Daily book biz round-up, March 18

What’s the buzz? What’s a happenin’? Here’s what’s a happenin’:

• Having had its butt kicked by the major publishers, Amazon starts beating up on the weaker kids
• Harper government flip-flops on funding for Internet access at libraries. We think. (We had to read this story a few times…)
• Amazon releases beta version of Kindle app for Mac
• Stanza has disappeared from the Apple app store! Oh wait, no it hasn’t. Never mind
• Gerald Posner: dirty plagiarizer times two
• Some new Just So Stories
• Who’s at fault for the joylessness of the Orange Prize titles? It’s the publishers, stupid!
• U.S. library full of dead bats! City brings in “professional bat exclusionist”

What is Kobo?

Remember that rumour from this past summer that Indigo was planning to unveil a dedicated e-reading device? Well, some intrigue at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office is reviving such speculation.

Yesterday, blogger Mark Bertils noted that the Shortcovers app had gone AWOL in the Apple store. And a little digging from the Association of Canadian Publisher’s Nic Boshart has unearthed that Indigo-owned Shortcovers has taken out a trademark on the name Kobo, described as a portable e-reading device “for receiving, downloading, displaying, providing access to and reading text, images and sound and other digital content through wireless Internet access.”

Amazon doesn’t want to get physical

Rumours that Amazon U.K. might be considering opening bricks-and-mortar stores have been greatly exaggerated, according to an Amazon spokesperson. Over the weekend, the Sunday Times published an article suggesting Amazon was “planning a surprise invasion of the British high street”:

Property landlords said that the American company, which has a market value of $59.1 billion (£35.6 billion), had launched a secret search for bricks-and-mortar stores to support its rapidly growing website. It is understood to be scouring the country for high-profile sites just as the Borders book chain is shutting up shop.

No sooner had the rumours begun circulating on the Internet than a spokesperson for Amazon announced that there was absolutely no truth to them. The ABC News website cites an unnamed Amazon spokesman asserting that the company “has no plans to open stores anywhere in the world.”

The article concludes by saying:

The Amazon spokesman declined to comment any further on the report, including whether it could partner with retailers, or its future plans.

Michael Turner massages the medium

In an interview this morning with Brian Joseph Davis at The Globe and Mail‘s In Other Words blog, innovative author Michael Turner offers a fresh, if not slightly perplexing, perspective on a writer’s relationship with technology. Turner says that “the problem with seeing ‘digital tools’ as ‘problems’ lies in the writer’s inability to see the computer and the internet less as tools than as a medium.”

He goes on to address the need for authors to have an online presence and embrace cutting-edge technology:

With respect to writers who see this new medium as an “annoyance,” I would add that they are in fact employing the new medium to advertise what they do – the advertisement, in this instance, coming in the form of difference. Thus, when an author identifies him or herself as a “good old-fashioned storyteller,” someone of bad manners and singular genius, a romantic, a lovable eccentric whose hat is always a little bit too big for their head, then the best way to convey that fantasy – and the book it squirted from – is to complain about “digital tools.”

Publishers are somewhat complicit in this, because for too long they cosseted and indulged their authors, until suddenly, with publicity campaigns going online, authors were told that the success of their book lay in their having an online presence. Obviously some authors have taken to this better than others, making their “platforms” more than where they are reading and how their book is “doing,” thereby expanding their practices, using their books as a device by which to cast shade, create depth, movement, hopefully leading them to new places, new ways of making meaning.

Turner’s online presence is definitely notable: his blog is updated frequently and the randomized version of his novel, 8×10, has been released via an online book remixer, BookRiff, a print-on-demand content broker.

Coupland borrows an Earth Sandwich

Sometimes writers will stop conversations to have this one:

“Can I use that?”
“What?”
“That joke/anecdote/story/funny phrase.”
“Why?”
“In a story? Can I use it?”

Writers are often collage artists, making stories out of observations, culling dialogue from covert eavesdropping. It makes sense that some might make a habit of asking permission if they’ve ever been called out for stealing ideas.

Last week, Douglas Coupland twittered about ZeFrank,  the blogger who invented the Earth Sandwich idea Coupland uses in his new book Generation A. The Earth Sandwich is, in short, when two people on opposite ends of the earth put a piece of bread down, forming a sandwich, and take a photo. In the book, Coupland describes the Earth Sandwich in detail without giving credit to its creator.

In a promotional video for Generation A, now offline, there is a small credit on the screen, but the blogger claims this is  “still infuriating” and asks, “Do you think I could get away with doing something he did VERBATIM and them putting a tiny credit?”

Coupland’s twitter response said, “@zefrank. I send you warm wishes and much cheer. And thank you for the lovely (and amazing) Earth Sandwich idea. You are brilliant.”

This conversation starts a larger one – when we put ideas into the world, via the Internet or casual conversation at a bar, are they fair game for appropriation? Should we keep our wit to ourselves when Douglas Coupland is within earshot?

Friends of mine know to interject and say, “No, you can’t use that.” Perhaps we should all be wary of the observer with the moleskine. Or, you know, relax a little about our ideas.

E-love you forever: website will read bedtime stories to your kids

From Your Local Guardian:

Hardworking fathers can still read their children a bedtime story in their absence, thanks to a new invention by a Kingston father-of-two.

Chris Coombs, 44, has come up with a personalised audio book that fathers can record through the internet and email to their offspring at home.

He came up with the idea in 2001, after being called away from Kingston to visit his father, who had fallen ill in Canada.

His daughter Mia, now seven, had been born the day after the September 11 attacks in America and Mr Coombs was about to board a plane.

He said: “I wanted to reassure my four-year-old daughter that I had to leave the country for a few weeks but everything was fine.

“As an audio mixer and dubbing editor I recorded myself reading a story and then added sound effects and prompts.”

He discussed the idea with four other friends who often missed out on bedtimes stories and fivedads.com was born.

Putting aside the absurd idea of e-mailing bedtime stories to kids, it’s nice to see utterly gratuitous references to 9/11 making a small comeback.

Widget allows book clubs to occur anywhere on the Web

The Book Oven blog has brought to our attention a unique social networking site called BookGlutton that seeks to provide users with a new way to read online. According to the website, the application allows users to “build an experience that is simultaneously a book group, a computer, and a book” by using a free, Web-based e-book reader called the Unbound Reader that features shared and private annotations and contextual instant messaging.

Of particular interest is the site’s newly released widget, officially called the “Book Launcher,” but jokingly referred to as the “Punk Rock Widget” in the BookGlutton office (due to its total hardcore awesomeness, not its resemblance to Sid Vicious). With the help of this free application, BookGlutton users can embed the book they’re reading, as well as the community of users reading along with them, directly into their own site. A recent post on the BookGlutton blog includes a YouTube video demonstrating the widget in action.

While the idea of an easily accessible, “in-the-moment” book club does seem well-suited to the immediacy of today’s online world, this Quillblogger wonders if online book clubs really are the way of the future. After all, how can you drink wine and eat cupcakes on the Internet?

Yet more developments in the Google Book Search settlement

In response to the rallying opposition to the Google Book Search settlement, a federal judge in New York has extended the opt-out deadline, giving authors an additional four months to consider Google’s terms.

As if that weren’t enough, the U.S. Justice Department has also opened an antitrust investigation into Google’s actions. Mobylives reports:

The probe seems to be focussed on the fact that, as a Reuters wire story reports, the settlement “would allow Google – and only Google – to digitize so-called orphan works” and sell access to them. Orphan works are books that are out of print, but still in copyright. (Reuters is not correct when it indicates that it is unclear who owns copyrights in this situation – often, ownership is clear, as we here at Melville House can attest about several books we’ve brought back into print that are available now through Google Books.)

“There are legitimate antitrust issues related to Google’s ability to solely commercialize this content,” commented Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive. IA also digitizes books, and Brantley “said his organization had ‘multiple conversations’ with the Justice Department about the Google plan,” according to Reuters.

The IMDB of publishing?

The Los Angeles Times reports on a beta website, filedbyauthor.com, which aims to create Web pages (1.8 million so far) for just about every author who’s ever existed, including a bio, links, and a list of their work. The site is similar to the Internet Movie Database – except authors must pay $99 to $399 if they want to be “verified,” i.e. have the ability to add more than two links or take advantage of the site’s blogging software. Otherwise, unlike IMDB, users have no control over content.

As the L.A. Times notes:

Shakespeare is in the FiledBy army. So are Fitzgerald, Alexander Pope, Charlotte Brontë and lots of other dead authors who can’t do a thing about their pages. The pages don’t link to definitive biographical information or the public domain work made available on Project Gutenberg for free. And if there is no one charged with minding the literary heritage of an author who’s shuffled off this mortal coil, who will polish the pages of our deceased literary greats?

This Quillblogger approves of the idea of an author community site, but not one which so blatantly attempts to make money off the very people it claims to be promoting, rather than by providing a hub of information for what is already a small and central database-deprived audience.

Fun with movie trailers

A couple of literary-themed movie trailers hit the Internet recently.

The preview for the adaptation of Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh can be seen here. Directed by Dodgeball auteur Rawson Thurber, the film looks to have, ah, streamlined some of the themes of Chabon’s novel. In the trailer, at least, there’s only a blink-and-you-miss-it reference to the narrator’s struggle with his sexual identity, which is the crux of the novel. To be fair, though, trailers don’t always represent movies with scrupulous accuracy.

Also looming is Away We Go, a film scripted by author/McSweeney‘s founder Dave Eggers and his wife, novelist Vendela Vida, and directed by Sam Mendes. According to the IMDB, the film is about a couple expecting their first child who, obviously being too special to live just anywhere, travel the country in search of the place that will best nurture their uniquely beautiful souls. To be fair, though, Quillblog is paraphrasing. The trailer is here.