Yes, Virginia, you can now self-publish your banal tweets for everyone to enjoy. TweetBookz is a new company that will publish your Twitter feeds as a hardcover book (for $30) or a softcover (for $20).

Works can be published in English, French, Spanish, or Hebrew, and bulk order discounts are available. 

From the TweetBookz press release:

To keep the tweets authentic, users are not allowed to edit past tweets or add new tweets directly to the books. Additionally, users CANNOT purchase books of other people’s tweets, although they can send gift cards to fellow Twitter users enabling them to print their own books.

[...]

Says TweetBookz.com co-founders, Jacob Shwirtz and Asael Kahana: “This is a fun way to look back on your favorite tweets and capture all the emotion of those moments to keep forever. It’s a great gift either for family, friends or just for yourself.”

What a precious keepsake to pass down to your children. “Today I couldn’t find a parking space. FML” and “Dang. Store doesn’t carry my fave brand of toothpaste” are sentiments that future generations will surely cherish for all time.

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.

The end is nigh … 

In a survey of 840 international industry experts conducted by the Frankfurt Book Fair, nearly half said that by 2018, digital sales will overtake those of conventionally published books.

According to an article in today’s Bookseller, 27% of the experts surveyed in 2008 said that digital books would never overtake the printed word; this year, only 22% still hold that belief. 

A whopping 80% said they embraced this technological future rather than seeing it as a threat to the publishing methods of old.

From the article:

“Now is the time to seek out new strategies, to scour the market, to engage in international benchmarking,” said Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurt Book Fair. “The one true business model is still a long way off and investments are still being held in check–at the same time, however, the fear that content will only be distributed free of charge on the Web in the future seems to have been averted for the time being.”

With news this month of Disney’s digital book push, the rumoured Apple Tablet “redefining newspapers, textbooks, and magazines,” the possible arrival of the Kindle in the U.K., and e-book sites launched by The Daily Beast and Sony, 2018 suddenly seems a lot closer …

The Department of Canadian Heritage announced today in Victoria that it will be renewing funding for the Canadian book industry to the tune of $39.5 million per year over the next five years.

The press release explains that the renewed investment will “help publishers and other book industry stakeholders to weather the current economic slowdown.” The Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) will be renamed the Canada Book Fund, to reflect the shift from “a developing industry” to “a mature industry.”

Deirdra McCracken, director of communications for DCH told Q&Q that despite the rumours, there will be no changes to the eligibility criteria.

The funding will help ensure that publishers keep up with new digital technologies and adopt competitive business models. The new program will begin in 2010 and specific details have yet to be confirmed.

The Association of Canadian Publishers announced its support of the changes in a press release today, with specific reference to the emphasis on digital technologies.

Here is ACP President Rodger Touchie’s response to Heritage Minister James Moore’s announcement: “New technology offers enormous opportunity to Canadian publishers, but it comes with challenges as well. Renewed BPIDP funding will help Canadian publishers compete as new business models emerge, and will make it possible for us to pursue new markets and opportunities.”

The Google book search settlement (for background, see here and here) faces yet another hurdle. The New York Times is reporting today that the U.S. Justice Department has confirmed its intention to investigate whether or not the settlement violates American antitrust laws. According to the Times:

“The United States has reviewed public comments expressing concern that aspects of the settlement agreement may violate the Sherman Act,” wrote William F. Cavanaugh, a deputy assistant attorney general. “At this preliminary stage, the United States has reached no conclusions as to the merit of those concerns or more broadly what impact this settlement may have on competition. However, we have determined that the issues raised by the proposed settlement warrant further inquiry.”

Antitrust experts said the letter was the latest indication that the Justice Department is seriously examining complaints that the agreement would grant Google an unfair monopoly over millions of so-called “orphan works,” books whose authors or rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

The U.S. government has been given a deadline of Sept. 18 to present its views, which will be considered at a fairness hearing scheduled for Oct. 7.

Inside Higher Education reports on the University of Michigan Press’s plans to publish its scholarly monographs in digital rather than book form. For a scholarly press with a small readership per book, it’s a natural and probably overdue move – one that many have been predicting or suggesting for years.

Over at the U.S. site The Morning News they’re in the middle of their annual “Tournament of Books,” in which various authors, critics, and litbloggers winnow down a list of notable 2008 novels down to one eventual winner. (No Canadian-authored books made the pool this year.) Two writers, Kevin Guilfoyle and John Warner, are providing “colour commentary” on the judges’ decisions, and in a recent entry, things get interesting. (Well, things were already interesting, but they get interesting from a business-of-books perspective.)

Warner veers away from discussing the two novels at hand and into a cri de coeur that the digital future of reading is coming and bookstores had better be ready. One major plank of his argument is that for him, reading a book on a handheld device (he switched back and forth between Kindle and iPhone), was not just an acceptable facsimile of reading a hard copy, but was actually an improvement.

Rather than being a liability, the small screen is an asset because it makes it almost impossible to skim since there’s not enough text on the screen to bother skimming. If I lose focus while I’m reading a physical book, I often find myself skipping down the page, looking for a fresh point of purchase into the text. With the iPod, it was remarkably easy to stay absorbed in the text.

BookNet Canada is getting around to posting videos from last week’s technology forum, and the first one to go up is BookNet CEO Michael Tamblyn’s talk entitled “6 Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better.” Judging from audience reaction, Tamblyn’s lively and wide-ranging presentation was one of the most popular of the day, covering everything from how to make e-readers sexy to improving online browsing experiences for book buyers to developing “an XML workflow that doesn’t suck.” The talk also included a pitch for BiblioShare.org, an online ONIX repository and data aggregator.

BookNet will continue to post videos each week. You can view slides from the conference here.