A Different Take on the "End of Books"

Not everyone thinks its the publishing apocalypse, it seems. Dennis McDonald over at Social Media Today blogs on Why Books Will Survive.

Why?

Economics may change, societal preferences for news consumption may change,
but the need to communicate ideas with enough organization and detail to provide
the basis for thought and reflection remains.

It's Banned Book Week

So get out there and read something someone thought was dangerous enough to challenge.

Friday Links

A few links with your Friday coffee.

• Spined books that together tell a story.
  
• Last Friday wasn't just International Talk Like a Pirate Day, it was also Blumesday. Read about the celebration in LA here and Diablo Cody's praise to the great Judy Blume here.
  
• PersonaNonData takes a look at HarperCollins UK's new Book Army. Who knows how it will do invading territory already occupied by Shelfari, librarything and GoodReads.
  
• SF Signal has a great round up of item on the genre yesterday including some free fiction and a defense of the genre.
  
• Two vampire links for Marta (if she stops back by) and the rest of you involving the giveaway of free stuff by the Fantasy Book Critic.
  
• Sara Lloyd talks digital publishing and feeling a bit like a gold fish at Eoin Purcell's.
  

GoodReads

After receiving several invitations over the last few months, I signed up for GoodReads the other day (hence the pretty widget in the sidebar and the one to the left). I wanted to log in all my books as I packed them up to move.*

Why GoodReads in the end? Well, it could be that I couldn’t remember my LibraryThing log in (and I don’t think I still owned most the books I’d originally logged) and I never used my Shelfari widget after DPI, but the truth is I was intrigued by this graph.





Graph from O'Reilly Radar article, "Social Networking for Books: One Ring, or Loosely Joined?"

I wasn’t attracted to it for the same reason Tim O’Reilly was, not for the ability to “follow and [be] followed by a small circle of friends and people whose taste in books I trust.” I wasn’t expecting to have any friends when I signed up, I just wanted the ability to catalog my books and check out all of GoodReads functions.

For authors, I’m intrigued by the Book Giveaways section as a way to set up a focus group on a title, which shows up when you click the authors tab (it's the same page includes a link to the stories and writing area where anyone can contribute their content). This would allow an author to post excerpts connected to the book's profile or otherwise work within the confines of the GoodReads.com system. But LibraryThing has an early reviewer system as well which members can sign up for.

As for author pages, from what I can tell only someone who is the author or has the "Librarian's Status" (which can be applied for, although I have no idea what the requirements for the position might be) can edit an author's page, but any member can edit a Shelfari or LibraryThing page.

I'm sure other differences could be discovered upon closer examination, and I have no idea if any of the sites are more likely than another to capture the search engine bots, but I would love to see a side by side comparison. It is interesting to see how high the unique visitor rate for GoodReads ranks so high at the moment, and I would be interested to see if these numbers level off within the next year. Is this spike due to the number of invites floating around or due to people turning from the other two book catalog systems to this one instead.

Or maybe it is the "ooh, new, shiny" aspect and something else will capture our interest soon.


*And one must not discount the "ooh, new, shiny" aspect that appeals to my inner magpie.

Pirates Cont'd

A yo, ho, ho and a free bottle of fiction from SCIFI Signal:

Free Pirate Fiction from Elizabeth Bear & Sarah Monette at Wired online who has been celebrating Pirate Week.

Also free, Shimmer Magazine's 2007 Pirate Booty edition. (Today only!)

Consider these additions to our Pirate list, me hardies.

Congrats to the best kind of nerd: A Written Nerd

Congratulations, Jessica! I know this won't be the last NY Times article we read on your successes.

You can read Jessica's own thoughts on the book world daily at her blog: The Written Nerd.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

The Pirate Encyclopedia brought to you by Snorg Tees.

It be "International Talk Like a Pirate Day," me hardies. And tonight I will swash my buckle and down my grog with my maties. In honor of this most holiest holy days, here be a book list for you:

Pirates! by Celia Rees: An oldie, but goodie much beloved by the HTC.

Sea Queens: Women Pirates Around the World by (amazing, wonderful, just not enough adjectives to describe her) Jane Yolen because male pirates shouldn't have all the fun. Read this in conjunction with Seafaring Women: Adventures of Pirate Queens, Female Stowaways, and Sailors' Wives by David Cordingly.

The Pirate Life by "Chumbucket" Baur and "Cap'n Slappy" Summers: The men who (un)intentionally brought us Talk Like a Pirate Day.

The Pirate Primer by George Choundas, so you be speaking the pirate speak while you be living the pirate life.

The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down by Colin Woodard. The sub title be saying it all.

The Sea Rover's Practice by Benerson Little. How else will you learn how to pillage your enemies and come along a victim ship?

To Catch a Pirate by Jade Parker: Swashbuckling, treasure and romance.

The History of Pirates by Angus Konstam et al. A bargain book that is no longer in print, it still has the pedigree of an author who used to run the armory for the Tower of London and the Key West Maritime Museum.

And although they are not out yet...

In November, Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the N World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge by Edward Kritzler. Two words: Pirate Rabbis.

In February 2009, The Dust of 100 Dogs by A.S. King. Go visit the official website.

David Foster Wallace

I would venture to guess that at one point or another Infinite Jest has lived on the "Employee Recommends" shelf of every bookstore in America. I've certainly seen my share of these earnest, hand lettered signs that touted how its satire and quirk transcended the length which might otherwise turn readers away. I'm saddened by the realization that it will once again find its way onto those shelves, but now as a tribute and obituary to a talent that died to quickly and not as an introduction to his oncoming work.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide this week, leaving the world at very young 46. He leaves behind his family, his students and the millions of readers who have read his work, or are just about to discover him.

Links: Copyright in the News

A friend and I were discussing the comic and book industries which eventually led to the discussion to the changing nature of copyright. She believes that the future of the creative arts will lie with s/he who creates the intellectual property. I believe we're going to have to come up with a less antiquated way to license and sell that intellectual property to make that work. While I've previously posted the link on the Lenz v. Universal suit, here are some other court cases you should be aware of:

• A translation of the Lexicon Ruling from A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea cozy.
• Penguin wins a reversal on the Steinbeck ruling.
  
• Earlier this year a judge ruled that the heirs of Jerome Siegel were entitled to part of the copyright of Superman (rights that were sold for $130).
  

Note: Jerome Siegel's case was not unique, Jack Kirby did not have rights to many of the characters he created for Marvel. Even today, my comics knowledgeable friend says, there are comic book companies whose contracts strip the writer/creator of all rights to their characters.

Social Media and You

Universal McCann International created the slide show below on the state of social media (MySpace, Facebook, etc): growth, future, and how it affects you. It's worth watching all the slides.

Universal Mccann International Social Media Research Wave 3

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: socialmedia research)

Under Construction

Hey, the blog's under construction at the moment while I try to wrangle the new late (larger columns--hopefully--yay) and figure out the error message I keep getting. Unfortunately the layout finagling means the out going links are non existent. Apologies to all, I'll get them back up as soon as I can.

Wednesday Links

Sarah Weinman has a really great discussion/explanation of imprints going on at Confessions of an Idiosyncratic Mind. See:

Publisher Imprint Report Card, Part I

And

Publisher Imprint Report Card, Part II

(To which I must confess, that Imprints drove me nuts as bookseller and still have the power to confuse me today.)

JA Konrath debunks “The Myth of the Good Book.”

Penguin has created its own "Peguin Authors Guide to Online Marketing." It's a large PDF so careful about clicking if your downloading speeds are, shall we say, insufficient. The guide has some very useful information in it, but it also lingers a bit in some unnecessary areas. I'll blog more on this later.

Just in case you missed it everywhere else, Cory Doctorow on why "Publishers should have a /covers directory." One of the arguments against this, in the comments focuses on the image rights and whether or not publishers have said rights to display without payment. This got me to thinking how the whole rights system when it comes to cover art is very last decade. With so much focus given to online marketing a cover is necessary for the process. If bloggers can't find the image from the publisher they'll just get a poorer version from Google or Amazon, circumventing the system. Sure, they could be hit with a take down notice, but wouldn't the use of the cover by a blogger constitute fair use if said blogger wasn't making a profit? Where do you draw the line?

In a World…Voiceless

While not exactly book related, this had to be posted.

You may have never heard of Don LaFontaine, but you’ve definitely heard his voice—his most famous voice over narration being “In a World…” The voice of “of more than 5,000 movie trailers and 350,000 commercials over the last three decades” (TVGuide.com); his vocal intonations are known the world over.

It was Don LaFontaine’s voice that we used to imitate in the bookstore whenever we would read bad back cover copy at the bookstore, and a day didn’t go by when one of us wouldn’t invoke “In a World…” in all his deep toned glory. Though this may sound weird to admit, it is Don LaFontaine’s voice that narrates every teaser snippet and back cover copy I still read today, and I’m saddened to hear that his voice will be silenced for the future even though it will live forever on in movies, television and in my own mind.

Don, you’ve left this world voiceless and we will miss you.

For a Laugh

Via The Publishing spot, if PBS turned to soaps for its rating boost:



I watched this with a bunch of friends and as soon as the old call sign came on we were all, "Oh my god, I remember that!" Oh PBS, you were my childhood.