MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 10): The Monkees, PayPal, Self-Publishing, Jeff Bezos + More

I was never that aware of The Monkees but the passing of Davy Jones generated a lot of reminiscing.  Mrs. PND recalls the time her Dad brought home the record - unprompted - becoming 'cool' in the process and in the last few days she has DVR'd what must be 24hrs worth of the show.  Here some thoughts from Neil McCormick at The Telegraph:

One of the most remarkable things about the Monkees is that the show, like the band itself, was sophisticated enough to be open to interpretation. Watching those endless repeats in my teens, I formed further ideas of the pop process. The myth of the Monkees is one of the great myths of pop culture: the manufactured band rebelling against svengali manipulators, briefly shining before burning up in the fires of ego. We see the same story played out again and again in the “real” pop world, from the Bay City Rollers to the Spice Girls, but with The Monkees, we can watch it happen in repeat, from the zany innocence of the TV series to the mad rush of their self-immolating movie, Head, in which the band attempted to break free of their constraints by exposing their own essential fiction, but only ended up destroying the illusion that sustained them.

All of this is really sustained, however, by genuinely fantastic music that has, remarkably, stood the test of time. The miracle of The Monkees is that this exploitative, manipulative, derivative children TV series was underpinned by brilliant pop songs, written to order by some of the great writers of the era (from Neil Diamond to Goffin and King), framed in colourful arrangements that captured the happy essence of the band’s spirit, performed with conviction and emotion. Last Train To Clarksville, I’m A Believer, Randy Scouse Git, Pleasant Valley Sunday … these are songs of such dynamic originality they put the imaginary band shoulder to shoulder with the heroes they were imitating.

PayPal the censorship enforcer?  Stranger than fiction as PayPal says it will strike off certain self-publishers (Independent):

From now on, the firm said, it will begin aggressively prohibiting erotic literature which contains scenes of bestiality, rape, incest and under-age sex. Ebook websites that sell such works will have their PayPal accounts deactivated. "It's underhanded, unfair and ludicrous, and it bodes badly for the future of free speech and expression," said Juillerat-Olvera, adding that Demon's Grace is now banned by self-publishing sites.

Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, one of the world's largest such sites, said the announcement has so far caused roughly 1,000 of the 100,000 novels that he stocks to be withdrawn from sale. "Regardless of whether you or I want to read these books, this is perfectly legal fiction and people have a right to publish it," he told The Independent on Sunday. "It surely isn't for some financial services company to control what is written by an author."

Mr Coker said that attempting to enforce PayPal's effective ban is likely to be impossible. "They say they won't have rape, bestiality or incest presented in a way that might titillate. But deciding what constitutes titillation is completely subjective," he said. "The Bible has incest in it, and rape. Nabokov's literature does. Should we ban the sale of those books?"

Articles about Self-publishing and the death of traditional publishing are as freckles on a haole.  Here's an interesting take from Atlantic author Alan Jacobs

But one of the illusions most common to writers -- an illusion that may make the long slow slog of writing possible, for many people -- is that an enormous audience is out there waiting for the wisdom and delight that I alone can provide, and that the Publishing System is a giant obstacle to my reaching those people. Thus the dream that digital publishing technologies will indeed "disintermediate" -- will eliminate that obstacle and connect me directly to what Bugs Bunny calls "me Public." (See "Bully for Bugs".) And we have heard just enough unexpected success stories to keep that dream alive.
Well, here's hoping. But a couple of months ago I decided to dip my toes into these waters: I wrote a longish essay called "Reverting to Type" about my own history as a reader -- a kind of personal epilogue to The Pleasures of Reading -- and decided to submit it as a Kindle Single. Amazon wasn't interested, so I decided to publish it myself using Kindle Direct Publishing. I announced its existence to the world: that is, I posted a link on my tumblelog and tweeted about it. A few people downloaded it; some pointed out typos that I had missed, but that a copy editor surely would have caught. I thought about ways to promote it better but haven't been able to come up with anything other than becoming a self-promoting jerk on Twitter. Last time I checked it had sold 98 copies.

And from the BBC, no more boring waffle (BBC):

Buy an e-book through, say, a Kindle, and one of the first things you will notice is that the length of the text itself is nowhere to be seen. Unlike a hardback, an e-book doesn’t have to have 250 pages any more than it has to cost a set amount, or sit handsomely on your shelf. There are some great losses wrapped up in these facts. As far as actually writing a book goes, though, the digital format has one significant advantage over the physical: it is much harder to get away with producing boring waffle.
...
Buy an e-book through, say, a Kindle, and one of the first things you will notice is that the length of the text itself is nowhere to be seen. Unlike a hardback, an e-book doesn’t have to have 250 pages any more than it has to cost a set amount, or sit handsomely on your shelf. There are some great losses wrapped up in these facts. As far as actually writing a book goes, though, the digital format has one significant advantage over the physical: it is much harder to get away with producing boring waffle.

From the Economist:

Taking the long view - Jeff Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, owes much of his success to his ability to look beyond the short-term view of things.

Mr Bezos’s willingness to take a long-term view also explains his fascination with space travel, and his decision to found a secretive company called Blue Origin, one of several start-ups now building spacecraft with private funding. It might seem like a risky bet, but the same was said of many of Amazon’s unusual moves in the past. Successful firms, he says, tend to be the ones that are willing to explore uncharted territories. “Me-too companies have not done that well over time,” he observes.

Eyebrows were raised, for example, when Amazon moved into the business of providing cloud-computing services to technology firms—which seemed an odd choice for an online retailer. But the company has since established itself as a leader in the field. “A big piece of the story we tell ourselves about who we are is that we are willing to invent,” Mr Bezos told shareholders at Amazon’s annual meeting last year. “And very importantly, we are willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.”

Could they have made Jeff's eyes more freaky in that image?

From the Twitter this week:

Librarians Feel Sticker Shock as Prices for Random House Ebooks Rise 300 Percent - http://goo.gl/2vYex

College Publishing Comes of Age: Highlights of the BISG Higher Education Conference (BookBus)

Jackie Collins experiments with self-publishing The Bitch Guardian Hilarious headline. So is "Queen of bonkbuster"

MediaWeek (Vol 5, No 8): Movies from Books, Digital Music, Coriolanus, Larsson & Journalists + More

From the Independent "Hollywood ate my Novel"

Novelists reveal what it’s like to have their book turned into a movie

Literary adaptations rule this year's Oscar nominations. But, for an author, having a book transformed by movie magic isn't always pleasant. Five writers tell Charlotte Philby what it's like to see your creation 'brought to life'.

Improving digital music but will we notice? (Economist):

Rock-and-roll, as usual, is leading the way. Bands such as Pearl Jam and Metallica have used FLAC to sell recordings of their concerts online. The rocker John Mellencamp issued a CD in 2008, which came with a lossless high-definition version on a DVD to demonstrate what the music should really sound like. In 2009, the Canadian singer/songwriter Neil Young ("the Godfather of Grunge") released the first of what is to be a ten-volume set of archives on Blu-ray Disc as well as CD and DVD. With its lossless codecs, Blu-ray can play high-resolution music way beyond a CD’s dynamic range.

Whether the listening public can actually hear the subtleties being conveyed is another matter. The perceived quality of a recording depends on what the listener’s ears have been trained on (as well as the quality of the audio equipment and the ambient noise). Jonathan Berger, a professor of music at Stanford University in California, gets his incoming students every year to listen to a variety of recordings compressed with different algorithms. Each year, their preference for music in MP3 format increases.

 Is Coriolanus relevant today? (Intelligent Life):

And yet a doubt persists: how “relevant” can this Shakespeare play be made to the present? Coriolanus’s tragedy begins after his return as a victorious general, when his mother (Vanessa Redgrave) and his mentor (Brian Cox) want to capitalise on his military success by turning him into a politician as consul to the Senate. Coriolanus succumbs to their idea, but won’t play the part that political success requires. He won’t flatter the rabble he despises, won’t woo them, refuses to dissemble. His political opponents—two consummate performances by James Nesbitt and Paul Jesson—will of course do all these things and more. They know how to play the crowd, when to make it angry and when to please it, and naturally they win. We’re familiar with this depiction of politics as a tactical game played out by self-seeking hypocrites; physically at least, Jesson’s Brutus reminded me of Tony Blair’s smooth legal chum, Lord (Charlie) Falconer. It’s Coriolanus who is the unfamiliar figure in the film, the protagonist who tests our understanding and forfeits our sympathy because there is so very little in him to like. 

From the Guardian: Radical alternatives to conventional publishing (Guardian):

A new breed of radical publisher has emerged in recent years, with writers responding very quickly to current events. Here, some of their authors explain what marks them out.

One of the most exciting radical presses at the moment is Zer0 books. A shoestring operation begun in 2009 by the novelist Tariq Goddard, its impressive backlist covers philosophy, political theory, music criticism, contemporary cinema and much more. Its highlights include: Ivor Southwood's mordant Non-Stop Inertia, about the culture of precariousness that defines the modern workplace; and Marcello Carlin's The Blue In The Air, gorgeously constructed essays about pop, written by a widower while waiting for his new wife to fly over from Toronto so that they can start their new life together.
Zer0 has been particularly good at identifying a nexus of young, savvy writers – such as Owen Hatherley, Laurie Penny, Nina Power and Mark Fisher (better known as K-Punk) – whose work had previously surfaced mainly on blogs and whose bylines now regularly appear but in mainstream newspapers and journals.

It's been forever since we read a Steig Larsson article but the Columbia Journalism Review has stated our appetite (CJR):

But what make the trilogy so valuable to the cause of journalism are the things it gets right. Over the course of more than 1,750 pages, its author captures a remarkable number of the challenges that doing honest journalism involves, as well as the reasons it matters whether people keep doing it. This is significant, given the profession’s apparent inability to make a compelling case for itself, at least in the eyes of the readers, viewers, and listeners who do not appear to be concerning themselves terribly much with its rapid disappearance. The journalists’ credo can be found in the instructions offered by Erika Berger, Blomkvist’s lover, best friend, and editor, to one of the young writers in her employ: “Your job description as a journalist is to question and scrutinize critically—never to repeat claims uncritically, no matter how highly placed the sources in the bureaucracy. Don’t ever forget that.” This could sound like the kind of pabulum that has entered into the speeches of all the gruff, quietly heroic newspaper editors once concocted by Hollywood, from Humphrey Bogart in Deadline, USA through Jason Robards in All the President’s Men. But in Larsson’s gothic and twisted murder mysteries, the attention to journalistic detail with which readers must identify to make it to the end can only endear them to the men and women sufficiently dedicated to Berger’s lofty mission statement to stick with it.

From Twitter:

How Companies Learn Your Secrets: http://nyti.ms/zcyXOc

The publishing industry has gone mad for film-style trailers - Features - Books - Independent

I made Sunday dinner this week - which Mrs PND couldn't quite believe:  Bo Ssam

Pippa Middleton's Sudden Fame Syndrome:

Pippa Middleton gets £400,000 for a party planning book.  Amusing assessment from the Independent :

The party tome is a classic Sudden Fame Cash-In Book, a low-brow genre even less dignified than the celebrity memoir. Whereas the latter tends to appear towards the end of a lengthy entertainment career, the former tends to be rushed out in haste soon after the author's first exposure to the public's gaze, for fear that their appeal may not survive the year.

The most recent example is Nancy Dell'Olio, who announced two weeks ago that she is to write a "lovers' guide" (with pictures of herself in saucy knickers). Ms Dell'Olio was known for years only as the hyper-maquillaged Italian girlfriend of the England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson, but her celebrity was fast-tracked by her appearance on this year's Strictly Come Dancing.

An earlier example of the cash-in author, someone persuaded to produce a book despite having no particular talent or subject, was Christine Hamilton. Known only for her on-camera handbagging of Martin Bell during the 1997 election campaign, when he stood against her husband, Neil Hamilton, she was ridiculed by the press as a classic Tory harridan and Home Counties termagant. So, following the famous advice that when it's raining lemons you make lemonade, she published The Book of British Battleaxes.

Erotic German Publisher is Catholic!

For any Frankfurt book fair attendee the idea that the average German trade publisher would publish some erotic fiction would be met with a shrug.  More surprising would be a publisher that didn't, but when the publisher in question is the Catholic church then the whole thing degenerates into a race to characterize the entire Church as a porn broker.

From the Independent, there's pornography in the opening paragraph:

Germany's biggest Catholic-owned publishing house has been rocked by disclosures that it has been selling thousands of pornographic novels with titles such as Sluts Boarding School and Lawyer's Whore with the full assent of the country's leading bishops.

But then it is mere 'erotic' in the third:

Buchreport revealed that Weltbild's massive assortment of titles available to customers online includes some 2,500 "erotic" books with unmistakably lewd titles including Call Me Slut!, Take Me Here, Take Me Now! and Lawyer's Whore, to name a few. The publisher's website also pictures the titles' lascivious dust jackets that feature colour photographs of scantily clad women in high heels and erotic underwear.

Perhaps more interesting is the news that the church appears to be managed by some hard nosed business people who aren't afraid to shrug off a little criticism. Weltbild is a company with an annual turnover of €1.7bn and is Germany's largest bookseller after Amazon.

The Catholic Church bought Weltbild more than 30 years ago. The publisher has gradually transformed itself into one of Germany's largest media companies with the help of some €182mof Catholic Church tax levied on believers. To increase its profits, in 1998 the company merged with five other publishing houses that market pornographic titles. One of them is Droemer Knaur, which is 50 per cent church-owned. Another is Blue Panther Books, which was excluded from the list of participating publishers at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair allegedly because of the pornographic content of is titles. 

On their website they threaten to sue the slanderers.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 26): OCLC, AAUP Conference, Intellectual Property Enforcement, Harold Robbins, Book Bloggers

OCLC announced that a revised record use policy will be going into effect on August 1st (LJ):

After more than a year and a half of proposals, withdrawals, and revisions, OCLC's final updated policy governing the usage of WorldCat records is set to go into effect on August 1. The document, an update to the currently prevailing "Guidelines for Use and Transfer of OCLC Derived Records" (from 1987), is written in the form of an agreement on "Rights and Responsibilities" governing both OCLC Cooperative members and the steward organization itself. This commitment-driven approach is a departure from OCLC's previous attempts, criticized for being opaque and for featuring severe legalistic language. The current iteration has been repeatedly described as "a code of good practice," and stresses cooperative member libraries' vested interest in maintaining WorldCat as a viable and self-sustaining resource for catalog records and other services.

A wrap up of the AAUP conference in Salt Lake City (Chronicle):

The program was praised by many attendees in part because it focused on digital how-to: how to make and market e-books, and how to work with libraries that want everything in electronic form. It's far too early to say that most or even many university presses have made the transition from a print-based world to an electronic one. But most have now recognized that they have to figure out what that transition will look like for their particular presses if they want to keep publishing.

Concluding:

Beyond the practical questions, there was a philosophical slant to the conference, too. The publishers wondered and worried about the future of the long-form argument—e.g., the scholarly monograph. How will it survive in an era of quick Internet searches and piecemeal reading? Nicholas G. Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, wasn't in Salt Lake City, but his argument that the Internet is killing off "deep reading" came up several times.

At a freewheeling session on "information hyperabundance," the audience wrestled with how society ought to deal with the flood of data coming at us. Michael J. Jensen, director of strategic Web communications for National Academies Press, talked about how publishers and the rest of us are up against "a whole industry of distraction engines" that wants us to surf the Web, play video games, and generally do anything but read a book.

A drink writer is a bad writer (Independent):

"The idea that drugs and alcohol give artists unique insights and powerful experiences is an illusion," he said. "When you try and capture the experiences [triggered by drugs or alcohol] they are often nonsense. These drugs often wipe your memory, so it's hard to remember how you were in that state of mind."

LA Times notes that the Obama administration is beefing up the policing of piracy and counterfeiting of goods and e-books are mentioned (LAT):

Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Victoria Espinel said her office would review current efforts to curb intellectual property infringement of U.S. goods abroad, especially in China. China also is the source of many counterfeit goods. A U.S. Customs and Border Protection report published last year said 79% of seized fake goods came from China.

The enforcement strategy outlined in a 61-page report released Tuesday contains over 30 recommendations, which includes establishing an interagency committee dedicated to curbing fake drugs and medical products. It also calls for agencies to encourage foreign law enforcement to go after rogue websites and "increase the number of criminal enforcement actions" against intellectual property violators.

"There's not an industry that hasn't been affected," said Dr. Mark Esper, executive vice president of the Global Intellectual Property Center at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, who lauded the enforcement strategy. "The next victim out there is probably going to be the e-books and the publishing industry. "

Also in the LAT, book bloggers are inheriting the world of book reviews (LAT):

Blogs like Riley's, because of the genres they focus on, have caught the eye of publishers, who are eager to have a new opportunity to reach readers. "Women's fiction that maybe wouldn't be covered by traditional book sections is being blogged about, talked about," says Jennifer Hart, vice president and associate publisher at HarperCollins for its paperback imprints. "There are books blogs for every niche of publishing — from literary and commercial fiction to young adult, to sci-fi, to cookbooks. This offers publishers an incredible opportunity — we can reach the audience for all of our books, no matter the genre."

Some of this diversity was reflected in the Book Blogger Convention's attendees. Joan Pantsios, a public defender from Chicago just getting started with book blogging, has a fondness for literature. Carrie Brownell, whose Christianity is important to her blogging, is a stay-at-home mom from Oregon. Monica Shroeder, a 23-year-old military service member, devours books with incredible speed — especially those with vampires. Yet despite their different backgrounds, world views and tastes in books, these women — most book bloggers are women — were all incredibly friendly, eager to connect.

Almost complete collection of Faukner's works goes up for auction at Christie's (AP):

The auction could be the last chance to acquire such a large collection of the Nobel Prize-winning author's work, said Louis Daniel Brodsky, a poet and Faulkner scholar, who lives in St. Louis.Brodsky, who donated his own private collection to the Center for Faulkner Studies at Southeast Missouri State University, said he once owned the extremely rare copy of Faulkner's first novel, "Soldier's Pay," in a dust jacket that's part of the lot up for auction."There are five of those known," he said.Also included in the collection are signed copies of "The Wild Palms" and "Absalom, Absalom!" In keeping with common auction house practice, Christie's didn't identify the owner, but said he was an American.A few items offer a glimpse into the personal side of the author, whose stream of consciousness writings explored the complicated social system of the South.Ironically, Faulkner likely would have cringed to know his personal items are to be part of a public bidding war, Griffith said.

The lot eventually went for $833K. Not too bad - pays for a few air conditioners.

News that Author House will bring Harold Robbins back into print reminded me of Basil Fawlty and the Waldorf salad episode of Faulty Towers. This is Basil's review of Robbin's work:

"aimless thrills, ... the most awful American ... tripe, a sort of pornographic muzak." Of course, when he (Basil) learns the Hamiltons (guests) like Robbins, Basil pretends to have been referring to another author named "Harold Robinson." Harold Robbins was an American romance novelist whose peak of popularity lasted from the 1950s through the 1970s. His lurid, melodramatic writings were dismissed by critics as trashy pulp but were international bestsellers.

Here from the press release:

AuthorHouse, a leading self-publishing imprint of Author Solutions, Inc. (ASI), announced Thursday that is re-releasing 12 classic novels from America's top-selling fiction author of all-time, Harold Robbins.

Robbins' widow Jann said she chose AuthorHouse because it provided her the opportunity to make the books available over a wide range of digital platforms, like the Kindle, the nook and through Kobo. Additionally, the books will be re-released in paperback and hardcover formats.

"I'm an avid reader of eBooks and Harold would have loved the idea of making his books available digitally," said Jann Robbins. "His books spoke to all people, and by increasing the ways we can reach readers [through digital formats], I believe we're carrying on his legacy."

Galley editions of the first three titles: Where Love Has Gone; The Lonely Lady; and Goodbye, Janette will be debuted at the 2010 American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference Friday through Sunday at the Washington Convention Center in Washington DC.

In addition, AuthorHouse will re-release nine more titles in the coming months. The release dates for hardcover copies and digital versions of the books will be announced in July, but pre-orders will be taken at the conference. "Harold Robbins is an American icon, selling more than 750 million books, in 32 languages, to readers worldwide. He paved the way for mainstream authors like Danielle Steele and Jackie Collins. We are pleased to bring his writing into the new digital age," said Kevin Weiss, ASI president and chief executive officer. The other nine titles being made available through AuthorHouse include: The Adventurers; Never Love a Stranger; Descent from Xanadu; Memories of Another Day; The Pirate; The Inheritors; Spellbinder; Dreams Die First; and The Dream Merchants.

From the @twitter this week:

Guardian: Conrad Black given fresh hope of early release after US supreme court ruling The http://bit.ly/9hImnD
TeleRead: Ray Kurzweil’s ‘Blio’ e-reader: Is it really all that? http://bit.ly/dgwClg
Guardian: 'Operation Thunderdome' takes US paper digital. http://bit.ly/c75mnE http://bit.ly/9fgvDu Digital first print last. Revolutionary
MediaPost Viacom's Copyright Infringement Lawsuit Against YouTube Dismissed: In a sweeping victory for Google, a federal... http://bit.ly/bRBAtR

BBC News: Spy novelist Alan Furst takes readers back in time http://bit.ly/bpagJF - Just saw this. He is a great writer. (Video)
Nothing to report in Sport this week.

MediaWeek (Vol 3, No 24): Freak Show, Penguin's Canadian Problem, Textbook Reinvention

On the road with an economist. Steven Dubner and the Superfreakonomics show (Observer):

It's bizarre to think that the crash might have made economics sexy.

I'm thinking it was less like sex appeal and maybe more like a sexually transmitted disease: it made people pay attention. There are a lot of guilds in the world still, professions that want to make their work appear as complicated as possible to protect their ability to charge a price for it. Lawyers, obviously. And macro-economists certainly. They want to seem like the Wizard of Oz. What the crash showed is that the magic doesn't work as well as they wanted us to believe.

Malcolm Gladwell pioneered this kind of roadshow; does he have a lot to answer for?

We owe Malcolm Gladwell a great debt. The Tipping Point made the world safe for a book with many different tales in it that are connected. I like to think we took it one stage further: we have no grand unifying theme. We don't even have a thesis.

Anthony Bourdain: My war on fast food (Observer) and an extract from his recent book:

McDonald's has been very shrewd about kids. Say what you will about Ronald and friends, they know their market – and who drives it. They haven't shrunk from targeting young minds – in fact, their entire gazillion-dollar promotional budget seems aimed squarely at toddlers. They know that one small child, crying in the back seat of the car of two overworked, overstressed parents, will more often than not determine the choice of restaurants. They know exactly when and how to start building brand identification and loyalty with brightly coloured clowns and smoothly tied-in toys. From funding impoverished school districts to the instalment of playgrounds, McDonald's has not shrunk from fucking with young minds in any way it can.

The Toronto Star's headline says it best regarding the resignation of the head of Penguin Canada (Star):

The Plot Thickens:

Last Tuesday, Davidar announced he was stepping down from his position to pursue writing and planned to relocate to his native India. The announcement shocked literary observers who saw the move as a sign the company was retreating from the Canadian publishing scene. Three days later, Penguin and Davidar, clarified the circumstances around his abrupt departure. In a statement Friday, Penguin Canada said Davidar was “asked to leave the company last month.” Davidar went a step farther: “The truth is that a former colleague accused me of sexual harassment and Penguin terminated my employment.”

Lionel Shriver (We Need to Talk About Kevin) is not happy with book prizes and the industry generally (Independent):

"It'd be totally hypocritical to discourage people from joining my profession, which was good to me in the end, but I have qualms about being encouraging. The odds are stacked against you. I want to give people enough of an idea of the capriciousness of the industry." She went on to cast aspersions on the successes of some best-selling authors whose writing was simply not very good, she thought, but whose books were aided by the benefit of the powerful publishing publicity machine – citing Bret Easton Ellis' latest book, Imperial Bedrooms, as one such example. "There are a lot of books that end up selling that aren't very good. I've just read Bret Easton Ellis' new book and it's awful but it's had a big publicity campaign. "I'm writing a 1,500 word review of it – the size of which alone will overwhelm what I say. It's not a case of cream rising to the top but skimmed milk rising – of the 'no fat' kind. The book doesn't deserve the attention. It's ghastly. In the meantime, there are lots of books that will not be reviewed," she said. Shriver's Orange Prize-winning novel has gone on to sell over 600,000 copies in Britain since publication and is currently being adapted as a film starring Tilda Swinton.

Source Books CEO Dominique Raacah is profiled in Naperville Sun:

Sourcebooks was launched in 1987 and has produced more than 2,000 titles in its history, including a number of New York Times best sellers. But in the past two years, the company has been positioning itself to move into the digital age -- a time that Raacah says "we as a company have been very communicative about."

"The subject of the digital transformation of books is something we have been engrossed in and find the work very compelling," she said. "We've wanted to be aggressive about the digital era and were the sixth publisher of over 20,000 in the nation to sign on with Apple allowing access downloads of our titles on the iPad. The digital era will be a very important one for publishing."

In Inside Higher Ed: Reinventing the textbook (IHEd):

The higher education industry should at least agree on one thing when it comes to textbooks: the current system for publishing, distributing and pricing them is rather broken. The challenge lies in reimagining the textbook so that faculty construct the right set of learning materials that engages their students in deep learning, without bankrupting them. The open educational resources movement is already laying a foundation for that type of radical change. We need to move beyond and away from the textbook concept altogether.

In its place I recommend the term Curricular Resource Strategies (CRS), which I first heard used by Mark Milliron, deputy director for postsecondary improvement at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to describe the new thinking in learning materials. CRS affords faculty greater freedom of choice and flexibility in delivering learning material to their students, offers the possibility of using everything across the content spectrum from costlier traditional print texts to the latest open digital formats, is drastically more affordable for students, allows faculty greater control of their intellectual property -- and still offers revenue streams for traditional textbook publishers and college bookstores.

While it may require more personal effort from faculty, the reward is a unique opportunity to create a new model for publishing academic learning content that avoids the mistakes of the old system. Faculty can learn from their librarian colleagues, whose past experiences in managing scholarly communication offers a lesson in how not to structure a publishing model.

From the twitter:

Demi Moore memoirs set for 2012 BBB news $2mm from Harpercollins.
Why Apple’s iBooks Numbers Are Meaningless - NYTimes
Self-pub and online services, e-books, and digital demand printing are joined into a new and powerful sector. Book Business Mag

And in Sport, Lancashire opened the first stage in their their redevelopment plan (Crains)

oh, and something about butter fingers (Guardian)

MediaWeek (Vol 2, No 40): Curating, Larsson, BooksEtc, Disney, Magazines

Interesting article in Sunday's NYTimes about curating content in the retail sense. Some relevance to book retailing and publishing although not specifically noted in the article (NYTimes):

The word “curate,” lofty and once rarely spoken outside exhibition corridors or British parishes, has become a fashionable code word among the aesthetically minded, who seem to paste it onto any activity that involves culling and selecting. In more print-centric times, the term of art was “edit” — as in a boutique edits its dress collections carefully. But now, among designers, disc jockeys, club promoters, bloggers and thrift-store owners, curate is code for “I have a discerning eye and great taste.”
Or more to the point, “I belong.”
For many who adopt the term, or bestow it on others, “it’s an innocent form of self-inflation,” said John H. McWhorter, a linguist and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “You’re implying that there is some similarity between what you do and what someone with an advanced degree who works at a museum does.”
Indeed, these days, serving as a guest curator of a design blog, craft fair or department store is an honor. Last month, Scott Schuman, creator of The Sartorialist, a photo blog about street fashion, was invited to curate a pop-up shop at Barneys New York.

The Girl Who kicked the Hornets' Nest by Stieg Larsson is the final book in Stieg Larsson's posthumously published Millennium trilogy and seals his status as a master storyteller, says Nick Cohen of the Observer. Of course not available in the US until next year. (Observer):

I cannot think of another modern writer who so successfully turns his politics away from a preachy manifesto and into a dynamic narrative device. Larsson's hatred of injustice will drive readers across the world through a three-volume novel and leave them regretting reaching the final page; and regretting, even more, the early death of a master storyteller just as he was entering his prime.

In the UK Borders has announced that it will retire the BooksEtc and Borders Express brands (Independent):

Borders UK has confirmed it plans to remove the Books Etc and Borders Express brands from the high street. The bookseller – which in July completed a management buyout backed by the retail restructuring specialist Hilco – is trying to sell its remaining seven Books Etc shops and two smaller format Borders Express stores.

Books Etc has been a financial millstone around the neck of Borders UK for a number of years. The retailer's spokesman said: "I can confirm that our future strategy is single-brand." Earlier this month, Borders UK said it would close its Books Etc outlet in Staines, Surrey. The company, which has 36 core Borders stores, came close to collapse in July under its previous owner Risk Capital Partners, the private equity vehicle of Luke Johnson, the Channel 4 chairman.

Was Frankenstein too good to have been written by a woman? (HuffPo):

The debate has continued right up until the present day, most recently through the publication of John Lauritsen's The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein (Pagan Press, 2007). The logic of the doubters has not shifted noticeably for 200 years: Frankenstein is too good to have been written by a young woman, therefore it must have been written by a man.
Percy Shelley was indisputably present at the birth of the creature, who was born in the Swiss countryside during the unseasonably rainy summer of 1816. Mary and Percy Shelley were part of a group that included Lord Byron, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori, Byron's personal physician. To beguile the hours, the group took to reading German ghost stories and decided to try and write their own. Mary was stuck for inspiration for several days when finally one night her dreams yielded up the image of a depraved scientist bringing to life a ghastly simulacrum of a man.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victoria-rosner/co-creating-a-monster_b_301089.html

Disney launch a subscription based web site for children (NYTimes):

DisneyDigitalBooks.com, which is aimed at children ages 3 to 12, is organized by reading level. In the “look and listen” section for beginning readers, the books will be read aloud by voice actors to accompanying music (with each word highlighted on the screen as it is spoken). Another area is dedicated to children who read on their own. Find an unfamiliar word? Click on it and a voice says it aloud. Chapter books for teenagers and trivia features round out the service.
“For parents, this isn’t going to replace snuggle time with a storybook,” said Yves Saada, vice president of digital media. “We think you can have different reading formats co-existing together.”
Publishers, of course, have been experimenting with e-books for the children’s market for years. About 1,000 children’s titles are now available digitally from HarperCollins. Scholastic has BookFlix, a subscription service for schools and libraries that pairs a video storybook with a nonfiction e-book on a related topic. “Curious George” is available on the iPhone.

There may be a new service provider in the magazine space that would aggregate magazine content for readers using electronic devices such as the Kindle, Blackberry, and iTouch. (ATD):

The idea: The new company, which will operate independently from the publishers that invest in it, will create a digital storefront where consumers can purchase and manage their subscriptions, which can be delivered to any device. The pitch: Control a direct relationship with consumers while gaining leverage with heavyweights like Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN).
Industry executives briefed on Squires’s plan say it has been well received by Time Inc.’s peers and that several major publishers, including Hearst and Condé Nast, are expected to sign on for the JV, which isn’t scheduled to debut until 2010. No comment from Hearst, Condé Nast or Time Inc., a unit of Time Warner (TWX).

Newsweek looks at the 'controversy' over holding back big books from the eBook store and gets to the nub of the issue (NewsW):

Why isn't Amazon.com livid about this? After all, this technology firm is providing the beleaguered publishing industry a more efficient way to reach readers, and it's being stiffed on some big sellers. It may be that Amazon is losing money on many sales it makes of Kindle-ready books. With the Kindle, Amazon has inverted the old business model of giving away the shaver and selling the blades. Amazon is using the blades (cheap books, in this case) as a loss leader to induce people to pay up for the shaver (the $299 Kindle). As I understand it, Amazon pays the same wholesale price for Kindle books as it does for real books—generally 50 percent of the list price. For a typical hardback that retails for $26—say, E.L. Doctorow's Homer & Langley—Amazon pays $13 and then sells it for $9.99 on the Kindle, taking a $3 loss on each sale. (The longer-term strategy, publishers fear, is that once the Kindle gains significant market share, Amazon will negotiate lower wholesale prices for digital versions.) In the short term, though, this means that Amazon is likely to lose more money on more expensive books sold on the Kindle. It would have to pay $17.50 per "copy" of the digital version of True Compass, and $14.50 per copy for Going Rogue, but would sell them for significantly less. It may seem perverse, but once Amazon has sold a Kindle to a customer, it doesn't have all that much incentive to sell expensive books to the Kindle owner—unless it's willing to boost the prices of electronic books significantly.

The Kindle goes to Princeton to mixed reviews. However, in the comments students unload on the whiners (DailyP):

But though they acknowledged some benefits of the new technology, many students and faculty in the three courses said they found the Kindles disappointing and difficult to use.
“I hate to sound like a Luddite, but this technology is a poor excuse of an academic tool,” said Aaron Horvath ’10, a student in Civil Society and Public Policy. “It’s clunky, slow and a real pain to operate.”
Horvath said that using the Kindle has required completely changing the way he completes his coursework.
“Much of my learning comes from a physical interaction with the text: bookmarks, highlights, page-tearing, sticky notes and other marks representing the importance of certain passages — not to mention margin notes, where most of my paper ideas come from and interaction with the material occurs,” he explained. “All these things have been lost, and if not lost they’re too slow to keep up with my thinking, and the ‘features’ have been rendered useless.”