Room audiobook narrator Michal Friedman dies

Michal Friedman, a New York–based actor and singer whose career included vocal work for several audiobooks, died on Nov. 25, from complications related to a Cesarean section after giving birth to healthy twins.

Most recently, Friedman, who once lived in Halifax and still has family there, performed the voice of five-year-old Jack for Emma Donoghue’s bestseller Room. Friedman also co-narrated Alyxandra Harvey’s YA vampire thriller Hearts at Stake.

A website has been set up to help raise funds for the twins and Friedman’s husband, Jay Snyder, who is also an actor and audiobook narrator.

Listen to a clip of Friedman reading from Room.

In the September 2011 issue of Q&Q: Guy Vanderhaeghe completes his iconic Western trilogy

Q&Q speaks to Governor General’s Literary Award–winning Saskatoon author Guy Vanderhaeghe about the final book in his Western trilogy, the ambitious A Good Man.

Also in September, rekindling interest in history with high-profile political biographies, a look at independent U.S. bookstore e-book sales, and touring the country with Doug Gibson. Plus reviews of new books by Brian Francis, David Gilmour, Marina Endicott, and more.

FEATURES
A good guy
After nearly two decades, Guy Vanderhaeghe has completed his iconic Western trilogy – and now he’s ready to move on

Raising the dead white men
Can a handful of high-profile political biographies rekindle interest in Canadian history?

E-reading’s awkward embrace
If the experience of U.S. indies is anything to go by, Canadian booksellers gearing up to begin selling e-books should expect some bumps along the road

FRONTMATTER
Orphaned Key Porter authors take back control of their work
How digital technology has put audiobooks within reach of small presses
In memoriam: Robert Kroetsch
Montreal violin-maker Tom Wilder turns publisher
Snapshot: Knopf Random Canada executive vice-president and publisher Louise Dennys
Cover to cover: R.T. Naylor’s Crass Struggle
Touring the country with Doug Gibson
Guest opinion: Rolf Maurer on rethinking the role of the arts

REVIEWS
Natural Order by Brian Francis
The Perfect Order of Things by David Gilmour
The Little Shadows by Marina Endicott
Our Daily Bread by Lauren B. Davis
Eating Dirt by Charlotte Gill

PLUS more fiction, non-fiction, and poetry

BOOKS FOR YOUNG PEOPLE
Starfall by Diana Kolpak; Kathleen Finlay, photog.
No Ordinary Day by Deborah Ellis
First Descent by Pam Withers
The Busy Beaver by Nicholas Oldland
Once Every Never by Lesley Livingston

PLUS more fiction, non-fiction, and picture books

Q&Q/BOOKNET CANADA BESTSELLERS

THE LAST WORD
Greenpeace International’s Tzeporah Berman on finding a balance between her own voice and that of the organization she represents

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Bookmarks: Britain’s phone booth library, Herta Müller’s “psychosis,” and the Bad Sex in Fiction Award winner

Some sundry links from across the Web:

• Resourceful idea of the week: British village transforms traditional red phone booth into local library
• Coming soon to a theatre near you: the book trailer for Quirk Classics’ Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
• Nobel Prize-winning Herta Müller “has a psychosis,” says Romanian spy
• Neil Gaiman discusses audiobooks with David Sedaris and Martin Jarvis on NPR. Similarly, Douglas Hunter praises the e-book at The Globe and Mail and Mark Medley reviews the Kindle at the National Post
• Nabokov’s posthumously published The Original of Laura is not a novel, says Nathaniel Rich
• And the Bad Sex in Fiction Award goes to … Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones

Bookmarks: Terminatrix Palin, Wild Things art, and the interactive Proust questionnaire

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Sarah Palin’s HarperCollins editor has a double life, The Daily Beast reports. He also helped work on the satirical title published during Palin’s VP run, Terminatrix: The Sarah Palin Chronicles
• Just before the Oct. 16 opening of the long-awaited Where the Wild Things Are, Vice Magazine has compiled a gallery of WtWTA-inspired artwork by 24 of its favourite artists; The New York Times wonders if kids actually “get” Maurice Sendak’s much-celebrated tale; and Newsweek interviews Sendak, screenwriter Dave Eggers, and director Spike Jonze on fear, childhood, and Mickey Mouse, among other things
• In order to promote its forthcoming book, Vanity Fair now makes its infamous Proust questionnaire available as an interactive game
• Google vs. Angela Merkel: The Guardian reports that the German chancellor has intervened in the debate and is appealing for more international co-operation on copyright protection
• Today, starting at 12 EST, fantasy novelist Neil Gaiman and a thousand Twitter followers will collaborate on an audiobook script. Sponsored by BBC Audiobooks America, the “round-robin interactive storytelling experience” takes place on this Twitter page

Amazon: more than just a bookstore

Time magazine book critic and tech columnist Lev Grossman follows up his report earlier this year about the future of literature with a new article, written with reporter Andrea Sachs, examining the impact Amazon is having on the publishing industry. “If Amazon is a bookstore,” the authors write, “it’s supposed to be buying from publishers, not competing with them. Right?” The answer, of course, is that Amazon isn’t just a bookstore anymore:

… Amazon has diversified itself so comprehensively over the past five years that it’s hard to say exactly what it is anymore. Amazon has a presence in almost every niche of the book industry. It runs a print-on-demand service (BookSurge) and a self-publishing service (CreateSpace). It sells e-books and an e-device to read them on (the Kindle, a new version of which, the DX, went on sale June 10). In 2008 alone, Amazon acquired Audible.com, a leading audiobooks company; AbeBooks, a major online used-book retailer; and Shelfari, a Facebook-like social network for readers. In April of this year, it snapped up Lexcycle, which makes an e-reading app for the iPhone called Stanza. And now there’s Amazon Encore, which makes Amazon a print publisher too.

As Grossman and Sachs put it, Amazon is “the most forward-thinking company in the book business.” Whether or not that’s a good thing depends on if you’re a book buyer or a publisher, they argue.

U2 and Madonna don’t have deals with record labels anymore; they did their deals with a concert promoter, LiveNation. That stuff that the labels used to do – production, promotion, distribution – it’s just not that hard to DIY now or buy off the shelf. It’s the same with publishing. Amazon could become the LiveNation of the book world, a literary ecosystem unto itself: agent, editor, publisher, printer and bookstore.

Still, as the authors rightly point out, while Amazon has the power to hurt publishers, it’s likely not in a position to mortally wound them. On the contentious issue of e-book pricing, for example, the industry is beginning to fight back against Amazon’s lowball $9.99 price tag on many of its best-selling e-books, an unsustainble price point aimed at fueling Kindle sales. Yesterday, Simon & Schuster announced it was bypassing the Kindle store altogether, making 5,000 titles available through Scribd, a social media platform that allows users to share and sell their own work. The S&S-set price – 20% off the hardcover price – is one that many publishers, not to mention authors, will find more sustainable.

Proofreading the public domain

At last month’s BookNet Canada technology forum, one memorable moment came during a talk by Montrealer Hugh McGuire, one of the co-organizers of BookCamp Toronto and the founder of LibriVox, an online repository of free, public domain audiobooks. McGuire had just finished sharing his thoughts on time, love, and the power of open source technology, when one audience member asked – rather petulantly – what, exactly, McGuire did to make a living. His response, if this Quillblogger recalls correctly, referred to The Book Oven, McGuire’s latest online startup, which has the stated goal of helping “more people make more books.” On Thursday, The Book Oven launched its first application, which aims at correcting typos in texts uploaded to Project Gutenberg.

Bite-Size Edits is a collaborative proofreading application that McGuire describes as either “a word-based online game” or “a massive — yet productive — time waster.” Here’s how it works: Instead of presenting volunteer proofreaders with long passages drawn from public domain texts, the program selects short, one-sentence snippets, along with the surrounding lines for context. Users read the snippet and then either approve it as is or suggest changes. According to technology blogger Suw Charman-Anderson, one of the principals involved with BookOven, “If our calculations are correct, it will take 100 people just 10 minutes to proofread a 100,000 word book, and we want to bring that collaborative power to bear on on the public domain.”

The application is still in the private, alpha phase, so to sign up, you need to have a valid invitation code (posted here, here, and here). Upon first use, the Book-Size Edits module seems clean, easy to use, and indeed, surprisingly addictive. (So far, about 1,600 individual snippets have been evaluated from public domain texts.) One conspicuous thing that’s missing, however, is an easy-to-access style guide that the proofers can refer to. Copy-editing, after all, can be a subjective art.

Another new format?

We’ve all heard of audiobooks, but videobooks?

HarperCollins is trying to pitch short films of authors summarizing their books (until recently known as an online promotional trailer) as a new format – even going so far as to sell the resulting 23 minutes on Amazon for slightly less than the cost of a new paperback.

Even if watching Jeff Jarvis talk about his book, What Would Google Do?, turned out to be as informative as reading the book would be, how do you consult it for reference? Sure it saves on printing costs, but so do e-books and audiobooks – without sacrificing valuable content.

If HarperCollins wants to move into the self-help video market, they should just say so.

The delicate art of audiobook casting

Reporter Nate DiMeo argues that for all the advances of the U.S. audiobook industry, the art of choosing the right readers has yet to be mastered. In an article on Slate, he lists some of the most notable casting blunders, citing (among other examples) Brad Pitt’s inexpert Spanish on All the Pretty Horses. DiMeo also points out how some readers have achieved a peculiar kind of fame within the industry, such as British voice actor Jim Dale, best known for his work on the Harry Potter series, and former B-movie actor Scott Brick.

For this Quillblogger’s money, the most exciting audiobooks are the ones read by the authors themselves – Douglas Adams’ reading of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which first saw life as a BBC Radio drama, is a particular fave. It’s too bad Adams isn’t around to read the series’ capstone novel, which is being penned by Irish writer Eoin Colfer and is due for release next fall.

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.

“Mommy, can you download me a story?”

Ah, the bedtime story. The little ones in their pajamas, all tucked into bed, getting ready to listen to yet another telling of a kidlit classic like Goodnight Moon… on their iPods?

Donna Vickroy, a columnist for Chicago-area newspaper Southtown Star, takes issue with AudibleKids.com, a new offshoot of audiobooks site Audible.com, which offers kids’ books for download.

There’s a popular children’s book that bears the title, “Let’s Talk About Being Lazy.”

How convenient that it may very soon be available in audiobook form.

Look, I agree that followers of attachment parenting can take that 24/7 lovey-dovey stuff too far.

And I believe that audiobooks are a refined arm of the technology craze.

But to expect parents to welcome the automation of their bedtime story reading duties is just plain cold.

[...]

And yes, something must be done to combat the reluctant reader phenomenon.

But when Audio Publishers Association president Michele Cobb says, “I hear lots of people talking, saying that when they put their kids to bed, they put them down with an audiobook,” you have to wonder whether virtual parents – today’s version of barbarians – aren’t knocking at the gate.