Obama, Rumsfeld books set for winter release

Simon & Schuster unveiled the cover for O: A Presidential Novel, an anonymously authored novel about U.S. president Barack Obama. The cover features a gold “O” bookended by a pair of protruding ears against a blue background.

Set during the 2012 presidential election, the book is described by The Washington Post as:

a novel about aspiration and delusion [...] written by an anonymous author who has spent years observing politics and the fraught relationship between public image and self-regard. The novel includes revealing and insightful portraits of many prominent figures in the political world – some invented and some real.

There’s been a flurry of speculation about the identity of the author, someone Simon & Schuster says “has been in the room with Barack Obama and wishes to remain anonymous.”

A blogger at the Wall Street Journal points out the futility of such conjecture:

In addition to the 469 employees of the White House, the president had 616 visitors there in December 2010 alone, according to records released by the administration.

And since we don’t know that this “room” is the Oval Office, we should probably also include everyone who’s attended a party or town hall or fund-raiser or campaign trail event also attended by Mr. Obama, plus his classmates, students and colleagues over the years.

O isn’t the only work of fiction inspired by American political figures published this winter. Donald by Eric Martin and Stephen Elliott is a novel that publisher McSweeney’s says imagines what would happen if former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld “was abducted at night from his Maryland home, held without charges in his own prison system, denied a trial, and kept in a place where no one could find him, beyond the reach of the law.”

The novel is set for release Feb. 8, the same day Rumsfeld’s official autobiography, Known and Unknown, is launched by Sentinel. By no coincidence, the covers of both books are similar — though only one features Rumsfeld in an orange jumpsuit.

Borders on the brink, but Kobo continues to grow

A year ago, in the week following Christmas, Canadian publishers and distributors were greeted with the dismaying news that one of the country’s leading bookstore chains, McNally Robinson Booksellers, was significantly scaling back its operations, closing down locations in Toronto and Saskatoon Winnipeg. This year, a retail shakeup on an even bigger scale is taking place in the U.S., where the future of the bookselling chain Borders, which operates 676 bookstores across the U.S., is in question.

Late last week, the Ann Arbor, Michigan–based chain announced it is delaying payments to some of its vendors in an attempt to restructure its debt. The news set off investor panic, resulting in the company’s share price falling by 22 per cent on Friday.

Now, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that at least one major vendor, Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group (which owns the distributor National Book Network) has temporarily suspended shipments to the retail chain. Other publishing companies, including Hachette Book Group and Sourcebooks, are also reported to be considering similar options. From the WSJ:

“When a customer of that size calls you up and says you aren’t getting a check, that’s a piece of information you have to act on,” said Jed Lyons, CEO of Rowman & Littlefield.

Mr. Lyons said he wanted more information from Borders and expected to learn more from the bookseller this week. “Up until now they’d been paying us like clockwork,” he said.

[...]

Mr. Lyons said that about a year ago, National Book Network approached its clients and said that if they wanted their books distributed to Borders, they would have to assume the risk associated with that business. Most clients, he added, responded by saying they wanted to continue shipping to Borders.

Borders is the U.S. retail partner for Kobo, the Indigo-owned e-book company, which nevertheless put a rosy spin on its holiday numbers. In a press release, Kobo reported that it had its best weekend ever on Christmas and Boxing Day, and that the number of registered Kobo users had nearly doubled since mid-November.

“Earlier this month we predicted that Christmas would be a record breaker for Kobo, and we have exceeded our expectations driving several ebook downloads per second since Christmas Eve, or an equivalent number hardcover books stacked as high as 50 Empire State Buildings [sic],”  Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis said in the release. Kobo also noted that it had experienced some of its biggest gains outside North America, in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Singapore.

Daily book biz round-up: WSJ’s Weekend Edition debuts; DeLillo wins PEN/Saul Bellow; and more

Today’s book news:

• Reviewing the Wall Street Journal‘s new Weekend Edition
• Dying author searches for someone to complete his last work
• Don DeLillio wins PEN/Saul Bellow award for American fiction (as if he needed it)
• HarperCollins U.S. to launch conservative imprint (as if we needed it)
• Strand Bookstore now does better with candy than books
• MobyLives attends Toronto WOTS
• Banned Book Week kicks off

Daily book biz round-up: Oprah and Franzen all but confirmed; WSJ book section slammed; and more

Today’s book news:

• MobyLives breaks out the smoking gun: a copy of Freedom with an Oprah sticker
• New Wall Street Journal book section sparks conflict-of-interest concerns
• Michael Lewis tops Business Book of the Year Award shortlist
• Final David Foster Wallace title unveiled
• The Millions on reading YA as an adult

Wall Street Journal starts book review section

Bucking the trend of ever-declining books coverage, The Wall Street Journal will launch its first-ever book review section in the coming weeks. According to The New York Observer, which broke the news, the standalone section will be headed by former Atlantic editor Robert Messenger. From the Observer:

Book sections in newspapers have been killed left and right over the last few years. The Washington Post cut its standalone book section last year, The Chicago Tribune did it the year before, and the L.A. Times did it the year before that. There have been a lot of obituaries written in honor of book sections over the last few years, all lamenting a dying art in a printed newspaper that Rupert Murdoch — naturally — will now stubbornly try to revive.

Book lovers, writers, and industry professionals will certainly welcome the news of more ink being spilled on books. But one wonders what took the Journal so long: Murdoch, of course, is not only a maverick newspaper baron – his NewsCorp also owns HarperCollins.

Copyright holders “greedy” say Woodlief, Curtis

In a July 9 Wall Street Journal article, Tony Woodlief argues that current practices for securing permission to reprint copyrighted material are too intricate and costly to survive. He cites his own experience writing a memoir and attempting to secure permission to use copyrighted material as chapter epigraphs:

When I asked to use a single line by songwriter Joe Henry, for example, his record label’s parent company demanded $150 for every 7,500 copies of my book. Assuming I sell enough books to earn back my modest advance, this amounts to roughly 1.5% of my earnings, all for quoting eight words from one of Mr. Henry’s songs.

Woodlief writes that the compromise between rewarding artists for creating original works and allowing the appreciation and dissemination of those works to be as easy and widely available as possible has been historically skewed too far in the former direction.

The copyright thicket is a growing frustration among writers and editors. One editor of a popular literary anthology (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of reprisals from publishers) confirmed that many publishers pursue illusory short-term profit at the expense of both profit and art. By demanding fees that most people won’t pay, they forsake free advertising for the artists they claim to protect. If restaurants behaved that way, not only would they deny you the right to take home leftovers to your dog, they’d try to charge you for smelling their food when you pass by.

It’s a clever analogy that has only one problem: it’s wrong. The proper analogy would involve someone walking into a restaurant, going up to the pass, taking some food off a plate, walking out and handing the food to a passerby on the street without paying for it, but charging the passerby a fee, which is then pocketed (Woodlief’s “modest advance” is surely combined with a royalty scale in his contract).

This minor inaccuracy, however, does not prevent Richard Curtis from picking up on Woodlief’s line of reasoning and extending it to encompass enhanced e-books that incorporate other media such as video and music:

What’s the problem?  For a recent webinar on the subject I stated it this way: “The challenge of clearing rights for enhanced e-books is so dauntingly complex that nothing less than an overhaul of the current antiquated system is necessary if enhanced e-books are not to die aborning.”

Curtis goes on to bemoan the process of tracking down permissions for copyrighted material, which he calls “extremely tedious,” as though the relative interest level of the task itself renders it untenable. He suggests that in the digital era, the battle over copyright “is intolerable and will simply have to stop.”

The rationale for this conclusion seems to be that traditional copyright protections make the production of enhanced e-books too complicated, meaning that only “auteurs” who produce, write, edit, direct, and score their own material will be able to create them. The faulty assumption here is that just because a particular technology (i.e. the ability to “mash up” videos, text, music, etc. to produce enhanced e-books) exists, everyone should be able to exploit it without restriction. This is the new digital fundamentalism, and it is deleterious to the notion that artists deserve to be adequately compensated for their artistic output.

It is, however, a notion that is becoming accepted if only through repetition. Jonathan Lethem (in “The Ecstasy of Influence”) and David Shields (in Reality Hunger) have both made the argument that artistic products should be freely available to be recombined, plagiarized, and enhanced as anyone sees fit. The ability to do this is made manifest by the digital tools that are now at our fingertips. Arguing that these digital tools are poisonous to the process of artistic creation is reductive, but so is the notion that the copyright battle currently underway “is intolerable.”

Bookmarks: why McCarthy won’t autograph, the definitive titles of the Noughties, and more

• James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, fought to keep a gay subplot in the novel.

• Cormac McCarthy talks about the film version of The Road in the Wall Street Journal and why you won’t find a signed copy of the book

• Remember when Scholastic tried to censor a tween book because one character had two moms? Mobylives reports that parent fanatics are at it again, this time trying to ban the entire Scholastic catalogue

• Dalton Higgins is this month’s writer-in-residence at Open Book Toronto.

• The Telegraph posted their definitive Books of the Noughties. Nothing very surprising – White Teeth, Atonement, Brick Lane -  Dave Eggers’s memoir comes in fourth, right behind good ol’ Dan Brown, Obama’s memoir, and bien sur, Harry Potter at number one. Sigh.

Bookmarks: a small town book tour, inappropriate books for kids, and Walt Whitman selling jeans

Bookish links from across the Web:

• Test your celebrity poet knowledge over at Details and guess which verses have been written by Michael Jackson, Mr. Spock, Jewel, or William Butler Yeats
• Battle of the sexes, poetry edition: Do women write “female” poetry? 
• Sarah Palin’s Going Rogue tour skips San Francisco and Los Angeles and makes stops in Noblesville, Indiana, and Rochester, New York 
• Don’t tell Scholastic: a new blog dedicated to inappropriate books for kids
• Recordings of Walt Whitman reading “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and “America” are being used in Levi’s Jeans new ad campaign. Controversial use of a dead poet’s work or clever marketing strategy? Slate Magazine discusses
• Kazuo Ishiguro “auditions” characters to narrate his novels. Colum McCann will print out chapters of his incomplete book, staple them together, and take them to Central Park, pretending to be reading someone else’s work. The Wall Street Journal interviews 11 top authors about their writing habits

Bookmarks: Suing the Nook, profitable poetry, and more

Bookish links from around the Web:

• According to Amazon, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin is the best book of 2009. Also on its list of the top 10 books of 2009: Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder; Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning Wolf Hall; Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín; Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl; Crazy for the Storm by Norman Ollstead; The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson; The City & The City by China Miéville; Stitches by David Small; and The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind by William Kamkwamba
• More trouble for Nook, Barnes & Noble’s new digital reader: GalleyCat reports that Spring Design is suing B&N over the Nook’s design, stating that the bookseller broke non-disclosure agreements and “misappropriated trade secrets” about Spring Design’s own Google-Android based e-book reader, Alex Reader
• British author/actor/comedian/Oscar Wilde fan/blogger/Tweeter Stephen Fry has something to say about the benefits of social media in this two-part online interview
• If you think the mania for classic literature and zombie mash-ups is going to die anytime soon, think again. The LA Times Jacket Copy reports that Quirk Books, the publishing company responsible for Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters has announced their latest project, titled Dawn of the Dreadfuls
• Can poetry be profitable? Publisher Dominique Raccah thinks so. The Wall Street Journal‘s Speakeasy announces Raccah’s trial website, an online poetry community that allows Web browsers to upload, hear, and buy poetry
• The ever-controversial Globe and Mail columnist and author Margaret Wente responds to her many haters. Turns out she likes to make Canadians angry, especially Newfoundlanders

Your e-book speculation for the day

It’s a shame Canadians still can’t experience the apparent bliss that is Amazon’s Kindle 2 (despite the release of that iPhone app that would doubtless work perfectly well on Canadian models), but that hasn’t stemmed our interest in all the commentary on e-book readers, like that which came out of a recent publisher’s conference in Britain.

Meanwhile, American author Steven Johnson’s piece from The Wall Street Journal is perhaps the first article this Quillblogger has read that makes an e-book reader sound like something worth owning:

A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I’d bought and downloaded Zadie Smith’s novel On Beauty. By the time the check arrived, I’d finished the first chapter.

This has obvious benefits for publishers, says Johnson:

Amazon’s early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it’s not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you’re at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and — voilà! — you own it.