Daily book biz round-up: Amazon’s bombshell, Kafka exposed, and more

• The news that e-books have topped hardcover sales at Amazon is rocking the publishing world…
• … But MobyLives questions some of the figures
• Andrew Nikiforuk becomes The Tyee‘s first writer-in-residence (via Canadian Magazines)
• Frank Kafka archive opened to prying eyes
• Disgraced historian Orlando Figes settles over fake Amazon reviews
• The BookLiberator allows every citizen to launch a Google-style mass digitization scheme

Canadians good at bad romance

The results are in for the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which recognizes the year’s worst opening lines in various book genres, and the romance category has been all sewn up by Canadians – the winner, Paul Chafe, is from Toronto, and the runner-up, Jonathan Blay, is from Bedford, Nova Scotia. Here’s Chafe’s winning entry:

“Trent, I love you,” Fiona murmered, and her nostrils flared at the faint trace of her lover’s masculine scent, sending her heart racing and her mind dreaming of the life they would live together, alternating sumptuous world cruises with long, romantic interludes in the mansion on his private island, alone together except for the maids, the cook, the butler, and Dirk and Rafael, the hard-bodied pool boys.

We actually prefer Blay’s runner-up entry, however:

She purred sensually, oozing allure that was resisted only by his realization as an entomologist that the protein dust on the couch from the filing of her crimson nails was now being devoured by dust mites in a clicking, ferocious, ecstatic frenzy.

You can see the rest of the Bulwer-Lytton victors, including the grand prize winner, here.

Daily book biz round-up: iPad security breach; on reading New Yorker fiction; and more

Book news pour vous:

• Early iPad adopters exposed to massive security breach
• Barbara Kingsolver wins Orange Prize
• Atwood to headline Frye Festival in 2011
• Only female candidate for Oxford professor of poetry position withdraws from race, citing “serious flaws” in election process
• Some Kindle titles more expensive in U.S. than in Canada
• Better writing through not linking
• On the joys and perils of reading The New Yorker‘s fiction selections
• The top ten bathroom reads

Battle of the authors

A literary spat has (possibly) erupted between two British authors on Amazon. Crime writer Philip Kerr, unhappy with a second negative review from historian Allan Massie, seems to have sought revenge by posting an 813-word review on the Amazon page for Massie’s new book, The Royal Stuarts. Kerr signed his name at the end of the unsolicited review, but it hasn’t yet been confirmed whether or not it was a hoax.

Massie called Kerr’s novel, A Quiet Flame, “good-quality airport fiction” and said that his most recent book, If the Dead Rise Not had “an unconvincing plot and a still less convincing love affair.”

According to the Telegraph, this is how Kerr lashed back:

“When I pay twenty quid for a ‘nuanced’ history of the Stuarts I don’t expect to be served up a slab of cheesy prose from a crappy old novel,” the post said.

The book asserts that all Scots can trace their ancestry to Robert II, the first monarch of the House of Stuart. “By the same token if you go back far enough we all share our ancestry with a turkey. And so alas does this book.”

Massie told the Telegraph, “I am quite amused to find that Mr. Kerr has taken such deep umbrage that he has clearly gone to the trouble of reading my book in order to slate it in an unsolicited review.”

Daily book biz round-up: Ignatieff accused; historians disgraced; and more

News, shoots, and leaves:

• Random House weakens in backlist e-rights debate
• Alan Sillitoe dies at age 82
• Conservative MPs shocked – shocked! – at less-than-truthful cover blurbs on Ignatieff book
• Disgraced historian Orlando Figes just looks worse and worse with every passing day
• Stephen Ambrose was probably a fibber, too
• Cornell prof says e-ink and LCD readers are both just fine for your eyes
• Guaranteed-to-be-truthy George Dubya memoir set for November release

Best of lists take a beating – but what about critical honesty?

On Salon.com, Laura Miller talks about the controversy over PW’s best ten books of 2009 being 100% male:

What’s at issue isn’t sales or even access to readers; this is an argument about prestige and critical recognition, an argument best articulated by the novelist and critic Francine Prose in a 1998 article for Harper’s magazine. Prose detected a greater reverence for books by men among the nation’s literary and critical establishment, which includes reviewers, prize committees and the institutions that bestow grants. She blamed this on a widespread if seldom-stated assumption that “women writers will not write about anything important – anything truly serious or necessary, revelatory or wise.”

Miller goes on to admit that anyone who’s had to compile a list – will feel an “awkward sympathy for the PW team”:

But every year we do face a ticklish question: Is it the right thing to gerrymander your list in order to counteract real, long-standing cultural biases, even if that means lying to your readers? What is a 10-best list, after all, if not a record of the books we enjoyed most over the past 12 months? If you insist on a list that’s ideally representative of gender, race, class, nationality (i.e., including at least one translation), publisher size (small as well as large), fame, length (short story collections as well as novels), region, genre and so on, you can easily wind up with, say, a list of nine books you kinda like and maybe one you truly love. That’s a tepid dish to serve up to readers, and not likely to inspire much enthusiasm, either.

Tamaki talks voice at the Written in Colour Symposium

On Nov 14th, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore will host the Written in Colour Writers’ Symposium, a full-day event geared toward emerging indigenous writers and writers of colour.

Workshops range from grant writing to getting your play produced to memoir and erotic writing. Facilitators include writers Tamai Kobayashi, Lee Maracle and Mariko Tamaki, as well as industry players like Cormorant Books publisher Marc Côté from Cormorant Books and John Degen from the Ontario Arts Council.

Tamaki, author of several books including the award-winning graphic novel Skim (with illustrator Jillian Tamaki), will be giving a workshop entitled You Are All Talk! about voice and writing.

“The idea is to get writers to think about writing and talk, what providing our characters with a voice means,” says Tamaki

Tamaki, who is Japanese-Canadian, thinks the symposium is relevant because culture and race are as important in the socio-political landscape as they are in the literary-arts landscape. “I think that representation is something everyone should be concerned about. People want to see themselves reflected back in the literary works that they love and so we should all have a vested interest in making sure that all different identities, readers and writers get supported.”

Tamaki notes that “colour” is a complex issue. “I write about Japanese people but I don’t like this idea that people feel beholden to put that element in their works. Like, if I don’t write about someone who’s Asian, have I messed up? Committed less of a service as an Asian feminist?”

The Written in Colour symposium will  be held at 918 Bathurst Street. Call 4-6.922-8744 to pre-register. Tickets are $15 to $30 sliding scale in advance and $30 to $50 sliding scale at the door.

Will Kindle be the Betamax of the decade?

In the race to win consumer confidence (or, well, interest) in e-readers, one can’t help but wonder how we’ll look back on the recent Kindle vs. Sony hardware wars. With Google planting flags, and Amazon opposing the Google settlement, The Globe and Mail‘s king of tech nerds, Brian Joseph Davis, suggests the Kindle could go the way of ColecoVision, the Commodore 64, or even the once beloved Betamax.

My money is still on Sony this week as they’ve entered the fray of the Google settlement crisis. They’re on the side of Google Books. Sony’s Reader displays any e-book format and supports file copying on up to six devices. The Reader and Google are a good match.

On the other side is Amazon with their Kindle (which is a proprietary-file-laden piece of poo). Stepping into that corner with legal and monetary support, just because they hate Google, is the axis of Microsoft and Yahoo.

Meanwhile, blogger B.Kienapple weighs in on the e-reader battle, discussing the Google-supported, UK-based Interead, the company behind the Cool-er e-reader. Now that Google has provided “books” for the terribly named Cool-er, she wonders who will actually read said materials:

Academics? School kids? Everyone knows that Amazon has the selection and pricing down pat. This is the sad fact of the matter.

Also, while the Cool-er e-store is now well stocked, you may not want to read them on the Cool-er’s own e-reader. The review that came in from Gizmodo earlier this year indicated that problems abound. My biggest complaint, from what I can see in the review, is the computer-like font. The Sony and Kindle both mimic print type (easier on the eyes, I do think). The Cool-er’s functionality looks entirely primitive, too.

While it’s easy to mock twitchy-texting, Twitter-obsessed blogger-types, many of those same tech-savvy users remain staunchly old-fashioned when it comes to e-readers. Maybe if one came in a swag bag filled with free “books” this Quillblogger might accept it, if only to take on a plane thereby avoiding the ache of heavy luggage.

But you may want to hum a bar of “Video Killed the Radio Star” and keep a curious eye on the tech pages as the e-reader war unfolds. You wouldn’t want to resemble your uncle clinging to his eight-track tapes.

Bookmarks: sex scandals, meth rings, and Lemony Snicket

Some book-related links:

• The catalogue pages for disgraced U.S. Governor Mark “Appalachia by way of Argentina” Sanford’s (cancelled) book
• Meth ring uses rare comic books to launder drug money (I knew there was something wrong with adults reading comic books…)
• Indian politician’s sympathetic book about Pakistan’s founder gets him booted from party, starts a firestorm
• Lemony Snicket working on new quadrilogy
• Wanna buy a million-dollar wine book?
• Dissertations as haiku

Yann Martel finally hears from the PMO

For over two years, Life of Pi author Yann Martel has been sending books that have “been known to expand stillness” to Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Beginning with Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich on April 16, 2007, Martel has sent a book every two weeks – for a total of 57 books to date – to the PM’s office on Parliament Hill, each with a cover letter explaining his choice. Martel documents each package he sends to the PM on his website, “What Is Steven Harper Reading?”

Except for a short note from one of Harper’s assistants thanking him for the “comments and suggestions” in his first letter, Martel has received complete silence in reply to his mailings. At least, that was the case until late April, when he received a reply to his package containing books number 53 and 54 (Chester Brown’s Louis Riel and Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea). From The Globe and Mail:

A little over two weeks later, an acknowledgment letter from an S. Russell, “executive correspondence officer” for Harper, landed on Martel’s doorstep, expressing “appreciation” for his “thoughtful gesture.” Another came shortly thereafter, dated May 1 and again signed by S. Russell, this one thanking Martel for providing William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar while acknowledging Martel’s concerns about policy changes to the Canadian Periodical Fund and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council that the novelist had addressed in his covering letter. On May 11, Martel sent out his 55th book, Lewis Hyde’s The Gift, and darned if on May 22 another “executive correspondence officer,” L. A. Lavell, didn’t reply – but without mentioning the book.

Martel admits that the sudden frequency of replies is unexpected and curious. He further explained his thoughts to the Globe:

Did the PMO reply because Louis Riel is still pertinent? Did they reply to my gift of Caesar because in that letter I mentioned SSHRC funding and the Canadian Periodical Fund? Are they trying to placate me because the Conservatives are not doing well in the polls? I have no idea.

Regardless of the PMO’s objectives, it seems Martel may have an ulterior motive for continuing his campaign: What is Stephen Harper Reading? Yann Martel’s Recommended Reading for a Prime Minister (and Book Lovers of All Stripes) is being published by Vintage Canada in early November.