Bookmarks: Four magazines die, a classic threatened (again), and the two-timing ways of Archie Andrews

Bookish links from around the Web:

• The foodie bride’s lament: Condé Nast-owned magazines Gourmet, Cookie, Elegant Bride, and Modern Bride all cease publication
• More book banning madness: Toronto parent wants Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird off the Toronto District School Board’s curriculum
• Speaking of writers from the American South, Reuters assures us that Maya Angelou is not dead
• Big Love, Riverdale style: Archie Andrews is set to propose to Betty after wedding her snooty rival, Veronica
• Michael Ondaatje’s Divisadero could be adapted for the stage
• Your daily laugh, courtesy of McSweeney’s: introducing the Kindle Gutenberg Bookreader

Barnes & Noble launches world’s biggest e-book store

U.S. mega-chain Barnes & Noble announced in a press release yesterday the creation of the world’s biggest e-book store comprising “more than 700,000 titles, including hundreds of new releases and bestsellers at only $9.99.” Unlike Amazon’s Kindle-only e-books, e-books purchased through B&N’s store will be compatible with a number of platforms (aside from the Kindle, of course): iPhone, BlackBerry, and most Windows and Mac computers. Through a partnership with Google Books, the B&N e-book store will also offer more than 500,000 free and downloadable public domain e-books.

B&N als announced an exclusive agreement to provide e-books for the forthcoming Plastic Logic e-reader, a device that is geared toward business professionals. From Fortune:

Plastic Logic vice president of business development Daren Benzi says his device is geared for business travelers, and as such will support the display of PDF files, Microsoft’s MS Word, Powerpoint, and Excel, as well as newspapers and magazines. But e-books are a big part of the game plan. “Will we carry every single one of those 700,000-plus titles? I don’t know. We’ll announce that as we get further along,” said Benzi. “But we will have access to them all.

Elsewhere in the blogosphere, The Book Oven analyzes how B&N’s move will affect the e-book market.

BC Book and Magazine Week

It’s almost time again for BC Book and Magazine Week (BCBMW), the province’s week-long celebration of all things literary. Founded in 1999, the festival takes place at multiple locations across B.C., from Victoria to Vancouver to Kelowna. BC Book & Magazine Week runs from April 18 to 25. Most events are free. A sampling:

BOOK LAUNCH: FIST OF THE SPIDER WOMAN: TALES OF FEAR AND QUEER DESIRE
Arsenal Pulp Press and Xtra! West present the launch of the highly anticipated queer woman’s horror erotica anthology, Fist of the Spider Woman: Tales of Queer Fear and Desire, edited by Amber Dawn. Readings and books signings by Vancouver contributors Mette Bach, Kestrel Barns, Larissa Lai, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Amanda Lamarche and Amber Dawn.

MAGAZINE CABARETS IN VICTORIA, VANCOUVER, KELOWNA, AND PRINCE GEORGE
In Victoria, BCAMP [BC Association of Magazine Publishers] and The Malahat Review present a literary cabaret featuring M.A.C. Farrant, Michael Kenyon, Arleen Paré, Madeline Sonik, and Yasuko Thanh, who will read from their work recently published in B.C. magazines. In Vancouver, BCAMP and subTerrain magazine present a literary cabaret featuring Timothy Taylor, Paul Carlucci, Emily Kendy, penny k-kilthau, Alex Leslie, and Diane Tucker. In Kelowna, BCAMP and off-centre magazine present a literary cabaret featuring Adam Lewis Schroeder, Heidi Garnett, Ryan May, and Shelley Wood. And, in Prince George, BCAMP presents a literary cabaret featuring Rob Budde, Dee Horne, Sarah de Leeuw, Betsy Trumpeter, and Gillian Wigmore.

BOOK LAUNCH: THE VERSE MAP OF VANCOUVER, EDITED BY VANCOUVER’S INAUGURAL POET LAUREATE GEORGE McWHIRTER, PHOTOGRAPHS BY DEREK VON ESSEN
Join Anvil Press for the launch of The Verse Map of Vancouver, a full-colour publication – Vancouver’s neighbourhoods in verse by a myriad of local poets accompanied by Derek von Essen’s stunning photography.

More information can be found at the festival’s website.

More bad news for American book coverage

It looks like the rumors were true about The Washington Post‘s standalone book supplement. According to The New York Times, Book World will cease publication after Feb. 15.

Book World was one of the last remaining stand-alone book review sections in the country, along with The New York Times Book Review and The San Francisco Chronicle’s Books section. The Washington Post’s move comes as the company, like most other newspaper businesses across the country, has been hobbled by a protracted downturn in advertising.

According to reports from Book World employees, the last issue of Book World will appear in its tabloid print version on Feb. 15 but will continue to be published online as a distinct entity. In the printed newspaper, Sunday book content will be split between Outlook, the opinion and commentary section, and Style & Arts.

Meanwhile, things aren’t looking very good for Quill & Quire‘s counterpart in the U.S., Publishers Weekly. The New York Times is also reporting that PW editor-in-chief Sara Nelson has been laid off, along with 7% of the magazine’s staff.

Ms. Nelson, 52, spent four years heading up the magazine and had become a lively presence within the industry, speaking frequently on panels and advocating forcefully for books in her weekly column.

According to a statement from [the magazine's owners] Reed Business Information … as a result of the restructuring, Brian Kenney, editor-in-chief of School Library Journal, will now be editorial director of that magazine along with Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.

It probably doesn’t need to be said that forcing one guy to edit three magazines is madness. The quality of all three titles is sure to suffer, no?

A new home for short stories

Toronto-based authors Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis have come together and launched a new website for short fiction, called Joyland. In a mass e-mail sent to Q&Q, they explain the impetus for the site:

Current literary publishing wisdom has it that the short story is dead. We think otherwise. We think the form is at its stylistic peak. It’s just that the traditional venues for short stories – commercial print magazines – have changed dramatically and jettisoned the once prominent short story.

Joyland is dedicated to finding a new way to publish short fiction, and rather than just start a web magazine we’ve wedded a strict mandate (only short fiction) to some principles of social networking sites.

The message goes on to list the initial contributors, and it looks like a pretty respectable line-up: Canadian authors Lynn Coady and Nathan Sellyn, and U.S. authors Ed Park and Harold Abramowitz. (Another aim of the site, apparently, is to get readers from both sides of the border reading authors they may never have encountered before.) They’ve also got an international assortment of contributing editors, including Schultz herself, Vancouver author Kevin Chong, and U.S. authors Janine Armin (New York) and Matthew Timmons (Los Angeles).

You can check it out for yourself here.

What the world needs now: more reading

All around the world, it seems, people need to step up their reading habits:

To cultivate a love of reading among Russian city dwellers, a Reading Moscow Train painted with portraits of characters and excerpts from classical literature will start running in May. Train carriages will also carry booklets featuring the latest books and magazines.

To foster a culture of reading in Ghana, one media consultant is urging the government to make reading a compulsory subject in school and wants every district to have a library and community book club. Accra newspaper Public Agenda reports that the consultant considers a lack of reading culture in Ghana to be a stumbling block for the country’s future.

And a recent study in the U.S. concluded that America’s literacy is in decline and that this will have “severe consequences for American society.” The report by the National Endowment for the Arts suggests people who read on a regular basis have better health, are politically engaged, and earn more money.

Hearst magazines go with Canada-only prices

In a story that’s near and dear to our hearts here at Quillblog, The Toronto Star is reporting that Hearst Magazines – which publishes Cosmopolitan, Oprah Magazine, Seventeen, Good Housekeeping, Popular Mechanics and Esquire – will stop printing U.S. prices on magazines sold in Canada, in an effort to quell consumer frustration over perceived high prices. The catch is that removing the U.S. price will have no effect on the Canadian one.

In the wake of the uproar about Canadian goods priced way above U.S. levels despite dollar parity, some magazines have quietly removed the U.S. dollar price from their covers, leaving only the Canadian one.

And the Canadian prices remain well above U.S. levels.

The only multinational book publisher in Canada that is taking a similar action is Simon & Schuster, which – as reported by Q&Q Omni – will be printing titles with Canada-only prices and barcodes beginning in 2008. (For the latest pricing updates, see Q&Q’s coverage here.)

As the Star article points out, simply removing the lower U.S. price isn’t exactly a good deal for consumers, but it does take the pressure off retailers, who after all aren’t responsible for setting prices. But the move does throw a wrench in the gears for retailers such as Wal-Mart Canada, which has been selling magazines, books, and gift cards at U.S. prices since October.

Wal-Mart Canada said yesterday that half the magazines on its shelves still have U.S. prices on them.

Hearst’s decision to move to a single price “complicates our offer of U.S. pricing,” spokesperson Kevin Groh said in an email.

However, Wal-Mart also has a policy of selling magazines for 10 per cent off the Canadian cover price, he noted.

“When we met with publishers, our focus was dropping prices, not removing them.

“Our end goal is a lower price for customers, regardless of what’s on the cover.”

Similarly, a number of booksellers have received positive attention – and experienced increased sales – for selling books at U.S. prices. And while removing U.S. prices from books would probably have a salutary effect on sales, at least in the short term, the question remains whether it would be enough to prevent consumers from going online to purchase directly from the U.S.

Dave Hickey makes a Believer out of Sheila Heti

There’s a great interview in the Dec/Nov issue of The Believer with notorious author and art critic Dave Hickey conducted by Toronto’s Sheila Heti.

The conversation ranges from the true nature of art, the role of criticism, Hickey’s current place in the art world, etc. – not the most thrilling-sounding stuff, but as James Wolcott writes on his blog, the interview is fun to read because Hickey “sounds like an actual human being talking, not a filtration device preening with little soundbites.”

For example, Hickey characterizes the whole notion of Fine Arts degrees as “training sissies for teaching jobs” and an efffort “to create an intellectual and pedagogical justification for the most frivolous activity in Western culture.”

Here are Hickey’s thoughts on arts in academia and government arts funding, a contentious topic this side of the border:

DH: I don’t think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists. Some good artists in their maturity – like me – will take a job at a university and continue to produce because they have trained themselves to produce. But the university environment is not a productive environment. It’s oppressive.

SH: It’s what?

DH: It’s not free. You cannot say what you want to. Let me explain. If I sell an article to Vanity Fair, they give me some money and we’re quits. I can take that money and spend it on heroin and Arab boys if I want to. But if I get the money I make from the university every year, that comes with a requirement that I not be a pedophile, that I not be a drug addict, that I not tell the truth, that I not say what I think about the president of the university. That’s what that money is. And if I take a job at a university and I’m a young person, I have six years in which I can’t express my opinion until I get tenure. Now, are you going to remember your opinions for six years? No!

SH: So if you eschew money from grants and from the government, then you’ve got to make money elsewhere–

DH: I wrote reviews of Porter Wagoner albums and squibs for titty magazines, but I fucking wrote them because I was trying to win and avoid all unavoidable compromises that presented me with the fantasies of comfort and security. I just like to write lucid prose. That’s my little thing. Why should it be easier for me than it was for Steve Tyler? Anyway, people don’t make literature, architecture, and art – the culture makes those things. We make books, buildings, and objects. We do our crummy little shit, and the culture assigns value to it, and I don’t think the culture needs government help.

How’s that for a Monday morning wake up call? Hickey also has some thoughts for those young or avant-garde writers and artists who feel they are not being given their due mainstream recognition:

The art world I came up into was very much like the jazz world I grew up in, which is to say, a relatively small thing. If you got to go see Miles Davis in a little bar on La Brea, that was great, and you didn’t sit around saying, “There was no coverage in the New York Times! Miles is not going to get any reviews!” You know what I’m saying?

Though Heti’s role in the interview is mostly to play straight (wo)man to Hickey, she does drop some hints about her own artistic future:

Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just – I can’t do it.

Uh, tiresome? As Hickey himself says, right at the beginning of the interview, about the creation of art: “if you don’t like it and it’s not easy, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

Q&Q: most influential magazine evah?

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.)

Flickr photo roundup: Book Camp, Paul Watson, and Other Goose

Here’s a quick roundup of some recent event photos posted in the Q&Q Flickr pool:

Photographer Fleur-Ange Lamothe posted a couple of images from Brantford Book Camp 2007. It was a three-day event in mid-August that brought together young would-be authors and top children’s writers and illustrators. Here, author Sylvia McNicoll reads to the assembled group.

Above, war photographer and journalist Paul Watson signs books at an event at the Library and Archives in Ottawa on August 22, 2007. Watson also spoke at length about his experiences in South Africa, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The Ottawa International Writers Festival has kindly posted over an hour’s worth of audio files of the whole evening here.

Pages Books & Magazines and Groundwood Books hosted “Calypso Night!” in honour of Barbara Wyn Klunder’s new book Other Goose: Recycled Rhymes for Our Fragile Times. The event took place at Toronto’s Gladstone Hotel on August 30 and included a calypso reggae band and a DJ.

Have you recently attended a book reading, library event, or author appearance? Have some interesting book-related pictures you want to share? If you’ve got photos of the Canadian book scene, we’d love to see them. Send them to us or sign up through Flickr and submit your images.