Big publishers say Amazon ebook/HC claims not far fetched

Meanwhile, across the pond, more bad news for paper books

Publishers looking to get even more slick and oily

72 ways to become a better writer (according to Someone!)

This article seems to be suggesting that novellas are the skanky club slut of literature: perfect for those afraid to commit

Larsson’s e-sales move into seven digits

How long can the celebrity memoir plague last?

Scholastic doing well with their catalogues full of brain-rotting shite for children

There’s apparently a “digital revolution” going on in kids books. Huh. Revolution? I thought kids’ narrative interests had already bridged the digital divide with the advent of that hideous little parenting surrogate called the “Nintendo DS”. And Scholastic has been selling plastic/electronic shit in place of books for some time now. Hardly a hardcore “revolution”. Take off the R, maybe.

Although children’s book publishers are pretty confident in the long-term survival of printed books for children—”Children are still going to have a bookshelf,” says Susan Katz, president and publisher of HarperCollins Children’s Books—they are far from ignoring the elephant in the room. Katz admits: “They’ll have shelves with many other things, too.”

On those shelves no doubt will be plenty of electronic gadgetry, and children’s publishers are working to determine what defines a book, which devices to embrace, how to handle digital rights (and who has them), and how they can make money with e-products.

Certain trends are already emerging, chief among them being interactivity. “We’re entering into a new interactive art form,” says Rick Richter, formerly the president of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing and now a digital media consultant. Freed from rules about page count and paper weight, digital creators enjoy great flexibility. In the process, they can appeal to nonbookworms, such as computer and game geeks. “If anything, it will lead a lot of kids to books,” says Richter. He’s not alone in this belief. “Early reports indicate that this content is not replacing traditional books. It’s replacing games,” says Kristen McLean, executive director of the Association of Booksellers for Children. “Parents would rather see their kids engaged in book content than in game content.”

I’m leaving tonight for ten days in Ontario, some of which will be spent in Toronto, and some of which will be in the wilds of Owen Sound, where most telecommunications are conducted from the tops of hills by banging on hollow logs with rocks, so I may or may not have posts coming. Check back, set your rss feeds to “listen”, and pray for Mojo.

Roger Ebert signs with Grand Central for memoir

Anne Rice’s house selling for $3.3 million—six foot deep “basement”, four coffin garage, and landscaped graveyard includes world’s only natural habitat for dramatic black roses. Inflated sense of talent and self-worth not included…

Short story junction Joyland launches ebook imprint

The problems with the Tehran bookfair went way beyond censorship and banning of authors… some women dared to show their hair….

Get your noogie-ing knuckles and wedgie-ing grips ready… the college nerds are playing quidditch… it’s sad when you first realize not all social rejects are offset by big brains

Robert Munsch: coke addict.* Damn. But really, when you think about it… who but someone struggling with addiction could have come up with that abomination Love You Forever? That book has chemical troubles written all over it. Scholastic supports his continued production of gravy-train titles him though. In all seriousness: Get better, Bob.

Top 10 underground Welsh novels… (note: not about fairies)

Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water… The Jersey Shore kids, with a collected IQ of -6, have a tie-in book coming (The proceeds of which, will presumably be used to clean up America’s other seaboard disaster, the Axe body spray, cheap hair gel, and burnt umber tanning cream spill off the NJ coast that threatens the countryside and is turning the wildlife into vacuous douchebags)

Venerable British lit agents Peters Fraser and Dunlop taken over…

File under The Landslide Brings You Down: British Booksellers Association sign with Google Editions prg

*Kudos and wrist slaps to the Calgary folks who editorialized by adding that picture to this story…

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

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

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

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

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

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

From which gusheth the brackish news..

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

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

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

One third of Yanks use library computers to get online

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

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

Curious George authors gets own show at Jewish Museum

Children’s fiction competition at the Times

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.

The ridiculous pageant known as airport security, coupled with the apparently jelly-spined nerves of Scholastic publishing types, has killed a terror manual Robert Munsch had planned to use to train a hardened army of suicide bombing eight year-olds. This was an underpants level of emergency here, people. We’re at two minutes to midnight! Thank god for the quick thinking of our society’s censors. They, and only they, are fully aware how stupid our children, and their parents who are unable to provide even a modicum of context, are.  I feel like singing our national anthem. Which one is it again?

“We were going to do a story on a little girl who smuggles all these dolls onto a plane, but then that thing happened in Detroit,” said Munsch. “Scholastic calls me up in a panic saying, ‘Hold everything, that kid couldn’t smuggle anything onto the plane, she’s lucky to get onto the plane herself.’ ”

Munsch said he had no problem with the change, and even chuckled about the coincidence of a story of his clashing with a real-life situation. He is now in talks with the publisher on his next project.

Diane Kerner, director of publishing for Scholastic Canada, said the book will be postponed for “a bit.”

“A lot of kids can’t take a bag on an airplane right now,” she said. “We have a lot of stories of Bob’s in play at any given time … I’ve got four complete binders – big binders – in my office full of the stories he’s sent me … so when something seems like it might not be right at this exact moment, we’ve got a lot of others to choose from.”

I kind of hope you didn’t show up yesterday to witness my shame. I’ve been doing public speaking engagements lately where I address various groups on how to set up, maintain, and develop online communities, and one of the key things I talk about is being consistent. Damn. Bad blogger-who-wants-to-be-a-novelist. If it’s any consolation, I wrote 7 pages.

Steven Galloway isn’t holding his breath

NYPL gets Proulx and Eloise collections

Scholastic to distribute through HC?

Robert McCrum gives McThumbs up to Electric Literature

Amazoodle UK’s top 100 books list

RIP: Claude Lévi-Strauss, dead at 100

Yann’s new book on Holocaust is “shocking”

70 thing you don’t know about Marvel, unless your favourite drink is Mountain Dew

Daily Dose of Digital

Get your e-S&S here… chapter by chapter!

iPhone app to threaten Kindle (listen, I’ve tried threatening a Kindle too, but the damn thing just sits looking at me and doesn’t respond… shrewd negotiator, it is)

And if you don’t believe people will read books on a glowing iPod screen, check this out: books DL are outpacing games…!

E-reader next gen parts are big business

Nook makers suing B&N over… Nook

Aside from selling kids a steaming load of plastic shite (along with a few TV tie-in books) in their “book” catalogues, Scholastic has now pitched their corporate tents in the realms of bigotry, censorship, and homophobia. Glad to see them diversifying in the very competitive world of cartoonish evil. They asked an author to remove some offensive language (understandable, to some degree) from her book and change the protagonists parents from a lesbian couple to a pair of breeders. The author capitulated on the language, but stood firm on the dykes. So Scholastic said they would exclude it from their book fairs.

Luv Ya Bunches, about four elementary school girls who have little in common, but bond over the fact that they’re all named after flowers, is the first installment of a four-book series. But Scholastic says the book, released on October 1, failed to meet its vetting process because it contains offensive language and same-sex parents of one of the main characters, Milla.

The company sent a letter to Myracle’s editor asking the author to omit certain words such as ”geez,” “crap,” “sucks,” and “God” (as in, “oh my God”) and to alter its plotline to include a heterosexual couple. Myracle agreed to get rid of the offensive language “with the goal—as always—of making the book as available to as many readers as possible,” but the deal breaker was changing Milla’s two moms.

“A child having same-sex parents is not offensive, in my mind, and shouldn’t be ‘cleaned up.’” says Myracle, adding that the book fair subsequently decided not to take on Luv Ya Bunches because they wanted to avoid letters of complaint from parents. “I find that appalling. I understand why they would want to avoid complaint letters—no one likes getting hated on—but shouldn’t they be willing to evaluate the quality of the complaint? What, exactly, are children being protected against here?”

The good news Scholastic has rolled over like a good, flip-flopping corporate asshole facing bad publicity and the power of the gay dollar. Yay for online petitions!

Late today we got word, after discussions with Scholastic representatives, that the company has decided to reverse their earlier decision and include the book in their spring book fairs. That’s an awesome victory from one of the biggest and most influential educational book publishers and book retailers in the world, and it sends the clear message that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with two men or two women raising a child.

You can read Scholastic’s full statement right here. The statement doesn’t speak to the reasons they initially excluded Luv Ya Bunches from their book fairs (which was because Myracle included same sex parents and refused to include a heterosexual couple when that was requested by Scholastic), but it does make clear that not only will they be including Luv Ya Bunches in their spring fairs, but they have also affirmed that they “are committed to a review process that considers all books equally regardless of their inclusion of LGBT characters and same sex parents.”

The backlash against Scholastic’s devolving school calendars has gone from concerned parents to concerned teachers. Over 1200 grade school cat-herders have signed a petition asking Scholastic to stop selling toys through their catalogues that have unusual access to the captive audiences we store in the classrooms of our country. Good for them. I suppose it wouldn’t be bad if the toys complimented decent books, but the books are increasingly shit too and the toys are becoming the main selling point for what’s in there. We’ve gone over this before a few times, and I was on Q to chat about it once (mp3–right click to download).

Some 1,262 teachers have signed a petition by consumer group Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood asking Scholastic to stop enlisting teachers to sell toys to students.

The scolding comes at a time when the world’s largest educational publisher — which markets through schools and has sold more than 6 billion books over 60 years — is processing final summer book orders.

Scholastic also is the U.S. publisher of the Harry Potter series.

The watchdog group says one third of the items sold in Scholastic’s 2008 elementary and middle-school catalogs were either not books or books packaged with other non-book items. Besides toys, non-book items sold include stickers, science activity kits, math brain teasers, electronic dictionaries and audiobooks.

God, linking to USA Today makes me feel dirty. Been meaning to link to this, and it’s an antidote to the USA Today link: Sean Dixon’s open letter to Scholastic regarding book substitution and the marked difference between precocious heroines.

Moby points to How Books Get their Titles

And in related news: Oddest book titles pick a wiener for Diagram Prize

Afterword points to Countryman Press’s Twitter page where they are laying out the catalog, 140 characters at a time

NL poet Randy Maggs knicks Winterset Book award from the jaws of Sara Tilley… I’m so torn here… poetry wins a book award, but over a very interesting novel…

Ontario posts budget with no harmonized tax on books… !!

Charles Darwin was a student like any other: spending more money on the good life than books (mind you, I wonder if the publishers of the day had worked out how to gouge students like they do now)

The Bodleian Library at Oxford is bursting at the seems, so a spillover site has been designated to save the groaning shelves

Amazon.com layoffs

Scholastic having financial problems like everyone else

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

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

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

Hi guys and gals. I’ll be on CBC Radio One’s Q tomorrow morning to kvetch about the Scholastic Books catalogues your kids get at school (as previously reported here). A group in the US is calling for them to smarten up their selection, and I largely agree, though I take a more moderate approach. Hopefully you can tune in and let me know what you think afterwards.

Hell yes. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m so sick of this shit that I’ve started hiding the flyers when they come into the house. They get filed under blue moments after they come out of the bag. Or, if Ninja Boy sees them first, he gets to keep them, but refers to them as his “magazines”. I feel like he’s losing IQ points just by browsing that catalogue o’ schlock. Apparently a group in the US feels much the same way.

The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy group based in Boston, said that it had reviewed monthly fliers distributed by Scholastic last year and found that one-third of the items sold in these brochures were either not books or books packaged with other items.

Based on a review of brochures in Scholastic’s Lucky Club for children in second and third grade, and its Arrow Club for fourth through sixth graders, the group said that 14 percent of the items were not books, while an additional 19 percent were books sold with other trinkets like stickers, posters and toys.

Susan Linn, director of the campaign, said she had received complaints from parents who were concerned that their children were being sold toys, games, makeup and other items under the guise of a literary book club that is promoted in classrooms.

“Marketing in schools is a privilege and not a right,” Ms. Linn said in an interview. “Scholastic is abusing that privilege.”

I love this part:

“We work with teachers to make sure that items are O.K. to put out in their classrooms,” Ms. Newman said. “In a class of 24 kids, some of them will be turned on by a game, and it helps kids engage in the book club process.”

Very revealing. Um, how about helping them become engaged with BOOKS instead of “the book club process”? How about teaching them to love words instead of to become mindless consumers?

The NYT says a good ereader is generally a good thing — in this case, The Kindle.

What’s most enjoyable about the Kindle are the books that take it over and how readily and inexpensively you can get them and read them. What’s not enjoyable is everything else: the bumpable buttons that constantly flip your pages and lose your place, the pointy and cruel keyboard that is stiff and ineffective, the lily-white casing that is ugly when new and dingy and gross when used.

Really, it’s terrible. How this prototype ever made it into production I don’t know. It’s as if its creators had never seen an iPhone. Or a Walkman, for that matter. Where have they been? And the Internet capability that the device offers (almost exclusively so you can download books and other reading material from Amazon) is so poor — its parameters so hard to determine, its browser so ungracious and inaccessible — that you’re discouraged from ever exploiting it.

At the same time, and you’d be justified in thinking I’m just seeking a silver lining to rationalize my homely new purchase (it cost $360, after all), there’s some way in which the Kindle’s weak Internet connection and elusive browser are the best parts of the machine. As I said, the Kindle feels insular and remote from the wild world of commerce and buzzing data swarms. But the fact that it’s connected to the Web sort of — it has to be, right? Or how else could I download all these books? — makes the Kindle somehow better than a book. Because while I like a few hours on an airplane, I can’t say I want to move into a locked library carrel and never visit the Internet again. And I like that the Kindle, which connects to the Web through some proprietary Amazon entity called a Whispernet, is not completely out of it. The Kindle acknowledges the Internet; it hears its clamorous demands. It just ignores those demands. For the user, this means the Kindle bestows on the contemporary reader the ultimate grace: it keeps the Internet at bay.

And the Boston Globe wonders if multiplatform books will drawn the kids in, Harry Potter-style.

More than a year has passed since the final book in the Harry Potter series appeared, ending J.K. Rowling’s hugely successful fantasy epic. While the Potter books will go on selling, children’s publishing is struggling lately, and the industry is wondering where the next Harry Potter is going to come from. Now Scholastic Corp., US publisher of the Potter novels, thinks it has the answer: “The 39 Clues,” a 10-book adventure series for ages 8 to 12. Published last month with a first printing of 500,000 in the United States and more than 1 million in English worldwide, the first volume, “The Maze of Bones,” jumped to No. 1 on The New York Times children’s chapter-book bestseller list. While it dropped to No. 3 last Sunday, Scholastic is confident it has a formula with the future written all over it. And a lot of kids are clearly on board, even if there is skepticism among some booksellers.

Around this time of year people start talking about literacy, mostly because they have to help their kids with homework, I think.

• Il/Literacy isn’t an area of easy labels
• Reading to children in UK takes backseat to life’s essentials, like dinner and TV
• Scholastic kicks Bratz books off list (this makes the whole catalogue only marginally more appealing… get rid of Dora, Bob the Builder, and other TV tie-ins, as well as the facile, stock photo-based non-fiction and you’ve almost won me back)

Ninja-Boy, who’s five and just started kindy, has nothing to worry about in this regard—-he started reading his first words at three, and he keeps synonym, antonym, homonym, rhyme and alliteration collections. Each separate. If you said to him, “Hey, here’s Harold!” He’d mime throwing something over his shoulder into a sack and say, “Cha-ching! It’s in my alliteration collection!” A couple years ago when he first started this (it was homonyms first, then synonyms), my dad said something to him that included a synonym. “Cha-ching! It’s in my synonym collection,” he said in his squeaky little three-year-old voice. My dad looked at me, “He has a cinnamon collection?” “No, Papa,” he said. “Syn-o-nym. It’s when two words mean the same thing but sound different.” My dad looked at me again like when I was teenager and he suspected I was doing drugs (me?). “Sin-o-men?” he asked suspiciously. So much for the new generations always being less educated. I would guess that’s only so in families that have long been in the middle class. (P.S. Regarding Scholastic: my son calls the catalogues that come home from school fortnightly “my magazine”… He keeps them beside his carseat so he has travel reading. it’s kind of like Maxim for hyper-literate five-year-olds.)

On writing by committee the tie-in for a successful internet mystery game. Yes, this fate awaits you too. And you’ll love it. You’ll call it liberating and show up for every press engagement with a smile. Why? Because you’re getting PAID. It’s kind of like the logic you’ll one day use to justify buying that faceless home on the suburban cul-de-sac. The kids love it and you’ve just never been happier…

When giving Mr. Riordan guidelines for writing the first novel, Mr. Levithan and three other Scholastic editors wanted to make sure that the books would complement the Internet game. One instruction was that the 10 books would reveal only one clue per title, leaving gamers to find the other 29 online; another was that the series take place in a number of locales around the world.

Mr. Riordan, who looks the part of a prim schoolteacher, showing up for an interview on a blazing hot summer day in a wheat-colored blazer and dark slacks, said that throughout the writing of the book he checked in with the team of editors at Scholastic, who asked him to add or change details.

He said writing a book with a committee was not selling out, but was in some ways “liberating.” Writing the Percy Jackson books, he said, “was a very solitary experience.”

Writer/illustrator/Caldecott winner, profiled in the NYT.

His obsessions with old French movies, automatons, clockworks and the filmmaker Georges Méliès inspired “Hugo,” which earlier this month won the Randolph Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished American picture book for children.

At 533 pages it is the longest book ever to win that award, although more than 300 of those pages are pictures that, like movie storyboard frames, propel the story forward. In the novel, a boy who lives in an attic in a Paris train station desperately tries to fix a broken automaton — a kind of robot — that also interests a mysterious toy-stall owner (who turns out to be Méliès) and a young girl.

“The way the illustrations told the story was so exquisite,” said Karen Breen, chairwoman of the Caldecott judges committee and the children’s book review editor at Kirkus Reviews. “It was a favorite right from the start.”

The book, published last year by Scholastic Press, was a finalist for a National Book Award in young people’s literature. It has spent 42 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list for children’s chapter books and sold 130,000 copies in hardcover, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales.

Scholastic is holding out hopes that something called 39 Clues will be Harry’s successor. Oh, wait… it’s not even a book. It’s book/game based on the kid-crack model of Webkinz. Why don’t you just include a free shot of heroin with it? It’s like the prize-in-a-cereal box of books, except this is in Krusty-Os and has sharp metal edges.

The series is also Scholastic’s attempt to create a branded franchise for which it owns all the rights. Ms. Rowling retained the rights to the Harry Potter series, which meant that she could pursue separate deals for film and other licensed products, effectively cutting out Scholastic.

An online game will allow readers to search for the 39 clues themselves, while solving puzzles and playing mini-games that will be refreshed daily. Mr. Levithan said the site would include blogs written from the points of view of characters, and maps, treasure hunts and videos, many with historical and geographical content.

Each book will come with six collectors’ cards that can be used to find further clues in the online game. Players can also win cash and other prizes.

The publisher hopes that reluctant readers will be drawn to the books by the game. “Reading the books will make you better at the games, so that is the incentive,” said Suzanne Murphy, publisher of Scholastic’s trade division.

Seriously, didn’t ANYONE see that episode of Star Trek where Wesley got addicted to that game that looked like headgear braces for your eyes? Have we learned nothing from the good people of the Starship Enterprise? Please don’t let Wil’s years of suffering as Wesley have been in vain.

Here are a few links to those of you who like kidlit stories that don’t involve JK.

• Blyton’s revenge – a secret code in her work?
• Insiders on The Outsiders
• Vampires for the coke and pixie stix set (it was coke and pixie stix in my day… now it’s coke and angel dust, but you get the drift)
• Scholastic grows fat on Potter (okay, I lied above, sorry)

Hopefully there won’t be too many more of these, but I thought I’d start the whole thing off with an excerpt from Robert McCrum’s review in the Guardian:

So what to make of it, now that it’s done? From the point of view of the English canon, it’s hardly great literature. But if Rowling is neither CS Lewis nor Tolkien, nor Philip Pullman, hers has been, none the less, an extraordinary performance. At the end of a decade of accumulating Pottermania, you have to acknowledge, first, the ambition to undertake such a marathon, then the dedication to execute it, and finally the ability to bring it off.

To write one successful children’s book requires uncommon gifts, to write two suggests a touch of magic, but to complete no fewer than seven bestsellers and apparently retain your sanity, and your all-round niceness, is a marvellous achievement. The completion of this world-shaking heptalogy is something close to a triumph.

So what does it all amount to? It’s not difficult to find things in these books to sneer at. Cardboard characters? Tick. Torpid paragraphs? You bet. Flat-footed dialogue? On every page. A more-than-slightly autistic attention to minutiae? No doubt.

Perhaps it’s the autism that animates it. The fair-minded critic has to concede that Rowling’s devilry lies in her attention to detail. The magic of Potter is that he inhabits a fully realised parallel world. Moreover, Rowling does that unbeatable thing: she makes it work. How exactly she does it remains the mystery, but it’s to do with a primitive grasp of basic storytelling.

• McCrum’s review
• Insanity summary
• Sales! Sales! Saaaaaallllllessssss!
• What if you threw a bookstore and no one came?
• Giese review in CBC
• NYT on Manhattan reception
• Indian police sieze pirated Harry … wait a MINUTE! Pirates…? Harry…? Do I smell a sequel? Can you say, Harry Potter and the Scurvy-Ridden Mouth?
• The real secret behind Harry’s success (get your notebooks out… sheesh)
• The apotterlyptic future of Scholastic

• The Harry review embargo broken by both the NYT and the Balitmore Sun… I’m guessing they won’t be receiving press releases and stickers for the next installment. Of course, fans were already breaking the embargo. (My favourite part here is when Richard Lea refers in the Guardian article to Michiko as “he”… )
• Harry predictions by fans, podcasters and pros, for those not inclined to buy a copy on ebay  or steal one from the printer and photograph it before the insanity sets in
• Rachel Giese on her love affair with a boy wizard who receives her stamp of approval
• More on Harry Potter and the Heavenly Host
• Today in Harry lawsuits… Release the hounds… I suppose this will be part of Bloomsbury’s new, post-Potter revenue stream planning

After all the justification by grown nerds (who really just want to justify reading a kiddie book on the train to work) as to why Harry Potter is good for kids and good for reading, comes this article claiming that the books haven’t necessarily turned the tables on youth’s growing disinterest in books.

There is no doubt that the books have been a publishing sensation. In the 10 years since the first one, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” was published, the series has sold 325 million copies worldwide, with 121.5 million in print in the United States alone. Before Harry Potter, it was virtually unheard of for kids to queue up for a mere book. Children who had previously read short chapter books were suddenly plowing through more than 700 pages in a matter of days. Scholastic, the series’s United States publisher, plans a record-setting print run of 12 million copies for “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the eagerly awaited seventh and final installment due out at 12:01 a.m. on July 21.

But some researchers and educators say that the series, in the end, has not permanently tempted children to put down their Game Boys and curl up with a book instead. Some kids have found themselves daunted by the growing size of the books (“Sorcerer’s Stone” was 309 pages; “Deathly Hallows,” will be 784). Others say that Harry Potter does not have as much resonance as titles that more realistically reflect their daily lives. “The Harry Potter craze was a very positive thing for kids,” said Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, who has reviewed statistics from federal and private sources that consistently show that children read less as they age. “It got millions of kids to read a long and reasonably complex series of books. The trouble is that one Harry Potter novel every few years is not enough to reverse the decline in reading.”

For the record, you don’t need to justify reading a kiddie book on the train. You just have to accept your place in the pecking order as just under that guy in the back room at work — you know, the 42-year-old sysadmin D&D dice collector with pin-up fantasy art of half-naked Boris Vajello warrior women tacked to his cubicle wall. He’s not ashamed. So why should you be?

Harry Potter 7 will have an initial print run of 12 million. As part of the froofraw leading up to this orgy of dead trees, Scholastic plans to lick the space between Harry’s rectum and scrotum and call it “a celebration of the joy of reading.” (I don’t know much about book collecting as a speculative sport, but I can’t imagine that a 12M print run does much for the eventual worth of a first edition…)