Milking Snake Venom

Another weekly image from my archive. Click on it to make it larger.

There are six or seven images from this scene at a snake farm in Bangkok (August 1969). Yes, there are such things as snake farms and here the guy in white is showing the audience the snakes innards and in particular its fangs.  I've no idea what kind of snake this is but its about 15feet long and a gross yellow color.   I hate snakes but to these guys it's just another day in the office.

In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Big Blurb Book: From the Archive 1960 -1980 of some of the images I really thought were special.

I now have an iPad version of this book for sale ($4.99) on the Blurb site which you can find here: STORE

I have to say, even on the iPad the book looks pretty good.

BISG E-Book Consumer Study & Student eBook Usage

BISG released the next edition of their consumer study yesterday and among the findings they reported:

• Power Buyers are spending more. More than 46% of those who say they acquire e-books at least weekly (considered “Power Buyers” in this survey) report that they have increased their dollars spent for books in all formats, compared with 30.4% of all survey respondents. This statistic is important because Power Buyers have proven to be a bellwether of overall consumer behavior by three to six months. 
• Amazon momentum continues. Amazon.com continues to be the preferred source for e-book acquisition (holding steady at 70%) and e-book information (44%). Barnes & Noble comes in second at 26%, with Apple in third. One to watch: libraries, which are on the upswing as a preferred source for e-book acquisition. 
• Satisfaction with e-reading devices is high. Seventy-five percent (75%) of respondents reported they are satisfied with their e-reading device, including more than 38% of respondents who reported being “very satisfied.” Less than 5% said they felt their e-reading device was not a good value for the money. 
• Many barriers to e-book reading are falling. Survey results indicate that concerns about e-book availability are diminishing. And although the cost of e-reading devices remains a reported concern, the single most popular answer to the question of what hinders respondents from reading more e-books was “nothing” at 33% (up from 17.6% a year ago).

The full press release is located HERE

Interestingly, eBrary (which has the same corporate owner as Bowker the BISG partner) also released some findings from their global student eBook survey last week in advance of the Charleston conference: There findings we summarized in a press release:

Key findings of the survey of more than 6,500 students include the following: 

• E-book usage and awareness have not increased significantly in 2011 over 2008 

• Preference for printed books over electronic books has not changed: Both are still equally 
important 

• The vast majority of students would choose electronic over print if it were available and if better tools along with fewer restrictions were offered

• There is a need for reliable social media tools geared toward research 

“These survey results suggest digital content and services providers need to re-think our approach: Until more electronic content is available simultaneously with print, we cannot lose sight of the value of printed books to end-users, who expect to find the most authoritative information at the point of need. To accomplish this we need better integration and tools to increase the availability and discoverability of all types of information, both electronic and print,” said Kevin Sayar, President and General Manager of ebrary. “We do not take data points from this survey lightly, and we thank the library community for working with us to gather important knowledge that will help shape the future of the information industry.”

Beyond the Book: How Social Media is Keeping Alive the Journal Article

From CCC's Beyond to Book series, How Social Media is Keeping Alive the Journal Article:

Scholarly communication is rapidly changing, and information managers in private companies and other sectors are finding new ways to serve their users. Social media, mobile devices, data mining, semantic technologies and other developments are creating a whole new environment for publishing. Yet the old standby – the journal article— seems to have no real rival yet. 

In this edition of special programming from RightsDirect, CCC’s European subsidiary, Madrid-based Victoriano Colodrón speaks with Hervé Basset, a Paris-based expert in scientific information management, who blogs in English and French, and is currently writing a book on social media for the pharmaceutical industry.

Basset tells Colodron how the increasing professional use of social media by company researchers is influencing the use of more traditional sources of information, including scientific journals. He also explains why the growing use of social media is changing the role and the work of corporate information professionals. 

Link to the Audio

Download Transcript 

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 4, No 45): The New A&R, Problem Biographies, Scan your Books, Education, Libraroes + More

Changing the way music stars are made (Economist):

David Joseph, who runs the British arm of Universal Music, says A&R men used to be alchemists, discovering base talent and turning it into gold. “They made dreams come true,” he says.

These days they are venture capitalists. Particularly at big labels such as Universal, A&R executives increasingly expect acts to have built a self-sustaining, if modest, business before they offer them a recording contract. 

Large numbers of Facebook friends and Twitter followers help show that a band has traction. But record labels have become wary of social-media indicators. They know that desperate bands may chatter about themselves or hire marketing firms to inflate their online metrics. The labels also want to know whether a band is drawing a steadily growing number of people to its gigs. The bar rises constantly. Mumford & Sons (pictured), a successful folk-rock outfit from bucolic west London, had amassed a large live following and had released several EPs before signing with Island Records in 2009.

Louis Adler, CEO of Melbourne University Press reflects on the Julian Assange biography imbroglio (TheAge):

When publishers and authors resort to lawyers, injunctions, and secret book drops to bookshops, things have gone haywire. Demanding an advance is returned is rare, retrieving the cold, hard cash even less likely. Contracts, deadlines and copyrights may have legal force but the relationship always depends on good faith. One cannot bully a writer into delivering a manuscript good enough to publish or on time. That is why it is in the interests of both publisher and author to keep it ''nice'' and renegotiate when deadlines loom or the editorial direction differs from the original brief, or when the author wants to put ''your'' book on hold while they write another book for another publisher.

Scan all your books - yes, there's a service for that (Economist):

1DollarScan is the American outpost of the Japanese firm Bookscan, founded to solve the problem of scant space in Japan's poky urban dwellings and to prevent damage caused by bookshelf-toppling earthquakes. (Bookscan has no relation to Nielsen BookScan, an American retail-sales-tracking service). Ship your volumes to 1DollarScan, and the company will slice off the spine, and charge $1 for every 100 pages scanned. (The firm also scans routine documents and photos.) It uses high-speed Canon scanners, with optical-character recognition (OCR) software developed jointly by Bookscan and Canon. The process does not yet produce text in standard e-book formats; instead, customers receive PDF files that show the scanned image, but also have whatever text was successfully extracted in a separate, searchable layer. The resulting files are chunky: tens of megabytes per book, or 100 times bigger than Amazon's Kindle titles. But it is a start. 

Hiroshi Nakano, the boss of 1DollarScan, says a few thousand books have been received in the first month or so of operation. And that is before the firm has begun its marketing drive, or adapted its Japanese-language smartphone software (for reading and managing user accounts) for English speakers. One early surprise has been the linguistic diversity of books sent over: besides English, there have been Portuguese, Hebrew and Arabic titles, among others. Boxes of books are being shipped in from Europe, too, in English and other languages. (The firm uses slightly different OCR software depending on the language in question.) Another difference is the volume of individual orders. Where Japanese customers send batches of 150 books, the California-based service is seeing an average closer to 30.

Commentary on the Dot Earth blog at the NYTimes about developing a different approach to education:

As I’ve written here before, finding and disseminating education methods that foster creative, collaborative and resilient learning and problem solving is a prime path toward fitting human aspirations on a finite planet. Nicholas Kristof’s recent column, “Occupy the Classroom,” explores relevant terrain. This approach is also particularly useful in the face of prolonged economic uncertainty. 

Notably, the potential learning-by-doing role of American students and scholars in advancing human prospects in struggling regions came up today at a meeting organized by the United States Agency for International Development (which just celebrated its 50th anniversary) and hosted by theWoodrow Wilson Center. Alex Dehgan, the science and technology adviser to the agency’s administrator, said you’ll know we’re there “when we have students not asking what is your major, but what is your problem.” 

Current classroom norms, which Goyal described as the “culture of fill in the bubble tests and drill-and-kill teaching methods,” aren’t a good fit in a complicated, connected, competitive world.

Nic Kristof in the NY Times takes a look at Room to Read which is one man's approach to solving illiteracy around the world (NYTimes):

I came here to Vietnam to see John Wood hand out his 10 millionth book at a library that his team founded in this village in the Mekong Delta — as hundreds of local children cheered and embraced the books he brought as if they were the rarest of treasures. Wood’s charity, Room to Read, has opened 12,000 of these libraries around the world, along with 1,500 schools. 

Yes, you read that right. He has opened nearly five times as many libraries as Carnegie, even if his are mostly single-room affairs that look nothing like the grand Carnegie libraries. Room to Read is one of America’s fastest-growing charities and is now opening new libraries at an astonishing clip of six a day. In contrast, McDonald’s opens one new outlet every 1.08 days.

From the Twitter:

Talks under way to save UK's biggest music and drama lending library http://gu.com/p/335ka/tw

A jewel of an of obit, by Margalit Fox: Jimmy Savile, TV Personality, Dies at 84: http://nyti.ms/w0jozP

In sports: Sir Alex Ferguson describes his 25yrs as a fairy tale. http://bbc.in/vTSWAV

Melbourne Cup 1973

Another weekly image from my archive. Click on it to make it larger.

It was race day in Melbourne this past week and the annual big race produced the closest finish in history.  I am not 100% certain this is the actual race from 1973 but it was taken in the right month and there would have been little other reason to visit the track.  I bet that skyline looks a little different now.

I'm not a big horse racing fan, but I did place my first bet - I didn't do it someone else did it for me because I was too young - a few years after this.  I think it was in something called the Cheltenham Cup and the horse was "How Now" which came in a close second.  I had him to place and I think I won about $6.  I quit while the going was good.

In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Big Blurb Book: From the Archive 1960 -1980 of some of the images I really thought were special.

I now have an iPad version of this book for sale ($4.99) on the Blurb site which you can find here: STORE

I have to say, even on the iPad the book looks pretty good.

Pearson Raises Outlook (Again)

From their press release this morning:

• Sales up 6% and operating profit up 13%*
• All businesses trading as expected
• Adjusted EPS now expected to be approximately 83p per share, benefiting from lower interest and tax

Pearson, the world’s leading learning company, is today providing its regular nine-month interim management statement.

Pearson increased sales by 6% and operating profit by 13% in the first nine months of 2011. Our businesses once again produced strong competitive performances in generally weak market conditions, benefiting from premium content and services, digital innovation and presence in developing economies.
The fourth quarter is always a key selling season in education and consumer publishing. But with all of our businesses performing well, we are reaffirming our trading guidance for the full year in spite of the recent deterioration in the macroeconomic outlook.
In addition, we anticipate that our interest and tax charges on adjusted earnings will be lower than our previous guidance. As a result, we now expect to achieve adjusted earnings per share of approximately 83p for the full year (ahead of our previous guidance of approximately 80p). This guidance assumes that the current exchange rate of £1:$1.60 prevails in the fourth quarter.
Pearson’s chief executive Marjorie Scardino said: “The world economy is neither simple nor helpful this year, but we are producing another good year for Pearson. Our mix of markets and services, as well as our ability to invest and to implement, has given us competitive strength that makes us confident of that. We can’t count on the trading environment to get any easier any time soon, but we do expect our durability and our innovation to continue to help us succeed.”

This is the section of the press release specific to Education:

In education, our long-term investment in technology and services is enabling us to achieve sustained growth, even in tough markets for education materials. For our education company as a whole, sales are up 7% in the first nine months of the year.

In North America, textbook publishing markets have been weak in 2011, affected by state budget pressures, the transition to Common Core standards and slower college enrolments. For the first nine months of the year, total sales for the US School and College textbook publishing industries declined by 11% and 2% respectively, according to the Association of American Publishers. 

Even so, Pearson’s sales in North American Education were up 1% as our leadership in digital learning continued to produce market share gains. In Higher Education, we generated more than eight million student registrations for our subject-specific digital homework and assessment programmes (the MyLabs), and almost five million enrolments in online courses provided through Pearson’s LearningStudio (formerly known as eCollege). These student registrations represent growth rates of 23% and 33% respectively over the same period last year. 

Our Assessment and Information business remained resilient with good growth in clinical and diagnostic assessments and automated online test scoring outweighing lower national test revenues. 

Our School Curriculum business continued to face state budget pressures, a smaller new adoption opportunity (of approximately $660m) and uncertainty caused by the pending transition to Common Core standards. It benefited from the particularly strong performance of our blended print-and-digital programmes in new adoptions, helping Pearson to win an estimated 37% share of new adoptions in which we competed. In September, we announced the acquisition of Connections Education which operates virtual public schools in 21 states in the US and served more than 40,000 students in the current school year. 

Sales in International Education were up 19% after nine months. By product line, we achieved good underlying growth in English language learning, assessment and higher education; and by geography in China, the Middle East and Italy. We are also benefiting from the contribution of our newer services businesses including English language schools around the world and universities in South Africa. School textbook publishing has tended to be relatively weak, particularly in markets where purchases are publicly-funded. In the first nine months, MyLab registrations outside North America were up more than 30% on the same period last year to more than 600,000. In August, we announced the acquisition of Stark Holding, a leading provider of education materials including test preparation resources for pupils and teachers in Germany. 

In Professional Education, sales were up 21%. We continued to see good growth in Professional Testing, which administered almost six million tests in the first nine months of the year, benefiting from sales of additional services to existing customers. We are also investing in a major strategic partnership with the American Council on Education to develop an online General Educational Development (GED) test aligned with new Common Core standards. Market conditions in our professional publishing business remained challenging but our digital programmes performed well. We continued to benefit from our growing presence in professional training, as Pearson in Practice (formerly known as Melorio) grew well despite tougher conditions in construction training. In October we announced the acquisition of TQ, which provides vocational and technical education and training services to governments, institutions and corporations around the world. 

Even so, Pearson’s sales in North American Education were up 1% as our leadership in digital learning continued to produce market share gains. In Higher Education, we generated more than eight million student registrations for our subject-specific digital homework and assessment programmes (the MyLabs), and almost five million enrolments in online courses provided through Pearson’s LearningStudio (formerly known as eCollege). These student registrations represent growth rates of 23% and 33% respectively over the same period last year. 

Our Assessment and Information business remained resilient with good growth in clinical and diagnostic assessments and automated online test scoring outweighing lower national test revenues. 

Our School Curriculum business continued to face state budget pressures, a smaller new adoption opportunity (of approximately $660m) and uncertainty caused by the pending transition to Common Core standards. It benefited from the particularly strong performance of our blended print-and-digital programmes in new adoptions, helping Pearson to win an estimated 37% share of new adoptions in which we competed. In September, we announced the acquisition of Connections Education which operates virtual public schools in 21 states in the US and served more than 40,000 students in the current school year. 

Sales in International Education were up 19% after nine months. By product line, we achieved good underlying growth in English language learning, assessment and higher education; and by geography in China, the Middle East and Italy. We are also benefiting from the contribution of our newer services businesses including English language schools around the world and universities in South Africa. School textbook publishing has tended to be relatively weak, particularly in markets where purchases are publicly-funded. In the first nine months, MyLab registrations outside North America were up more than 30% on the same period last year to more than 600,000. In August, we announced the acquisition of Stark Holding, a leading provider of education materials including test preparation resources for pupils and teachers in Germany. 

In Professional Education, sales were up 21%. We continued to see good growth in Professional Testing, which administered almost six million tests in the first nine months of the year, benefiting from sales of additional services to existing customers. We are also investing in a major strategic partnership with the American Council on Education to develop an online General Educational Development (GED) test aligned with new Common Core standards. Market conditions in our professional publishing business remained challenging but our digital programmes performed well. We continued to benefit from our growing presence in professional training, as Pearson in Practice (formerly known as Melorio) grew well despite tougher conditions in construction training. In October we announced the acquisition of TQ, which provides vocational and technical education and training services to governments, institutions and corporations around the world.

How to reform copyright

Lewis Hyde in the Chronicle of Higher Ed has some interesting observations and proposals for reforming copyright:

Focusing on the benefits of an initial registration requirement tells only one part of the story. Whenever copyright offers a second term, the renewal formality has even stronger commons-enhancing effects. After all, the commercial value of most creative work is exhausted fairly early. A study done of copyrights registered in 1934 found, for example, that half of them were worthless after 10 years, 90 percent after 43 years, and 99 percent after 65 years. It should consequently come as no surprise that many rights holders did not renew after the initial 28-year term. The numbers vary year to year and by genre (music rights being renewed more often than books, for example), but roughly speaking, for most of the 20th century, when owners were given a right to renew, only 15 percent chose to do so. As with initial registration, a renewal formality serves as a filter, releasing commercially dead work to the public without depriving authors of a longer term if they wish to have it. Put another way, formalities effectively shortened the term of the copyright grant during most of the last century; 85 percent of copyrights lasted only 28 years.

and this,

The last time that Congress added years to the term of copyright, a group of economists, both liberal and conservative (including five Nobel laureates), filed a brief with the U.S. Supreme Court arguing that the extension made no economic sense. (Milton Friedman supposedly asked that the brief contain the phrase "no brainer.") It is patently clear to almost everyone that the term of copyright is now senselessly long. At the same time, it is almost certainly politically impossible to retreat from it; the few who benefit are too well connected, and the many who do not are too thinly spread. To my mind, the greatest appeal of new-style formalities, then, is that they would leave the nominal term untouched (and accord it to all who care) while greatly reducing the effective term. Sprigman calculates that during the 20th century, when the vast majority of rights holders did not avail themselves of the renewal option, the effective term of copyright was only 32 years. That's just four years longer than the nominal term the founders offered in 1790.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 44): Books in Browsers, Photography, Drivel + More

I pride myself somewhat on how I organize these posts, only to find that those of you receiving this in the email version will think I am careless and disorganized.  In truth, it is the blogger editor which while never very good has gone from bad to worse.  I spend at least 50% more time putting these things together now versus how long it took prior to the 'upgrade'.  So my apologies to those of you who care about these things but it's just not my fault.

At the Books in Browsers conference hosted by the Internet Archive attendees debate "what is a book" NYTimes

The challenge will be to sort all of that material into ephemeral and semipermanent baskets, some of which might be called, for lack of a better term, books. But at the moment, as Mr. Hellman said, online books are largely stuck in the “pretend it’s print” model. That works for traditional publishers because it offers a model that looks a lot like the past but ultimately depends on a notion of false scarcity.

Mr. Hellman’s own idea, which he is developing as Unglue.it, is to crowd-source the money to digitize individual titles and basically set them free. It sounds like a dreamy but impractical idea, but he added this to ground it in reality: “Have you ever given a book to someone? Have you ever given the same book to multiple people? Would you like to give this book to the entire world?”

From the Observer a look at how British museums are embracing photography all of a sudden (Observer)

The culture around photography – festivals, book publishing and selling, workshops, websites and prizes – has grown exponentially, making London a centre of contemporary photographic practice. Finally… 

Inevitably, if belatedly, the major art institutions have responded in kind. Last week the Victoria & Albert unveiled its new Photographs Gallery, a permanent space to show highlights from its extraordinary collection, chronicling the history of photography from 1839 to the 1960s. Ironically, the exhibition harks back to a time when London embraced what was then a revolutionary new medium that threatened to make painting a thing of the past. The V&A was the first museum to collect photography and, in 1858, to exhibit photographic prints. The oldest photograph on display in the new gallery is a daguerreotype of Parliament Street from Trafalgar Square by an anonymous photographer, and many of the pioneering giants of photography, from Margaret Cameron to Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray to Irving Penn, are represented. What's more, the exhibition will be re-curated every 18 months to show off the scale of the museum's archive of original prints.

"We play to our strengths," says curator Martin Barnes, "which, in photography, is the fine print. We are not showing the history of photography, nor charting a chronological story with examples along a linear trajectory, but nevertheless the collection is deep enough that the historical reach will always be evident in the exhibition."

And again from the Observer a review of a book that looks at the history of some of London's ritzy hotels during the war (Observer)

At the Savoy, journalists filed articles from makeshift offices carved from the carcasses of once-expensive suites. Con artists and swindlers, invigorated by the opportunities brought by war, hunted for victims among the potted palms. Illegal abortionists, profiting from the wartime increase in unwanted pregnancies, conducted their business behind locked hotel-room doors. Spies and spymasters made the grand hotels into thriving centres of espionage, using quiet suites for debriefings and interrogations and picking at the plasterwork for hidden microphones. MI5 booked a suspected Nazi double agent called Stella Lonsdale into a room at the Waldorf, and waited for her to crack. Guy Burgess installed a pair of spies at the Dorchester, one a painfully handsome 19-year-old with 10 targets on his watch list – mainly homosexual Magyars (Hungarians) who were charmed by his unfingermarked good looks. "The whole place," shuddered the head of Special Branch, "is crawling with foreigners." 

The photographer Cecil Beaton made a gleefully snobbish inventory of the Dorchester's inhabitants: "Cabinet ministers and their self-consciously respectable wives; hatchet-jawed, iron-grey brigadiers; calf-like airmen off duty; tarts on duty; actresses (also); déclassé society people; cheap musicians and motor-car agents." At the front of the hotel, General Eisenhower plotted the progress of the war behind a concrete barrier installed for his protection. Beneath the hotel, the foreign secretary Edward Halifax slept beside his wife and his mistress in the Turkish bath – not realising that the chamber projected out from the main body of the hotel and was therefore one of the most vulnerable spots in the building.

Will games replace reading? The Author answers his own question (Observer):

As an author who also plays games, and the father of three boys who read books and play games, I often get asked whether I think games will kill off the novel, and the answer is no, of course they won't. Books have survived the coming of films and TV, rock'n'roll and sudoku, and they will survive the coming of computer games. But they will be influenced by them, just as all those other media had their own impact and influence on books and, let's not forget, were hugely influenced by them. 

The best games have taken stuff from books (where would computer games be without Tolkien, for instance?) and any novelist worth their salt should be taking stuff from games. What you don't want are books that slavishly replicate the experience of playing a game because, well, why not just go and play a game instead? In the same way, you don't want a game that gets bogged down with interminable cut-scenes and has only one, very rigid, way of being played. There are cleverer and more elegant ways of designing them, as demonstrated by the brilliant GTA series.

More mindless drivel (Telegraph)

It is reported Miss Middleton has had two meetings with publishing executives at HarperCollins and has met with several other publishing houses. There are predictions that she could make more than £1m from royalties and the sale of international rights and spin-off projects.

A well-placed publishing source told the Sunday Times (£): “Pippa is very serious about the project and has been going to meet publishers personally. Pippa hasn’t signed a contract yet but I don’t think it will be far off. She is a good writer but I expect she would be offered the services of an experienced ghost writer.” 

Movie and theatrical performance rights may follow if all goes well (This bit is a lie).

From The New Republic, why authors should embrace Amazon's push into publishing (TNR):

THE TIMES WONDERS if Amazon can “secretly create its own bestsellers.” Actually, it already has, although they aren’t the books in its publishing program. Of the current top ten e-book bestsellers on Amazon, four of them are self-published. These aren’t flukes: They’ve been in the top ten more than 50 days on average. They’re books by authors you probably haven’t heard of—Darcy Chan, Chris Culver, Michael Prescott, Douglas E. Richards—right up there with James Patterson and Nicholas Sparks. At 79 to 99 cents a copy, they’re priced to sell. But considering that sales estimates for some of the top indie e-book sellers start at 2500 copies a month, that’s money most authors would be quite pleased with. Self-published e-books occupy several slots of the top ten on all the genre lists, too—sci-fi, romance, mysteries.

This is staggering, and it’s a part of the story that hasn’t yet been fully explored. When nontraditional e-books are taking such a large cut of the market, why on earth is Amazon building an editorial apparatus? It would seem to be exactly the wrong move—unless there’s some other piece of the puzzle we don’t know about.

Amazon can be faulted for a lot of things, but making bad business decisions isn’t one of them. If the company has calculated that the gain of bringing edited books to market is worth the investment in an in-house editorial staff, that’s not an assault on the publishing industry. To the contrary: It’s a signal that the services the industry has traditionally offered are still of value. What’s under assault, rather, is the bloated, arrogant, and conservative culture of the publishing conglomerates that for so long have enjoyed far too much control over what we read.

Notes on a voice from More Intelligent Life takes on Conan Doyle:

“Dr Watson doesn’t write to you, he talks to you, with Edwardian courtesy, across a glowing fire.” So said John le Carré, one of many writers in thrall to Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930). His most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, provides the excitement. But his second most famous, John Watson, provides the voice.

The stories (1887-1927) are infinitely re-readable. Fans focus on Holmes himself, that perfect assemblage of cold calculation and eccentric tastes—the violin, the cocaine, the tobacco in the Persian slipper. “Every writer owes something to Holmes,” wrote T.S. Eliot in 1929. But Holmes would be precious without Watson’s direct, manly presence. A late story narrated by Holmes was hopeless. The prose lost most of its energy and all of its suspense, and became smug.

Watson, the medic ever ready with a pistol and a flask of brandy, was a conduit for Doyle himself, who had been a GP. The doctor is decent, and, contrary to popular belief, not stupid. He shares the reader’s breathless bemusement at Holmes’s lightning deductions. “What can it all mean?” Watson gasps in “The Speckled Band”, the most terrifying story of all. “‘It means that it’s all over,’ Holmes answered.”

From Twitter:

Lonely Planet looks to digital publishing http://bit.ly/rVpFRq

Philip Pullman: Using the internet is like looking at a landscape through a keyhole - Telegraph

Tom Waits: 'I look like hell but I'm going to see where it gets me' – interview http://gu.com/p/32mnp/tw

Editing Wikipedia at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: http://nyti.ms/qCaJdn

Boys on a Log - Bangkok August 1969

Bangkok August 1969

Another weekly image from my archive. Click on it to make it larger.

These boys all look happy and cheerful waving to the silly tourists out sightseeing.  This is old Bangkok where life centered around the rivers and klongs and, while some of this still exists to the north of Bangkok, you don't see scenes like this too much anymore.

In addition to the images I've posted on Flickr and those I've periodically posted on PND, I have now produced a Big Blurb Book: From the Archive 1960 -1980 of some of the images I really thought were special.

I now have an iPad version of this book for sale ($4.99) on the Blurb site which you can find here: STORE

I have to say, even on the iPad the book looks pretty good.

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 43): Tom Waits, Children's Books, The Booker, "Close the Libraries", Textbooks & Education + More

Interview with Tom Waits in the Observer:

"Music has generally involved a lot of awkward contraptions, a certain amount of heavy lifting," he says. "The idea that it will just be a sort of vapour that you listen to out of speakers the size of a dime alarms me. It's like injecting yourself. Or eating alone."

He is, he says, equally wary of the ease of search and shuffle. "They have removed the struggle to find anything. And therefore there is no genuine sense of discovery. Struggle is the first thing we know getting along the birth canal, out in the world. It's pretty basic. Book store owners and record store owners used to be oracles, in that way; you'd go in this dusty old place and they might point you toward something that would change your life. All that's gone."

Does he ever stray online?

"No," he says. "But then I'm one of those guys that is still a bit afraid of the telephone, its implications for conversation. I still wonder if the jukebox might be the death of live music."

In Observer, there is a section devoted to reading with kids and here an essay on asking why young adults are so interested in dystopian fiction (Observer):

A new wave of dystopian fiction at this particular time shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's the zeitgeist. Adults write books for teenagers. So anxious adults – worried about the planet, the degradation of civil society and the bitter inheritance we're leaving for the young – write dystopian books.

We create harsh, violent worlds. These are dark, sometimes bleak stories, but that doesn't mean they are hopeless. Those of us who write for young people are reluctant to leave our readers without hope. It wouldn't be right. We always leave a candle burning in the darkness.

And we write good stories. That's why teenagers read them.

Gaby Wood reflecting on the Booker prize (Telegraph):

But when our shortlist became the fastest-selling since records began, all hell broke loose. Clearly, our choices must be too “commercial” and not “literary” enough. Significantly, none of this discussion was a response to the actual books on the list.

Of the people who have scoffed, asked me if I’m embarrassed, or who pronounced the prize to be on its last legs, not a single one has read The Sisters Brothers or Half-Blood Blues or Pigeon English, all shortlisted and all quite sophisticated exercises in voice-throwing or genre-bending. There is something magnificent about this: that books which in another year would be classed as too odd or offbeat or even experimental have been derided as too commercial. Readers, we have slipped you some truly wonderful, surprising stuff in the inadvertent guise of the mass market.

Of course, The Sense of an Ending in any case makes these arguments instantly out of date, since its author is not a controversial or “unliterary” choice, and the book is a masterpiece by any measure. Most of the judges loved it as soon as we read it, all of us have read it several times, and no one doubts that it improves with every reading.

We should close the libraries says John McTernan who has an MA in librarianship and has 280 comments - so far. (Telegraph):

The final defence of the public library is that it is a place for the pupil who has nowhere else to study and revise. Once again, this is the 21st century. Virtually every kid has a desk at home – even if it often has a games console on it. And libraries at secondary schools are, in my experience, uniformly good and open places for young people.

Few institutions are timeless. Most reflect the period when they were created, and have to change as society changes if they are to survive. The crisis in our libraries is not because of the “cuts” – it’s because they are needed less.

And there are currently 280 comments including this one from "billfanshel"

"Google a subject and you can become ridiculously well-informed ridiculously quickly."

No, Google a subject and you can become ridiculously misinformed ridiculously quickly, with the result being an increasing susceptibility to demagoguery. A

major job of a librarian is to help patrons distinguish good information from bad. Having apparently been out of the profession for 17 years, the author has become out of touch with the modern library and the evolving role of librarians. That is, of course, assuming that he ever was in touch with those things.

As a librarian in the U.S., my philosophy regarding online resources is "supplement not supplant." In other words, the Internet should add to what is available in print and not replace it. It is sad to see that public officials in Britain are as ill-informed and anti-intellectual as those in the United States. However, based on this comment thread, it is encouraging to see that the British populace is as supportive of its public libraries as the U.S. populace and will fight attempts to eliminate them.

A few years ago, as part of austerity measures, the mayor of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, wanted to close down 11 of the city's 54 public library branches. The people balked at that prospect, and the library branches remain open. Do the same in Great Britain!

Is this war? In wake of Pearson's unveiling of a free LMS, Blackboard announces moves to promote sharing of open course content. (InsideHigherEd):

The company plans to unveil both of these moves at its corporate session here today. Ray Henderson, the president of Blackboard’s LMS product line and chief technology officer at the company, discussed them with Inside Higher Ed here at Educause on Tuesday.

“We look at the market and we see there’s a real curiosity in trying to extend the mission that the institutions have and who they serve,” Henderson said. “And there are a lot that take inspiration from, say, the MIT OpenCourseWare project, where they would really like to have their catalog of courses, and the course materials that they’re creating -- they’d like to contribute those more openly.”

Under the partnership with Creative Commons, Blackboard instructors will be invited to tag their course content with different licenses that indicate exactly how others can use it. Instructors will then have the option of sharing the course on Twitter or Facebook.

The company is also working to make the licensed course content more visible to public search engines, so that it can be discovered more easily by instructors searching the Web for free course content.

Under proposed legislation government grant money will be denied to developers of open access educational content (Inside HigherEd)

The move is a boon to publishers, who have feared that government support for the freely available, modifiable course materials, known as “open educational resources,” or OERs, would eat into their profits and give the free programs an unfair advantage. If effective programs are already for sale, they argue, the federal government shouldn’t spend extra money to reinvent the wheel.

Advocates for community colleges and online education argued that the provision, if enacted, would stifle innovation and restrict colleges to the publishers’ more expensive programs.

“We hear any concerns that the subcommittee might have about duplications of efforts and resources,” said James Hermes, director of government relations for the American Association of Community Colleges. “If there really is truly an alternative already in existence, you don’t want to duplicate that and create something from scratch that’s already there.”

From the twitter:

Philip Pullman: Using the internet is like looking at a landscape through a keyhole - Telegraph

Editing Wikipedia at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts: NYTimes

An Indiana School System Goes Digital: NYTimes

Cengage will partner with Moodlerooms: Journal

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 42): Frankfurt, CS Forester, Martin Amis + More

Exclaiming this is the time for start-ups the Frankfurt Book Fair concluded on Sunday with traffic slightly up and a continued expansion to more diverse attendees and exhibitors:

With many exhibitors and visitors, not only from the book industry, but also other related industries such as film, games, and information and communications technology, the Frankfurt Book Fair demonstrated that the sphere of interaction for members of the publishing industry has become significantly larger. Many new areas of specialisation – from digital publishing services and computer games production, to legal and financial consultants for crossmedial products – could be found at the Book Fair, spread between the different halls, professional areas and regional sections. In all, 7,384 exhibitors from 106 countries were present, and the more than 3,200 events attracted 280,194 visitors.

“This is now the time for start-ups, and the book industry is in a positive mood for renewal,” says Juergen Boos, Director of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Besides the electronic reading gadgets, visitors to the Book Fair witnessed a lively experimentation with new ideas, with new forms of storytelling and with multimedia formats. “An enormous diversity of ideas arises from the combination of enterprising spirit and technological opportunity. The international book and publishing industry has become a lot more multi-facetted.”

This year, the Frankfurt Book Fair also recorded a slight increase in the number of visitors, with about one per cent more people coming to Frankfurt in 2011 than in 2010. The interest in international training and networking events grew perceptibly, such as those offered in collaboration with the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers, under the umbrella of the new conference brand, the Frankfurt Academy. Here, the emphasis was on event-formats such as the all-media StoryDrive Conference and the Tools of Change Conference.

“The more globalised the books business becomes, the greater is everyone’s need to meet in person at least once a year – and that, of course, in Frankfurt. Conversations about people and books are indispensable,” says Professor Gottfried Honnefelder, President of the Association of German Publishers and Booksellers, and he adds: “Those involved in the market are optimistic. We’re not only talking about the e-book business, we’re already taking action. The face of the Frankfurt Book Fair is one of self-assurance. The framework exists; now each publisher and each bookseller needs to find the right path for itself.”

CS Forester has a new novel coming out (Observer):

The novel, which is complete and polished from start to finish, was accepted for publication in 1935 by his publisher, Michael Joseph, now part of Penguin. However, Forester and his publisher delayed its release, deciding that it would not be sensible to publish it between two Hornblower books. Forester then moved house and when his publisher was sold, The Pursued somehow disappeared.

Forester clearly felt its loss. Decades later in his autobiography he wrote: "The lost novel was really lost. It is just possible that a typescript still exists, forgotten and gathering dust in a rarely used storeroom in Boston or Bloomsbury."

He was right. It surfaced at Christie's in 2002, when Lawrence Brewer, a lifelong Forester aficionado, was astonished to find that the auctioneer was selling it as a "job lot" of 11 Forester-related items. "It was a pathetic little auction," said Brewer. "There was no … great publicity. Something should have been made of it."

Excited by the chance to own words by Forester that no one had read, Brewer bought the typescript with Colin Blogg, a fellow founder-member of the CS Forester Society, for just £1,500. "Goodness me!" Brewer exclaimed in pure Foresterese. "I found it. I was sky-high."

Martin Amis was interviewed at the Hay Festival in Mexico and didn't hold back on a variety of subjects. Here beginning is comments on empire's decline (Telegraph):

MA Yes, it’s satirical, but it is about what happens to countries when they’re in decline. We’re now seeing America beginning to cope with decline, and I don’t think they’re going to be anything like as reasonable about that decline as England was.

England went from being ruler of a quarter of the globe to a second-rate country in the course of the Second World War. They talk about the Second World War. They say “the big three”: Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill. Churchill wasn’t one of the big three. Stalin and Roosevelt could hardly bring themselves to stop giggling when Churchill said, “I think we should do this”, because we’d ceased to matter by then.

And somehow we got through it.

JG Ballard, the writer who was interned in China by the Japanese, returned to England at the age of 12, 13, and he said it looked as though England had lost the war. It was blackouts, rationing, everything sordid and dirty and depressed, and what we were doing was coping with this tremendous demotion from being a great power to being a minor power.

But we somehow got through, and I think we were very greatly helped by the ideology known as political correctness, relativism, levelism, because that was fiercely anti-imperialist. So as we were coping with decline – and it takes decades to do it – we had the ideology that was telling us that empires are s---, you don’t want an empire, you should be ashamed for having had one.

In the NY Times a review of some of the past movie adaptations of LeCarre's novels (NYTimes):

In retrospect it seems miraculous that the movies did so well by Mr. le Carré on that first go. The next couple of attempts, Sidney Lumet’s 1966 “Deadly Affair” (based on the novel “Call for the Dead”) and Frank R. Pierson’s “Looking Glass War” (1969), were largely bungled operations, though “Deadly Affair” benefits from the casting of James Mason as a version of Mr. le Carré’s most famous character, the mild-mannered and deceptively wily spymaster George Smiley. After “The Looking Glass War,” an adaptation roughly as successful as the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, Mr. le Carré withdrew from the field for better than a decade. He knew when it was time to come in from the cold.

What the failed adaptations of his books had made clear was that even in his relatively straightforward early novels his narrative techniques were a little too tricky for the movies to handle. Mr. le Carré is maybe the most eccentric constructor of fiction in English literature since Joseph Conrad. His stories are full of digressions and long flashbacks; he circles around his plots for the longest time, as if he were doing reconnaissance on them before deciding to go in for the kill. And the verbal textures of the books can be challenging too, because his spies tend to speak in their own special jargon, which seems like normal speech, but isn’t quite. It’s like one of those maddeningly elusive regional English dialects: you need to get the hang of it, and it always takes longer than you would have thought possible.

Stieg Larsson books are being adapted for the comics (Telegraph):

In a statement ahead of the Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, the publisher behind Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman said its Vertigo imprint would work with Larsson's estate and Hedlund Literary Agency to adapt the books.

"Each book by Larsson will be presented in two graphic novel volumes that will be available in both print and digital formats," it said, starting withThe Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in 2012.

DC Entertainment co-publisher Dan DiDio said "the intricate characters and stories Larsson created in the Millennium Trilogy are a perfect match for the graphic novel format."

The diaries of a Holocaust survivor generated some interest this week and will be published in 2012 (Observer):

The story is one of many recorded in a concentration camp diary that was sold to publishers around the world at the Frankfurt book fair. The private journals of Helga Weiss are to be published in the UK for the first time next year by Viking Press, while foreign rights have been snapped up by publishing houses across the world.

Weiss, an artist in her early 80s who lives in Prague and is also known by her married name of Weissova-Hoskova, mentioned her journal during occasional public appearances, but until now public interest in her written story has always been overshadowed by her success as a postwar painter. The British publisher Venetia Butterfield heard of the diary's existence last summer when Weiss visited London for a concert at the Wigmore Hall commemorating fellow inmates at the Terezín camp in former Czechoslovakia. 

"I heard about the event and called someone in north London who knew Helga. They told me she was just about to get on a plane back to Prague, but that she was coming round for a coffee first," said Butterfield. "I raced up to see her and we talked for no more than 10 or 15 minutes. She is an amazing woman with a great, feisty attitude."

Frankfurt Book Fair Round Up Day Two.

Author Roger Rapoport writing for the McClatchy-Tribune News Service takes us on a best picks tour of the fair (Link)

Two years ago my pick for the most overlooked title at Frankfurt was "Nobody Owns the Moon," a Viking/Penguin Australia picture book by Tohby Riddle. This year I have a new nominee, a title that should be required reading in every school in the land. Can we have a round of applause for Larry Gerber's "CITED! Identifying Credible Information" (Rosen Publishing Group)? This brief title makes it clear that "much of the information on the Internet is someone's opinion" that can't be tested or proved. It shows young people how to do accurate and trustworthy research and avoid being suckered by "phony facts." Parents, go get this book for your kids.

And bizzarely:

Certainly one the most ambitious travel guides of the year is "The Holocaust Sites of Europe: An Historical Guide" by Martin Winstone (I.B. Taurus/Palgrave Macmillan). Even if you have no plans to visit any of these destinations, this is a superb armchair travel book for students of the Third Reich. An exhaustive look at the Holocaust camp by camp, this work documents little-known Nazi killing groups like Maly Trostenets in Belarus. At this former Karl Marx Collective, Hitler's troops executed at least 200,000 prisoners.

Euronews Video:  Pressing issues at the Frankfurt Book Fair (YouTube)


Deutsche Welle reminds us how the Frankfurt Book fair evolved (DW)

Frankfurt's fair is the largest in the world, but it also looks back on a proud tradition: Manuscripts have been traded at fairs in Frankfurt since the late Middle Ages. After Johannes Gutenberg invented the letterpress in the neighboring town of Mainz in the 15th century, he came to Frankfurt to sell his products. Even then, printers and book traders made their way from across Europe to Frankfurt, and a special "Book Barge" from Cologne helped ferry visitors from Flanders to the event.

This pan-European book trade, the center of which was Frankfurt, was possible due to Latin's role as the lingua franca of the time. But the Reformation changed that, heralding a new era of book publishing in national languages. The Reformation also brought the Kaiser as an advocate of Catholic interests into play, and as a free imperial city, Frankfurt quickly became a focal point of attention. Whoever wanted to trade in books was forced to comply with draconian censorship regulations. This pushed Frankfurt aside, making way for a new center of European book trading to flourish in Protestant Leipzig. Frankfurt's book fairs closed in the 18th century.

Rachel Deahl in PW looks at the deal action (PW):

Amid a frenzied round of deal-making before the fair, Leyla Belle Drake, at Salomonsson, is selling a debut trilogy by Alexander Soderberg called The Andalucian Friend. The agency was going to hold off on selling the series until London, but, after the scouts picked up on it, rushed a translation—in a week they got the first 100 pages of the book translated into English to have at Frankfurt. The trilogy was pre-empted in Sweden in what Drake called a “huge” deal, and a significant auction has also closed in Italy and Germany. A number of offers are in from other countries, but the agency is planning to hold off on a U.S. sale at the fair and, instead, to shop the rights in the States in November. A U.K. auction, the agency said, may or may not close in Germany. The trilogy is set in Sweden and the author used to be a screenwriter. The central character in the trilogy is a female nurse and Drake said the first book, which is written, is “very cinematic”and features “explosive action.”Book one in the trilogy will be published in Sweden in May.

Sound familiar?

MediaWeek (Vol 4, No 41): Frankfurt 2011, Indian Authors, Digital Rights,

Frankfurt has always been my favorite of the trade shows I've visited.  There's such a variety of people, customers and potential business partners that its unlike any other book show.

It is a gloomy day today and rain is forecast for tomorrow but the threat of industrial action may be less imminent since the government has become directly involved in getting the parties to negotiate. 

A delegation from India is presenting a collection of indigenous Indian works for translation as reported by India's Daily News and Analysis:

In a first showcase of Indian indigenous writing, a literary panorama featuring works by over 30 language writers will be on display at the Frankfurt Book Fair in a pilot exhibition for readers and publishers from Europe, the US and other countries.

The literary panorama, initiated by the union culture ministry under the 'ILA: Indian Literature Abroad' project, will be held Oct 12-16.

The project aims to carry the diversity of contemporary regional Indian literature from the grassroots to the world through source translation, which involves creation of original work directly to foreign languages in an attempt to remove dependence on English translation, a top ILA official said.

Initially, the focus of translation is on six UNESCO languages: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

“The project requires patience and nurturing. It is (in the) long term. We want to understand the kind of Indian language books the international market likes and the market dynamics. We are looking at source language translations - like from Tamil to French," writer Namita Gokhale, the member secretary of Indian Literature Abroad project, told IANS.

"Translating a regional literary work first into English and then into a foreign language results in loss of textual matter,” she said.

“Different cultures appreciate different kind of literature,” she added.

Gokhale heads the delegation carrying the Indian literary showcase to Frankfurt Tuesday.

A discussion, 'Romancing the Languages: Indian Literature's Journeys' will debate on the future of Indian regional language writing and its global positioning Oct 13.

The Bookseller doesn't expect the slow global economy to impact the US business at Frankfurt (Bookseller):

Meanwhile, organisers are expecting 7,500 exhibitors at the fair, as the halls reach capacity. FBF spokesperson Katja Boehne said there will be 761 exhibitors from the UK and 604 from the US, with between 280,000 to 290,000 visitors set to come through the doors—of which around 150,000 will be trade visitors. She said: "We will see at this book fair what publishers have made of the digital options. There will be lots of enhanced e-books and multimedia projects, some of which we don't have a name for. There will be a large dollop of creativity and new ideas."

Boehne added that the numbers of exhibitors and visitors was "more or less" the same as last year, as the fair has "come to the end of capacity; there is no space left for extra exhibitors".

In Publishers' Weekly Rachel Deahl suggests this years Frankfurt will be about digital rights just like last year and the year before and she concludes, (PW):

And then there’s the growing concern and confusion over e-books and the open market. Under the reigning territorial model, the open market right allows publishers to sell English-language books in European countries outside the U.K. Whether the open market can, or should, be preserved in the digital world is a recurring question. A recent court ruling, outside the book world, may also be a topic of conversation in Frankfurt. In Football Association Premier League Ltd. et al. v. QC Leisure et al., an E.U. court just ruled that a British pub owner was not legally allowed to use a decoder to air Greek soccer games in her bar; without the decoder she would have had to pay a licensing fee to Sky Sport. The ruling had to do with the fact that Sky Sport had negotiated an exclusive licensing fee with the Premier League to air its games in the U.K., and, although the decoders are legal, they cannot be used to show the games to a group. Attorney C.E. Petit, who blogs about publishing and the law at Scrivener’s Error, picked up on the case and noted that the judgment might have implications in the book world. Since Europe is now under a more unified copyright law, with the establishment of the E.U., there could be a case about multiple English-language editions being sold in Europe. In other words, there could now be legal ground for stamping out the open market in publishing.

A not well known Irish author Flann O'Brien gets and appreciation from More Intelligent Life:

Despite the pseudonym, everyone in Dublin’s incestuous literary circles knew him. When he started openly mocking the civil service and expressing political opinions—a serious transgression for an employee of the state—he was invited to retire at age 42, in 1953. His pension, together with the slender income from his writing, might have let him succeed as a novelist. But O’Nolan was better at self-sabotage than self-promotion, and he died at 54 of cancer and alcoholism. He still left behind five novels, three of uneven quality and two, “At Swim-Two-Birds” and “The Third Policeman”, that are among the greatest accomplishments in English-language fiction.

He finished “At Swim-Two-Birds” when he was 28 and sent it off to Longmans, a London publisher, where by a rare stroke of good luck Graham Greene was reader. “I read it with continual excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage,” recalled Greene, who urged publication. From Paris, James Joyce, in a blurb written to help promote the book, pronounced its author “a real writer, with the true comic spirit.” O’Nolan was cautiously optimistic. But the cosmic balance was soon restored. War broke out and in 1940 the Luftwaffe destroyed the London warehouse in which the entire print run of the novel was stored; fewer than 250 had been sold. Then in 1941 Joyce, who had promised to help with publicity, suddenly died, along with O’Nolan’s hopes for the book. “[I]t must be a flop,” he wrote, wallowing in gloom. “I guess it is a bum book anyhow.”

From the twitter this week:

The adventures of Tintin – and CGI http://gu.com/p/32etq/tw

Armour to stand down as Reed finance chief - FT.com - Mediahttp://on.ft.com/nHFHnJ

Stars Will Read Amazon Unit's New Audio Book Series:http://nyti.ms/nWdh4E