Book links round-up: Google launches e-reading device, Amazon asks for voter referendum, and more

• Google eBooks launches e-reading device, available only at U.S. Target stores
• Amazon asks for California voter referendum, hoping to overturn sales-tax collection law
• Penguin Classics book covers as Band-Aids
• Share that unfinished novel (and reasons/excuses) with the world

Timothy Leary’s papers find a home at the New York Public Library

He was perhaps best known for invoking the peace and love generation of the 1960s to “turn on, tune in, drop out,” but Timothy Leary, the guru who advocated the mind-enhancing positive effects of LSD, was a central figure in the counterculture, associating closely with literary figures such as William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, and Allen Ginsberg. Last Thursday, The New York Times reported that the New York Public Library has purchased Leary’s voluminous library of papers and correspondence for $900,000.

The 335 boxes that comprise the library’s acquisition include photographs, videotapes, and “session records” with figures like Ginsberg.

From the NYT:

The archive will not be available to the public or scholars for 18 to 24 months, as the library organizes the papers. A preview of the collection, however, reveals a rich record not only of Leary’s tumultuous life but also of the lives of many significant cultural figures in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.

Robert Greenfield, who combed through the archive when it was kept in California, for his 2007 biography of Leary, said: “It is a unique firsthand archive of the 1960s. Leary was at the epicenter of what was going on back then, and some of the stuff in there is extraordinary.”

[...]

Leary kept meticulous records at many points during his life. There are comprehensive research files, legal briefs, and budgets and memos about the many institutes and organizations he founded, but there are also notes and documents from when he was on the run after escaping from a California prison with help from the Weather Underground. A folder labeled as notes from his “C.I.A. kidnapping” in 1973 is full of cryptic jottings recounting the details of his arrest in Afghanistan, at an airport in Kabul, after he fled the United States.

While it is unsurprising to read of people like Jack Kerouac requesting that Leary contribute to his “next prose masterpiece” by sending him a bottle of psilocybin (“Allen said I could knock off a daily chapter with 2 SMs and be done with a whole novel in a month,” Kerouac wrote), one of the most interesting tidbits in the NYT piece is that Cary Grant was an aficionado of LSD whose correspondence with Leary is included among the papers. (Although that is arguably less astonishing than the revelation that Leary “kept meticulous records” including “research files, legal briefs, and budgets …”)

East Coast author files lawsuit against Warner Bros.

A Nova Scotia sailor and writer is suing Warner Bros. for allegedly plagiarizing his novel, Fandango’s Gold, for their 2008 Matthew McConaughey/Kate Hudson vehicle Fool’s Gold.

In a statement of claim filed in federal court last week, Lou Boudreau maintains that writer-director Andy Tennant’s screenplay shares “uncanny” similarities with Boudreau’s book, written in 1999. Fandango’s Gold, based on the author’s real-life experience as a diver and fisherman, was registered with the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia and published in 2006 by Tiller Publishing, a Maryland-based press specializing in nautical books.

The claim doesn’t specify the amount Boudreau is seeking in damages, though he says he’s entitled to the same cut afforded to the screenwriter of the film, which made over $300 million.

From Halifax’s The Chronicle-Herald:

In his statement of claim, Boudreau says his manuscript ended up in the hands of movie industry insiders, particularly in California, because he spent about five years between 1999 and 2004 promoting it.

In an interview… Boudreau said Fandango’s Gold starts out as the tale of a Spanish sailor on a galleon laden with gold sailing for Spain. It runs into a hurricane and is wrecked on a remote atoll in the Caribbean. The crew carries the treasure ashore and hides it in an underground cave with a passage to the sea.

[...]

In his statement of claim, Boudreau lists pages of similarities between his book and the film. They include the two romantic leads looking for the galleon’s treasure, the female lead being taken hostage by the bad guys, and the lead characters finding the treasure in an underground cave and swimming through an underwater tunnel to safety.

Boudreau is wading into risky waters – many an author has taken on big U.S. production companies and filmmakers, and the results haven’t necessarily been favourable. (Remember when Rebecca Eckler took on Judd Apatow in 2007?) In the end, Boudreau says he has to stand up for his work and his “moral rights.”

“I’m the little schooner captain from Cape Breton and they are Warner Bros. Therein lies the great inequity,” he told The Chronicle-Herald. “It’s important for me because I wrote this book. It was very personal to me.”

Mark Twain: dead and kicking

As willed by the author, the first volume of Mark Twain’s autobiography was released for the first time on Monday, 100 years after his death. Yet even before its release, the Autobiography of Mark Twain, Volume 1, landed on the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble bestseller lists. The Globe and Mail review of the book says:

Twain hit upon a unique method for writing an autobiography: He dictated to a stenographer whatever was on his mind at the moment, sometimes responding to the morning’s paper or the morning’s mail, sometimes following seemingly random trains of thought wherever they led him, often interleaving relevant newspaper clippings along the way.

Twain’s publisher, University of California Press, planned to release 50,000 copies of the book, but has since increased the number to 75,000, reports another Globe article.

California group to Apple: you lie!

Consumers in California have banded together to sue Apple for its claim that reading an iPad is just like reading a book. More at ebooknewser:

“Indeed, according to the www.apple.com website, ‘[r]eading on iPad is just like reading a book.’ However, contrary to this promise, using the iPad is not ‘just like reading a book’ at all since books do not close when the reader is enjoying them in the sunlight or in other normal environmental environments. This promise, like other portions of Apple’s marketing material for the iPad, is false.”

No “oral sex” in California school dictionaries

The Guardian is reporting that the 10th edition of The Mirriam-Webster Dictionary has been yanked from classrooms in the Menifee Union district of California after a parent complained about a “sexually graphic” definition for the term “oral sex.” The dictionaries were purchased four years ago for use in fourth and fifth grade classrooms; the offending entry was deemed not “age appropriate.”

While some parents have praised the move – “[it's] a prestigious dictionary that’s used in the Riverside County spelling bee, but I also imagine there are words in there of concern,” said Randy Freeman – others have raised concerns. “It is not such a bad thing for a kid to have the wherewithal to go and look up a word he may have even heard on the playground,” father Jason Rogers told local press. “You have to draw the line somewhere. What are they going to do next, pull encyclopaedias because they list parts of the human anatomy like the penis and vagina?”

There is a panel in place to assess whether the ban will be made permanent, but in the meantime, district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus told the Menifee Press-Enterprise that she will remain vigilant:

“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” Cadmus said.

Bookmarks: Simon & Schuster’s bad year, Book Oven launches, and more

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Simon & Schuster’s operating profits decline by 58% for the year
• Gil Adamson featured in the Guardian
• Book Oven, a collaborative literary community run by BookCamp Toronto’s Hugh McGuire, opens its doors
• My Life in Orange author Tim Guest has died
• Ontario library applies for liquor licence (Ontario, California, that is)
• A roadmap of Amazon’s investments
• Author pulls out of lucrative movie deal, because he hates stupid actors

Terminating textbooks, with extreme prejudice

As many of you probably already know, the state of California is dealing with one of its worst ever fiscal crises, and governator Arnold Schwarzenegger is proposing a number of emergency measures to deal with the $24-billion deficit. His latest idea, according to The Daily Mail, is to join the digital publishing revolution by banning the use of textbooks in schools.

Jokingly telling a press conference that large books are now only suitable to be used for weightlifting (biceps curls in particular), he said: “Textbooks are outdated, in my opinion. For so many years, we’ve been trying to teach the kids exactly the same way. Our kids get their information from the internet, downloaded onto their iPods, and in Twitter feeds to their cell phones … Basically, kids are feeling as comfortable with their electronic devices as I was with my pencils and crayons.”

“So why are California’s school students still forced to lug around antiquated, heavy, expensive textbooks?”

State officials say the average price of a textbook is $75 to $100, whereas digital media can be distributed cheaply if the required infrastructure is in place.

Unfortunately, Arnie never addresses the matter of having to buy handheld reading devices for all of the state’s less well-off children, nor does he address the costs of digitization and who will be paying for it. Also, why stop at textbooks? Why not close down all the schools and have teachers instruct their pupils via BlackBerry?

Bookmarks: donated books, sci-fi nostalgia, robot librarians, and Looney Tunes

Some book-related links:

• Winnipeg women’s group sends more than 5,000 books to Nunavut (Winnipeg Free Press)
• Is sci-fi too nostalgic? (i09.com)
• Robotic librarian wreaks havoc dispenses books in rural California (The Sacramento Bee)
• Library patron barred over “lost” Looney Tunes DVD (Chicago Tribune)
• Zadie Smith on E.M. Forster (New York Review of Books)
• Can fan fiction help us read Moby Dick? (Confessions of a Aca-Fan)
• Has Updike lost it? (The Guardian)
• Why are high school English courses so boring? (Washington Post)

Bookmarks (snobbery edition): judging someone by their books, picking the right reading wine, and more

Some book-related links:

• Judging a mate by his/her books (The New York Times)
• What wine goes with that book? (Stuff)
• Will Internet book piracy cause authors to stop writing? (Times Online)
• Settlement in sight for Greater Victoria Public Library (Times-Colonist)
• California librarian fired for alerting police to child-porn-watching patron (Los Angeles Times)
• Fiction’s famous fools (Brandenton Herald)