Bookmarks: sexy Dan Brown, Mein Kampf manga, and the Electric Literature YouTube channel

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Is this the end of the Free Library of Philadelphia?: all free libraries in the city of brotherly love could close on Oct. 2
• Dan Brown’s latest literary endeavour hits shelves today. The Globe and Mail edits Brown’s writing, slowly, and The New York Times says “Dan Brown … is bringing sexy back”
• A sentence from Michael Cunningham’s novel-in-progress, animated on The Electric Literature YouTube channel 
• Mein Kampf manga, anyone? Three controversial classics are given a manga makeover  
• Backpacker book recommendations: weighty tomes for when you’re on the road and fall reads to cozy up with

Bookmarks: Mockingbird, Hitchhiker’s Guide, and Sony Reader’s Library Finder

Sundry links from around the Web:

• “Author whose books are most likely to be found in Oxfam’s secondhand charity shops” is probably not the recognition Dan Brown was hoping for
• Crayola presents kids’ author Eric Carle with a 5-foot-tall crayon named Very Hungry Caterpillar Green
• Eoin Colfer’s sixth book in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy” is getting its own theme song
• The long-awaited memoir from Senator Ted Kennedy, who passed away last night, will be published in September
• Gizmodo test drives the Sony Reader’s new Library Finder service, which lets you check out e-books from your local (American) library for free, direct to your reader
• Lawrence Hill on To Kill a Mockingbird, and why we should focus more on Canadian stories of slavery, racism, and civil rights

Why your e-books should be free … even though Dan Brown’s aren’t

On his Guardian blog Digital Rights, Digital Wrongs, sci-fi author Cory Doctorow argues the case for releasing free e-books simultaneously with print editions. (Doctorow does this himself through the use of Creative Commons licences.)

A publisher’s publicity and marketing for a book is an excellent way to get it into some readers’ hands, and the word of mouth enabled by freely copyable e-books then acts as a force-multiplier to expand the publisher’s efforts. Whether your “natural” audience is small or large, free downloads generally expand it, by letting readers make informed guesses about who else will like it, and giving those readers a persuasive tool for closing the sale.

On a related note, Random House announced late last week that Dan Brown’s upcoming blockbuster The Lost Symbol will be released as an e-book simultaneously with the hardcover on Sept. 15. Prior to this announcement there was some hope that Random House might challenge Amazon’s $9.99 pricing strategy, but it seems that not even Brown (and his rumored English-language print run of 6.5 million copies) has that kind of clout.

Publishers scramble to avoid the coming Dan Brown tsunami

Hollywood has made determining a film’s release date into a science. You don’t want to release a quirky little independent film opposite the new Transformers sequel because you’ll get crushed. Similarly, publishers are eyeing Sept. 15 with a certain amount of trepidation. That’s the day that The Lost Symbol, Dan Brown’s long-awaited sequel to The Da Vinci Code, arrives in stores.

Because Doubleday, Brown’s publisher, has so much at stake with this novel (which is rumoured to have an English-language print run of an astounding 6.5 million copies), you can expect wall-to-wall media coverage surrounding the book’s release. Which means that other authors with competing books risk being shut out.

Writing on The Daily Beast blog, Sara Nelson points out that new novels by commercial writers Joseph Finder, Terry Brooks, and Larry McMurtry are all scheduled for August pubs, likely to avoid the Dan Brown juggernaut. Nelson writes:

As the number of media outlets covering books shrink, and as fewer stores – think Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com – control more of how books get promoted and displayed, you don’t want your little first novel (or your potential blockbuster, more likely) to be hit by an avalanche of Dan Brown articles, TV interviews,  and step ladders. “It’s standard procedure to try to determine when other houses are publishing important books,” says a marketing executive at Penguin. “We often change our dates accordingly.” That, and the need, ever more desperate, to make sure your book lands at the top of the dwindling number of bestseller lists; because those lists are relative, no self-respecting publisher would want to put his Patricia Cornwell, say, up against Twilight author Stephenie Meyer … so a good part of an agent/author’s job is manipulating that pub date.

One publisher unafraid to go head-to-head with Brown is Philadelphia-based Quirk Books, which is releasing Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the follow-up to this year’s surprise bestseller, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, on Sept. 15. Whether the gambit will pay off, or whether Sea Monsters will sink without a trace, remains to be seen.

Sorry, who wrote this book again?: Dan Brown headlines on someone else’s book

While it may be standard practice to see book covers with blurbs that read “In the tradition of [insert best-selling author's name here],” the Internet is abuzz today about one of the most blatant abuses of this questionable technique. MarketingWeek is reporting that the cover of Deadline, a new novel by British thriller writer Simon Kernick, features The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown’s name well above, and much more prominently than the book’s actual author.

The cover (which can be seen here) states, “If you like your thrillers as fast, furious and unputdownable as Dan Brown, then we thought you’d enjoy…,” followed by the real author’s name and book title way down at the bottom. The top half of the back cover copy lists reasons to read Dan Brown – only the bottom half mentions Deadline.

Photos of the cover indicate that this edition is exclusive to U.K. chain WH Smith. From writer Pace J. Miller’s blog:

There is no right of publicity in the U.K., but I’m sure both Brown and Kernick would be spewing if they knew about this cover (and at least a prima facie case of passing off could be made). It’s designed to mislead and deceive the careless book buyer, or at the very least cause what is commonly referred to as “initial interest confusion.” The danger is exacerbated when this book is placed right next to Dan Brown’s books, which it was when I found it in WH Smith.

The thing is, Kernick is not some crappy first time author who can’t sell a copy. His previous novel, Relentless, was the 8th best-selling paperback, and the best-selling thriller in the UK in 2007.

The gospel according to Dan Brown

New York Times columnist Ross Douhat (who does not look at all like David Brent … well, maybe just a little) believes that Dan Brown’s novels are successful not just because the books are cheesy page-turners, or because the notion that the Vatican conceals nasty little secrets is inherently interesting (especially to many Catholics), or even because, well, corny thrillers often sell huge, but because The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons (the film of which just opened to big numbers) present an alternative vision of faith, one more attuned to modern life:

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

[...]

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.

Jesus and Dan Brown, then, are kind of like cake and cookies – you can only pick one.

Bookmarks: the new large-format Kindle, layoffs at Waterstone’s, and more

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Rumours abound that the launch of a new, big-screen Kindle is only days away
• Waterstone’s, the U.K.’s largest book retailer, cuts up to 650 positions
• The Toronto Star offers a glowing profile of the New York-based Canadian art director Leanne Shapton, whose latest book, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry, has been optioned by Brad Pitt’s production company
• Director Ron Howard claims that the Vatican interfered with the filming of Angels & Demons
• Google’s book scanning “secret”
  
• Revamping book clubs for the 21st-century

Bookmarks: Books as art, Watchmen, and more

• A GTA gallery is about to launch an exhibit in which books are transformed and incorporated into art.
• As the new Watchmen movie starts getting some not-so-great reviews, Canadian graphica expert Jeet Heer schools New Yorker film critic Anthony Lane. (Not that Heer’s a fan of the book or anything.)
• Following the announcement of Canadian Heritage funding policy changes that could be disastrous for litmags, the advocacy continues.
• Surprise, surprise: another Dan Brown movie adaptation is about to come out, and a Catholic group don’t like it. (Love the “Galileo asked for it” aside. Nice.)

Undercover reading

Stephen King is the U.K.’s favourite guilty pleasure read, as reported in The Guardian. In a survey conducted for the Costa Book Awards 2006, King topped a list that included J.K. Rowling, John Grisham, and Dan Brown (the latter two tied).

The article includes a quote from Simon Trewin, a contributing author to The Encyclopaedia of Guilty Pleasures: 1001 Things You Hate to Love, noting that in general we prefer to read a book in public “that makes us look good.” And Quillblog noticed that Guardian reporter Peter Bradshaw’s own blog included a New Year’s resolution to finish reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time and a future goal of tackling Hermann Broch.

But if guilty reading pleasures are ruling the day, perhaps it’s Bradshaw who will need to mask his high-brow literary tastes with the faux book covers Costa provided for download.

It’s crowded at the top

Nicholas Clee has a story in The Times about three books that claim to be #1 bestsellers, and the vaguely dishonest, semantical games their authors and publishers play to justify that claim. One book was #1 in Britain for a week, though not internationally, as its jacket claims. Another was the top seller at a single book chain. The third, and most suspect, was very briefly ranked number one on Amazon UK, thanks to its author, who “sent out e-mails offering ‘certain bonuses’ (mostly tennis-related) to people who bought his book from Amazon, hoping for a top 100 position.”

After taking the time to make clear that The Times‘ own list cannot be so easily manipulated, Clee gives some explanation as to why some authors and publishers have resorted to this kind of sleight of hand:

“Dan Brown’s domination of the 2005 bestseller lists charts caused a lot of grief to ambitious novelists who found the #1 position blocked to them for most of the year.”

Perhaps we’ll soon see books marketed as being top sellers based on the fact that their authors were once given a mug that said “#1 Dad.”

Related links:
Read the story in The Times