.”

Authors or editors? Where does the buck stop on the whole “facts” vs. “wild, sales-inducing fantasy”? Should editors really be responsible when authors turn out to be lying dickheads? The whole Pellegrino saga down south has made the NYT (ironically) do some souls searching on behalf of the publishing industry.

This is not the first time a publisher has been humiliated by an author’s unverified work. But this instance has occurred at a time when the publisher’s traditional role is under economic and technological stress.

With the rise of electronic books, makers of reading devices and online retailers are putting pressure on prices and the traditional book publishing business model. And, as with record labels and newspapers, digital media raises the question of what part the traditional book publisher will play in the future.

“If book publishers are supposed to be the gatekeepers,” said Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of “Studio 360,” a public radio program, “tell me exactly what they’re closing the gate to.”

In the case of “The Last Train From Hiroshima,” the author, Charles Pellegrino, said he had been duped by a source and insisted that other sources the publisher questioned definitely existed.

Publishers say that responsibility for errors and fabrications ultimately must lie with the author. “It would not be humanly possible to fact-check books the way magazine articles can be fact-checked, just because of length,” said Robert A. Gottlieb, the renowned editor who worked at the publisher Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker magazine, which has a celebrated fact-checking department.

But in many recent cases publishers did not seem to ask basic questions of authors, accepting their versions on almost blind faith.

Well, duh. But also, YAY! Anything that brings more stories into a language can only help build understanding and good will… except with, you know, [whispers] Republicans….

The Arabic version of the book, “A Tale of Love and Darkness,” went on sale late last month in Beirut, Lebanon, where it has received positive commentary — notably by Abdo Wazen, cultural editor of the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat — as well as some angry reaction. The book is due to be distributed more widely in the region in the coming weeks.

In explaining his decision, Mr. Khoury said that literature was an important bridge and that he had a specific goal in mind with this book, a point he includes in a preface to the translation.

“This book tells the history of the rebirth of the Jewish people,” he said as he sat in his law office. “We can learn from it how a people like the Jewish people emerged from the tragedy of the Holocaust and were able to reorganize themselves and build their country and become an independent people. If we can’t learn from that, we will not be able to do anything for our independence.”

Ah, “No comment“… A motto shared between the guilty and the inept since the dawn of corporate time. If anyone wants to get a kick in on Amazon’s ribs before it gets back up and wipes the soccer pitch mud from its face, now’s the time. (But remember, Canucks, the bully may switch schools soon and you’ll find yourself seated next to him in class…)

Calls and messages to Amazon for comment on the pricing gaffe have not been returned.

Many of the mispriced titles were hardcover collections of classic comics selling for more than $100 that were being offered for $14.99 or less. While there are reports that some of the lucky buyers have received their heavily discounted purchases, many other purchasers have not. Bleeding Cool reports that some purchasers have received letters canceling their orders; while some who ordered multiple copies of pricey hardcover editions, for say $8, have been told that Amazon will ship only one copy of the mislabeled book.

Even in what we now perceive as the Golden Ages of literature, the best stuff floated on top of a soupy sea of shite. So what’s so different about today? How do we know we’re not in a Golden Age right now?*

Just at the moment there’s a constant background murmur of complaint from what one might call the New Elitists that the pure well of our literature is being polluted by – for example – celebrity novels and ghosted memoirs. To say nothing, of course, about the explosion of stuff that’s appearing, unmediated, on the web. (Previous blogs here have touched on this theme, I know.)

But how new or different is this, actually? My answer is that the process of literature, from long before Shakespeare, has always involved oodles of ephemera (spelt C – R – A – P). You can illustrate this assertion from virtually any period from the Middle Ages onwards, but I want to choose just three discrete moments when a contemporary IT revolution sponsored what seemed to be an unruly proliferation of popular self-expression.

(Answer: Dan Brown)

Ah, the Onion. Always so painfully true (if you’re at work or the kids are around, make sure you use headphones to listen…)

Breaking News: Some Bullshit Happening Somewhere

An open letter from CBA president Stephen Cribar warns the government against allowing Amazon into Canada. The Globe has some analysis. What do you think?

The booksellers association warned the Heritage Minister that allowing Amazon to operate here would contravene the Investment Canada Act, which requires that foreign investments in the book sector be compatible with national cultural policies and “of net benefit to Canada and the Canadian-controlled sector.”

“To allow Amazon to enter the Canadian marketplace will detrimentally affect independent businesses and would raise serious concerns over the protection of our cultural industries,” CBA president Stephen Cribar said in a letter to Mr. Moore.

The CBA said the federal government should reject Amazon’s application partly because an American online retailer can’t ensure the promotion of Canadian authors and culture.

The rising tension between Canadian booksellers and Amazon underlines the paradox in federal policy that allows Amazon to run a virtual business – Amazon.ca – as long as it does not have a physical presence in the country.

Into which tumbleth the book world’s minutiae.

An Amazon screw up deeply discounts expensive comics and drives graphica to bestseller list

FYI: UT <3s DFW

Giller jury comprised of Monica Ali Smith, Claire Messud, and a guy from CBC

Ex-FSG editor Lorin Stein to take helm at Paris Review

9,000 changes to new ed of Finnegan’s Wake: five bucks to first person who can point them all out without involuntary admission to psychiatric ward

Eric Hill and Spot the Dog

More job cuts at Borders US

Galleycat points to a video of how book covers are made: six hours of work in two minutes:

An established author decides to self-publish his book of short stories. Is this a warning signal to an outdated publishing model?  Note that he’s doing it with a book of short stories, not a novel… Low risk experiment? There was a guy here in Canada who did this years ago, leaving Harper Collins to pursue self-publishing. I honestly can’t remember his name, but he was compelling and a nice guy. Little help? I hope he’s doing okay and that they find his body some day.

In an unusual move for an established author, critically acclaimed novelist, memoirist and National Book Award finalist John Edgar Wideman is teaming up with self-publishing and print-on-demand service Lulu.com to release, Briefs, Stories for the Palm of the Mind, a new collection of his short stories. The new book will go on sale exclusively through Lulu.com beginning March 14 and will be launched at a series of live readings from the book that will be held in New York and Los Angeles.

Wideman is the latest established writer to experiment with releasing an original book in a nontraditional manner. His books have been published almost exclusively by Houghton Mifflin for years.

Citing changes in the publishing business and a desire for more control over the publishing process, Wideman said, “I’ve been thinking about alternatives for a long time. I like the idea of being in charge. I have more control over what happens to my book. And I have more control over whom I reach.” Wideman also noted his “distaste” for what he called mainstream publishing’s “blockbuster syndrome”–the tendency for large trade  publishing houses to focus their resources on books with bestseller potential.

The McSweeney’s magnate and literary wunderkind is growing up and getting the respect it’s becoming apparent he deserves. Here he’s profiled in the Guardian as “America’s conscience”… I don’t know about that, but he’s definitely something positive for America. As an early adopter of McSweeney’s in the late 90’s and HBWSG (which I reviewed for the Globe in 2000—my first professional review), I was an early fan, but then grew tired of what appeared to be a sort of false, ironic earnestness in the pieces coming out of the magazine. I drifted away from it, in part because it always felt like it was laughing at people more than the jokes, but have continued to follow Eggers’ work and he’s really living up to the hype.

Writing the book was, he has said, an act of rebellion in some ways, and once it was out there, selling so crazily, and winning itself a Pulitzer prize nomination, its success was kind of alarming, though he is at pains to emphasise that he always welcomed the responses of individual readers. “I thought it would be read by 29 year olds in Brooklyn, treating it as an experimental text. But the first few hundred people who came up to me said, ‘I lost my parents, too.’ I know authors who hate that kind of thing. It drives them crazy. But I feel like any point of intersection is valid.”Anyway, he seems to have been rowing away from it ever since. After A Heartbreaking Work… he wrote a novel, and then, in 2006, What Is the What, which he called fiction but which was based closely on the true story of a Sudanese Lost Boy called Valentino Achak Deng. The book was widely acclaimed – it won the Prix Médicis in France – and has since become a much-loved totem for liberal America. President Obama read it and urged his White House aides to do the same; Duke University’s Class of 2012 was sent a special edition of the novel and told to read it before arriving on campus. Eggers is still close to Valentino. The desk that runs the foundation that was established by McSweeney’s in his name is right next door, beside those of the bright young things. Thanks to the proceeds of What Is the What, Valentino has built a school in Sudan. Eggers hopes to visit it this year. “We try not to be hit and run. We give micro-loans and I have no problem helping people out financially. Three-dimensional results are important to me. I did once spend some time just writing, and floating around, and I lost my mind a little bit. I wasn’t so good at that. I guess I’m very practical. My mom taught me that. That’s why I get along with Zeitoun so well, and with Valentino. They build things. They make things happen.”

Does he also find it relaxing to hide behind them on the page? “Yes! It’s ideal. Remember that I started as a journalist [he worked on slate.com and founded his own magazine, Might]. Then, when I was 29, I wrote a memoir. I didn’t know it would make sense to anybody. I certainly didn’t think anyone would read it…” He pauses. “I feel like I scratched that itch, I guess.” Does the memoir now feel like some kind of aberration? “Yeah! Aberration is a word I have used a lot. That’s exactly how I see it. I don’t know how to improve upon aberration. Even using the first person; I’ve been desperately trying to avoid that.”

Why hasn’t the literary world been able to pin down Toronto? Is it because the city lacks character or because it’s still “becoming”?

As author Jonathan Lethem told me in an interview concerning his most recent novel Chronic City – which is an epic, hallucinatory riff on the past and possible future mythologies of New York City – “You’re lucky. Toronto is a city that’s just comfortable being a city.”

Why lucky? As I read books that trade in the particular histories and mythologies of cities – as Chronic City does with New York’s, William Boyd’s Ordinary Thunderstorms or Ian McEwan’s Saturday do with London, or Brad Leithauser’s The Art Student’s War even manage for Detroit – I’m always struck by the scarcity of this kind of literature sprung from Toronto. I’m not talking about books merely set here, though even those are conspicuously under-represented considering the city’s size and state of constant flux, but those that spring from a certain shared idea of what the city is. Novels that can imagine what a city might be or become because there’s a consensus – at least between the writer and ideal reader – of what the city is.

In this regard, Michael Redhill’s Consolation remains one of the most astute fictional accounts of what living in this city is like. His Toronto is a place that disregards its history, that, in its struggle to become something, literally buries all traces of what it was. History disappears in the process, but with it goes the necessary conditions to build from that history. Projecting a city’s future is only possible if the past is sufficiently present. Without it, the Toronto of tomorrow remains as murky as the skyline of a March dawn.

Is Chindigo looking to dodge its own death by selling out to Amazon? Despite tapping deeply into the lucrative picture frames and useless-point-of-sale-plastic-shit markets, Indigo’s death has been predicted by analysts and wags for some time now. And with word of Amazon bringing it’s three-ring circus north, it looked more and more likely another designer scented candle was lit by Heather as she cried silently into a holiday themed napkin set deep in her mountain fortress on Bay Street.

Now Heather Reisman, chief executive officer at Indigo Books & Music Inc, has sent a letter to the Minister of Culture asking for clarification of the government’s position on foreign ownership in the book sector. She said she wanted to know “whether this is a fundamental change in the government policy”. She told the Globe & Mail that the move had the “potential to reshape the landscape”.

Under Canadian law bookselling is one of a number of cultural trades protected from foreign ownership so that American influences do not overpower Canada’s culture. Reisman told G&M: “Our request was to determine whether this is a change in policy indicating that book retailing no longer needs to be controlled by Canadians.” The government had previously blocked Reisman entering into a partnership with the US-owned bookseller Borders.

The move could lead to a huge shake-up of Canada’s book trade. Moving into the country would mean the company could ship to Canadian consumers more quickly and cost-effectively. Amazon’s proposal was issued on 27th January, and could take 45 days to “determine if it will be of direct cultural benefit to Canada”, Tim Warmington, media relations officer for Canadian Heritage, told The Bookseller earlier in the week.

“Reshape the landscape…” and “huge shake-up…” I know. I KNOW! It’s too funny, right?

Yet all hope is not lost for you, Head… Do you mind if I call you Head? See, it’s pretty close to common knowledge that now that you’ve nearly accomplished your long-term goal of completely destroying of the Canadian bookselling trade, you’re looking for a way to escape the disease-ridden monster you’ve created, presumably to go on to another hobby that will keep you busy dreaming up ways to separate disposable income from people in the most brain-dead ways possible. See, there might be an out that allows you to do what you live for, Head: appear to win. Moby links to an article on INDEX//mb that postulates the following:

It is news because it means Amazon could dominate on-line sales of general merchandise in Canada. The Bay and Canadian Tire would be screwed.

It is news because it would mean Canadian Heritage would finally clarify the ownership provisions in the book trade that have been fuzzy ever since Simon and Schuster set up in Canada and Little Brown Canada went away.

But it is huge news because it gives Heather Reisman — owner of Indigo/Chapters and Coles — the opportunity to sell her chain of ‘cultural department’ stores thereby, dodging the bullet everybody knows is coming.

Think about it.

The chain has too much square footage and it inherited some bad leases during the Chapters merger. It is in a sector with low margins and insane returns. Attempts to diversify have been mixed –  toy sales have been successful but Pistachio has failed. The online book business has been hemorrhaging money. And the digital wave hasn’t even hit yet. If Tower Records and Blockbuster are any indication, big-box bookstores need to prepare themselves for the day when the customers don’t come in anymore.

Wake-y, wake-y, sweepyhead! Oh, wook… who’s a tired boy…? Aw.

Sony takes on the iPad with an e-reader/netbook/gaming machine…

Why Burton’s Alice in Wonderland sucks

B&N to bundle e-books with print books

Iris Murdoch was a dirty old dame… God, I wish I’d been around then…

Britain’s libraries coming to the end of all the tap steps they know?

Popular Science has put its entire run of the magazine online… free… AWESOME!

Russell Smith laments the coming obsolescence of the bookshelf.  I hear you, brother. But out here in the wilds of St. John’s our rows and rows of shelves will always have a secondary (soon to be primary?) function: insulation. Nothing like a stack of dead trees to keep the neighbour’s disco parties to a dull thump, and the North Atlantic wind to a puffy squeak. Hooray for books on windy days!

So I always wonder, on every move, why I add to the cost and cut down the space in my inevitably tiny new living quarters by keeping these. People come to see my minuscule new living room and say, hmm, you could have another foot and a half without that wall of bookshelves. True, but then you would never be able to distract yourself, while waiting for me to dress, by pulling down, at random, Weapons of World War II and 100 Erotic Drawings.

But you’d probably have brought your own e-reader with you, which you’d be looking at anyway (checking Facebook, updating: “I am so mad right now”). Book-walls are just aesthetic now, just an unusually dense wallpaper: We don’t really need them for consultation. I can probably find the complete text of most of them online within an hour. It’s the same for CDs: If you have the time to copy them all, you can throw them all away and buy music online for the rest of your life. In the future, we will live in ever-smaller houses with ever-larger TV screens, so you need all the wall-space you have. And all our books will be invisible, like our music: The sum total of our literary experience will be a list of file names on a grey plastic machine in a briefcase.

Amazon.ca First Novel Award nominees are up

Goin’ All Roguey Too to hit shelves soon

S&S brokers deal with Man Utd to publish club titles?

Jon Stewart to host BEA breakfast

Books outnumber games on iTunes?!

World Book Day matters, dammit

Is Tony Blair’s revisionist historical novel worth £4.6m?

Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol to lose tan jacket and face world in flexible black turtle neck on

How will the end of print journalism affect old loons who hoard newspapers?

How Will The End Of Print Journalism Affect Old Loons Who Hoard Newspapers?

Some of you may have gathered from the waxing and waning of my passions on the stories covered herein, that besides being involved as a sort of book world newsie/stand-up comic/pundit/assclown, I am also a poet. Thing is, when it comes to poetry, unlike here, I’m usually pretty serious. So take a look at the poem I’ve got up on the Granta website this weekend: Whiteout. Among other things, it’s about being damned if you do, damned if you don’t… Which is quite often the case around here.

The most recent PW panel on ebooks looks at page design. I’m glad someone is talking about this. Any designers out there with opinions on the matter? Word/character count is one of the reasons I can’t read on the iPhone size screen.

Nix then went on to discuss character count in a line as it applies in traditional books. The eye works best with 50-65 characters per line (10 to 11 words). This, he calls “the sweet spot” and is the easiest to read and enjoy and understand. Legal documents can be as dense as 150 characters per line (enough said) whereas newspapers use telegraphic text, presenting thoughts in bursts at a line length of 39 characters or 4 words per line in a column.

So where does this put e-books? The Kindle and Sony e-reader weigh in at 43 characters per line (of course, you can make the font larger which changes this equation) Reading on an i-phone reduces it to 26. The question becomes one of readability vs legibility. You can read all of these, but at what point can you extract information? And where is the pleasure?

In the area of extreme life experiments, this ranks very close for me to that Jacobs book where he tried to live literally by the Bible for an entire year: Incontheivable!! A week without books? Why don’t you just kill me n—-….. hey, wait a minute. I think in my life that would be called a “holiday”.  I want to do this. And I want my name to be something wild and obviously invented by a guy tripping on acid while I’m doing it… something like,  “Bibi van der Zee” . Yeah….

Going to the loo without a book! It is a profound shock. Instead of reading, I stare at the walls and notice that there are still two empty nails on which I meant – a year ago – to hang pictures. Also, I notice the dust on the floor and the cobwebs on the ceiling. I sense that I will be doing a lot more housework than usual this week.

Going to bed is bizarre. If there is one time of day I always, always read, it is in bed before I go to sleep. On the first night of my week without books, I download Being Human on the iPlayer and give my nail polish some quality attention. But when the programme finishes and I try to shut my eyes, my head is buzzing. My eyes keep bouncing open again. Boing. Boing. Boing.

I decided to try giving up books for a week because I have come to the point where I wonder if they are holding me back.

Sing it, sister van der Zee.

Dudes, my petri-dish children have infected me once again, and again not with something cool like lycanthropy or some alien virus that turns my eyes into lasers, but with the fucking common cold. Question for science: doesn’t the production of phlegm and bursts of highly accelerated air in an infected pus-bag like myself constitute a break in the first law of thermodynamics concerning the conservation of energy? Do I not at this moment in time, with more liquid and air coming out of me than going in, constitute a kind of perpetual motion machine? Could we not harness the free flow of snot to create a clean…er source of renewable energy for mankind? Whenever someone would normally have a sick day from work, could they not report instead to a Mucus-lot, where they’d be hooked up to something resembling those robotic milking machines from a dairy farm in order to do their part for humanity? Please research, you white-coated clowns. (The Nobel committee can check the “About” page for my contact info.)

Firebomb attack on a literary club?!? Oh, it’s in Saudi… but still…

UK study says boys prefer to read simpler books

Torstar doing well with Harlequins… swollen-member well

James Cameron isn’t going to let a silly little thing like “the truth” stand between him and his next pile of heavy-handed schlock masquerading as film

Penguin <3s the iPad

O Canada lyrics to be reviewed (ostensibly for gender issues—we all know how gender-conscious our fundamentalist Christian right-wing government is, especially in times of election—but hopefully also to add something about Sidney Crosby)

Karl Rove’s new book should be an entertaining read.

For the most part, his book, “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight,” is an unapologetic defense of Mr. Bush and his presidency, and takes aim at Democrats, the news media and others for what he describes as hypocrisy, deceit and vanity. He also describes his own hardscrabble upbringing in a family broken by divorce and suicide.

What many historians may focus on is his description of the war in Iraq, its origins and consequences. While many have accused the administration of drumming up a case for war on the back of false intelligence about Mr. Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, or W.M.D., Mr. Rove maintains that the White House genuinely believed the reports, and pointed to Democrats who accepted them as valid as well.

Most intriguing is his rumination on what would have happened had Mr. Bush known the truth. While the opportunity to bring democracy to the Middle East as a bulwark against Islamic extremism “justified the decision to remove Saddam Hussein,” Mr. Rove makes clear that from the start, at least, the suspected weapons and their perceived threat were the primary justification for war.

“Would the Iraq War have occurred without W.M.D.? I doubt it,” he writes.

For some reason The Bookseller, the UK’s awesome (and largely free online) trade magazine, is breaking news about Canada before our own book hounds seem to be able to get on it. ‘Sup wit dat? Amazon has filed an application to set up shop in Canada, which is something of a game change here.

The move could lead to a huge shake-up of Canada’s book trade. Amazon.com does not have a physical operation in the country, but sells books through its domain Amazon.ca. Moving into the country would mean the company could ship to Canadian consumers more quickly and cost-effectively. But to operate there, Amazon must receive permission from Canada’s heritage ministry.

The application is subject to a confidential inquiry by the Canadian government, which will assess whether it breaks Canada’s tough cultural protection rules, which are designed to prevent American influences from overpowering Canada’s culture.

According to Privy Council documents seen by The Bookseller, an inquiry ordered by Canada’s governor general (The Queen’s representative in the country) under the Investment Canada Act will probe “investment by Amazon.com Inc to establish a new Canadian business carried on by Amazon Fulfillment Services Canada Inc”.

Amazon spokesperson Mary Osako confirmed that an application had been made, but declined to say what it planned to sell through the new company and services. “We’re always looking for new ways to serve our Canadian customers, but it’s premature to discuss our plans as we await a ruling on our application,” she said.

Looks like Apple is also feeling the sting of a humiliating Olympic hockey loss and jonesing to get a piece of Canada’s golden action, booyah. Or something. Maybe healthcare and tax benefits. But hockey’s probably in there somewhere, I would guess. Bookseller again with the international scoop.

Apple began marketing its iPad in the UK immediately after its launch event in the US in January but has yet to confirm pricing, and its features specifically exclude the iBook Store. A spokesperson for Apple said: “We haven’t made any further announcements about the iPad or the iBook Store since our January event.”

The Apple recruitment ad said it was looking for someone who would have responsibility for building its book business in “Australia, New Zealand and Canada”.

Lisa Moore writes a painfully lovely personal essay about grief, around the anniversary of the Ocean Ranger disaster, for the Guardian. Her novel, February, also dealing with events around the Ocean Ranger, is magnificient.

In 1982, two years after my father’s death, the Ocean Ranger sank in a storm that began on the night of 14 February. By early on the morning of the 15th, all 84 men on the rig had died. It was a shock that sparked a ­massive and collective grief. Every Newfoundlander remembers the ­sinking of the Ocean Ranger. Everyone knows someone who has lost a loved one on the rig.

I was working in a restaurant that night. Every table had been reserved for a special Valentine’s dinner, but the restaurant had to close due to the weather before the customers arrived. I remember the parked cars outside the restaurant window almost buried in drifts, the howling wind sending a dustbin flying past. Everything erased. Everything white. Someone told me years later he remembered the water in his toilet bowl sloshing because the wind was so violent it shook his house.

It remains impossible to fully ­imagine the terror the men on the Ocean Ranger must have felt when they realised the rig would not recover from the list that had developed and when they were forced to radio for help. It was soon clear that there were no survivors, but for a long time it was impossible to believe. An inquiry into the Ocean Ranger disaster found that the accident was unnecessary. The men on the rig had not been trained properly; the lifeboats were damaged. The men were not wearing the survival suits they would have needed to withstand the cold. I knew firsthand what it felt like to lose my father ­suddenly and without warning, but I could only ­imagine the kind of grief one would feel if the death could have been avoided. Twenty-seven years later, the tragedy is still vivid and present.

Macmillan CEO and ass-kicking dreamboat John Sargent has started a blog and used its first post to clarify Macmillan’s agency model for ebook sales. Hooray for the free flow of information!

After the events of the past several weeks, I have been in touch with many of you. It has become clear to me that there is far too little accurate information available in this time of unprecedented change. The issues we all face together are complex, and no news story or 140-character snippet can adequately address them. Therefore, I propose to write you occasionally, when I get a sense that there is a need for direct information.

The first topic is the e-book agency model, and how it will affect our business in the near term. Starting at the end of March, we will move from the “retail model” of selling e-books (publishers sell to retailers, who then sell to readers at a price that the retailer determines) to the “agency model” (publishers set the price, and retailers take a commission on the sale to readers). We will make this change with all our e-book retailers simultaneously.

Rather than address the long-term or author royalty consequences of the change (I’ll save that for next time), I’ll focus on the two major effects at retail.

[Attention: link may contain nearly toxic levels of waxed fireman chest.] Romance novels give insight into “what women want“.

In a paper titled “The Texas Billionaire’s Pregnant Bride,” recently published in the Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology, they analyze the titles of Harlequin romance novels. Anthony Cox of the Center of Psychology and Computing and psychologist Maryanne Fisher of St. Mary’s University contend these best-selling volumes — and in particular their market-tested titles — provide a unique insight into their buyers’ desires.

Coming from an evolutionary psychology perspective, they hypothesized these titles would reflect mating preferences that have evolved over the millennia — specifically, a desire for a long-term relationship with a physically fit, financially secure man who will provide the resources needed to successfully raise a family.

They found considerable support for this theory, although some of their speculative specifications were spelled out more directly than others.

While academics seem to have it all worked out, apparently Germaine Greer never knew what the hell she was talking about.

Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch is considered a seminal text of the women’s liberation movement. But according to a fellow Australian writer, Louis Nowra, Greer fundamentally misunderstood how women tick, and modern realities have debunked her vision of how they would live after casting off traditional shackles.

In an essay to mark The Female Eunuch’s 40th anniversary, Nowra lambasts the book as “hopelessly middle class” and Greer’s depiction of women as misogynistic. The playwright and novelist writes: “She wanted women to undergo a profound change in the way they viewed themselves and their relationships with men. If you look at how Greer thought this could happen and what actually did, then our contemporary world must come as a disappointment to her.”

So, my people, we have this gun, see… and the question is, how should we use it? Leave the planet to the drooling idiots mentioned above, or start a revolution….?

Crummey, Grant and Moore up for Winterset

UK indies join with Bloomsbury for digital library

RIP: Barry Hannah, author, dead at 67

Interview with Sam Lipsyte

Web comic about why DRM on books doesn’t work

Google responds to privacy concerns with unsettlingly specific apology

Learning keeps your brain healthy and staves off ageing… Does that include the kind of learning you do when you realize you shouldn’t try to wedge a cup of coffee onto your desk by shoving the pile of papers back with it because the elasticity of bent paper has, given sufficient mass, the strength to shoot a cup of coffee from the desk and onto your lap? Because if so, I’m living to 100…

Moby points to this interesting video as evidence of what happens to your basement bookshelves when you sniff too intensely the moldy paper of the old paperbacks on them:

Charlie Orr, the very same Charlie Orr, I believe, who designed the Bookninja logo above years ago, has a new blog on which he displays and chats about book covers he designed for favourite authors. The catch is, the books don’t exist.

Following in the recently rich vein of list-enabled advice for writers, part-time ‘Ninja Coady gives us her list of dos and don’ts, which is perhaps the most palatable to date.

1. Never snack while writing; consume only complete meals – a starch, two vegetables and one serving lean protein (remember that one serving is about the size of a pack of playing cards.)

2. Marry somebody who will cook this.

3. When revising, consider whether you have written anything that will hurt or offend a member of your immediate family. If the answer is no, go back and add something.

Responding to articles in the NYRB (on the digital future—another mag might think of it as “present”—for books) and the Huff Po (on the importance of editors as agents for quality control) Robert McCrum, the Crime Fighting Critic, riffs on the role of the editor as cultural gatekeeper in the new publishing world.

The previous age of books is always seen as the golden one. In that fabled time, a generation of Maxwell Perkins clones walked the aisles of the great publishing houses, lost in the quest for split infinitives or dangling participles, or engaged in extracting the angel from the marble of the heroic first draft, as in the case of Thomas Wolfe, author of the sadly forgotten classic Look Homeward, Angel (by the way, my guess – based on experience – is that, yes, there was a generation or two who worked very hard on improving writers’ manuscripts, but that Wolfe’s example is the exception not the rule). Much of what Baron describes as the editor’s function now – her “10 things”, once choosing the book and editing the book have been dealt with – strike me as having more to do with in-house PR. The role of the editor is not what it was: everyone concedes that. So much for the microcosm. When we turn to the big picture, we find Jason Epstein.

His clear-eyed pragmatism is refreshing: the world has changed, irreversibly and forever. The great publishing giants and their old ways are increasingly redundant. And yet there is still the inescapable fact that writers sit alone in rooms, putting words on paper, or on screens.

Motoko goes over the economics of ebook pricing at the NYT. Have I linked to this article already or has it just been written about 20 times in the last month? Regardless, please discuss.

Publishers differ on how they account for various costs, but a composite, and necessarily simplified, picture might look like this, according to interviews with executives at several major houses:

On a typical hardcover, the publisher sets a suggested retail price. Let’s say it is $26. The bookseller will generally pay the publisher $13. Out of that gross revenue, the publisher pays about $3.25 to print, store and ship the book, including unsold copies returned to the publisher by booksellers.

For cover design, typesetting and copy-editing, the publisher pays about 80 cents. Marketing costs average around $1 but may go higher or lower depending on the title. Most of these costs will deline on a per-unit basis as a book sells more copies.

Let’s not forget the author, who is generally paid a 15 percent royalty on the hardcover price, which on a $26 book works out to $3.90. For big best-selling authors — and even occasionally first-time writers whose publishers have taken a risk — the author’s advance may be so large that the author effectively gets a higher slice of the gross revenue. Publishers generally assume they will write off a portion of many authors’ advances because they are not earned back in sales.

Without accounting for such write-offs, the publisher is left with $4.05, out of which it must pay overhead for editors, cover art designers, office space and electricity before taking a profit.

Now let’s look at an e-book. Under the agreements with Apple, the publishers will set the consumer price and the retailer will act as an agent, earning a 30 percent commission on each sale. So on a $12.99 e-book, the publisher takes in $9.09. Out of that gross revenue, the publisher pays about 50 cents to convert the text to a digital file, typeset it in digital form and copy-edit it. Marketing is about 78 cents.

The author’s royalty — a subject of fierce debate between literary agents and publishing executives — is calculated among some of the large trade publishers as 25 percent of the gross revenue, while others are calculating it off the consumer price. So on a $12.99 e-book, the royalty could be anywhere from $2.27 to $3.25.

All that leaves the publisher with something ranging from $4.56 to $5.54, before paying overhead costs or writing off unearned advances.

Well, my lovelies, I’m so sorry to leave you hanging here and there these last couple weeks with unannounced days off, but my life has become a shitstorm wrapped in a disaster wrapped in a deadline apocalypse (wrapped in a feather boa). So, please bear with me whilst I dig myself out from the piles and piles of crap that I’m way behind on.

Moby has been covering the lies and heartache mounting around the Pellegrino book that had a sketchy source

Yann Martel, who gets fan mail from Obama, has some changes in store for his Harper book club

Luminato festival nabs Roddy Doyle

Canadian market up slighty in aught nine—largely due to picture frames on sale at Crapters

US, not so much

Lamba has strange new Lambda Literary site… so strange it’s almost… queer…

eBook pricing continues to dominate the collective boredom of our arts pages — Kindle vs iPad

Darling little books that will just make you plotz!

Fucking celebrity novels are fucking fucky fuck

Australians are bald-faced liars, each and every one

Ever wanted to be filmmaker specializing in web productions of classic novels? Weh-heh-helllll!

Should writing poetry be an Olympic event? (Yes, but it can only hand out bronze medals… BOOM! HEADSHOT!)