My first guess, before reading the article, is because he’s cranky. My second guess is because he knows Nobeltown ain’t big enough for two Murrays and it would just be a matter of time before we was standing in the dust of the street, waggling fingers, pre-draw.

The devouring fame that would come with the Nobel is why he remains distinctly ambivalent about the possibility, as frequently canvassed, of his becoming Australia’s next literature laureate. Each November, he is invariably on the bookies’ lists of favourites. At 71, he still has time. “It doesn’t mean anything to me. I get a sense that it would be an enormous disaster in your life and turn you into a damned celebrity.”

Murray brought out a new collection of poems, Taller When Prone, last month. He remains very much a working poet. He gives readings, he goes to writers’ festivals, he submits poems to magazines and journals and he takes his work overseas to universities and festivals. In March, he was in China; later in the year he is due in Slovenia and Britain.

He once said that poetry was like dairy farming: a trade in which you make a living by bits and pieces and hope to God it adds up to an income.

Under which layeth the news, sword of information upon his noble chest.

Author mounting bid to buy Newsweek

Top 10 Kindle “sellers”: free and genre

It’s alright: Wolf and Greer still tight, despite

20 year survey shows the internet (well, duh) and supermarkets (like Target, Walmart and Indigo) show largest marketshare leap

Speilberg and Morpurgo hook up for War Horse film

A great new project to increase Braille books

They’ve got the recipe for winning!

Aaaaaand here comes the latest wave of revelations of authorial ethics indiscretions. Remember that historian who first blamed his wife and then took responsibility for slagging his rivals via Amazon review like a complete idiot? Now comes a truly evil version of said idiot: in the form of an author who wrote threatening posts and emails to a genuine Amazon reviewer for a bad review of her book. Nuts! I can’t decide whether “stupid”, “pathetic”, or “psycho” best describes this situation.

A couple weeks ago, an Amazon reviewer named Alana Chandler—the No. 1 reviewer, according to Amazon, of new books on the site—left a one-star review for Secrets of a Jewish Mother, the new book by Real Housewives of New York City cast member Jill Zarin. “I wanted to find this warm and loving but it seemed more like a doctrine in many cases that isn’t loving and could be detrimental on several levels,” Chandler wrote in her 1,500-word-plus review. “Not to mention it’s been widely reported that it’s for show rather than actual advice the authors themselves believe.”

Three days after Chandler’s review went up, an Amazon user named “Susan Saunders” left a comment on the review. Saunders wrote that Chandler was “a jealous person who likes to gang up on people.” She continued: “I feel sorry for you but more for your cat.” (Chandler’s reviewer photo shows her with her dog.) “Someone needs to take your cat away from you and give it to a loving person. Jealous of Jill? You are just making her more famous and people are buying her book because it is a GREAT book about Jewish Mother’s [sic]. You are ANTISEMITIC and it shows.”

Saunders quickly deleted her comment, but not before someone took a screenshot and sent it to Zap2It.

Why so shy all of a sudden? Because other Amazon reviewers quickly figured out that “Saunders” was actually Zarin. It didn’t take much: The Amazon wish list for “Saunders” had items listed on it for Zarin’s husband Bobby and her daughter Ally. And Saunders also had the same birthday as Jill. From there, the review thread got ugly, with commenters accusing her of a range of crimes, from a lack of Internet savviness to being “pathetic.”

Remember that Huffy essay by Jason Pinter in which he postulated some reasons men might not be reading so much? Laura Miller responds at Salon, concentrating on why more men aren’t involved in publishing.

Pinter’s essay provoked all the predictable responses, in HuffPo and beyond: the pointlessly anecdotal refutations (”My husband reads books, so lots of men do!”); the desperate straw-snatching (”This is why no one will publish my masterpiece, ‘Rock Meteor and the Lector of G.R.I.M.E.’!”); the flaming gender paranoia (”Evil feminists are trying to castrate us with their rosebuds-and-doilies book jackets!”); the reasonable but shortsighted rejoinder (”If you can’t find something you like in the 700,000 books published every year, it’s your own fault!”); and so on. One blogger made the Möbius-strip-like argument that if today’s men were truly manly they wouldn’t be scared away from reading by its reputation for unmanliness.

Pinter, to his credit, takes pains not to denigrate the “many, many brilliant women” who work in publishing, or to suggest that a plot is afoot. But “the system,” he maintains, is perpetuating an artificial imbalance. He may, indeed, be right. “Publish more books for men and boys,” he urges, but if all those women editors are so blinkered about what men and boys find interesting, how can we expect them to make the right choices?

It’s worth asking, then, why there are so few men in publishing. Could it be the low pay, low status and ridiculous hours?

Google will start offering ebooks this summer. Get your big foam “Number 1″ fingers and beer hats ready to cheer on your favorite team to crushing defeat! Don’t be evil! Don’t be eeeeevviiilllllll!

WSJ

FP

PW

Google says users will be able to buy digital copies of books they discover through its book-search service. It will also allow book retailers—even independent shops—to sell Google Editions on their own sites, giving partners the bulk of the revenue.

The company would have copies on its servers for works it strikes agreements to sell. Google is still deciding whether it will follow the model where publishers set the retail price or whether Google sets the price.

While Mr. Palma didn’t go into details, users of Google Editions would be able to read books from a web browser—meaning that the type of e-reader device wouldn’t matter. The company also could build software to optimize reading on certain devices like an iPhone or iPad but hasn’t announced any specific plans.

From which cracketh fuzzy, peeping info chicks.

HC world doing better than last year

Am both pleased that the children of the obscenely rich can still discover poetry (and conceptual poetry, no  less), and dismayed that their relations will make sure more people read it than ever see the best verse by our best poets

Digital props up Harlequin… Just goes to show, eventually all porn goes online

Two longtime Bookninja pals, Maud Newton and Bookslut, turn 8 this month… Happy Birthday second graders, from first grade! (Bookninja will be 7 in August)

How what you read is related to how you vote

I doubt it, but it sure might save a rainy afternoon…

Mainstream publishing has gone sexually wide-open. Seventy-seven years ago it took an order by a federal judge, John Woolsey, to overturn the government’s obscenity ban on James Joyce’s classic novel “Ulysses.” But in the past few years, Random House, Penguin, Kensington, Simon and Schuster and others have all inaugurated erotica imprints.

Exactly why erotic literature has become so popular now is a matter of speculation, though it doesn’t seem entirely coincidental that the creators were mostly raised in the era of Madonna videos on MTV, open discussion of sex during the initial HIV scare, and the mainstreaming of porn. Much of the new erotica is simply porn moved to the printed page, only smarter and largely aimed at women.

Whatever the reason, publishers are pleased. At a time when overall book sales have been flat or declining for several years “we saw it as a growing opportunity; it has exploded,” Karen Auerbach, Kensington’s director of publicity told me.

Did you really mean “exploded”, Karen, or were you thinking something more like “________”? (Provide the word in comments below. Extra points for classy innuendo.)

Apparently there’s not much stigma left for those who self-publish. Now, that doesn’t sound very fair, does it? Well, I say this is a travesty! They deserve as much stigma as any other vanity-pursuit-with-little-quality-control and designed-for-the-idly-wealthy no matter how snazzy they look!  Up with stigma! Down with acceptance!

In this time of Twitter feeds and self-designed Snapfish albums and personal YouTube channels, it’s hard to remember the stigma that once attached to self-publishing. But it was very real. By contrast, to have a book legitimately produced by a publishing house in the 20th century was not just to have copies of your work bound between smart-looking covers. It was also metaphysical: you had been chosen, made intelligible and harmonious by editors and finally rendered eligible, thanks to the magic that turns a manuscript into a book, for canonization and immortality. You were no longer a kid with a spiral notebook and a sonnet cycle about Sixth Avenue; you were an author, and even if you never saw a dime in royalties, no one could ever dismiss you again as an oddball.

But times have changed, and radically. Last year, according to the Bowker bibliographic company, 764,448 titles were produced by self-publishers and so-called microniche publishers. (A microniche, I imagine, is a shade bigger than a self.) This is up an astonishing 181 percent from the previous year. Compare this enormous figure with the number of so-called traditional titles — books with the imprimatur of places like Random House — published that same year: a mere 288,355 (down from 289,729 the year before). Book publishing is simply becoming self-publishing.

Fresh ground black people book sees sales increase… The time draws near when I will leave this planet…

Useful! A survey of talking animals in fiction

iPad reaches the 1M sales mark

Should poets cede the reading of their work to actors? This is a seriously good question…

A comic series that is sadly relevant to authors

Britans! Harken unto me! You have a chance to vote for a guy who considers Samuel Beckett a hero!

The Post has a whole bunch of interviews with artists appearing at the Comic Arts Festival in Toronto, including this one with Bookninja cover contest podium owner Evan Munday

Spiderman, who’s apparently losing some muscle mass lately, bagged yet another thief, this time RIGHT IN THE COMIC BOOK SHOP! Nhoy, GLAVIN! Take him away, boys. (Video of … incident?… at link)

The Spider-Man in question was not a mild-mannered young photojournalist who’d been bitten by a radioactive arachnid, but Adelaide Comic Centre owner Michael Baulderstone, who had dressed as Spidey to celebrate International Free Comic Day.

And Baulderstone’s spidey-sense was set off when he spotted one customer ‘behaving suspiciously’ at the rear of the store. He went to investigate, and discovered the man trying to shoplift an X-Men omnibus worth AU$160 (around £97).

American Gods will, somewhat ironically, lauch the world’s largest good intention bookclub, a gathering of Twitter accounts, some of which are helmed by people, that will pretend to read a single book together.

“The aim with One Book, One Twitter is – like the one city, one book programme which inspired it – to get a zillion people all reading and talking about a single book. It is not, for instance, an attempt to gather a more selective crew of book lovers to read a series of books and meet at established times to discuss,” explained Howe at Wired.com. “Usually such ‘Big Read’ programs are organised around geography. Seattle started the trend for collective reading in 1998 when zillions of Seattlites all read Russell Banks’s book, Sweet Hereafter. Chicago followed suit with To Kill a Mockingbird a few years later. This Big Read is organised around Twitter, and says to hell with physical limitations.”

Gaiman, whose novel follows the story of ex-convict Shadow, released from prison and embarking on a bizarre journey across America with the mysterious Mr Wednesday, who claims to be a former god, said he thought One Book, One Twitter was “a great idea – a sort of worldwide book club”.

Rather than sitting down and figuring out how to best use this new fangled Facebook thingy, Pearson has decided to strike out on their own and start a social networking site for teens.

The publisher Pearson is preparing to launch its own social network to capitalise on the success of a website designed to encourage reading among teenagers.

Pearson, which owns Penguin Books and the Financial Times, set up Spinebreakers as an “online book community for teens” in September 2007 and plans a significant overhaul to allow users to connect to each other before the end of the year.

Anna Rafferty, the digital managing director for Penguin in the UK, said: “We want to develop peer-to-peer capabilities and have plans for a full social network. I would love to have teenagers tagging their favourite books and sharing it with their friends.”

She hopes the site will become an important part of a teenager’s social networking portfolio. “We want to allow elegant integration with other sites. For example, it would be good if tagging a book on Spinebreakers would show up in your Facebook newsfeed,” she said.

Um. Yeah. I’m glad you’re excited… Mom… It’s always cool and popular when adults get really into teen things and help MAKE THEM BETTER! You can put the tray of cookies over there… (To put their teen usage stats into context, Bookninja gets many times as many visitors every month, and we are neither a multinational corporation, nor able to sustain a social network, one would think…)

Drew Barrymore to release tell-all book. Details below.

If you were able to enter therapy, somewhere about 10 sessions in, your councellor might be forced to say something like, “Can you find a common variable in all the battles you are currently fighting? Is there one thing common to every dispute? No? What about… you, Amazon? What about that? Yeah… Yeah… Okay! We’ve done some good work here today. Hugs!” Or so I imagine. Yes, there comes a time when you have to realize, my sons and daughters of the ethernet, that YOU are the problem.

Sincerely,

George

In fact, it’s breeding like mice in a bakery, rabbits in a carrot garden, roaches under your fridge. Vermin, I tell you. I wonder what the traps would look like… But I digress. Apparently the proliferation of all things poetry means the genre is thriving. By that logic, the human race in their wee, goopy uteran pods in The Matrix was also flourishing. Just saying. Also: God, I love tank tops.

Paradoxically, while few people seem to be reading or buying poetry, there has likely never been a time when more people were writing poems, especially because in the age of print on demand virtually anyone with a computer and a rudimentary knowledge of PageMaker can become his or her own publisher.

It was Daniel Halpern, publisher of Ecco Press, who once remarked trenchantly, “If as many people bought poetry as wrote poetry, there would be no problem publishing it.” But that was in the bad old days before online journals and perfect-bound chapbooks, which have reduced the costs involved in a small print run to virtually nothing.

I think I would like to hug, then slap, this author.

She was offered £300,000 by a US film studio for the rights to her novel, which follows a British woman tracing her ancestry to the island Spinalonga, off the coast of Crete.

However, worried about how her novel might be handled by Hollywood producers, and eager to give something back to the country in which it is set, Hislop instead opted for the Greek company Mega, which will turn her novel into a 26-part series, employing 300 local actors.

Can authors survive the internet?

On symbiosis between e- and p-

Is the iPad the be-all or the end-all?

A pretty safe list (for hand-holding timid parents through cutting the intellectual umbillical cord they’ve been using to strangle their children since first grade), most of which you’ll already find on high school lists, so I suspect there will only be a few new finds here for you younger folk. But there were about five I’d not known about. I like seeing Maus on the list, but there are surely a couple other graphica titles that would fit?

Here is a sampling of a few things I missed on my Friday off, added to today’s news.

Malcolm Gladwell tops “most highlighted” text by Kindle users

Beat poet Michael Horowitz throws his beret in the ring for the Oxford post… I imagine “beat” will take on the role of both history and prophecy here…

Salinger case granted stay of execution

US gov trying to force author to reveal sources on CIA story. In related news: CIA file casually searched for author’s shoe size for cement loafer fitting

Amazon makes Indigo look like a book store

Edgars announced

Shortlisted Orange titles get sales boost

Indiana’s stupidity not just attributable to sharing a border with Kentucky

Personal journals of PKD should be … disturbing

Maud points to this video with Larkin explaining his feelings around work and writing. He’s bang on.