I’m donning my shadowy ‘Ninja gear and heading out of the cave today to do CBC NL’s Radio Noon call-in show, Crosstalk, where the topic is on words and phrases that drive us mental. Utilize (do you mean “use”)? Functionality (do I need to beat you about the face for saying that)? Action (as a verb will get you smacked)? “To be honest…” (what, have you been lying until now)? Planning for the future (as opposed to planning for the recent past)? Literally (to mean figuratively or metaphorically)? Terrorism (used to describe a Minister getting a pie in the face)? No problem! (in place of “you’re welcome”)? Drill down / tease out (I shudder…)? “On a go-forward basis…” (someone shoot me, please)?

Any to add for today’s show? Or just want to kvetch? Bookninja is your place to be. You can also listen live online here and call in: 1-800-563-8255. Starts 11:05 EST or 12:35 in NL.

AAAAAHHHGGGH! THERE ARE KIDS EVERYWHERE! SWARMING ME LIKE BEES! My house is disturbingly infested with these grimy, whiny bipeds which I’m told are my genetic offering to the gristmill of evolution. I feel a bit like a mother spider whose eggs have just hatched. Please don’t eat me little ones. Plus, we’re currently undergoing what will come to be refered to as the Blizzard of ‘10, and the pipes in my bathroom froze yesterday and burst apocalyptically last night at midnight, so… Well, guess. Guess what I’m going to be doing today. That’s right: duct taping the children together and seeking comfort in vodka.

Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson grants a once-in-a-lifetime interview to a newsie down south. Why’d you quit Calvin? Because it was done. But don’t you know we love you? Yes, I’m aware. And thanks. (That kind of sums it up. But he’s still awesome.)

With almost 15 years of separation and reflection, what do you think it was about “Calvin and Hobbes” that went beyond just capturing readers’ attention, but their hearts as well?

The only part I understand is what went into the creation of the strip. What readers take away from it is up to them. Once the strip is published, readers bring their own experiences to it, and the work takes on a life of its own. Everyone responds differently to different parts.

I just tried to write honestly, and I tried to make this little world fun to look at, so people would take the time to read it. That was the full extent of my concern. You mix a bunch of ingredients, and once in a great while, chemistry happens. I can’t explain why the strip caught on the way it did, and I don’t think I could ever duplicate it. A lot of things have to go right all at once.

What are your thoughts about the legacy of your strip?

Well, it’s not a subject that keeps me up at night. Readers will always decide if the work is meaningful and relevant to them, and I can live with whatever conclusion they come to. Again, my part in all this largely ended as the ink dried.

Moby has done a great job covering and contextualize the Macmillan/Amazon dust up. But despite the screaming adoration of their peers and the poverty-stricken love of their authors, Macmillan has seen no sign of their “capitulation”, and their titles remain censored, closed for sale, on the Amazon site.  In fact, there’s no real sign of Amazon at all. I suspect it has to do with in-house vs. contract PR opinions on how to salvage a shred of dignity from this giant FUBAR. Right now Amazon looks like a Little Rascal who got the old backfiring tailpipe in the eye. (And speaking of harming little children for profit, Rupert Murdoch waits in the wings, gleefully rubbing his crooked, skinless fingers together, wondering how he can get in on a piece of ass-kicking that doesn’t result in negative press for once.) You know who’s fault this is? Steve Jobs’. The solution? Buy a tech company that can give Kindle touch capability and cross your fingers. Or in Bezos’s case: talons.

Big news broke yesterday in Canada as one of the country’s coolest presses (Anansi) loses its publisher (Lynn Henry) to one of the country’s biggest presses (Double Day). Anansi is no small lit press anymore, but it is independent, and something of the bridge between small and large here—plus, it has a rep for innovative publicity and snagging great writers that compete with the best in the world. A few years ago, I couldn’t have imagined them surviving the loss of the editor responsible for much of their cred, Martha Sharpe, but they did, and I suspect Lynn was a large part of that. So good luck!

“Lynn is known as both an excellent communicator and a strong and collaborative leader, and I am confident that we will all benefit from the breadth and depth of experience she brings,” said Kristin Cochrane, publisher of Doubleday Canada, in a statement. Cochrane became publisher of Doubleday since last December, when Maya Mavjee left to become president and publisher of Crown Publishing Group in New York.

“My understanding, and of course I haven’t walked through the door yet, my understand is that I’m going to work very closely with Kristin, but really looking at the editorial side of Doubleday,” she said. “The three wonderful senior editors there are going to be reporting to me, and I’m also going to be developing my own list, and I’m going to work with everyone on acquisitions, and on the editorial side of things. Just trying to really build on the successes that Doubleday already has.”

Over the course of a 15-year career, Henry has worked with authors including Lisa Moore, Peter Behrens, Gil Adamson, Bill Gaston, Colin McAdam, and Rawi Hage, whose debut novel De Niro’s Game was plucked from a slush pile and went on to win the Dublin IMPAC Prize.

Palin has used her PAC to buy $63,000 worth of her own book. That’s not including $8,000 on bookmarks and $20G for her to have her own photographer and a handler on her tour. And all of it was spent in two months.

The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential candidate had her political organization spend more than $63,000 on what her reports describe as “books for fundraising donor fulfillment.” The payments went to Harper Collins, her publisher, and in some instances to HSP Direct, a Virginia-based direct mail fundraising firm that serves a number of well-known conservative politicians and pundits.

Sarah PAC spent another $8,000 on colorful bookmarks designed by a Nashville-based event branding firm. And her committee paid her publisher $20,000 for what appears to have been the cost of sending her personal photographer and another aide along on her book tour. Those expenses are listed by the PAC as travel repayment to Harper Collins.

I had written this piece last year as a joke for some friends, and I even briefly considered trying to publish it, but forgot about it until today, the post Lost, Season 6, day. I suppose it’ll be funnier to Newfoundlanders than everyone else, but here it is:

10 Reasons the Island of Newfoundland Could Be the Island From Lost

1. Its rugged, pristine beauty belies a history of dark secrets and danger.
2. Once you’re on the island it’s nearly impossible to get off.
3. It’s full of dated machinery and crackpot experiments that never really worked out.
4. Most of the outside world can’t find it on a map.
5. People on the island don’t seem to be having as many children anymore.
6. If you’re new to the island, it often feels as though someone you can barely understand is whispering behind your back.
7. Though it may sometimes seem as though you’ve gone back in time, you’re actually half an hour ahead.
8. The insanely rich are desperate to possess it and exploit its resources.
9. There’s only the one doctor.
10. Those who do leave the island spend their whole lives trying to get back to it.

Short on poetry, heavy on ass-kicking, the Inferno video game has changed how we sell Dante. As far as trade offs go, I’m pretty good with the ass-kicking/poetry divide. Seems like a fair trade-off.

players may find that this version of that pitiless (if strangely satisfying) part of “The Divine Comedy” doesn’t necessarily correspond to their memories from comparative literature classes of yore. In the video game Dante is no longer a reedy, introspective poet but a knight who returns home from the Crusades to find that his beloved Beatrice has been brutally murdered. Her innocent soul has been taken captive by Lucifer, and Dante must chase the archfiend into hell, fending off wave after wave of advancing demons with a mighty scythe.

“It’s a highbrow/lowbrow project by design,” Mr. Knight said. “If you know the poem, the game has a lot to offer. If you just want to mash buttons and kill demons, that’s all it has to be for you.”

Though Electronic Arts is perhaps best known for its Sims series and sports games like Madden NFL, the company is always searching for existing properties that can be translated into video games.

“We look at companies like Walt Disney, where they’ve got intellectual properties that feel like their own, but are based on literature from a time gone by,” said John Riccitiello, Electronic Arts’s chief executive. “A great intellectual property can live a second or third time in new media, because it gives you a head start.”

Disney. Great way to model yourself. Maybe you can hire away their star racism/sexism consultant to help beef your offerings up with some coloured savages who need saved by a white man and add some pumps to otherwise ancient princesses.

Attention Twitterverse: Jurgen Habermas is NOT on Twitter… as you were

The books of Lost… Feels like it’s been years since I’ve been able to stare at Kate’s ass as she shimmied up some vine-covered soundstage hill, or marvel at the ridiculous beauty of Sayid’s eyes, or even complain about the turnoff of Sawyer’s stringy hair and slope-y shoulders… but even longer has been the deficit of book spotting… Was there a fucking library on that plane?

Texas jail ban of books: can there be good in evil?

Nick Hornby, Oscar winner?

Comics publishers adapt to iPad universe

Faber, fleshing out depression wing, wants Eliot AND Morrissey

Judge an Atlantic book by its cover… go on… I dare you

Macmillan sure is getting the love. And well they should. I love it when my people rise up like a sallow, bespectacled army of stick men. It’s like when pasty, pre-nutso Crispin Glover clocked that guy who played Biff a the end of the Back to the Future. Getting the trophy wife is only part of it, my geeklings. The admiration of your fellow nerds surrounding you in a circle and reaching out to touch your Apollonian glory is the real reward. Soon everyone’s going to be lining up to tape “kick me” to Amazon’s back.

Speaking of which: never one to miss beating up on someone, Rupert Murdoch is tapped to be next in line to teabag Amazon (if you don’t know what teabagging is, I recommend you don’t look it up and consider yourself a lucky person)

Salon on how the iPad has had an iMpact (I somehow suspect a significant percentage of the Salon staff have been unable to resist playing with their own nipples since the iPad announcement…)

Even the Authors Guild has to admit The Mac is kind of sexy right now (they who sometimes give the other bully, Google, the odd handy by the shop class back doors)

Hey, did you know there’s a magazine called “Business Week“, which I think, but don’t quote me on this, covers a sector called “business” on a “weekly” basis… Huh.

WaPo: Yo, ese, Macmillan is Yeesus Chrys of publishing, mang…

A rules switch at the Booker around the time I was born created a black hole into which some great fiction fell. So the powers that be are staging a lost Booker contest that has 22 titles, including Canadian sex symbol Margaret Laurence and a host of other awesome names (Orton? Murdoch? White? Awesome!) . Complete list below. Great time to revisit some old titles.

Brian Aldiss, The Hand Reared Boy
HE Bates, A Little Of What You Fancy?
Nina Bawden, The Birds On The Trees
Melvyn Bragg, A Place In England
Christy Brown, Down All The Days
Len Deighton, Bomber
JG Farrell, Troubles
Elaine Feinstein, The Circle
Shirley Hazzard, The Bay Of Noon
Reginald Hill, A Clubbable Woman
Susan Hill, I’m The King Of The Castle
Francis King, A Domestic Animal
Margaret Laurence, The Fire Dwellers
David Lodge, Out Of The Shelter
Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat
Shiva Naipaul, Fireflies
Patrick O’Brian, Master and Commander
Joe Orton, Head To Toe
Mary Renault, Fire From Heaven
Ruth Rendell, A Guilty Thing Surprised
Muriel Spark, The Driver’s Seat
Patrick White, The Vivisector

Penguin dusts off the Salinger backlist, which presumably means it’ll be a while before we see his “in-between list” come to the frontlist

Reader’s Digest on A-bridge to Nowhere… I crack me up

American school realizes it looks stupid and backpedals on Anne Frank censorship

Book tokens?

“Apparently”, and allow me to reiterate that in deep quotes, “”"”apparently”"”", a truckload of flanimals books have gone missing in the US. And if Ricky Gervais weren’t involved, I might not be suspecting this was a publicity stunt and that those of us who’d never even heard of these abominations of cool were all being fleeced (teehee!) into posting about it. But here we are. I just like posting things with pictures of Ricky in it. He has a face I love.

Involving the antics of creatures including the timid Splunge and the ferocious Bletchling, Gervais’s first pop-up Flanimals books were en route to an Indiana warehouse belonging to his US publisher, Candlewick, when the truck driver discovered they were missing. The copies of the $19.99 (£12.50) book – which will be released in March – are valued at more than $240,000, and Candlewick told US publishing magazine Publishers Weekly that police were investigating the incident as grand theft.

In a statement issued by Candlewick to the magazine, Gervais showed a sense of humour about the situation. “This is obviously a misguided Flanimal Rights group or an organised gang of eight-year-olds,” said the comedian. “Just like the books, the thieves will fold under questioning.” The publisher said the theft would not affect availability.

Mr Gervais won my eternal affection about ten seconds into this video. So, yes, I will post your thinly veiled publicity grubbing, Ricky.

Somewhere around the duodenum, Amazon’s foot, which had apparently entered through its own mouth, met Macmillan’s foot which, as we saw yesterday, entered through Amazon’s rectum, and the two are having a kungfu battle amid the half-digested remains of America’s mid-list novelists. Heady stuff.

Moby does a good job of rounding up the story so far

Meanwhile, Galleycat interviews a digital playah

Amazon’s stock price sinks, presumably suffering from the relatively new phenomenon called “The Douche-Effect”

Agents largely on author/publishers’ side (except when they’re at parties with Amazon, in which  case, reverse that…)

Don’t anger the publishing sector, bitches… we’ll get our hands ready for a fuck of a slap fight

What gave the skinny, bespectacled kid in the in the playground the cahones to stand up to that hulking bully Amazon in the first place? He cultivated his own hulk…  Nothing picking a fight in the shadow of your backup plan

Wired calls it a “beatdown” and a winner for “content”

Boho Dick’s Orange County days profiled in the LAT.

Dick was a Bay Area fixture until November 1971, when he returned to his house in San Rafael to discover his doors and windows blown out, water and asbestos shards on the floor and his stereo and papers gone.

He would blame the Black Panthers, the KGB, neo-Nazis. But regardless of the perpetrators, he wanted out. When an offer came to appear at a sci-fi convention in Vancouver, Canada, Dick set out for British Columbia, and a month later had not returned. Eventually, he wrote to Willis McNelly, a professor at Cal State Fullerton, to ask whether that community might suit him.

“You must realize of course,” McNelly wrote back, “that Fullerton is in the heart of darkest Orange County. . . . O.C. is also the place where Nixon’s representative in Congress is a card-carrying member of the Birch Society.”

Dick’s next letter came from a rehab facility. “Dear Will,” he wrote. “Well it happened, I flipped out.”

Dick had been running with heroin addicts in Vancouver; he’d also tried to kill himself. John Birch Society or not, Orange County didn’t sound so bad.

Then why are they doing it? Speculative positioning. Really interesting piece on what might become known as the Failwall.

I hear that the brass at the New York Times expect its paywall to be revenue neutral — the amount of money they expect to bring in from online subscriptions is pretty much equal to the amount of money they expect to lose from online advertising.

I’ve been running the numbers on the NYT paywall for a while now, and this comes as no surprise to me. But if the NYT doesn’t expect to make money doing this, why are they still going ahead with it?

The answer is that a paywall comes with a certain amount of option value. Once it’s implemented, nytimes.com will have two revenue streams rather than one, and diversification in and of itself is quite a good thing. If the online ad market gets worse rather than better, the subscription base will help to cushion the blow. More generally, a metered paywall is a flexible thing: if it turns out to be costing the paper money, the meter can be dialed back so far that almost nobody ever hits it. On the other hand, there’s a small possibility that the paywall will be an enormous success, and make a large difference to total revenues — maybe not at first, but once you have your subscribers, they tend to be pretty price-insensitive, and will happily keep on renewing even as you continue to raise the subscription price.

Essentially, then, the paywall looks, on its face, a bit like a free lottery ticket for the NYT.

I’m guessing that once the story of his death, life, and work has been covered from every conceivable angle (now that people are free to cover it without getting a cane to the noggin), and exploited for trite filler, we’ll start getting regularly spaced speculations on what’s in his drawer of unpublished work, as well as cranky legacy protection diatribes.

But what was he doing? The writers of memoirs about him penetrated his legendary secrecy, and occasionally there was some suggestion that “not publishing” did not mean “not writing”. Joyce Maynard, a lover of his from the early Seventies, said in a memoir that he continued to write every morning – something that other intimates confirmed. By 1972, she said, he had finished two more novels. His daughter, Margaret, in another memoir, even described the filing system he had for his unfinished work. A neighbour, Jerry Burt, claimed that Salinger had told him that he had the barely credible total of “15 or 16″ unfinished novels in his famous safe.

Of course, a writer who works in so unusual a way is perfectly likely to have destroyed every one of the books. Or he may not. Speculation about Salinger’s unpublished work has, until this point, been an easy, vulgar sort of critical wondering, like guessing what Keats’s poetry of the 1860s would have been like, or Keith Douglas’s late period.

We’ll never know, so it doesn’t really matter what we say. But we may, in due course, find out what Salinger’s post-publication period was like. Was the weird and unreadable fantasy monologue of “Hapworth 16, 1924″ a one-off blip before he returned to the classical, heartbreaking lucidities of “Raise High the Roof-Beam, Carpenters”? Could there be a novel of the quality of The Catcher in The Rye waiting there?

The Writers Trust has revealed its shortlist for the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writinzzzzzzzzzzz. No, I’m just kidding, I’ve read all of these—they’re rivetting. <snort> <muffled guffaw> Naw, I’m just yankin yer line. I couldn’t care less. But someone’s going to be $25G richer, and that’s news, baby. News.

John English (Kitchener, Ontario) for Just Watch Me: The Life of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, 1968-2000, published by Knopf Canada

Terry Gould (Vancouver) for Murder Without Borders: Dying For the Story in the World’s Most Dangerous Places, published by Random House Canada

Rudyard Griffiths (Toronto) for Who We Are: A Citizen’s Manifesto, published by Douglas & McIntyre

James Maskalyk (Toronto) for Six Months in Sudan: A Young Doctor in a War-torn Village, published by Doubleday Canada

Daniel Poliquin (Montreal) for René Lévesque, published by Penguin Canada

Crybaby Amazon is “being forced” to sell Kindle e-books at higher prices and trying to shift blame for their predatory business practices to the publishers standing up to them by writing a Dear John letter to their customer base that basically says, Hey, we may be playing hardball, but when it’s our turn to bat, you pitch underhand (see how I brought that around to the American pastime of Rounders?) Letter on Amazon copied below for the purposes of hilarity.

Dear Customers:

Macmillan, one of the “big six” publishers, has clearly communicated to us that, regardless of our viewpoint, they are committed to switching to an agency model and charging $12.99 to $14.99 for e-book versions of bestsellers and most hardcover releases.

We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles. We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books. Amazon customers will at that point decide for themselves whether they believe it’s reasonable to pay $14.99 for a bestselling e-book. We don’t believe that all of the major publishers will take the same route as Macmillan. And we know for sure that many independent presses and self-published authors will see this as an opportunity to provide attractively priced e-books as an alternative.

Kindle is a business for Amazon, and it is also a mission. We never expected it to be easy!

Thank you for being a customer.

BoingBoing points to this commentary rounding up Amazon’s truly spectacular failures of the last week.

I’m sure it’ll be a while yet before we can escape the gravity well of the iPad singularity. So I’ll try to ghettoize them and switch to warp engines..

What does it mean for book culture?

10 other uses for the iPad

Will the e-book war escalate now that the iPad is on the scene?

Random takes a wait-and-see approach

Borders lays off 10% of its corp HQ staff

Moby continues to pursue the story with the fervour of a cub reporter fang-deep in a big story

Big authors threaten to boycott Google books

B&N being investigated for online discount practices

Reclusive author, dead at 91.

Charles McGrath’s NYT obit

Richard Lea’s Guardian obit

Andrew Pyper in the Globe

WaPo obit

Independent obit

Laura Miller’s Salon obit

Fulford in the Post

Slate on his “best” story

NYer hauls out all his old stories the published (great link)

The Onion even gets in on the action with a note perfect short piece

All ladies’ sanitary product joking aside, I wonder what Bostonians think about this thing. I mean, haven’t they been listening to iPads for years? iPad Nano, iPad Touch, iPad Shuffle… Anyway, the nerds have rutted themselves on the joy of the day: we are one step closer to living in a Star Trek movie. This is fine by me so long as the new Uhura is there. The Post folk have a nice little roundup that will give you the basic details for now. More to come in the days ahead, I’m sure.

Called iPad, it will play video, music and serve as an eReader, which Jobs announced will be called “iBooks”. As this is our books blog, let’s focus on the latter (for our tech reporter’s full report visit FP).

Looking poised to deliver a huge blow to Amazon’s Kindle product, Jobs did have a word for Jeff Bezos’s group: “Amazon’s done a great job of pioneering this functionality with the Kindle. We’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a little further.”

How fun would it be to be this guy?

Wait, don’t swear and go off to another site in a huff. This article’s actually interesting. When commercial mags dropped fiction, the lit mag was there to carry it (presumably like Jesus did for that guy who’s forever walking on the beach). But even as fiction has become a common pastime pursuit for the vocationally undecided idly rich (re MFA prgs), its viability as a commercial venture has fallen further than ever. Is it time to just give up on fiction in magazines?

One would think that the rapid eviction of literature from the pages of commercial magazines would have come as a tremendous boon to lit mags, especially at the schools that have become safe harbors for (and de facto patrons of) writers whose works don’t sell enough to generate an income. You would expect that the loyal readers of established writers would have provided a boost in circulation to these little magazines and that universities would have seen themselves in a new light—not just promoting the enjoyment of literature but promulgating a new era of socially conscious writing in the postcommercial age. But the less commercially viable fiction became, the less it seemed to concern itself with its audience, which in turn made it less commercial, until, like a dying star, it seems on the verge of implosion. Indeed, most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues—as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.

In the midst of a war on two fronts, there has been hardly a ripple in American fiction. With the exception of a few execrable screeds—like Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint (which revealed just how completely postmodernism has painted itself into a corner)—novelists and story writers alike have largely ignored the wars. Even our poets, the supposed deliverers of “news that stays news,” have been comparatively mum; Brian Turner is the only major poet to yet emerge from Iraq. In this vacuum, nonfiction has experienced a renaissance, and the publishing industry—already geared toward marketing tell-all memoirs and sweeping histories—has seized upon the eyewitness remembrances of combatants and the epic military accounts of journalists. That, combined with the blockbuster mentality of book publishing in the age of corporate conglomeration (to the point of nearly exterminating the midlist), has conspired to squash the market for new fiction.

To save the body, sometimes you have to cut off the head. Michael Wolff thinks that the paywall gambit the NYT is implementing come 2011 is really symptomatic of poor leadership. Will staff even WANT to work there when estimates say the paper will lose between 90 adn 98% of its readership for the more important articles? Moby fleshes this all out with a couple other articles, including one showing other paywall newspapers failing dramatically.

Apparently the New York Times is going to start charging for online access. Putting aside whether this will work, the decision clearly means the Times has decided that the decade or so it has spent not charging was a bad idea.

We’re in one of those problematic loops. The same people who made the wrong decision upon which the company has tried to build its business—and that would be, foremost, the publisher, Arthur Sulzberger, Jr.—are now the people making this new opposite decision about how to build the business. (Apparently, Carlos Slim, the Mexican bandit and Internet genius who is the Times‘ largest shareholder, also thinks charging is a nifty idea—so good to keep him happy, I guess.)

In a more performance-based culture, when it becomes necessary to jettison the existing business plan—one in which management has invested the future of the company—you change management.

Not doing so means you’re pretty much managing by crapshoot.

The iSlate or whatever the hell the Apple tablet will be called (the iFollow) is being announced today, and the speculation about e-reading is through the roof. Gear-pig nerds and print media producers across the continent look like they’re jingling change in their pockets in unison for some reason. Hey, wait a min—ew….

“The iPhone was a harbinger,” said Trip Hawkins, a founder of Electronic Arts and now chief executive of Digital Chocolate, which makes games for cellphones. “When you have a device that is this convenient and fun for consumers to use, you can get a lot more people interested in paying for and engaging with the content. Big media companies should be all over this like a cheap suit.”

Indeed, they already are. The New York Times Company, for example, is developing a version of its newspaper for the tablet, according to a person briefed on the effort, although executives declined to say what sort of deal had been struck.

On Monday, The Times also announced that its media group division had created a new segment for “reader applications,” and named Yasmin Namini, the senior vice president for marketing and circulation, to head it. Executives said the timing was coincidental, prompted not by the Apple device specifically, but by the growing importance to The Times of electronic reading devices in general.

At least three publishers, Hearst, Condé Nast and Time, have also created mockups of their magazines for tablets, even before such devices have hit the market. “Apple upended the smartphone market with the introduction of the iPhone, and it’s likely that they will, if they enter the tablet market, lead the pace there,” said Thomas J. Wallace, editorial director of Condé Nast. He said that “2010 is going to be the year of the tablet, and we feel we are in a very good position for it.”

Sigh. You know I’m going to get one.

What’s peeled away to get to the fleshy, sweet news beneath.

World’s largest book to be hauled out like sideshow freak for public indifference

Michelangelo’s poetry about the Sistine Chapel

Border’s Chief resigns: industry analysts nervous, giddy-with-something-new-to-gossip-about

Aussie publishers slow on e-books

Timed chapters: the latest solution to an invented problem

UK’s TV book club grows, may stand chance

In a startling upset that sent shockwaves around the world (well, more like staticky ripples, but you get my drift—we live in a very small plane of existence, us bookish-types), a poetry book has beaten one of the few native English-speaking authors with funny marks over more than one of his vowels, Colm Tóibín, to win the … ergh… muffle… ahem… “costa”…ew… Book Prize. I haven’t read either book, but I’ll definitely order Reid’s today.

An intensely personal and moving series of poems written as a tribute to his late wife tonight won Christopher Reid one of the UK’s most important literary prizes.

Reid follows in the footsteps of Douglas Dunn, Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney by becoming only the fourth poet to win the overall Costa book of the year award, picking up, in total, a £30,000 prize and an incalculable increase in readership.

Novelist Josephine Hart, who chaired the panel of judges, said his winning book, A Scattering was “good bordering on great,” and that when she said great she meant the likes of Yeats and Browning. “It is devastating piece of work and all of us on the jury felt it was a book we would wish everybody to read.”

How come reviewers aren’t being honest about boredom and books? It’s a part of life, so surely it’s a part of books as well.  In fact, books and boredom were made for each othzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…………

…boredom is woven into the very fabric of the literary enterprise. We read, and write, in large part to avoid it. At the same time, few experiences carry more risk of active boredom than picking up a book. Boring people can, paradoxically, prove interesting. As they prattle on, you step back mentally and start to catalog the irritating timbre of the offending voice, the reliance on cliché, the almost comic repetitiousness — in short, you begin constructing a story. But a boring book, especially a boring novel, is just boring. A library is an enormous repository of information, entertainment, the best that has been thought and said. It is also probably the densest concentration of potential boredom on earth.

Boredom, like the modern novel, was born in the 18th century, and came into full flower in the 19th. The Oxford English Dictionary’s first recorded use of “to bore” dates to a 1768 letter by the Earl of Carlisle, mentioning his “Newmarket friends, who are to be bored by these Frenchmen.” “Bores,” meaning boring things, arrived soon after, followed by human bores. By the time of the O.E.D.’s first citation of the noun “boredom” in 1852, in Dickens’s “Bleak House” (where it occurs six times by my count), everyone, or at least everyone in the novel-reading middle classes, seemed to be bored, or worried about becoming bored.

Boredom, scholars argue, was something new, different from the dullness, lassitude and tedium people had no doubt been experiencing for centuries.

If everyone has a book in them, they also now all have time to write it. Well, stab me in the fucking eye with a Bic. Could I please have a handful of salt to rub in these wounds while I work away in my goddamn DAY JOB?

EVERYONE has one book in them, the saying goes, but the problem – or the excuse – has always been finding the time to write it. No longer.

For practitioners of the latest literary trend, Lay-off Lit, time is what they suddenly have bundles of. The question now is how to weave it into literary gold.

Lay-off Lit joins Chick Lit, Dick lit (lovable lads), Miz Lit (desperate childhoods) and Pit Lit (tough types from northern mining towns make good) in a growing line of easy-definition genres making bookshelves bend and publishers grin.

But its emergence also reflects real cultural forces: Lay-off Lit is written by those whose response to being made jobless by the global financial crisis was to reach for a pen and finally write that book.

Last of the great Yiddish poets, dead at 96.

His poem about a sky filled with white stars was put to a plaintive melody and became a classic of Yiddish song — “Unter Dayne Vayse Shtern” (“Beneath the Whiteness of Your Stars”).

Mr. Sutzkever and his wife, Freydke, fled the ghetto with a group of partisans and were airlifted to Moscow, where their daughter Rina was born. The family made its way to Poland and Paris and finally to the British mandate of Palestine, where they remained after independence in 1948.

In Israel, where modern Hebrew was the muscular language, he devoted himself to keeping Yiddish alive even as the number of speakers diminished year after year. He founded and edited Israel’s leading Yiddish literary journal, Di Goldene Keyt (The Golden Chain), until it stopped publishing in 1995. And he continued to turn out Yiddish poetry, most notably “Lider fun Togbukh” (“Poems From a Diary 1974-1981”), which many regard as his masterpiece. In 1985, he was awarded the country’s most prestigious award, the Israel Prize.

NBCC Award finalists announced

LRB in crisis, if it were any other magazine

Is Borders in crisis? Yes! say industry watchers / No! says Borders

More changes at Granta

Kindle braces for Apple tablaggeddon

For ‘Ninja Pete: Helvetica cookie cutters (from BoingBoing)

Texans continue to do nothing to improve slack-jawed idiots image: Brown Bear, Brown Bear banned from schools because of name mix up with (”anti-American”) Marxist author

Liberals also riding Stupid Train to Dumbtown: bookstore demands English only conversations among staff

Cali prudes worried Jesus is killing kittens ever time a child reads the dictionary: Merriam-Webster’s pulled because definition of “oral sex” is too graphic

(And no, none of these are Onion articles, unforetunately)

What ever happened to reading alone?

Reading might well have been among the last remaining private activities, but it is now a relentlessly social pursuit. Gaggles of readers get together monthly to sip chardonnay and discuss the latest Oprah selection. On fan sites for the Harry Potter and “Twilight” series, enthusiastic followers dissect plot lines, argue over their favorite scenes and analyze characters. Publishers, meanwhile, are fashioning social networking sites where they hope to attract readers who want to comment on books and one another.
…
Publishers are trying to use the increasingly social media landscape to stimulate a new reading culture. “I don’t think they are walking into bookstores in droves, so how do you get to teens and how do you get an author in front of a teen?” said Diane Naughton, vice president for marketing for HarperCollins Children’s Books, which has initiated enterprises including the Amanda Project, a Web site affiliated with a young-adult mystery series, and inkpop, where teenagers can upload their writing and receive commentary from peers and HarperCollins editors.

The concern with some of these sites is that users will spend their time talking to one another rather than reading books — just as some book groups spend more time drinking wine and gossiping than discussing the month’s title. Ellie Hirschhorn, chief digital officer at Simon & Schuster, said executives were concernedwhen they started PulseIt!, a Web site where teenagers can read advance galleys and comment on them. “Did they just want to use our bandwidth to hang out and chat with each other?” Ms. Hirschhorn wondered. But by tracking page views on the digital galleys, she said, “what we found is that they are voracious readers.”

What’s next? More than one toilet per bathroom?

The NYT Magazine takes an (ironically?) in-depth look at the James Patterson publishing meat-grinder—a powerhouse operation that scoops up the literary equivalent of the hooves, lips, and assholes fallen between the slats of fiction’s abattoir kill-floor grating and churns and presses this slurry into the pink goodness of a nitrate filled foot-long street-meat called “the popular thriller”.

No sooner had Patterson established himself in the thriller market than he started moving into new genres. Kirshbaum didn’t initially like the idea; he was worried that Patterson would confuse his thriller fans. Patterson’s first nonthriller, “Miracle on the 17th Green,” published in 1996, did very well. That same year, Patterson wanted to try publishing more than one book despite Little, Brown’s view that he would cannibalize his own audience. In addition to “Miracle on the 17th Green,” Patterson published “Hide and Seek” and “Jack and Jill,” each of which was a best seller. From there, Patterson gradually added more titles each year. Not only did more books mean more sales, they also meant greater visibility, ensuring that Patterson’s name would almost always be at the front of bookstores, with the rest of the new releases. Patterson encountered similar resistance when he introduced the idea of using co-authors, which Little, Brown warned would dilute his brand. Once again, the books were best sellers. “Eventually, I stopped fighting him and went along for the ride,” Kirshbaum says.

Patterson’s vision of a limitless empire forced Little, Brown to reorder its priorities. Publishers have finite resources, and the demands of publishing Patterson were extraordinary even for a blockbuster author. Some Little, Brown editors worried that other books were suffering as a result. “To have one writer really start needing, and even demanding, the lion’s share of energy and attention was difficult,” Sarah Crichton, Little, Brown’s publisher from 1996 to 2001, told me. “There were times when some of us resented that. When Jim felt that resentment, he roared back. And he was too powerful to ignore.”

Crichton says she was continually surprised by the success of Patterson’s books. To her, they lacked the nuance and originality of other blockbuster genre writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz. “Jim felt his ambitions weren’t being taken seriously enough,” Crichton says. “And in retrospect, he was probably right.”

Dude, you got to know that, no matter what your sales are, what you’re doing is irredeemable when even your publisher says you don’t have “the nuance and originality” of Dean Koontz. Your publisher. The person who invested hours and hours of her life in you. Tsssssss. Ooooooo. Buuuuuurrrrnnnn.

Some interesting things here in the mix today, instead of just the usual reader announcements and dire predictions of gloom and doom.

• On texting—”You may not like seeing the phrase “LOL — U R gr8” on the page, but it is common enough that you are likely to understand it. Why have such inadvertent “reforms” succeeded where generations of dedicated intellectual attempts have not? And will they last?”
• Preparing for the Apple tablet to save publishing—”There are electronic reading devices in existence already, such as Sony’s e-Reader and Amazon’s Kindle. But, publishers hope the unquestioned design talents of Apple will ensure that its latest product is the vehicle that enables them to transform their business models.”
• Kindle “bestsellers” are actually “bestfreebies”—”Most of the giveaways are of older titles by an author, with the idea that reading them will convert new fans who will go on to buy more recently released books. Even if only a small percentage of those who download a free book end up buying another one, “that’s all found money,” said Steve Oates, vice president for marketing at Bethany House Publishers, a unit of Baker Publishing Group, whose authors Beverly Lewis and Tracie Peterson had free titles on the Kindle best-seller list this week.”
• Ian McEwan is first mainstream author to sign e-deal with DevilAmazon—”Ian McEwan, the Booker prize winner, has become “the first mainstream British author” to sign an exclusive deal through Amazon to double the royalties he receives on his back catalogue, reports the Times.”
• The Millions interviews a book pirate, sad-yarrr—”He lives in the Midwest, he’s in his mid-30s and is a computer programmer by trade. By some measures, he’s the publishing industry’s ideal customer, an avid reader who buys dozens of books a year and enthusiastically recommends his favorites to friends. But he’s also uploaded hundreds of books to file sharing sites and he’s downloaded thousands. We discussed his file sharing activity over the course of a weekend, via email, and in his answers lie a critical challenge facing the publishing industry: how to quash the emerging piracy threat without alienating their most enthusiastic customers.”

Today is Lady Ninja’s Ninth Annual 30th Birthday Celebration, so it’s in her name that I dedicate today’s news of the agonizing disintegration of our industry.

Kitty Kelly releasing Orpah bio (spoiler: it’s apparently revealed that when Oprah buys property, she also buys the neighbours on either side so she can have three houses—one with wicker furniture and sleek clothes for when she’s skinny, and the other two appropriately provisioned for when she’s not)

Ursula Le Guin could be in one of those ads for supplements that keep older folk active, but instead of powerwalking and playign bacci ball, she’d be whupping Google’s ass

Tesco, not content with destroying the book industry through the cancer of its business model, will now add insult to injury by making the books it discounts to death into films… ah… hear that smacking sound? That’s sweet idealism being forced to kiss the anus of economic reality

In India books are big business

Leading poets stage Haiti benefit reading in the UK

Martin Amis gets continued press coverage for remarkable streak of being Martin Amis

Though it is largely a thankless profession, there is the occasional event that makes it all worth while.

Ninth-grade Collins High School English teacher Melissa Hamlin told coworkers Monday that the one moment she looks forward to all year, watching her students reach the end of Shirley Jackson’s short story The Lottery, is rapidly approaching.

According to new research in the UK, market share is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of fewer companies. Like Hachette, which took almost 17% of all sales. But the good news is, an alliance of indies (incl. Faber, Granta, Cannongate, etc.) got themselves into the top 5, beating out Pan Macmillan, et al for a 2.7% share of the market. Rock on!

While seven of the top 10 single publishers saw sales decline, the alliance—comprising Faber, Canongate, Quercus, Atlantic, Granta, Icon, Walker, Profile and their respective imprints—has continued to grow.

At the end of 2008, the alliance had sales growth of 12.5%, taking its revenues to £47.5m, or 2.7% of the market. But one year later this had grown to £57.4m or 3.3% market share. Pan Macmillan fell marginally, with revenues of £57.3m, or 3.3% market share. The difference between the two is £21,228, or just 0.002% in market share terms.

Will Atkinson, sales director at Faber, said: “We are 
the only good news story of last year.”

Aside from several articles at the Post that appeared yesterday, there are quite a few, and far flung, appreciations of Paul Quarrington showing up around the web. More to come, I’m sure.

Dave Bidini remembers his friend (Post)

Mark Medley surveys the reaction to the news of his death (Post)

BBC announcement

Vit Wagner calls him a “Renaissance man” (Toronto Star)

Books editor Martin Levin remembers (Globe)

Michael Posner highlights his multiple talents (Globe)

Macleans mourns and includes video

I wanted to pull these articles out from the news roundup:

Amazon appears to be trying to lure authors to bypass traditional publishing structures and sell straight to the Kindle by offering a 70% royalty rate. I think this is great, except that Amazon’s involved, which instead makes it skeezy, even if I can’t think how yet. But what I can think of is how clear the slush piles will be! And 70% of $100. Man, that’s like 50 bucks or something! Score! I’m so definitely going to upload my fantasy novel there.

Also, Moby asks whether the publishers trying to punish Amazon for their monopoly by delaying the release of ebooks have done themselves any favours. Answer? No.

The risks here are manifold, but the central fear is that of monopsony—control of a market by a single buyer–wherein Amazon would emerge not only as the only retailer of e-books, but, eventually and far more dramatically, the only buyer. As a result Amazon would potentially be able to dictate prices (pushing wholesale rates below $9.99), build a near-monopoly market share, and–in a true innovation in Amazon’s selling of cheap e-books–make money. And there are of course other risks: parts of the book industry could disintegrate as a result of the quick rise of Amazon as a mega e-book retailer, leaving big publishers without their tried and true methods for creating print blockbusters.

But the large publishers’ chief strategy for preventing such a disaster—delaying of some e-books until months after their print release, a step taken by Simon and Schuster, HarperCollins, Macmillian, Penguin, and Hachette–fails to account for something else altogether: that some consumers are very willing to wait. “Some 30 percent” of those surveyed in the BISG study said they “would wait up to three months to purchase the e-book edition of a book by their favorite author.” Some consumers have always opted to delay buying (paperback releases are the obvious example, but think also of second run movies, as well as cable and rentals, as well as bargain bin LPs). But here consumers have said that they are willing to wait three months, even for books by their “favorite” writers. One wonders how long such consumers would be willing to wait for these books.

Aussie writers get stamp of approval (no Les Murray?)

“Howl”—Ginsberg biopic premieres at Sundace

Famous literary slurrers

World’s cutest bookmarks?

Bloomsbury backs down again on “whitewashed” cover

Random culture: urbran sprawl as good as slime mold…

Daily Dose of Digital

We hate Google!

We like Google!

Google scares and confuses us!

I have a question about this whole Google opt-out thing—maybe one of you folk who actually reads the emails sent to you by the Writers’ Union can help me out: If I don’t opt out on Jan 28, does that only cover the four books I currently have out, thereby allowing me to choose to opt-out or stay in for future books, or is this an expulsion-from-the-garden kind of scenario?

Years ago we were all happy to see the New York Times drop its paywall and join the century. Now that paywall is going back up. I’ll certainly be linking to fewer and fewer NYT articles if a full paywall model is adopted. There are plenty of places on the web to get the same news. I like going there because the content is reliable and literate. But if it’s not free, buh-bye. I guess ad revenue hasn’t worked out for them and they’ve either not investigated or ruled out other revenue generation models. Sad, but we’ll find another paper of record for the internet. Maybe the Guardian or the BBC? Moby has some excellent extended coverage of the issue.

What wasn’t mentioned in the article or in the press release is that the Times Company is struggling, with hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and an increasingly complicated cast of creditors, including Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim (which loaned the company $250 million, at 14 percent interest) as well as a $225 million sale-leaseback arrangement involving its corporate headquarters. And, as Michael Wolff has pointed out, these odd deals, and the general economic woes of the company, can be blamed squarely on Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., who is the same exec responsible for leading the pay-wall changes. Sulzberger has presided over a ten-year-long catastrophe at the Times that has come close to destroying the company. Most dramatically, Sulzberger spent some $2 billion dollars buying back stock (for which he paid more than $50 a share, nearly four times what it’s worth today). But he also ended the company’s previous experiment in charging for online access, Times Select, just before the advertising economy started to sink.

Opinion about the coming pay-wall is divided. Many industry analysts doubt the ability of the Times to charge for content and maintain their audience. Some readers have stepped forward saying they are happy to pay for content—because they value what the Times does. Others, like Wolff, have mocked the paper, saying that aggregators like his own Newser have the most to gain from the move since they can, after paying the Times‘ small subscription fee, simply summarize its expensive work and re-sell it…thus making advertising income without having the costs of staffing bureaus and copy desks.

But who’s to say that the Times plans on convincing all of its readers to pay? What’s much more likely is that the company will aim to persuade a small potion of its current audience, say 10 to 20 percent, to subscribe. This would put the site well into the norm of so-called “freemium” business models wherein 10 to 20 percent of customers pay for premium content and, in so doing, support a variety of other services.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Beloved Canadian novelist, musician and screenwriter Paul Quarrington, dead at 56. I attended a fet for Paul at Harbourfront in the fall. If you hadn’t known of his diagnosis of terminal cancer, you’d have hardly known at all. Goodbye, Paul, from all of us!

Paul Quarrington, the multi-talented, award-winning Toronto author of “Whale Music,” has died. He was 56.

“He passed peacefully at home in Toronto in the early hours surrounded by friends and family,” said a statement on his website. “It is comforting to know that he didn’t suffer; he was calm and quiet holding hands with those who were closest to him.”

Quarrington, who was diagnosed with an advanced form of lung cancer last year, maintained a wide-ranging creative career over the past decades as a playwright, musician, writer and filmmaker.

He achieved perhaps his greatest success as a novelist and author.

Update: The Canadian literary community remembers Paul Quarrington at The Afterword.

Remember a few months ago when Bloomsbury got nailed for putting a white girl on the cover of a novel about a black girl? That, but with a fantasy novel this time. Must have something to do with space/time warps or something.

Magic Under Glass, a young adult novel, is the story of a “foreign” music hall girl, Nimira, hired by a sorcerer to sing with a piano-playing automaton. But she finds that a fairy has been trapped inside the clockwork automaton, and the two fall in love. Although Dolamore’s heroine is described in the book as black-haired and brown-skinned – and the official trailer for the novel shows her as such – the cover chosen by Bloomsbury USA Children’s Books shows a white, brown-haired girl. The choice has provoked outrage from bloggers and commentators, particularly following the publisher’s decision (later reversed) last year to feature a white girl on the cover of Justine Larbalestier’s novel Liar, about a black girl.

Once again the Canadian government shows their contempt for the preservation of cultural heritage, this time by creating new rules that will effectively kill almost every literary magazine in the country.

While the overall aid-to-publishers budget is roughly the same as last year – $73-million – a single title can now receive only a maximum of $1.5-million a year. The only exception to this cap are agricultural publications such as The Western Producer, Canadian Cattlemen and Grainews.

Moreover, small publications with a total annual paid circulation of 5,000 copies or less are ineligible for any CPF assistance, with exemptions for aboriginal, ethno-cultural and official language publications.

The rules are part of the new Canada Periodical Fund that Heritage Minister James Moore announced last year would be replacing two funding streams; the Canadian Magazine Fund, which supported editorial content and business development, and the Publications Assistance Program, which subsidized the mailing costs. (For instance, it costs Maclean’s 80 cents to ship a copy to Newfoundland while for downtown Toronto it’s 38 cents.)

The motivation, Moore said, was to create a more streamlined, flexible and balanced system.

I’ve got the trifecta of parenting fubar: a sick baby, a six-year-old on a snow day, and a sinus infection. I therefore respectfully beg off on any real posting today unless everyone but me falls asleep. Set your RSS feeds. It could happen. To tide you over, read this horrific expose on the exploitation of animals in books for children: “Friendship Between Caterpillar, Horse Exploited For Cheap Children’s Book“.

Are you a fan of Narrative? They have an iPhone app now. And they’re doing some kind of reader promotion called iStory, which I assume has to be in the first person… Or written on a MAC. Or something.

Scary news for US Democrats today as Mass. bizarrely goes from Ted Kennedy to a guy in a truck. But I’m a fan of minority rule, so let’s see some wheeling and dealing to get things done. However, not all hope for the Senate is lost: one rogue fellow is plying the house back to humanity with the oldest of tools: poetry. (Well, aside from the stick inserted into a termite mound to fish the insects out to supplement a prehistoric protein rich diet. That’s more likely the oldest tool.)

Late one weeknight, in the midst of the heated run-up to the Senate’s vote to move forward with debate on health-care reform, Ward — Bingaman’s aide — tries to explain Gutman’s poetic appeal. Never one to linger on poetry before meeting Gutman, he suddenly goes all Gutman-y.

“You got three or four minutes?” Ward says. “I want to read you a poem.”

And he does.

All 61 lines.

It’s a Zbigniew Herbert work about five soldiers on the night before their execution. On first reading, Ward keyed on the lines about the horror of the execution:

Before the bullet reaches its destination

the eye will perceive the flight of the projectile

the ear record the steely rustle

the nostrils will be filled with biting smoke

a petal of blood will brush the palate.

Then he talked to Gutman, who took away something entirely different, remembering most the lines recounting the soldiers talking “of girls/of fruits/of life.”

“Huck talked about the richness of life,” Ward recalls. “For Huck, it’s that passion for every moment.”