Whatever happened to positive spin?

Via The AP:
Publishers expect book sales to stay flat
The Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit organization supported by the publishing industry, projects a 3 percent to 4 percent growth through 2011. The BISG expects little change in the actual number of books sold and sees a drop in the general trade market by more than 60 million. "The hits will keep doing well, but other books will have troubles," says BISG senior researcher Albert N. Greco, a professor of marketing at the Fordham University Graduate School of Business.

From the Guardian UK...

Hanif Kureishi (The Buddha of Suburbia, My Beautiful Laundrette) has launched a withering attack on university creative writing courses, calling them "the new mental hospitals."
Read it here.

Zadie Smith (White Teeth, The Autograph Man) salutes George Eliot ("the Victorian novelist who gave future writers the freedom to push the form to its limits"), while analyzing a young Henry James' review of Eliot's Middlemarch.
Read it here.

Sex and the City may be fabulous, but Candace Bushnell is sharper, darker, braver and cleverer than her most famous creation.
I disagree, but you may not. Either way, you can read it here.

E-book News, In Brief

Via Publisher's Weekly: Penguin has reported that e-book sales from the first four months of 2008 have surpassed the house's total e-book sales for all of last year. According to the publisher, the spike is "more than five times the overall growth in sales, year-on-year, through April 2008."

Via Publisher's Weekly: Barnes & Noble has launched a retail destination designed specifically for those with BlackBerries and smartphones. The new site, www.bn.com/mobile, caters to those who want to order books and other products from their mobile devices and, presumably, is intended to compete with Amazon's TextBuyIt option.

Via ebook2u: There is a wealth of content and other information in the public domain that is or soon will be in an ebook or some sort of digital form...A large collection (over 13,000) of public domain books have been indexed and made available in digital format at http://pdbooksonline.com.

Book News, In Brief

Lately, it seems like every author/publisher/cartoonist is trying to hip themselves to the concept of 'free.' But is merely giving away your product and then hoping for donations really the business model of the future, or just a poorly conceived idea on the way to something better? Techdirt dissects the phenomenon.

Microsoft has abandoned its plans to digitize books. The reason? They can't make money off of it. Seems that this 'free' thing is a hard nut to crack...even for the experts.

Hang in there! Borders has launched their own online store. The dying giant will use Alibris as their source for used books.

In lieu of any other news, here's a quick sampling of some of the odder book reviews floating around the net:

From FoxNews: Book: Paris Under Nazis Was One Big Sex Romp Book suggesting that German occupation of France encouraged sexual liberation of women shocks country still struggling to come to terms with the war.

From The AP: Book offers fascinating tales of modern-day cannibalism You know the standard image about cannibalism: A white Christian missionary stews in a large pot while an African tribe dances around him, planning to make him their next meal. There's no evidence that ever happened, author Paul Raffaele tell us. But real-life cannibals are far more interesting.

From BlogCriticsMagazine: Knitting Memories - Reflections on the Knitter's Life What do you do when you are knitting? Some knitters possess the talent of working with their hands while their eyes are directed elsewhere: watching television, overseeing their children, or engaging in lively conversation with friends – including direct eye contact.

Choice Quote

From Sunday's NYTimes article on Salman Rushdie, Now He’s Only Hunted by Cameras:

Umberto Eco was seated at the center of a long narrow table, opposite Mr. Rushdie and Diane Von Furstenberg. He and Mr. Rushdie were to travel to Rochester and then return to New York to appear at the 92nd Street Y with Mario Vargas Llosa: a scaled-down literary version of the Three Tenors.

The three appeared in 1995 at Royal Festival Hall in London. “We said we were the Three Musketeers and now we meet again,” Mr. Eco said. For the recent panels, he chose to read from “Foucault’s Pendulum,” he said, because Mr. Rushdie had once ripped it in The London Observer: “Humorless, devoid of character, entirely free of anything resembling a credible spoken word, and mind-numbingly full of gobbledygook of all sorts. Reader: I hated it,” Mr. Rushdie wrote in 1989.

“I picked it just in order to upset him,” Mr. Eco said, leaning back and smiling. He said he had not yet read Mr. Rushdie’s latest creation, or hardly anyone else’s, for that matter. “If they are different than me, I hate them, and if they are like me, I hate them,” he said.

Bookstore Chic

Available here.

Book News, In Brief

According to Publisher's Weekly, Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio announced that he is looking for ways to end the traditional returns practice, and predicted that it could be possible to find a solution “in a year or two.” Riggio said B&N has always been open to finding alternate ways to deal with unsold books, calling the current practice “insane” and “expensive.” While Riggio's right that shipping 1/3 too many books to bookstores is wasteful, a no-returns policy has a wide range of negative effects that must also be taken into account. When a similar scheme was implemented in comic book stores, it resulted in the bland, no risk stocking patterns that the majority of comics shops now adhere to. Do we really want to risk that in bookstores, as well?

Damn you, PW, for beating me to this one, too. Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policeman's Union) sits down with Reuters for a three page interview on his writing and writing habits.

Ah, here's one that PW hasn't snaked me on. Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting) tells The Guardian UK how to get furious - and survive.

Book News, In Brief

From Booktrade.info, yet another argument for print on demand: In 2005, there were approximately 1.5 billion books published and distributed to retail outlets. Out of these a staggering 465 million were returned as unsold...Interestingly this week Faber also announced that it was going to reprint its 'Classics' line using Print on Demand (POD) technology. Is this a dry run for the shape of things to come? POD is certainly a leaner and greener method of getting books into store.
What do y'all think? Personally, I'm a vegetarian, so I hate plants with a passion. Meat-based books, on the other hand...them thing's is just wrong.

National Geographic has compiled a list of the Top 50 Most Translated Authors. Strangely, a corporate entity ranks #1, while the Bible grabs the lucky 13th spot. Head over to Well-Mannered Frivolity for the whole shebang.

Everybody guessed that it was going to happen. It looks like they were right. Barnes & Noble has put together a team of executives and advisers to look into the possible acquisition of Borders.

Image: Nude With A Book by Chuck Mardosz

Disney Book News

Disney's corporate fat-cats will be thrilled to know that the Gargoyles comic has won the category of Best Anthropomorphic Comic Book at the Ursa Major Awards. They may not be so thrilled to know that the Ursa Major Awards are a furries-centric awards show held at an Ohio Holiday Inn. Huzzah!

P-p-p-p-p-p-lease, your honor! Roger Rabbit author Gary Wolf has lost his merchandising royalties case against Disney. Via BusinessStandard.com: The author of the book behind the Who framed Roger Rabbit movie lost an appeals court decision in a royalties dispute with Walt Disney, the second largest US media company. A California appeals court said yesterday that a trial judge erred in letting a jury interpret whether author Gary Wolf was entitled to part of the gross receipts of Disney units that sold Roger Rabbit merchandise.
Certainly sounds like the work of Judge Doom to me.

The looong delayed release of Walt Disney's Legends of Imagineering and the Genesis of the Disney Theme Park by Jeff Kurtti and Bruce Gordon seems to be over. According to Amazon.com (do your research on the net, but make sure to buy locally!), the book is scheduled to hit bookshelves on July 15. For a brief article on the book and its many delays, check out this Jim Hill article from Sept. '07.

Book-To-Film News

Behold, the first image from the feature film version of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. I have a feeling NAMBLA's gonna love this.

(Head on over to Twitch.com for a bigger photo...you sick perv.)

Glyph Comics Awards Announced!

From the official press release:
The Glyph Comics Awards recognize the best in comics made by, for, and about people of color from the preceding calendar year. While it is not exclusive to black creators, it does strive to honor those who have made the greatest contributions to the comics medium in terms of both critical and commercial impact. By doing so, the goal is to encourage more diverse and high quality work across the board and to inspire new creators to add their voices to the field.

The winners of the 2008 Glyph Comics Awards were announced in a ceremony at the East Coast Black Age of Comics Convention on Friday, May 16. The winners are:

Story of the Year
Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm; Percy Carey, writer, Ronald Wimberly, artist

Best Writer
James Sturm, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow

Best Artist
Kyle Baker, Nat Turner: Revolution

Best Male Character
Emmet Wilson, Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow; co-created by James Sturm, writer, and Rich Tommaso, artist

Best Female Character
Amanda Waller, Checkmate; Greg Rucka, writer, Joe Bennett & Jack Jadson, artists

Rising Star Award
Marguerite Abouet, Aya

Best Reprint Publication
Aya, Drawn & Quarterly; Chris Oliveros, publisher, Helge Dascher, translator

Best Cover
Sentences: The Life of MF Grimm; Ronald Wimberly, illustrator

Best Comic Strip
The K Chronicles; Keith Knight, story and art

Fan Award for Best Comic
Fantastic Four: The New Fantastic Four; Dwayne McDuffie, writer, Paul Pelletier & Rick Magyar, artists

Book News, In Brief

The Space Review laments the loss of their childhood hero, asking Where Are You Tom Swift? This tidbit of kids' lit nostalgia runs deep in me, too -- only my teen adventurers of choice were always Soup and Trixie Belden.

Spring ushers in more than just raging hormones and hay fever. It also brings with it a tidal wave of 'Beach Books' articles. The Star Herald delivers the first of the season (and it includes a list!).

NPR has an audio piece on first time authors using the net to push their books. Warning: Listening to it will cost you 5 minutes and 11 seconds that you should've spent re-writing that opening paragraph for the 100th time.

Would someone please write a virus to disable Amazon.com? I speak on behalf of every brick and mortar bookstore in the world when I say that you would be handsomely paid in free bookmarks and tepid, no-name coffee. To read the online behemoth's newest plans for worldwide domination through print on demand services, head on over to Forbes.com.

Blog-Jacking:The Art of Manliness.com

100 Must-Read Books: The Essential Man’s Library
Originally posted on May 14, 2008
Written by: Jason Lankow, Ross Crooks, Joshua Ritchie, and Brett McKay

There are the books you read, and then there are the books that change your life. We can all look back on the books that have shaped our perspective on politics, religion, money, and love. Some will even become a source of inspiration for the rest of your life. From a seemingly infinite list of books of anecdotal or literal merit, we have narrowed down the top 100 books that have shaped the lives of individual men while also helping define broader cultural ideas of what it means to be a man.

Whether it be a book on adventure, war, or manners, there is so much to learn about life’s great questions from these gems. Let us know in the comments which of these you loved, hated, and the books that meant a lot to you and should have made the list (you can even get really indignant about your favorite book). And without further ado, this is our list.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Set on the East Coast in the roaring 20’s, this American novel is a classic. From it we learn that often the wanting of something is better than actually having it. It is relevant to every man’s life. Furthermore, one true friend is worth infinitely more than a multitude of acquaintances.

"He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles… It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor."

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

Considered by most to be the authoritative text on statesmanship and power (how to obtain it as well as an illustration of its trappings), although certainly a shrewd one.

"From this arises an argument: whether it is better to be loved than feared. I reply that one should like to be both one and the other; but since it is difficult to join them together, it is much safer to be feared than to be loved when one of the two must be lacking."

Essentially, Machiavelli advocates letting your people have their property and women, but making sure that they know what you are capable of doing if they step out of line.

To continue, click here.

When Life Imitates Art...

Chester Himes' A Rage In Harlem begins with the lead character, Jackson, getting duped by a couple of scam artists. The grifters promise Jackson that they can double dectuple the value of his cash by wrapping it in 'specially treated chemical paper,' and then heating it up in the stove. When the novel was originally published in 1957, this scam -- and variations of it -- were already the stuff of urban legend. Maybe if more folks read Himes' crime fiction, scams like the following wouldn't still be happening today.

Via Chinaview.cn:
Man Loses Money Trying to Double It by Marinading
BEIJING, May 12 (Xinhuanet) -- A Vietnamese man in Norway who believed that mixing cash with a special liquid could double its value suffered in fact a loss of 35,000 U.S. dollars, according to media reports Monday. This unidentified man was told by a 32-year-old Frenchman that if he mixed the real cash with blank bills and then marinate them in a special liquid for one night, he would have double the amount of the cash. The gullible Vietnamese believed the Frenchman's story and gave him 180,000 kroner (35, 000 U.S. dollars). But when he prepared to collect his money the next morning, both the cash and the Frenchman disappeared. "He has given a statement that leads us to believe that he really believed this was possible. But we are of course having a hard time understanding how someone could actually believe such a tall tale," police officer Ragnar Ingberg said. Early on March, the Frenchman was arrested while trying to leave Norway. He is set to stand trial in a lower court near Oslo next week. But his lawyer claimed that his client is extremely surprised to be charged with something that was so incredible.

Book News, In Brief

Happy 100th birthday, Wind in the Willows. The Orlando Sentinel has a hyperbolic tribute to you.

Great news for geeks (like me), acid fiends (er...guilty) and hippie dippie starchildren (no, not at all). Not only will HarperCollins be releasing Arthur C Clarke's final book, The Last Theorum, later this year, they also plan to re-launch their entire line of Clarke books.
Correction, Via Michael:
Harper Collins UK is doing the final Clarke book over there, but Random House/Del Rey is doing the book in the US.

Everybody loves a list -- even the members of America's corporate cabal! Here's a link to The Top 25 Books Corporate America Is Reading, and a second link to a press release offering shout-outs to Real You Incorporated: 8 Essentials for Women Entrepreneurs, the only women's business book to make the list.

Comics creator Elizabeth Genco (Blue) asked a number of the leading indie comic book shop owners for tips on how to get a self-published work put into their stores. The answers that she was given (Avoid: Bad design both from a visual standpoint and a financial one: an unreadable spine, an unattractive cover or a cover that doesn’t reflect the interiors in some way, a title or price that’s impossible to find. You need to have: An ISBN on there.) can applied to all self-published endeavors. (A tip of the hat to The Beat for the initial heads-up.)

Free Online Manga: Nana

Review stolen from Comics Worth Reading:

Nana is a little slow-starting, but the result is more than worth the time invested. A few volumes in, it becomes incredibly addictive. Like many manga series these days, the first volume is prologue, leading into a simple premise. Two girls named Nana come to Tokyo to follow their dreams and in search of love; they wind up rooming together and learning from each other.

Book one is made up of two stories, each one introducing a different Nana. The first, Naive Nana, is largely average, with no distinguishing characteristics except for her boycraziness. She falls in love instantly with highly inappropriate choices. As the book opens, she’s being dumped by the married man she’s been sleeping with.

More disturbingly, she has no drive and no purpose in life besides being in love. Nana constantly refers to her bad-luck name and the poor omen of the number 7 and the “demon lord” who’s cursed her for no known reason. Her friends think she’s joking around, but she says it in one of those “ha ha only serious” ways. She’s looking for anything to seize upon to make herself not responsible for her own life.

Best friend Jun wants to go to Tokyo to art school, and since Nana thinks she can meet boys there, she tags along. Soon she meets Shoji, and after confusion over whether she’s capable of having a male friend (no) and some drunken evenings, she’s involved with Shoji and trying to find her way to Tokyo to follow her friends.

Nana’s casual acceptance of relationships based on nothing but physicality is disturbing, especially her affair with the married man. That pairing was based around nothing but sex, and Nana’s inability to comprehend how she was being used makes it hard for me to identify with or even understand her. In short, she’s an idiot (or, as a friend of mine calls her, the “wishy washy wimpy one”). But that’s just where she starts.

Thankfully, the author gives her enough luck to survive, and as I read more about her, her touching faith in the future is beginning to grow to me. When she gets to Tokyo in book two, she stumbles into a great job and coincidentally encounters the second Nana.

That Nana, a singer and punk rocker, is the kind of strong personality the first Nana needs to learn from. When musician Nana’s boyfriend gets picked up by a Tokyo band on the rise, she refuses to follow him until she can do it on her own terms. She’s determined to take care of herself, even if it requires sacrifices. The two Nanas first encounter each other on the train to the big city, where Naive Nana spills her guts to the more reticent Punk Nana. Although the same age, the two seem like they’re from completely different generations in their temperament and attitudes.

Like Ai Yazawa’s previous manga series Paradise Kiss, an underlying theme here is that the family you build and choose is better than the one you happen to be born into. Naive Nana is a mostly ignored middle child, and Punk Nana was an orphan raised by a harsh grandmother. The two of them have made small groups of close friends with shared interests to support them instead.

To begin reading, click here.

Book News, In Brief

Parents' groups always seem to hand awards to the crappiest books. Oh, look. Here's another. Via Marketwire: iParenting Media Awards announced My Bag and Me as a winner in the book category. My Bag and Me is a thoughtful book educating children on the topic of going green and ways to reduce waste on the earth. Grocery shopping bags are not only wasteful but unnecessary, especially when a special reusable bag is available. My Bag and Me comes with its very own reusable shopping bag for children to use when shopping with mom and dad.
Seriously, if any of my abusive foster parents had ever handed me a book called My Bag And Me, I would've called Social Services on them.

At long last, a real crackhead's memoir. From The Huffington Post: We just got our hands on an early, early copy of New York Times columnist David Carr's memoir, The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life. His Own. It documents Carr's adult life of addiction and recovery as well as his career and family trajectory. Because of the recent strain on the genre by hoaxers like JT LeRoy, Margaret Seltzer, and James Frey, Carr actually went to the trouble of video-interviewing other participants in the events that he remembered, just to be as accurate as possible.

Nerds: Looking for a great way to stir up stagnant pheromones? Try Campus Quidditch! Via Ashland Daily Tidings: "Run, snitch, run!" With a shout, Jessica Snee sets an afternoon game of "quidditch" into motion. The once-fictional sport, featured in author J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels, made its debut on the Southern Oregon University campus Sunday. In the Harry Potter universe, the "snitch" is a winged golden ball, the capture of which ends the quidditch match. Here on SOU's Cox Lawn, the snitch is freshman William Barondeau. The "seekers" on both teams aim to snatch a tennis ball in a sock from the back of Barondeau's cargo pants. "It's weird being a ball," Barondeau said after the game.
(Question: How long do you think it will take before Rowling's lawyers come sniffing around?)

Book News, In Brief

Girls and gays love Wicked. That's why I'm dedicating this Gregory Maguire-related link to my lesbian sister.

There's only one thing worse than a public poetry reading. An amateur public poetry reading. Poet Laureate Charles Simic offers advice on reading one's sonnets aloud.

Johnny Ryan makes comics like the ones you used to read as kid. Well, the ones you used to have to hide from your parents for fear of a switchin' with the Jesus stick. Vice Magazine interviews the dirty bastard, and includes plenty of examples of his work.

The Independent asks, why are so many political memoirs published, and does anyone read them? (How meta would it be of me to ask: Why do newspapers ask questions about the publishing of political memoirs, and why do bookstore blogs link to them?)

Eerily similar -- and similarly English -- The Guardian UK asks: They are petty, shabby and shallow, and tell us nothing about the real workings of government. No wonder the latest crop of backbiting political memoirs - from Cherie Blair, Lord Levy and John Prescott - make such compelling reading. But why write them, and why now?

Book News, In Brief

Gruffalo author bums out stoner fans with her harsh vibes. Via Entertianment Times Online: Julia Donaldson, author of The Gruffalo, the bestselling children's book about a mouse's adventures with a monster, has backed the reclassification of cannabis, blaming the drug for exacerbating the mental illness that drove her son to suicide. Whatever, dude. Dr. Seuss never talked sh*t about the green, and he was, like, a doctor.

Christian film company Walden Media announce larger tithes in '09. Via FT.com: Walden Media, the film studio behind The Chronicles of Narnia franchise, is teaming with HarperCollins to create a children’s book imprint.Known as Walden Pond Press, the imprint will acquire and publish titles for children. Walden Media will then have the option to develop and produce some projects as feature films.

The trailer for the film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight has already been viewed more than two million times -- in just three days. Not only does this mean that Meyer will be taking her 'trilogy' well past book three, but you can expect a sequel or two from Hollywood, to boot. So far, the first three Twilight books have sold over 6 million copies in the U.S. alone.

Top Five Election Books(note: this list was not compiled democratically)

5. What It Takes by Richard Ben Cramer
Review excerpt, care of Brothers Judd: If this were a novel, there would be no doubt in my mind that it was the Great American Novel. But, amazingly enough, it's all true. These men really exist and they really did all put themselves through the grueling process of running for president. We want our presidential candidates to be heroic figures, but then we put them though an oftentimes degrading process that supposedly determines whether they are fit to lead. Before you judge either George W. or Al Gore too harshly, read this book and find out what it takes to run for president.

4. Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow! Inside the Strangest Presidential Election Finish in American History by Jeff Greenfield
Review excerpt, care of Salon.com: CNN senior political analyst Jeff Greenfield tells how CNN and the other news organizations mistakenly called the winner of the presidential race not once, but twice. He provides a feel for the off-camera drama of covering this historic election, showing both the show business side of television news, as well as the backstage nitty-gritty of anchors and analysts cramming their heads, or notecards, full of interesting facts and figures to fill the airtime. Greenfield makes no effort to justify the goofs, rather he reveals how they so easily happened.

3. Miami and the Siege of Chicago by Norman Mailer
Review excerpt, care of NYBooks: In lesser hands, New Journalism could also be a recipe for self-indulgence, solipsism, and mischievous fictionalization, but that is not the case with Miami and the Siege of Chicago. Mailer's book holds up better than most political journalism written last week, let alone four decades ago. Indeed it survives better than it has any right to—as history, as literature, and as a portrait of America both then and now. As a narrative of the summer's actual political events it is both compactly comprehensive and dead-on, often hilariously so.

2. Election by Tom Perrotta
Review excerpt, care of belladena: On the surface, Election seems just another tribute to Generation-X, broken families, and the classically icky tale of the over-achiever you knew in high school. However, what unfolds in this slim volume is a seamless story about a classless anti-heroine. Amidst some very sharp diction, biting humour, and poetic observations...The ultimate impact of Election is an exacting political satire and complex human portrait that is not without its jabs at the American Dream and the inherently doomed and damnable American Dreamer.

1. Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72 by Hunter S. Thompson
Review excerpt, care of NYTimes: Thompson writes on two levels. On one, he is the journalist observing the candidates in action from any accessible perspective. His comments in this regard are revealing both about the problems of campaign coverage and the differences among the candidates...On another level, Thompson is defiantly subjective. Unlike his more conventional colleagues, he feels free to denounce hypocritical political maneuvering when he spots it.

Don't agree? We welcome your violent dissent in our comments section.