Bellow’s regrets

Slate’s political columnist Timothy Noah takes umbrage with author and book editor Adam Bellow’s response to a two-year-old column about the Coulter-ization of conservative-leaning books in the U.S. Bellow, who edited two of the books cited in the column, hits back in a piece in the summer issue of World Affairs. But it’s not quite the riposte it might have been – while shrugging off Noah’s criticisms that the current crop of conservative tomes borrow too liberally (pun intended) from right-wing commentator Ann Coulter’s shrill style, Bellow also concedes that the contemporary conservative dialogue ain’t what it used to be.

Granted, Bellow’s piece is about more than just Noah’s column, but regardless, it seems Noah comes out on top in this battle of wits:

Whether Bellow will go to hell for publishing either work is not a question that interests me. I’ve interviewed him by phone a couple of times—we’ve never met face to face—and I found him congenial and intelligent. (Also—full disclosure—when I first started writing this column, he sent a complimentary “if you ever want to write a book” note.) Unlike [...] Bellow, I experience no distress when I contemplate conservatism’s intellectual bankruptcy. Not my religion, and therefore not my problem. But I’m not too fine a person to enjoy Bellow’s torment and vacillation in reaction to something I wrote. Yup, it sucks to be a conservative today. Have a Maalox on me, pal.

Newsflash: Canadians still going to libraries

Despite the onslaught of entertainment options competing for our attention, apparently Canadians are still flocking to our public libraries, according to a feature in today’s Ottawa Citizen. The article suggests business is booming at Canada’s major public libraries due to factors ranging from the high price of buying books to the rise in Internet usage thanks to the popularity of social networking.

The piece offers some eye-opening stats:

Toronto boasts the busiest public library system per capita in the world, with 1.2 million cardholders and 28.9 million items in 40 languages circulating each year. In Regina, 3,180 people are on the waiting list for Fearless Fourteen, the newest offering from romance-turned-crime writer Janet Evanovich. Halifax public libraries have 240 readers on a waiting list for Kathy Reichs’ newest forensic mystery, which won’t even be published until the end of the summer. And in Ottawa, 667 people are waiting to get their hands on one of 77 copies of Sophie Kinsella’s Remember Me?

“Everyone thinks the Internet has been the death of the public libraries and exactly the opposite is true,” says Grant Kaiser, director of marketing and development for Calgary Public Library. “We see more and more and more readership every year.”

[...]

Patrons are visiting the library for more than just books, too. Videos and DVDs comprise four per cent of the Ottawa library’s collection of 2.3 million items, and waiting lists for popular titles are often as long as those for books: recent films Juno, No Country for Old Men and Michael Clayton have waiting lists [...] 800-strong.

More to (e-)read

For all the talk about electronic books, the market for e-book readers still seems fairly limited, so it’s not surprising to hear that Sony has announced that its digital reader will now be able to read e-books published using the .epub format.

Until now, the Sony Reader could only read books available from the Sony e-book store, PDF documents, and DRM-free text. But the company plans to provide a software update to the Reader so the device can display .epub books, an open format being adopted by several large publishers (akin to how MP3 files have become the open-format standard in music). That means more choice for users, who will now be able to buy e-books from stores other than Sony’s (such as Amazon, for example, which has a larger selection of e-book titles than Sony’s e-book store).

CNet.com reports:

The Sony Reader Digital Book is the first e-book reading device to support the .epub format, which is the XML-based standard format proposed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. It allows publishers to convert books to different formats, protect the copy using DRM (digital rights management) and has the ability to resize PDF e-books and other text to better fit the reader’s screen size.

Publishers including Harper Collins, Random House, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin are offering texts in the .epub format.

[...]

“This upgrade opens the door to a whole host of paid and free content from third-party eBook stores, Web sites, and even public libraries,” Steve Haber, senior vice-president of consumer product marketing for Sony Electronics, said in a statement.

The announcement is the latest move in a standards war over e-book formats pitting Sony against Amazon. Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader and e-books it sells support the proprietary .azw format. Amazon also acquired Mobipocket, which offers a format for texts read on PDAs and BlackBerrys, and its Kindle can read DRM-free .mobi files.

Best of the fest

Just a reminder that Ontario’s largest summer literary gathering, the Leacock Summer Festival in Orillia, is under way this week and continues through the weekend.

Hosted by the Leacock Museum (a national historic site), the festival features readings, speeches, and dinners. Some of this year’s highlights include Leacock Medal for Humour winner Terry Fallis appearing July 25; University of Toronto philosophy professor and author Mark Kingwell expounds on his latest book, Concrete Reveries, on July 26; and the festival wraps up July 27 with an afternoon reading by authors Diane Schoemperlen, David Gilmour, and Jane Urquhart, as well as an evening birthday barbeque for Giller Prize-winning novelist Austin Clarke.

On the (online) shelf

Ordering books online may be old hat by now, but along comes the next manifestation of the Web 2.0 bookstore: Zoomii.com (the Canuck version is at zoomii.ca), a nifty new online application that marries the ease of online ordering with the fun of browsing through a bookstore.

The ArsTechnica blog explains:

Zoomii, in a nutshell, is a visual bookshelf browser for over 19,000 books from Amazon’s catalog, though it can search for over 162,000 titles. Instead of browsing through flat lists of book titles and their cold statistics, Zoomii stacks books in shelves alphabetically by author, organized by genre. You can click and drag across Zoomii’s landscape of shelves, zoom in and out with your scrollwheel, and click a book’s cover for basic statistics from Amazon, including the ability to add the book to your cart or wishlist. We aren’t quite sure how Zoomii picks the books that stock its shelves, but some kind of system that picks through a combination of top sellers and new releases is a safe bet.

[…] Zoomii’s attempt to bring the bookshelf back to the online bookstore experience is a novel – and mostly successful – experience. Scrolling across Zoomii’s shelves is snappy, and book images render in crisp detail surprisingly quickly. Clicking a book’s cover displays a higher-res version and plenty of details instantly, and all refreshingly without a single drop of Flash.

The blog goes on to point out that, surprisingly, Amazon itself hasn’t actually scooped up Zoomii – the site is the brainchild of a single developer, Chris Thiessen, who worked on the project for two years in an “attempt to bring online as much of the real bookstore experience as possible.”

Sean Dixon pays it forward

To mark last week’s inaugural Independent Booksellers’ Week in the U.K., the BBC took a look at how certain indie bookstores are playing up their particular areas of expertise in order to stay alive in a market dominated by big-box stores, and also asked readers to recommend (and send in photos of) their favourite indies. In detailing the charms of local bookshops, they unearth a Canuck connection:

Goldsboro Books, in London’s West End, specializes in specially-bound signed books and in spotting new talent. So it is stocking the first U.K. print run of Canadian writer Sean Dixon’s novel, The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, about the world’s premier book club (with a twist – none of them read).

Though the Independent Booksellers’ Week is a locally-focused event, while he’s from across the pond, Dixon was being championed by Goldsboro for his passionate support of independent retailers. In fact, thanks to Dixon, a homegrown indie garnered a shout-out on the august BBC – in the article, he tips his hat to Toronto’s Type Books as his own favourite bookstore.

Borrowing liberally

Forgetting to return your library books long enough to rack up massive fines is one thing, but it seems one fellow in Denver took the concept of “checking out” library items a bit too literally. Associated Press reports:

A man accused of checking out hundreds of books and DVDs from libraries around the Denver area and then trying to sell them will be doing all his library borrowing from now on behind bars.

Denver prosecutors say 34-year-old Thomas Pilaar was sentenced to 10 years in prison and ordered Tuesday to pay $53,549 in restitution. He pleaded guilty in May.

Of an estimated 1,400 books and DVDs that were taken, about 500 have been recovered.

Denver Public Library estimated it had lost $35,000, while Douglas County said it had $11,000 worth of overdue items.

Authorities were tipped off by a woman who recently bought books on Craigslist and noticed the library identification stamps.

In appreciation of Anne

As you may have heard, spunky red-haired heroine Anne of Green Gables is celebrating her centenary this year. Here at home, we’ve always been partial to L.M. Montgomery’s tale of the spirited orphan who grows up on idyllic Prince Edward Island, but it’s amazing to note just how wide an impact our Anne has had on readers around the world.

Slate.com weighs in with some interesting insights into the novel, in light of Random House’s decision to issue and heavily promote a centennial edition of the book on their Modern Library classics imprint. (“Tolstoy and Anna Karenina, meet L.M. Montgomery and Anne Shirley.”)

To some, this canonical promotion of a writer who would probably now be classified as a YA author might seem preposterous. To certain left-leaning cultural theorists who won’t embrace a heroine with a less-than-revolutionary CV—Anne, once the Island’s best young scholar, chooses to become a devoted wife and mother of six—the Modern Library’s decision may appear to be a reactionary cave-in to nostalgic sentimentality. All very plausible arguments. But none of them is capable of accounting for Anne’s still-flourishing appeal and the series’ intellectual hold on the women who read it as young girls. Revisit Anne of Green Gables with an open mind, no matter what your age, and there’s an excellent chance you’ll feel that Anne deserves, however belatedly, to dwell in the company of Huck and Tom.

Apparently the folks at Jezebel.com agree, asking, “Why isn’t Anne Shirley worthy of Huck Finn status?” In a post today, they suggest that Anne should be part of the “kiddie canon” of classic books read in schools:

And yet how many of you (outside of Canada — it might be required reading there) actually read it in school? How did a book — eventually a series of books — beloved by even sometimes-YA author Mark Twain not make it into the canon of Things You Must Read? And how many of the books in that canon are about girls?

Bytes and pieces

The Economist‘s blog takes a look at how the same market forces that led to the digitization – and ensuing fragmentation – of the music industry could eventually come to bear on the book biz. Writer Daniel Hall suggests that technology has shifted the balance for both books and music, with music consumption becoming increasingly individualistic (given the advent of the iPod), while book consumption is heading towards a more collective experience, given the rise of book blogs and other online promotions. He notes that the fragmentation caused by technology can often lead to more choice for consumers of art and media:

If this is so, it is interesting to consider the likely impacts on other cultural forms. For movies, while it is hard to imagine the summer blockbuster ever entirely disappearing, I think the net effect is likely to be increasing fragmentation. Museum art is harder to predict. Will global branding allow a few artists to attain rock star status? Or will niche artists flourish by using the internet to raise awareness and create alternative art experiences? I find myself hoping it’s the latter. In my experience the areas where technology is causing significant fragmentation—not only music but areas like news media—have become far richer and more interesting to me as a result.

Seen and heard

Rattling Books, purveyor of Canuck audiobooks, is holding a contest on its website to caption a charming little cartoon of a flock of penguins razorbills – one of them sporting headphones, just like the bird in Rattling’s stylized logo – drawn by Newfoundland illustrator Jennifer Barrett. The contest runs for the month of July, and the winners will be announced in early August. Three winners will get to choose three Rattling titles each from their wide selection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and kids’ books – not a bad prize for the dog days of summer, when lounging in a hammock while a good yarn is piped into one’s earbuds seems like a vastly better idea than picking up that unread tome still sitting by your bedside.