Saturday is the first International Read a Comic in Public Day. Loud and proud, GBLT community (Geeks, Bookworms, Lame-Os and Techies)! This is your Stonewall Riots, people. Swears.

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

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

Russell Smith explores the wilds of nostalgia, and notes why he resists the urge to go there.

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

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

On golems. Very timely. Especially considering my experiments of last…uh…I’ve said too much.

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

Scientific American has a piece surveying Apocalit—that genre of literature and film that ends up with most of us dead. For me, this will act as a defacto shopping list.

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

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

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

On New York and Mark Twain

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

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

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

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

A little rumination on Byatt and the memoir leads to a tich of hyperbole.

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

Forget worrying about ads in ebooks—it’s not only highly unlikely, it’s also less insidious than what this guy predicts will actually happen… The product placement cometh.

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

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

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

Should e-books that come with extras cost more? I think we should put this to the film industry: should dvd extras or 3D movies cost more? Oh, wait, you already answered that.

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

Someone at Bloomsbury shifts slightly, scattering dust into the silent, musty air… “I say, old chap, have you heard of this ‘electronic books‘ thing? What if we…?”

Kindle 3 gets good review from PW

Dudes… DUDES….! BBC is doing a Dirk Gently’s show. I shit you not. (from SFSignal)

Students to pay $20 for access to online texts for 8 courses… Nice.

Amazon says Kindle has high/no numbers

Penguin wants to get in on some of that sweet sweet Wylie love

The Afterword has followed up it’s list of over-rated Canadian writers with a list of under-rated writers. A couple of these I agree with, but it’s mostly people who have decent recognition within the critical community, but no public recognition. And they’re mostly older. Whither Zoe Whittall? Whither Derek McCormack? Peter Darbyshire? Sean Dixon? Sina Queyras? Elizabeth Bachinsky? Not enough years put in to judge?

We chose also to focus on underrated authors because it’s important to bear in mind that there is a huge wealth of worthwhile literature being written in this country. Unfortunately, the vast majority of it flies under the radar due to limited marketing budgets, the increasingly poisonous blockbuster mentality that is infecting publishing, and an overwhelming number of books being published. With such a deluge of material, consumers need guidance; where better to look than award winners and well-regarded books? But, the overinflation of certain reputations tends to crowd out others that are equally (if not infinitely more) worthy of attention.

With one exception, the authors on this list don’t have the same recognition factor as those on the previous list (and the one exception is notorious for all the wrong reasons). However, while they are heterogeneous in style, subject, and approach, they share in common a vivacity and willingness to push the boundaries of language and form. And they make reading a joy, not a chore, which is something sorely lacking from much of our fiction these days.

Facebook is suing a social networking site for teachers called “Teachbook“, which was apparently graphically designed by first grade students. FB seems to believe it owns the term “book” in relation to social networking.

Facebook’s lawsuit Wednesday seeks unspecified damages and demands a judge order Teachbook, of Northbrook, Illinois, to immediately cease using “book” in its name.

This begs the obvious question: Would Facebook sue a social-networking site for priests named Goodbook? Or a librarian-networking site named Librarybook?

Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesman, pointed out that “we have no complaint against Kelly Blue Book or Green Apple Books or others.”

“However, there is already a well known online network of people with ‘book’ in the brand name. Of course the Teachbook folks are free to create an online network for teachers or whomever, and we wish them well in that endeavor,” he said in an e-mail. “What they are not free to do is trade on our name or dilute our brand while doing so.”

What happens when you’re up for a lit award and they announce the winner and you just lost—and worse still, the world just watched you lose. Your fans are disappointed, your enemies are sneering , your publisher sighs over what could have been… A Booker judge dishes on how to be a good loser. The trick is to apparently not anyone know what you’re actually thinking…

The twice-shortlisted Tóibín (shockingly, Brooklyn was not shortlisted in 2009) has not won the Booker, and wryly regards himself as an old hand at “losing” it. On the night of the prizegiving dinner at the Guildhall, he told the audience that the shortlisted novelists each have a camera trained on them, ready to record the delight of the winner.

“And as soon as the winner is announced and it isn’t you,” he observed, “the cameraman just walks away, and you are left there at the table trying to look composed, and you want to die.”

The remark was delivered with practised timing and self-deprecation, and the audience laughed a trifle uneasily, but it carried a great burden of regret. Indeed, Tóibín remarked, until The Sea and then Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007) won the prize, he could at least comfort himself with the observation that the judging panels were prejudiced against Irish writers.

“Now,” he sighed, “it seems that it is just me.”

I’ve lost three times, in much smaller horse races, and all three times I was just surprised and pleased to be there in good company. I suppose I’d have been more sour if I’d ever lost to anyone who sucked. But, hey! It’s a long race! I have plenty of time to lose to you, ___________!

Study (paid for by Sony, mind) says e-Readers aren’t killing books—on the contrary, e-users are reading more, not less. It’ll be interesting to reconduct this study in about 10 years. But this article covers the bases of why you shouldn’t panic…yet.

Among early adopters, e-books aren’t replacing their old book habits, but adding to them. Amazon, the biggest seller of e-books, says its customers buy 3.3 times as many books after buying a Kindle, a figure that has accelerated in the past year as prices for the device fell.

It’s too early to tell the reading lift will sustain after the novelty of the gadgets wears off, and the devices go mass market. But because e-book gadgets are portable, people report they’re reading more and at times when a book isn’t normally an option: on a smartphone in the doctor’s waiting room; through a Ziploc-bag-clad Kindle in a hot tub, or on a treadmill with a Sony Reader’s fonts set to jumbo. Among commuters, e-readers are starting to catch up with BlackBerrys as the preferred companions on trains and buses.

Obama didn’t buy Franzen early, he was given an ARC… cancel the impeachment

Günter Grass is done the telling

An occasion to make jokes about the banjo scene from Deliverance

British library attendance tanks

Vigilante library justice!

Appointment-only secular Yiddish bookshop in NYC in trouble

As expected, Stephanie Meyer’s new novel, Breaking Wind, is in top spot after only a few days

Author says poor people should be forced to stop at two kids… publisher curls into fetal position and begins keening while rocking back and forth

In the battle over e-book rights, Andrew The Jackal Wylie appears to have blinked first. Or did he? I’d like to know what went down there. Because I was seriously under the impression that fellow makes it a policy to not blink. Ever.

Yesterday Random House appeared to have got its way. A joint statement issued by the publisher and the Wylie Agency said the two parties had “resolved [their] differences”, and that the 13 “disputed” Random House titles – which also include Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, VS Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival and books by John Updike and Orhan Pamuk – were being removed from Odyssey Editions and taken off sale.

“We have agreed that Random House shall be the exclusive ebook publisher of these titles for those territories in which Random House US controls their rights,” said the joint statement. “The titles soon will be available for sale on a non-exclusive basis through all of Random House’s current ebook customers. Random House is resuming normal business relations with the Wylie Agency for English-language manuscript submissions and potential acquisitions, and we both are glad to be able to put this matter behind us.”

I somehow missed this ridiculous bit about some BC bookstores not stocking Lyon’s book because there’s a bare bum on the cover. But the Guardian didn’t.

Annabel Lyon’s The Golden Mean is the story of Alexander’s childhood, told through the eyes of his tutor Aristotle. Praised as “a triumph of erudition and story-telling” by The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas author John Boyne and shortlisted for Canada’s top literary award, the Giller prize, it was published last year in Canada and is just out in the UK where the Financial Times has admired its “eerie earthiness”.

But apparently its jacket – featuring a naked man lying on the back of an equally naked white horse – is offensive to some. Although stores across Canada and the UK are selling the book, Lyons revealed on her blog that British Columbia ferry company BC Ferries is not stocking it “since the trade paperback still features a bare bum on the cover”.

The verdict is in: e-readers will fuck up your children’s future less than a paper book. First compelling reason I’ve seen to get one.

Think of an e-reader as the cloth diaper of books. Sure, producing one Kindle is tougher on the environment than printing a single paperback copy of “Pride and Prejudice.” But every time you download and read an electronic book, rather than purchasing a new pile of paper, you’re paying back a little bit of the carbon dioxide and water deficit from the Kindle production process. The actual operation of an e-reader represents a small percentage of its total environmental impact, so if you run your device into the ground, you’ll end up paying back that debt many times over. (Unless, of course, reading “Pride and Prejudice” over and over again is enough for you. Then, by all means, buy it in print and enjoy.)

Canadian industry down in second quarter… If you’re asking whether now is the time to jump from your window in a Depression-like act of despair, I would remind you that most of you are in your dining room

RIP: Edwin Morgan, Scottish poet, dead at 90

BBC and HarperCollins are in a battle over something I very much don’t care about

Samsung and WH Smith release yet another e-reader into the wild—has no one considered the implications if these things start breeding?

Study of nuns leads to finding that linguistic ability indicates Alzheimer’s resistence… fuck, I was expecting to be drooling by the time my hour came…

Anne Frank tree felled

The in-flight magazine for Afghan airline is oddly revealing

Waterstone’s one-ups Indigo on not selling books by opening restaurants and bars in-store (”Does the Martin Amis Happy Hour special come by the jug? “)

And lastly, Time Magazine has announced a new version of its magazine, but now aimed at adults:

Following in the footsteps of American and British overrated writers lists, the intrepid Steven Beattie (yes, that guy over there with the red dot from a sniper’s laser sight on his forehead) c0-pens a list of overrated Canadians. A brave list, and while some are like shooting fish in a barrel, others I completely disagree with. Erin Moure is a genius. I’m not saying she’s perfect every time, but that she’s consistently good enough for me to trust her impulse to publish whatever she feels like. Very rarely prolificity is a blessing, not a curse, and she falls into this category for me. (See this article for my views on prolific writers.)

The rules of the game were pretty simple. We considered living authors only. Some established track record was required (breathe easy, Vincent Lam, your time has not yet come). And the two of us had to be, if not in complete agreement, at least amenable to each other’s point of view. Though as it turned out, when the time came to compare names, there were few major points of contention.

Of course, the judgment of who is overrated and who is underrated will always be somewhat subjective, but we did manage to hold to a few guidelines. Overrated authors win prestigious literary prizes, receive fawning reviews in the national media, and are brand names, if not always bestsellers. The underrated (which will be posted tomorrow) are names you may have heard of but, if sales figures are any indication, we’ll wager you haven’t got around to actually reading them. Some have won prizes, but there isn’t a Giller- or a Booker-winner among them. Like a lot of writers, they got their start in the small press. The difference is, that’s where most of them have stayed.

Come on, you had to know this was coming. Godin’s been worming his way out of the system for some time. And now he’s decided to go all out. Or all in, depending on how you see it.

“I’ve decided not to publish any more books in the traditional way. 12 for 12 and I’m done. I like the people, but I can’t abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don’t usually visit to buy something they don’t usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that’s hard to spread … I really don’t think the process is worth the effort that it now takes to make it work. I can reach 10 or 50 times as many people electronically. No, it’s not ‘better’, but it’s different.

A cleverly- somewhat cloyingly- written article on fact checking in the age of instant news and zero accountability.

as broadband brought millions of facts, the fantasy of perfect factuality and the satisfaction of fact-checking to everyone. Soon — and astonishingly — Google became much more than trusted; it became shorthand for everything that had been recorded in modern history. The Internet wasn’t the accurate or the inaccurate thing; it was the only thing. And fact-checking was no longer just a back-office affair. While it continued to take place in fact-checking departments, something calling itself “fact-checking” now happened out in the open, too. In the ideologically heated months after Sept. 11, 2001, pro-war bloggers like Andrew Sullivan staged point-by-point critical annotations of articles by antiwar journalists, notably Robert Fisk of The Independent, that came to be called “fact checks” or even “fisks.”

These annotations, which still appear on blogs, are aggressive and witty, and they nearly always end with a highhanded, Tory-style Q.E.D.; gloating about gotchas is mandatory. Surprisingly, though, the focus of modern fact checks is rarely what we 20th-century fact-checkers would have underlined as checkable facts. Instead, Web fact-checkers generally try to show how articles presented in earnest are actually self-parody. These acts of reclassifying journalism as parody or fiction — and setting off excerpts so they play as parody — resembles literary criticism more than it does traditional fact-checking.

Sigh. This oughtta be an interesting comment stream…

After Jodi Picoult’s complaints about JFranz getting mag covers and a great NYT review because he’s a white male, it was only a matter of …Time… before someone started to crunch the numbers (see what I did there?) Turns out she was right…

Here in Canada, however, coverage seems to suggest things work the other way…

And in the UK, discussion with AS Byatt around the Orange Prize leads her to say that women who write intellectual books are written off as “strange and unnatural” by critics

[Update] Commenter Panic (below) posts a frank open letter to Picoult at this link.

For those of your following the Google BS, will Google’s thingy on whatchamacallit affect the whosiwhats?

Do e-readers make lonely geeks seem less like wallflowers and more like sexy trend-setters?

Nutbar pbjectivist uses GPS to create an Earth-sized ad a nutbar objectivist can be proud of

Want a leaked sneak peek at the new Sony e-reader?

“Business journalism’s image problem“—you mean, besides the pairing of the words “business” and “journalism”?Barack Obama takes unpopular stance again, this time by getting JFranz for beach reading instead of StiLarss (and pretending to force kids to read something other than Where’s Waldo books)

And speaking of StiLarss… Friggin lovers and the not-handing-over-of-last-manuscripts!

Peter Pan just got slightly creepier than its normal 9.5 on the pedobear-meter… Two baby corpses found in trunk with Peter Pan paraphenilia

Seedly link of the day: did the VQR editor drive the VQR managing editor to suicide?

Kids publishers jump wholesale into iPad development for titles… How will this change the way kids learn?

Despite the grumbling of everyone you know, Reuters says indy booksellers aren’t actually doing that badly. The key to this surprising success? Competition from Google is driving innovation. Go figure.

While book sales are down, industry experts say the demand for bookstores with a local feel remains strong.

Bookstore owners say the industry has found new life with the locavore movement, which puts a premium on locally grown or raised food. The trend has brought farmers markets and by extension breweries and craft soap factories to cities.

“People are rediscovering the value of an independent store that’s connected to their neighborhood and understands them and their tastes,” said Jessica Stockton Bugnolo, who opened Greenlight Bookstore this year.

Popular author Picoult is smarting after other popular author, who does not, presumably, have ovaries or melanin surfeit, got a great review in the NYT. If Moby were not on vacation, I’m sure we’d have a great statistical analysis of the last ten years of NYT reviews. Maybe I should pick up the slack and… NAH.

Picoult, whose popular novels of everyday people facing awful dilemmas have sold more than 12m copies worldwide but are largely overlooked by the literary establishment, was quick to respond. “NYT raved about Franzen’s new book. Is anyone shocked?” she wrote on Twitter. “Would love to see the NYT rave about authors who aren’t white male literary darlings.” For every review of authors such as Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat or the Dominican-American Pulitzer winner Junot Díaz, “there are 10 Lethems and Franzens,” she added later.

Picoult also criticised Kakutani’s use of the word “lapidary”. “Did you know what [it] meant when you read it in Kakutani’s review? I think reviewers just like to look smart,” she tweeted.

I gave this short piece its own post in case you want to discuss it. Ads in books: bad? inevitable?

With e-reader prices dropping like a stone and major tech players jumping into the book retail business, what room is left for publishers’ profits? The surprising answer: ads. They’re coming soon to a book near you.

Old timey superheroes were good role models, say psychologists (who, in my experience, are generally nutbars who should have sought mental health help instead of mental health education), whereas today’s anti-heroes are douchebags and will probably get your kids killt, yo. What do you think?

While Batman, Iron Man and Spider-Man might be impressive and powerful at the box office, they aren’t so good for today’s youth say psychologists. During last week’s Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association (Psy-Con?) mental health professionals said that, while yesterday’s heroes fought crime and made better role models, today’s superheroes are too violent and send the wrong messages and images to young, impressionable boys.

Sorry for my lateness. My life continues to intervene. Friggin’ life. Always gettin’ in the way of bloggin’.

More-accurate book titles (my fav is the first one… it’s funny because it’s true)

Florida’s Gainsville did the right thing and denied a church a burn permit for a Quran bonfire on 9/11… seriously, someone applied for that permit

OUP and the Case of the Uncredited Baseball Historian

Ebooks failing!

No, wait, ebooks succeeding!

University bookstore moving online

Highest paid authors in Forbes… wait a minute, is James Patterson actually still considered an author? His name “appears” on books, and he takes the money, but doesn’t his sweatshop of indentured hacks actually write them?

RIP: Frank Kermode, literary critic, dead at 90

OED gets its yearly tithe of new words from the idiocy of humanity

France’s new literary star is fifteen… don’t bother doing the math to figure out what you were doing when she was born… it won’t end well

Margaret Atwood very kindly recommended my new book Glimpse to her legions of Twitter followers today. If this convinces you that I am too-legit-to-quit, please buy it at your local bookshop. If you can’t get it there, you can order it straight from ECW or from Amazon.ca or Amazon.com. If it doesn’t convince you, I don’t want to know about it. From her Twitter feed:

Glimpse: Selected Aphorisms, George Murray: shld appeal to T-folks: short! sharp! salty & sweet!

What happens when someone recommends a book you totally hate? I can only speak for myself here, but I never NEVER let it affect what I think of someone, or our friendship, and I will support and cherish that person’s opinion even as they recover in hospital from that near-fatal accident on Deadman’s Curve when they suddenly found their brakes didn’t work. It’s all about rising above.

It’s lovely, how this enthusiasm for books and writing draws us together like molecules in liquid, gathering and binding us. We willingly become entangled in a sort of literary waltz, a pleasant to-and-fro of fresh discovery.

But what about when someone presses a book on you, assuring you that you’ll simply adore it … and you don’t? Worse – you hate the thing, and can’t understand how anyone would think of it and then think of you.

In looking at her love for the Bildungsroman, this Guardian blogger suddenly realizes that all her favs were written by Americans. What gives?

What these books have in common is that they’re all by American authors (with a high proportion of National Book Awards and nominations among them). Is this merely coincidence, or is there something else at work here? Do American writers absorb Bildungsroman aptitude alongside fluoridated water and Wonder Bread? The titles that inevitably pop into my head when I hear the phrase “coming-of-age story” are Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird. Even when I deliberately racked my brains to come up with outstanding British examples, Meg Rosoff’s How I Live Now was first off the blocks, and while she may be expatriate, I’m afraid she’s still a Yank.

If we keep doing this to each other, there’s no way we’ll ever get ahead, man! Bigger indy’s arrival met with partisan resistence by existing indy in small town.

The animosity seems to have stemmed from the fact that Books & Books moved in when there was already an independent bookstore, the Open Book, around the corner. And as some people saw it, there was no room for another one.

Terry Lucas, a librarian and the owner of the Open Book, which she founded in 1999, said Books & Books is on a course to put her already struggling store out of business.

The dueling bookstores have caused a bit of summer drama in this quiet, laid-back town on the south fork of Long Island, where much of the commercial activity happens on Main Street, a tidy stretch lined with restaurants, real estate offices and boutiques.

“You’d think the thing that was going to kill the little town bookstore was the e-reader,” said Glenn Dorskind, a high school English teacher and friend of Ms. Lucas’s. “But the thing that’s killing it is another bookstore.”

Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library to become first attraction ever in Indianapolis

Putnam signs Betty White to two book deal, presumably for pair of BDSM manuals

Apple developing smaller iPad that can do more, tentatively called the “iPhone”

Why are YA authors pulling out of a Texas book festival? … People, it’s Texas… Why do you think?

Bob Probert’s autobiography to be published (I hated this guy, but very few people deserve to die at 45…)

UK authors protest Blair book signing

Did you know there was someone called Octomom? Perhaps people like me (ie, literate) not knowing is part of the reason no one wants her book

RIP: Ludvik Kundera, Czech poet, dead at 90

It’s not a toilet, it’s a porcelain sculpture that once lovingly cradled the shit of a famous author (no word on whether Salinger’s shit was also reclusive)

Was there really a Quasimodo?

There is nothing that can’t be made better with the addition of Emma Thompson, including Beatrix Potter

Percy Jackson-themed birthday parties for your kids, as opposed to my usual mayhem and sugar production

Ray Bradbury takes one more step down the road to Crazy Old Coot with a call for another American revolution (will someone please get him his meds and call the nurse? He keeps sneaking off into Orson Scott Card’s room and setting all the Arthur Clarke books on fire)

How will we change when our keyboards, anachronisms of analog culture, change? What will happen to our brains? Will they be tastier or repulsive to the coming zombie hordes? Someone needs to ask these questions, people.

Among the 20th-century activities our muscles can’t forget is typing on a qwerty keyboard. And though most people who type now don’t know the meaning of a typebar jam — much less the inky aggravation — the configuration of characters that begins with the row q-w-e-r-t-y-u-i-o-p, first marketed for typewriters in 1874 to reduce such jams, is still the most common configuration in the world for English-language keyboards.

For 136 years, then, typing in English has meant making certain neurological associations. Words exist in our minds and on our tongues, but they also live in our hands and fingers. Anyone who types envisions and feels words in space, and for English speakers who use technology, this space is defined by the qwerty keyboard. Who knows what qwerty has done to the language — even to modes of thought — by attaching meaning to certain constellations? Deep in our typist-minds, G and H are centrally located and somehow siblings; X and Z are southwestern outliers; and Q is always followed by . . . W.

But maybe qwerty is finally on its way out.

But is that floating like a butterfly or like a shit in the toilet? These are the questions that keep me up nights. Yet, while the language we use on Facebook is artificial and stilted, it’s only so in a different way from that we use elsewhere, which makes it a good medium for cross overs for fiction, etc. Or so this seems to be saying. Well, at least for “these kids today”. I don’t think I could handle it. I find myself wanting to strangle some authors while reading and if I could just switch over one tab and find their address and identifying photos, well, that wouldn’t be too good.

In the dark, medieval days before the Internet, teenagers were forced to scribble their stagiest experiments in self-hood in journals and notebooks, or to express themselves through their clothes. The high drama was the same, the amped-up, overstated processing of life the same, but the media available were inferior. How amazing to be able to tell your 1,344 closest friends, “guess who I saw at the Apple store? I died it was so awkward!!!!!!!” Or “ I am so freaked out and excited about tomorrow I can’t stop eating, are you experiencing this?” or “Robert in twilight is so ahhhhhhhhhhhhh.” Facebook gives the exhibitionism, the pure theater of those years, a whole other level of stage.

Well, you’re going to have to. I kind of actually like how he divides up this one when talking about what we’ll lose as the private library disappears from our homes.

The architecture of our lives is constantly changing, and the library may be next on the list of rooms that grow vestigial and then vanish from our floor plans. Where it survives, it has merged with the “office” or the “den,” and the language of the contemporary home, which stresses flow and openness, doesn’t bode well for the survival of a room that should stand apart, a quiet eddy to the side of the busy torrent of modern life. The library, alas, may go the way of the separate dining room and the formal parlor, not because we won’t read anymore, but because we won’t read books anymore, at least not books printed on paper.

But what a loss to the ways books represent, bedevil and impeach us. They represent us, of course, as anyone knows who has made basic decisions about which books go in the living room and which get confined to less public places. That they bedevil us is clear if you have moved recently or live burdened with closets filled with books — books under the bed, books in the attic — or if you have ever saved a book for years or decades only to discover, upon desperately needing it, that it has been lost in the general deluge of too many books.

But they also impeach us, and it is that function that electronic readers can never replicate. A wall of books is mortality made geometric, a pattern of hope and loss, ambition and failure.

Ian Rankin is not only embarrassed of his early writing, he doesn’t even understand some of it. I hear you, brother. I hear you.

The bestselling Scottish novelist told the new issue of The Word magazine that he went a bit overboard when writing the book. “When I read my first novel now – Jesus, it’s like the writing of a PhD student,” Rankin said. “There’s words in it I don’t actually understand. In thrillers, there is very little room for purple prose.”

Heh. Stick it to them egg-head PhDs, Ranky!

What happens when you read a hard book? Same thing that happens to your muscles when you lift weights like, say, an 100 pound box of candle wax from the trunk of your car. Well, YOU get a workout. Me? My muscles rip and I end up on the couch moaning. But we’re getting away from the point here. You need to read harder books.

We all lead such insanely busy lives, and do so much multitasking, that there’s no way we can take in really complex or important new thoughts. Most of us are stuck with whatever big ideas we studied in college. Even in the fields we make a living in, we’re more likely to rely on what we learned at school, or pick up pell-mell on the job, than on new reading in depth. How many lawyers with cases to argue and clients to bill can catch up with the latest big ideas on law, or with the big ideas of Plato or Aquinas that they missed out on years ago?

The one stretch of undistracted time most of us have is when we take vacation. The temptation — my temptation, almost always succumbed to — is to go catatonic, escaping the working world into the oblivion of Ludlum. But when I settle into my next holiday, I’m hoping to resist that urge. I hope to use the rare gift of an empty mind to grapple with a big idea or two — with a chunk of Marx, maybe, since I’ve never read a word he’s actually written, or with that Foucault that’s been gathering dust.

I forgot that Friday was Bookninja’s 7th birthday. In honour of that, I am continuing to update Bookninja daily for the foreseeable future. I will also continue the inhalation and exhalation of atmospheric gases, the consumption and metabolization food, and the practice of occasionally taking leave of voluntary bodily functions and the suspension of consciousness in order to reconstitute psychic, physical, and emotional energy. Hoorah!

Today’s top story: The Seattle Times has come up with a game-changing idea: writers should take “the Internet” road to success… Srsly. No, wait, hear them out…! It’s an INFORMATION SUPER-HIGHWAY! This is going to be BIG, people! I can just feel it in my series of tubes!

Power signings are becoming a major pain in the ass… why would you ever submit yourself to the stringent security measures of a book signing starring someone like Tony Blair unless you either a) actually wanted to shake the hand of a spineless puppet, or b) actually wanted to try stabbing him? Either way, you deserve what you get

Subtitle-o-matic

The ebook price war will kill us all

Archie is poised to take on Wolverine in what promises to be an extremely bloody battle of comic book empires, with Archie presumably countering the adamantium claws and mutant healing factor with a deadly dose of dimples and ginger charm—ROWR!

Booker nominee gets into slap-fight over “shit” European fiction

The release of Stephanie Meyer’s Breaking Wind in pb is projected to be the biggest ever

You know why your bookstore is failing? It doesn’t have a cat. I’m sorry, but it’s true. No one fucks with the store guarded by an attack cat. My suggestion is you contact the Humane Society as soon as possible. Also, get some paper towels…

Why bother buying a Kindle now when the price will surely go below $100?

Why colour e-readers are useless

The end of Kindle! Or not!

Who needs publishers? Skip the line and serialize online!

More fretting over the loss of marginalia in electronic books… Is it really going to disappear?

Exactly HOW Canadian is Scott Pilgrim? Answer at Vanity Fair

Maestro Fresh Wes gives up his backbone slide in favour of cracking the spine… OF HIS BOOKS! Hy-OOOOOOOOO!

Poetry donation boxes seek to boost coffee sales… Why does this seem so confusing to me?

Worst book of the decade? I have to ask: author’s fault or subject’s?

Priest accuses Pullman of war on Christianity while non-Christian world chuckles at irony

Ricky Gervais sued over kids book

Tony Blair: afraid of readers

PEI poet strikes it big on YouTube

Toronto design cool guy David Gee (who did the cover for my latest) is interviewed

Have you seen this neat project? Peter Kao wrote in to tell me he uses the entire text of a document to create a piece of art relevant to the document itself. Guess the classic books below and go check out the rest.

This is the first piece I’ve seen in a while on that old arts page staple about authors being forced to shill their work in person like… like… like… common plumbers! And accountants! And bus drivers! And… politicians! But for the genuinely public averse, are there alternatives? Yes! Look here, here, and here, for some of mine! Oh, and I’ll be reading in St. John’s, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Kitchener, Winnipeg and New York this fall, as well as anywhere-the-fuck-else someone asks me to go, so I guess it doesn’t really apply.

we’re living in era where a writer can’t just write. They have to be out there. I understand that. Some would argue that readings are part of a writer’s job; I would counter that if someone is terrible at an aspect of their job, then they should instead play to their strengths. I fear that a bad reading could be counterproductive. Of course, not being a drinker of alcohol these days and not having access to a regular supply of tranquilisers possibly doesn’t help either.

I can’t explain my own aversion. I’ve been on live radio and numerous television programmes and can hold my own in conversation with tramps, toffs and rock stars alike, so I know I’m not shy, but reading something so personal as my own work? No. I would genuinely rather jiggle my bare genitals at an audience than do that. In fact, I’m available for bookings. Maybe not children’s parties though.

So how does the performance-shy writer compensate? Well, fortunately it’s the 21st century and there are many alternatives.

Getting older, fatter, and uglier by the day, I’ve opted to have no author photo on my last two books, but I suppose if you were writing something other that poetry it might actually matter. So I can see why people agonize over their author photos. This woman got called out for being different than hers and so started thinking about hiring her hottie daughter to work as a body double. Hm. This is exactly what I proposed to Jude Law, but did he even consider? NoooOOOOoooo. He just slapped on a restraining order and walked away. How is that constructive, I ask you? How is that “adding to the conversation”? Just think of the chicks he’d have got with my words and his looks. Hey, I should write a book about that.

Then I had another creative brainstorm: What if I just hired my daughter as a body double? She’s 21, blonde, blue-eyed and gorgeous. It wouldn’t matter what kind of photo or pose she took, because my daughter is in that flawless bloom of young womanhood where she could be wearing a paintball mask and still look good.

Books might not sell better with a gorgeous author, but it couldn’t hurt. I wished that I had the sort of look that can sell a book, like the young and lovely Vendala Vida, author of The Lovers, or exotic Jhumpa Lahiri, author of Unaccustomed Earth. Hotties have an easier time marketing just about anything in our society, from detergent to shoes — unless you go in the other direction and market a product with someone noticeably dorky, like that little troll of a guy who has built his empire out of playing the downtrodden Windows PC guy on those Mac commercials.

If I used a body double, though, I’d have to send her to my book signings and media appearances. What would I do if I ever ended up on The Today Show or Jon Stewart? I couldn’t disappoint Jon Stewart! He’s the conscience of our country!

On the other hand, there was some merit in this idea: If I had a body double, I’d get a lot more writing done. And my daughter loves to travel.

Hey, if Obama can disappoint John Stewart, why can’t you, lady?

The transparent pseudonym is the subject of much consternation, analysis, and spin-management for everyone except, you know, readers.

Price was unable to comment on the utter blandness of his pseudonym, or why he chose to reveal his identity before he even cloaked it.

“This, God save me, should be fun,” he said in a statement.

Fun for the author, yes. But to a reader, this kind of bestseller boondoggle may come off as vain and childish, and contrary to the literary heritage of the truly deceptive pen name. Price’s announcement was akin to a magician pulling a rabbit out of a see-through hat.

“The transparent pseudonym is very modern,” says Carmela Ciuraru, a Brooklyn-based author and editor whose book “Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms” comes out next year. “It’s getting to have it both ways: exploiting the popularity and safety of your own established brand while using the protective cloak of a pen name. . . . It’s an easy way to show off how versatile they are as a performer. . . . If a critic bashes them for taking on a different genre or prose style, they’ve always got their own wildly successful, established name to fall back on.”

Same way Indigo is battling … um … everyone. Toys and games and miscellaneous crap. And ebooks.

“This company is going to go through a really fundamental existential struggle,” said Peter Osnos, the founder and editor at large of PublicAffairs, an independent publisher. “What you have is this aggregation of factors — the changes in the way book buying is taking place, the general sluggishness of the economy, the management issues at Barnes & Noble. All of those things together create a set of problems which are really quite striking.”

At the expansive Barnes & Noble store in Manhattan’s Union Square, the changes sweeping the company and the industry are on full display. Shelves have been stripped bare to make room for toys and games, as a sign dangling from the ceiling cheerfully announces.

“I’m in favor of anything that brings traffic in the store,” said Ms. Reidy of Simon & Schuster. “If it’s toys or games that brings a family into the bookstore, then I say fine.”

The company is also taking significant steps to capture the digital market. In September, it will begin building 1,000-square-foot boutiques to showcase the Nook in all of its outlets.

Bestselling Booker list in a long time… cool. I hope Lisa Moore gets some serious cash, because I know she’s been looking around for a poet to support who can do light cleaning and entertain party guests…

JFranz gets not only a feature in Time, but the cover… done.come.up

Another defence of chicklit as “literature”

Dorchester not, in fact, going ALL digital

A Tolkien and a Dickens team up for a kids book, presumably about a cockney dwarf

Newsflash! Publisher sues news agency over plagiariszzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…………

Random, Kobo, and rich people sleeping place partner to get rich people ebooks

International buyers love remainders

Antidote to Overrated writers bs purports to credit underrated writers, but while I’d take nothing away from any of them, quite a few here are hardly “underrated” and are doing quite well… including part time ‘Ninjas Eisenberg and Millet

Librarians at Night. (via Matthew T)

I know there’s a variety of opinions out there on used books (neither the author nor the publisher gets a cut of a used book purchase), but one thing is certain: in hard times, pre-browsed/pre-sneezed-on is doing well.

That’s no surprise to Brian Elliott, CEO of Alibris, which has 15,000 active sellers, including 80 ABA members. “Alibris had a great 2009. We saw double-digit growth and are still seeing growth overall in 2010,” says Elliott. To make it easier for booksellers to manage their business across multiple marketplaces like Amazon, eBay, Buy.com, and Half.com, Alibris bought the software provider Monsoon in March. In addition, Alibris continues to partner with retailers like Barnes & Noble, Chapters/Indigo, and Borders to match buyers and sellers.

At Half Price Books, the leading dedicated brick-and-mortar retailer of used books in the country, revenue rose nearly 8%, to $220 million, for the fiscal year ending June 30. Last week the bookseller held a grand reopening for its location in Brookfield, Wis., which has added 20% more shelf space. The company is also in the process of moving its Maplewood, Minn., store into larger space at the end of September and will open a new store in Oklahoma City, Okla., later this month. According to spokesperson Rebekah Gannaway, Half Price will have 113 stores by the first quarter of 2011.

The Post profiles artist Jane Mount, who paints pictures of great bookshelf lineups. I’m pretty sure that’s one of mine over there on the right. No, further right. Further. Fuurrrrrther. Sweet.

The books on someone’s shelf will often tell you more about a person than the clothes they wear, the music they listen to, or the friends they keep. Jane Mount, a visual artist hailing from New York City, taps into this emotional connection with her project Ideal Bookshelf, a series of paintings which capture the spines of peoples favourite books.

“We show off our books on shelves like merit badges, because we’re proud of the ideas we’ve ingested to make us who we are, and we hope to connect with others based on that. I think this is endearing and charming,” she says. “When I paint someone else’s favorites and they have the same book I have in mine, I feel closer to them, like we must understand each other in some meaningful way.