Book links roundup: Natalie Portman takes on Judith Krantz, beautiful bookstores, and more

• Natalie Portman is behind a new TV miniseries based on Judith Krantz’s steamy novel Scruples
• Take a peek at 20 of the most beautiful bookstores in the world
• The New York Times reports Barnes and Noble won’t stock Amazon-published titles
• Collette, Dorothy Parker, and Anaïs Nin among 10 legendary bad-ass girls of literature
• The Lambda Literary Awards are set for June 4, 2012, at City University of New York

Book links roundup: White House disdains The Obamas book, U.K. stamps honour Roald Dahl, and more

• The White House speaks out against New York Times reporter Jodi Kantor’s new book, The Obamas
• Slideshow: set of 2012 U.K. stamps celebrates Roald Dahl
• Podcast: author Scott Berkun shares his experiences with traditional versus self-publishing
• GalleyCat reports on efforts to create a used ebook market
• Behind the scenes of a medieval manuscript library’s annual deep clean

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 …”)

U.S. literary journals thrive with low overhead and dedicated audiences

A couple of weeks ago poet Michael Lista got the attention of the publishing Twitterverse with his National Post essay “Why literary magazines should fold.”

Now, we don’t need another American TV sitcom to point out the differences between our two cultures, but here’s an interesting article about the financial health of U.S. West Coast literary journals. Turns out, boutique publishers like The Threepenny Review, Zoetrope, and McSweeney’s Quarterly are doing just fine these days, but not for the reasons you might think. According to The New York Times:

If literary journals “are poised to do well,” as Laura Cogan, editor of San Francisco-based ZYZZYVA, said, it may be because they share qualities with many successful online ventures: skeletal staffs, low overhead and specialized audiences.

The article suggests journals associated with academic institutions have financially suffered the most over the last couple of years. Not that the successful print publishers are sitting around counting their money bags — they’ve been investing in the online side of their businesses by overhauling websites and promoting online subscriptions. McSweeney’s even hired a digital media director.

But, as the article concludes — and here’s where Canadians can nod in agreement — if these publishers are doing well, it is relative to their notions of success:

“No one has ever been able to make a good living writing or publishing literary fiction,” Stephen Elliott, a writer and founder of The Rumpus, said. “It doesn’t matter that there are exceptions. The rule stands.”

Book links roundup: Kobo expands, Bezmozgis racks up the raves, and more

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Deirdre Baker’s tribute to the life and work of fantasy author Diana Wynne Jones
• Kobo kicks off European expansion: e-book stores set to open in Spain and Germany in May, with France, Italy, and the Netherlands to follow
• The New York Times calls David Bezmozgis’s The Free World “self-assured, elegant, and perceptive”; read Q&Q‘s review
• Simon & Schuster confirms it will publish authorized Steve Jobs bio; iSteve: The Book of Jobs to appear in early 2012

Daily book biz round-up: March 18

• The Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders’ Arrival City “couldn’t be more timely” according to The New York Times
• How I wish this were an Onion headline
• Novelist Alison Pick proves some authors are still loyal to their publishers in Open Book Toronto’s Questionless Books interview
• Ten Canadians make the LAMBDA Literary Awards shortlist
• Looking at earthquakes through literature
• Margaret Atwood on e-books

Daily links round-up: Free Kindles, James Frey, and more

Sundry links from around the Web:

• Robert Fulford on the “long service in the trench warfare of editing” of Oxford University Press’s William Toye
• The Association of American Publishers reports a staggering 116 per cent increase in e-book sales in January, but most other categories are down
• The British government downplays concerns that legal protections for U.K. libraries are under threat
• As Borders outlines downsizing, Australia’s RedGroup Retail lays off 26 head-office staff
• The battle to get Amazon to collect sales taxes in the U.S. is heating up; plus, is the free Kindle just around the corner?
• The New York Times launches new paywall in Canada today; the rest of the world will have to wait until March 28
• Salon’s Laura Miller on James Frey’s latest contrived controversy

EU proposes seven-year limit on Google

An independent panel of arts and communications experts has advised the European Commission to limit the amount of time a private company such as Google can exercise preferential use of digitized materials from the public domain.

Speaking at a press conference in Brusells yesterday, Androulla Vassiliou, EU commissioner for education and culture, said that Google’s current 15-year limit should be halved to seven years in order to encourage competition in both digitizing and commercializing digitized assets.

Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle reports that Google Books is currently the world’s biggest producer of digitized content of public domain works. In the six years that Google Books has been around, it has already digitized 15 million texts.

As the company responsible for the digitization of a work, Google is currently granted an extended period of preferential use throughout which access to the item is limited, in Google’s case, to a library’s website, noncommercial websites, or Google’s website. In pushing for the new limit, the panel is hoping for increased access for not-for-profit organizations, specifically Europeana, an online portal for digitized works of European arts and culture funded by the EU

According to The New York Times, the commission also recommended “direct[ing] more public funds to digitizing those works to increase educational resources and develop new businesses.”

The commission also suggested that that would offer value for money, as the funds needed to build 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, of roads would be enough to pay for the digitization of 16 percent of all available books in E.U. libraries.

Publishing: not always a downer

There’s some funny book stuff floating around the internets today. Lest the trolls be confused or angered by humour, this is indeed an attempt to offer some Friday afternoon levity:

Eye Weekly columnist Sarah Nicole Prickett defends Chapters as her favourite bland non-space to rest without people judging her:

They don’t complain about how many magazines I’ve read for free and possibly ripped things from. They don’t look askance at my taste. Their eyebrows don’t say, “Oh, you’re just getting into Murakami now?” They make no suggestions, having nothing to prove; they work at Chapters. “Are you sure you want The Paris Review?” says absolutely nobody to me. “What about The Believer?” I never feel like I have to buy anything, the way I do everywhere else books are sold, as though upon walking in I’ve been handed a bucket, and now I must scoop out my share of the water to prevent us all from drowning. Not here. This ship will float on.

Those crazy kids at CBC Radio’s Day Six provide us with an audio track of Giller winners reading from Snooki’s debut novel, A Shore Thing:

Linden “Giller Gorilla” MacIntyre is a journalist with CBC’s The Fifth Estate, the winner of eight Gemini Awards, an International Emmy, and the 2009 Giller Prize for his novel, The Bishop’s Man.

Johanna “Skib-WOWW” Skibsrud is the 2010 Giller winner for The Sentimentalists, and the author of several collections of poetry.

The New York Times points to a project by a group of history teachers with an inventive and bizarre way to engage students. They produce music videos for altered versions of their favourite songs that replace the original lyrics with lyrics based on classic books and historical figures. Witness – for serious -  “Jenny From the Block” as Mary, Queen of Scots.

Aussie readers asked for input about future of publishing

Last week, the Internet behemoth Google launched its e-book sales site, Google eBooks, in the U.S. The e-book market is now crowded with offerings from Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and Sony, which in turn has spawned a cottage industry for articles about the future of reading and the future of publishing. Amid all this cacophony, it’s small wonder publishers have responded to the rapidly diversifying marketplace with a mixture of fear and confusion.

In Australia, a consortium called the Book Industry Strategy Group is directly petitioning readers about their reading habits, desires, and preferences as a way of gaining clearer insights into the way forward. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Barry Jones, chair of the BISG, states that the group is “seeking ideas from all Australians on how to face the challenges of the digital age, and to turn them into opportunities.” Jones suggests that opportunities lie in the flexibility and ready availability of e-books as against their print counterparts:

Where Amazon and Apple have got it right is the immediacy of purchasing an eBook. Both the Kindle and the iPad come with wireless connectivity to the Amazon and Apple stores, respectively. In the case of the Kindle, if you have an Amazon account, the Kindle comes preconfigured with your details so you can buy a book at 3am if you so desire. New York Times technology writer Nick Bilton calls this Me Economics, which is really just instant gratification in book buying. But it beats late-night television.

And although Jones throws a bone to those of us who still enjoy reading printed books (which he refers to as “pBooks”), it is clear that the digital arena is where he and his group are most invested:

And what about people who like the smell of books or the feel of books, or the cover artwork, or who just want to scribble over the pages? No, these sorts of people will mix up their reading habits and buy both pBooks and eBooks.

Public libraries are starting to offer access to eBooks via downloads or by access, by borrowers, to subscriptions taken out by the library. We want to hear about these initiatives and your experiences with them.

School kids will agree that carrying an eReader with all their textbooks on it beats carrying a heavy school bag with all their textbooks in it. And textbooks form a large part of the book industry in Australia. Can we hear your thoughts?

The public can submit comments and suggestions to the BISG until Jan. 31, 2011. One hopes that they will be slightly more innovative and nuanced than the sort of shopworn analysis Jones allows himself above.