Philip M. Parker is the (computer-aided) author of more than 200,000 books. And, thanks to the wonders of print-on-demand, he has yet to lose money on a single one. His work represents the tip of a very long tail.

From the New York Times:

Among the books published under his name are “The Official Patient’s Sourcebook on Acne Rosacea” ($24.95 and 168 pages long); “Stickler Syndrome: A Bibliography and Dictionary for Physicians, Patients and Genome Researchers” ($28.95 for 126 pages); and “The 2007-2012 Outlook for Tufted Washable Scatter Rugs, Bathmats and Sets That Measure 6-Feet by 9-Feet or Smaller in India” ($495 for 144 pages).

But these are not conventional books, and it is perhaps more accurate to call Mr. Parker a compiler than an author. Mr. Parker, who is also the chaired professor of management science at Insead (a business school with campuses in Fontainebleau, France, and Singapore), has developed computer algorithms that collect publicly available information on a subject — broad or obscure — and, aided by his 60 to 70 computers and six or seven programmers, he turns the results into books in a range of genres, many of them in the range of 150 pages and printed only when a customer buys one.

If this sounds like cheating to the layman’s ear, it does not to Mr. Parker, who holds some provocative — and apparently profitable — ideas on what constitutes a book. While the most popular of his books may sell hundreds of copies, he said, many have sales in the dozens, often to medical libraries collecting nearly everything he produces. He has extended his technique to crossword puzzles, rudimentary poetry and even to scripts for animated game shows.

All we need now is a machine that reads for us, and we’ll finally be free of the oppressive shackles of literate culture.

From CBC.ca:

A surge of bilingualism in Quebec has one of the province’s most popular writers threatening to burn his entire body of work if something isn’t done to stop it.

Victor-Lévy Beaulieu, the author of some 70 works of fiction, non-fiction, drama and poetry, is giving the province two months to correct what he considers its errant linguistic ways, or the books will burn.

Beaulieu, 62, started making good on his symbolic ultimatum earlier this week by tossing a copy of his most recent novel, La Grande Tribu (The Big Tribe), into the wood stove at his remote cottage northeast of Quebec City.

Tabarnac - il lui manque des bardeaux!

In literary circles, there is probably no author more loathed than the U.S. thriller writer James Patterson, who freely admits to writing his books – which he pumps out at a rate of eight or so a year – with the assistance of a large stable of co-writers. Not that Patterson gives a fig. His books have sold 130-million copies worldwide, and now, according to The Independent, a survey has found that U.K. libraries lend more of his books than those of any other author.

Titles by the author were lent more than 1.5 million times between July 2006 and June 2007, an annual survey found. Such is his popularity that he has ousted the children’s writer Jacqueline Wilson from the number one spot, according to the Public Lending Right figures.

His primacy in the world of book lending is bound to reignite the debate on the “consortium style” working practices of some popular writers, where teams of co-writers help with the process of putting together a novel.

[…]
When Random House took over as his publisher last year, Patterson was referred to as a “company”, according to Joel Rickett, deputy editor of The Bookseller. The publishing house also claimed that he has had more number one bestsellers around the world in the past five years than Dan Brown, J. K. Rowling, Tom Clancy and John Grisham combined. Mr. Rickett said while his collaborative way of working may be frowned upon by some, it was a more common way of working in the thriller genre.

“If you compare his way of working to other writing teams such as those in television, it’s not that unusual. He appears to have a keen awareness of brand and there’s a certain amount of cringing in this country but it is really about establishing a name that readers can trust”

Judith Regan may be sleazy, but she’s not that sleazy, at least according to Regan’s former bosses at News Corporation, the owners of HarperCollins U.S., where Regan had her own imprint.

According to Yahoo! News, News Corp. has settled a lawsuit with Regan that arose fom her firing in 2006, and has released a statement that says, in part:

“After carefully considering the matter, we accept Ms. Regan’s position that she did not say anything that was anti-Semitic in nature, and further believe that Ms. Regan is not anti-Semitic.”

That’s pretty much the least you’d want your former employers to say about you when you’re gone, isn’t it?

Remember that project in which classic novellas were packaged to look like cigarette cases? Well, they may have pulled it off a little too well. As The Guardian reports:

The books, released as Tales to Take Your Breath Away at the start of the cigarette ban in pubs and restaurants last July, were well received by the design press and have made popular Christmas presents. But now the publishers are having to inhale deeply themselves as British American Tobacco (BAT) claims that one of the packs, containing Hemingway’s The Snows of Kilimanjaro and The Undefeated, resembles its own Lucky Strike pack. Claiming that such an association could seriously damage the health of the brand, BAT is trying to have the works pulped.

We are officially on holiday as of yesterday, but we thought we should end the Quillblog year with a look back at our ten most popular posts of the year.

They are:

• Secrets of the Canadian literary cabal (January 23)
• Event Photos: George Jonas launches book with a little help from Conrad Black (March 29)
• Fun with blurbs (Rebecca Eckler edition) (April 2)
• Eckler vs. Hollywood (June 4)
• Harry Potter and the Online Leak (July 18)
• Lawyers are not rats, say lawyers (July 30)
• CanLit hates youth, says young author (October 22)
• Bill O’Reilly outs J.K. Rowling as a “provocateur” (October 24)
• The Golden Compass banned by Catholic school board (November 22)
• The most influential people in the Canadian book-biz are….? (November 26)

What these posts say about our readership we wouldn’t presume to say.

All we can do is hope that all you scandal-loving, muckraking, conspiracy-minded booklovers who delight in the misfortune of others have some very happy holidays.

See you in the new year for more of this kind of thing.

Feel free to tell us in the comments what your favourite books of the year were, what books you hope to be given as presents, what books you plan to give yourself as presents, and what books you are looking forward to next year.

Oh, and tell us how you think the industry should handle the issue of pricing differentials – you know, Christmasy stuff.

Maybe, according to the New York Post:

Karl Rove, the controversial and long-time senior adviser to President George W. Bush, is shopping a memoir in an auction that will kick off today and likely result in a seven-figure payday.

“It will sell for millions, but how many millions is the question,” said one publisher who is expected to bid.

“It’s going to be an interesting auction, he’s smart and he’s capable of moving beyond the cliches,” said the publisher, who predicted a $3 million sale.

Among those who have taken a pitch meeting with the man known in some quarters as “Bush’s Brain” were HarperCollins (which is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Post), the Threshold Editions imprint of Simon & Schuster and the Random House imprint of Random House, Inc.

Rove is being represented by Robert Barnett. The famed Washington, DC attorney has fetched multi-million dollar advances for everyone from Alan Greenspan to Bill and Hillary Clinton to most recently Tony Blair and Ted Kennedy. Barnett declined to comment.

When your best justification for spending a few million dollars on the self-aggrandizing recollections of one of the most hated men in America is that “he’s capable of moving beyond the cliches,” you know things have gone terribly, terribly wrong somewhere.

Here’s a shocker: Bill O’Reilly said something incredibly stupid on his show yesterday, something that would be offensive if it weren’t so laughably moronic.

This time, it was about J.K. Rowling’s recent claim that she felt Dumbledore was gay – a claim that sent a chorus of shrugs through her legions of young readers.

Here’s what O’Reilly had to say about the whole kerfuffle, according to Think Progress:

Bill O’Reilly joined in the fray, asking if Dumbledore’s outing was part of the “gay agenda” of “indoctrination” of “children.” O’Reilly claimed that by dropping “the gay bomb,” Rowling is a “provocateur” who is “going to let all hell break loose.”

O’Reilly made clear he didn’t think Dumbledore’s sexual preference was a case of just one queer apple in an otherwise unspoiled basket. “Those wizards,” he said, “I’m very, very suspicious about what they’re doing in their spare time.”

For the morbidly curious, here’s what O’Reilly gets up to in his spare time. (Not for the faint of heart.)

The good people at Masthead have put forth Q&Q as a contender for its list of the 20 most influential Canadian magazines, and have asked for feedback from readers. You can join the discussion here. (Be sure to mention the time Q&Q practically saved your marriage/life/day.)

Canadian authors are well represented in a book of fictional love letters, titled Four Letter Word, which is being published by Knopf Canada in 2008. Prior to its release, Times Online is inviting readers to sign up for free excerpts, which will be sent to their inboxes beginning Oct. 29, by contributors such as Margaret Atwood and Leonard Cohen.

In the meantime, lonely hearts may find some consolation from a similar series of love letters published in The Walrus in 2005, which also featured contributions by Atwood and Cohen, as well as David Bezmozgis, Sheila Heti, M.G. Vassanji, and Jonathan Lethem.

That earlier series varied widely in terms of tone and delivery – from bald lasciviousness (Cohen: “When I caught her in the flesh / And floated on her hips…), to squalid romanticism (Bezmozgis: “My love has brought neither of us any happiness”), to outright weirdness (Lethem’s entry is addressed to and from inanimate objects) – but remained consistently G-rated. Times readers might be in for something a little racier: the promotion is prohibited to minors under the age of 18.

They’re doing it again: earlier this week, former Bush adviser Karl Rove compared himself to both Grendel and Beowulf. Before that, he was Moby Dick.

Now, Rove’s ex-boss, one George W. Bush, is doing it – in a speech defending America’s continued presence in Iraq, Bush cited – wait for it – Graham Greene’s The Quiet American:

“In 1955, long before the United States had entered the war, Graham Greene wrote a novel called The Quiet American. It was set in Saigon and the main character was a young government agent named Alden Pyle. He was a symbol of American purpose and patriotism and dangerous naivete. Another character describes Alden this way: ‘I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused.’”

Again, Bush was citing a book about the dangers of American overseas naïveté to support his argument in favour of staying in Iraq. The best part is, as can be seen here, Bush’s critics have often cited the character of Alden Pyle to criticize the president’s foreign policy.

What’s next? “My fellow Americans, there was once this guy named Chauncey Gardiner…”

Last week, we told you about the literary pretensions of Karl Rove, U.S. president George Bush’s notorious senior adviser, who has just resigned his post. He’s at it again.

Previously, Rove compared himself to Moby Dick, and the Democratic Congress to Captain Ahab. This week, he digs even deeper for a comparison, coming up with this: “Let’s face it. I mean, I’m a myth, and they’re — you know, I’m Beowulf. You know, I’m Grendel. I don’t know who I am. But they’re after me.”

Here are some other literary things Rove could be:

• the Jabberwocky
• Voldemort
• the Pit and/or the Pendulum
• the most dangerous game
• Cthulhu
• Dr. Moreau
• Iago
• the hound of the Baskervilles
• Uriah Heep
• Lady MacBeth
• the Penguin
• one ring to rule them all
• Veruca Salt
• April (the cruelest month)
• the Wicked Witch of the West
• the Oobleck
• Raskolnikov
• the muffin man
• Galactus, the devourer of worlds
• the rough beast slouching towards Bethlehem
• a creative non-victim (for fans of Atwood’s Survival)

The Bush administration has long been noted for the high literary tone maintained by its most powerful denizens. The president’s own voracious reading habits are well known, as is his fondness for employing complex Oulipian constraints in many of his public remarks, which some of his lesser-read critics have misinterpreted as mere malapropisms.

This tradition continues with the departure of Bush’s closest advisor, Karl Rove. In reference to Congress’s current subpoena-mad mindset, Rove had this to say: “I’m realistic enough to understand that the subpoenas are going to keep flying my way. I’m Moby Dick and we’ve got three or four members of Congress who are trying to cast themselves in the part of Captain Ahab — so they’re going to keep coming.”

Rove went on to compare the Washington press corps to Eliot’s The Hollow Men, “Leaning together/ Headpiece(s) filled with straw,” the controversy over warrantless wire-tapping to Kafka’s The Trial, and the situation in Iraq to the final act of Macbeth.

The blog Two Umbrellas points to an eyebrow-raising scheme: a continuing education course at Temple University in Philadelphia entitled “A Sneak Peek at Tomorrow’s Bestsellers.” According to the course description:

Every fall publishers introduce and promote a new crop of novels, books they hope are future bestsellers. This unprecedented course is your chance to get a sneak preview of five forthcoming novels from major publishers. You will read special advance copies of the books and then, as a class, critique each book and predict what readers and critics will say when the books are actually published. Contributing publishers will include: W.W. Norton, Knopf, Random House and others to be determined.

The fee for the course? $95. That’s right, people are being asked to shell out close to a C-note for the privilege of participating in a publishers’ focus group. No wonder the Two Umbrellas post is titled “A New Low.”

(Thanks to The Millions for the link.)

The hit Hollywood comedy Knocked Up opened this past weekend to rave reviews and big box office. The movie is about a couple dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, and whatever the film’s strengths, no one could dispute that its premise is an old and well-worn one.

Except Canadian author Rebecca Eckler, who thinks they stole it from her.

In a long article in the latest Maclean’s, Eckler argues that the movie’s writer-director, Judd Apatow, ripped off her 2004 memoir of the same name, and explains that she’s suing Apatow and Universal Studios. The piece isn’t available online, but here are some of Eckler’s smoking guns:

The movie Knocked Up features a woman named Alison who becomes pregnant after getting drunk. While she gets drunk going out celebrating a promotion at work, I got drunk, and knocked up, celebrating at my engagement party. Both my book and the movie feature one night of passion and the nine months that follow. Fine. Whatever. But what got me was the fact that “Alison” was an up-and-coming television reporter; in my book I was an up-and-coming newspaper reporter.

Also, Eckler had a friend with kids, and the Alison character has a sister with kids. And both book and movie have scenes with multiple pregnancy tests. And, a-ha, the father in the movie is a Jewish Canadian, just like the father of Eckler’s child. (And, um, also just like Seth Rogen, the actor who plays the film father.)

Maybe it’s just Quillblog, but this nonsense seems equivalent to one mystery writer suing another because both of their books open with mysterious murders, or because both of their cop heroes tend to buck departmental bureaucracy. A warning to comedy writers out there: if you’re working on a gag in which someone has to buy something embarrassing at the supermarket and the cashier calls for a price check on the store PA system, you better make sure Eckler hasn’t used that one – if she has, she’ll think you nicked it from her.

Oh, and in her Maclean’s piece Eckler refers to an infamous e-mail blowout between Apatow and another TV producer, Mark Brazill, implying that the dispute is evidence of Apatow’s thieving ways. Readers should probably check out the whole thing and decide for themselves, though.

Finally, on a completely unrelated note, the very same issue of Maclean’s has an article called “Courting trouble with misblurbs,” about an interesting legal development in the U.K.: “Misquote a critic to sell more tickets or books, and you could face jail time in Britain.”

Parent company HarperCollins may have shut down ReganBooks late last year, but the defunct imprint has issued a ghostly transmission in the form of its summer 2007 catalogue, which hit the Q&Q home office this week. It’s packed with close to 40 new titles (including the controversial, already-benched Mickey Mantle bio), covering a ridiculously wide range of topics, from political polemics to novels to … um … How to Star in Your Own XXX Movie.

If Quillblog were Jon Stewart, this would be the part where we say nothing and look sadly at the camera for a beat or two.

Douglas Coupland can add celebrity endorser to his list of roles. The Vancouver author, screenwriter, artist, and all-around Renaissance dude is one of the five “extraordinary people” endorsing Rogers’ Blackberry Pearl.

Not only does the product’s website feature a still of one of these phones with a shot of Coupland on its screen (how deliciously meta) but by clicking on it, you can discover all of the exciting things he does with his new toy, and at what time he does them. For even more Coupland-Blackberry fun, watch a video in which he extols the product’s virtues and tells us that the Blackberry is a part of the future finally feeling like the future that was promised by sci-fi — “I mean, just the fact that I can get e-mail in a parking lot is sexy,” he tells us.

In addition to perusing Coupland’s technological, company-approved itinerary, you can also take a look at a posting on flickr photo sharing titled, “WTF douglas coupland!?” that features, in addition to a shot of a two-page magazine ad of Coupland, Blackberry in hand, a thread of outraged fans bemoaning his corporate stint.

(Thanks for the tip, Bookninja.com.)

Related links:
To see Douglas Coupland’s Blackberry, visit this website, then click the “LIFE” button.
The magazine ad and flickr conversation are here

The Internet Movie Database, along with a jillion other celeb-gossip-carryin’ websites, announced actor Robert Downey Jr.’s plans to pen his memoirs, which will “detail his life story” and will, ostensibly, go over his various battles with drugs and high-profile affairs. He signed the publishing deal with HarperEntertainment for a 2008 release.

The blurb also details what publisher spokesperson Marjorie Braman had to say: “He has an intelligence which shines through all his performances, revealing his intellect as well as his acting abilities. His dramatic personal life, often at odds with his career, adds a layer of complexity to who he is.”

But can the man write?

Downey Jr. is merely the most recent in publishing’s long line of entertainers who figure they can take their entertaining skills into the lit-arena, despite the fact that they have no writing experience and may very well not know how to string two sentences together. Note the publisher spokesperson’s zero-mentioning of any sort of writing talent at all — and we all know a lot of smart bad writers. (Of course, that’s what ghost writers are for.)

The trend continues over at chinaview.com, which reported that “Canongate Books of Edinburgh said it had acquired world English-language rights to [Sean Connery’s] memoirs, Connery’s Scotland, in conjunction with Polygon.” Here, Connery’s endorsement of his own work is less than ringing: “Our goal is to produce a very readable, visually stimulating and hopefully intriguing history of Scotland, with personal discoveries.”

“Readable,” eh? Let’s hope that the rest of the celebographies announced this year — including actor Angelina Jolie, former president Bill Clinton’s Round Two, and singer Charlotte Church (who, at 19, is on her second set of memoirs) — can hire a publicist who can do better than “readable.”

Related links:
Check out the Internet Movie Database announcement here
Read the full Sean Connery announcement here

Sweet justice! A London court has ruled, in not so many words, that Dan Brown and Random House are free to continue making grillions of dollars off The Da Vinci Code. Also, the release of the movie won’t be delayed, so Ron Howard can sleep easily tonight, although In Other Media has a feeling that he sleeps easily most nights. Sarah Lyall of The New York Times filed her report from London earlier this morning: “In issuing his judgment, Justice Peter Smith said that Mr. Brown did indeed rely on The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in writing a section of the book, but he said that Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, the two authors of earlier book, had failed to prove what the central theme of their book was and thus failed to prove that Mr. Brown had lifted it from them. In fact, the judge said, the earlier book ‘does not have a central theme as contended by the claimants: it was an artificial creation for the purposes of the litigation working back from The Da Vinci Code.‘”

Related links:
Click here for the New York Times article

Another recent article from The New York Times maintains that James Frey is not the only popular author who faked a hard life. Times writer Warren St. John may have answered a question vexing literary hipsters for years: just who is JT Leroy?

St. John affirms our suspicions when he says the author we know as Leroy may be nothing more than a fictional character. This would explain Leroy’s reluctance to speak to press and give public readings, his affinity for communication via e-mail and fax, the payment of his advances and writer’s fees to a company in Nevada, and the sunglasses-wig-and-hat get-up he sports while making public appearances.

We linked last October to a story written by Stephen Beachy and published in New York Magazine, which theorized that one of the people who was reported to have saved Leroy from a life of homelessness, hustling, and drug addiction, Laura Albert, was also the true writer of books supposedly written by JT Leroy. The article prompted an investigation by the Times into the circumstances surrounding an article Leroy wrote for the paper in its Travel section. Then a photograph of Savannah Knoop, Albert’s half-sister-in-law, surfaced. Writes St. John, “Five intimates of Mr. Leroy’s, including his literary agent, his business manager and the producer of a forthcoming movie based on one of his books, were shown the photograph and identified Ms. Knoop as the person they have known as JT Leroy.”

St. John says that Albert, Knoop, and other orchestrating parties conjured the hoax as a bid for wealth and access to celebrities, but a conflict remains. Central to the popularity of Leroy’s work — and to his mystique — was the view that the things he wrote about were directly inspired by his own life experiences. The news of Leroy’s true identity has, no doubt, left his many supporters — celebrities and readers alike — feeling cheated.

“To present yourself as a person who is dying of AIDS in a culture which has lost so many writers and voices of great meaning, to take advantage of that sympathy and empathy, is the most unfortunate part of all of this,” said Ira Silverberg, Leroy’s agent. “A lot of people believed they were supporting not only a good and innovative and adventurous voice, but that we were supporting a person.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times
Click here for Beachy’s October article in New York magazine

Debut author Jeanne Bice headed for a shopping channel to promote her book – and eight TV minutes later, she had sold 15,000 copies. As an article in The New York Times reports, the author of Pull Yourself Up by Your Bra Straps: And Other Quacker Wisdom has sold her line of clothing, Quacker Factory, exclusively on the shopping channel QVC, and therefore used the same venue to promote her book. As the article reports, the book is “a combination of memoir, business advice and collection of homespun aphorisms of the type often found on those shellacked pieces of driftwood sold at a Stuckey’s Pecan Shoppe (‘When you get to the end of your rope, tie a knot and HANG ON!’).”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from The New York Times

William Safire has a funny piece on the International Herald Tribune site on the unique lexicography of book blurbs. Safire points out that in the “throbbing universe of book promotion … we have a language that treats lesser-known authors like stars shooting toward the firmament of literary fame,” then provides readers with a handy guide to decoding blurbspeak: “Acclaimed, in this fulsome lingo of book ads and catalogs, now means merely ‘the author received at least one good review.’ Widely acclaimed means ‘two or more, plus a cable TV plug.’ Critically acclaimed means ‘it was decently reviewed in a specialized publication but didn’t sell.’” (Thanks to goodreports.net for the link.)

Related links:
Read William Safire’s piece on blurbspeak

Fox TV may have finally found a way of getting men to read – or at least check out their local bookstore. Tonight the American network will launch Stacked, a new sitcom starring Canada’s own Pamela Anderson as a jilted woman who gets a job working in a bookstore, to the delight of the various nerdy men who frequent the store. There is no word yet on whether the show will feature a “Pamela’s Picks” segment, but the publishing community remains hopeful.

Related links:
Read about Stacked

Aida Edemariam was a fact-checker at Harper’s magazine in the spring of 1998 when it came out that journalist Stephen Glass had a habit of making up his stories. Glass worked at The New Republic, but he had recently published a freelance piece in Harper’s, which Edemariam was forced to reassess. In this Guardian piece, she looks back at that time and considers the case of Stephen Glass. It’s not the most timely story for North American readers — coming several months after Shattered Glass, the movie about the writer, and a full year after The Fabulist, Glass’s own noxious cash-in, er, novel about the controversy. (Shattered Glass just opened in the U.K.) But it’s an entertaining read, and Canadian book folk will remember Edemariam for her stint as the deputy books editor at the National Post back in the early part of the decade.

Related links:
Aida Edemariam on the case of Stephen Glass