What Balsamo intimated was this: Digital Natives are unconcerned with remembering events and data because they can usually find the information they need online. My own experience indicates this is true. Take, for example, the act of remembering the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. In a pre-internet age, a young person might have felt compelled to memorize its approximate date, the circumstances that led to its collapse, and, just maybe, the fact that someone named Edward Gibbon wrote a giant book about it.

A Digital Native, on the other hand, can say, “I’ll look it up later on Wikipedia,” and leave it at that. This nonchalance towards remembering facts applies to experiences as well... In Balsamo’s view, the Internet has become a prosthetic memory; as Digital Natives rely on it, their own capacity for recall only grows weaker..."

Mothers who Blog!

Bonnier's Parenting Group in the US surveyed 847 mothers who visited Parenting.com to collect data. The company found "that Gen X-ers, those who were born in the late 60s and during the 70s, tend to use the Internet to accomplish certain tasks rather than interact with others. This includes looking at photos, reading product ratings, and buying products online. On the flip side, Gen Y-ers, those who were (generally) born in the 80s and 90s, tend to be more social online. They are more likely to interact with other people through the use of blogs, social networks, and video-/photo-sharing sites.

Overall, Gen Y is a lot more tapped into social media than Gen X. 149 of Gen Y moms surveyed have their own blog, and 160 said they read others' blogs. Comparatively, only 71 Gen X women reported having a blog, and only 86 read the blogs of others. 148 Gen Y moms have an online profile somewhere compared to only 78 of Gen X moms, and 154 Gen Y-ers create and share videos online while 96 of the Gen X group do so...The company said that the younger generation is more likely to integrate tech seamlessly into their lives with blogs, IMs, and text messages, while Gen X moms would much prefer to keep online and offline lives separate".

Writers' wiki

Following the piece on book groups in last week's blog, I came across this new site.

The wiki is designed to bring authors and book groups in touch with each other. The wiki is organized by location; some locations are broken down by region, province, or state. There are no book groups entered under the ACT at the time of typing. Lets fill it Gen Y or X

10 SF books that should never have been filmed!

This blog entry lists the '10 SF Books That Were Better Off on Paper.' covers books such as Dune and I Robot and has had immense reader feedback. What do you think?

Book collecting on this scale is Criminal?

The UK Telegraph reports on a "Connoisseur of Crime" who kept 7,000 books about murder in an extension to his bungalow. Wilf Gregg, who died on June 15 aged 76, built up one of Britain's biggest private collections of books about murder.

"He housed nearly 7,000 volumes in an extension he added to his suburban bungalow and, when that was full, began double-shelving them. Gregg was thought to own a copy of every book published on Jack the Ripper and on the assassination of President John F Kennedy, although he eventually ceased collecting the multitude of volumes about JFK "because it was getting impossible".

Gregg reckoned that his best find (bought for $100 on the internet) was not a published work at all but a private scrapbook called Murder Most Foul, compiled in 1921 by a criminologist fascinated by the Eliza Manning cause célèbre of 1849, in which a couple murdered a man and buried him under the scullery floorboards; Mrs Manning went to the scaffold wearing black satin, a material that fell from fashion as a result".

Back to the Future

A major literary discovery has recently been made in New Zealand.

'The Great Romance', first published in a very small edition in Dunedin and Ashburton in 1881, was republished last month by the University of Nebraska Press and has been hailed in the SF genre "as a work as significant as Pride and Prejudice"!

The Great Romance deals with "ground-breaking" themes such as interplanetary colonisation by humankind, sexual relations with aliens and the problems of space flight, including space shuttles, spacesuits and air locks, academics and reviewers say.

Written by an anonymous author who used the pseudonym "The Inhabitant", the novella was first published as two separate volumes. The first comprised 55 pages, the only known original of which is held in the Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington. The second instalment is just 39 pages. The reprint had attracted glowing reviews since being republished last month by University of Nebraska Press, he said. The Los Angeles Times reviewer Ed Park described it as a "slim, oddly proportioned book, a hybrid of utopian and space exploration narratives that reaches out to grasp the reader's hand, unexpectedly and vigorously, from the equally remote milieu of late 19th-century New Zealand".

Publishers Weekly claimed: "This may have been the first time that anyone described spacesuits, air locks or the difficulties of landing on an asteroid or entering a planetary atmosphere . . . This reprint will be of considerable interest to specialist scholars of science fiction, if not the casual reader."

What Makes us Laugh?

Mary Beard, Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge, has a regular blog in the Times Literary Supplement but a recent essay by her can be found in the New York Review of Books Volume 55, Number 12 July 17, 2008. It begins:

Laughter is one of the most treacherous of all fields of history. Like sex and eating, it is an absolutely universal human phenomenon, and at the same time something that is highly culturally and chronologically specific. Every human society in the world laughs, and whatever their race or language, people make almost exactly the same sound in doing so. Not only that, but they represent the sound of laughter in almost exactly the same alphabetic or phonetic form. Whereas Albanian dogs apparently go "ham ham" rather than "woof woof," and Hungarian pigs go "rof rof rof," not "oink oink,", there are few language communities in the world that do not represent the sound of laughter with some variant on "ha ha" or "hee hee."

A new Australian Independent Booksellers' Prize

As mentioned in the Canberra Times Litbits of July 5, Australia’s independent booksellers will show their support for Australian authors with the launch of their major new prize, The Indie Award. The $18,000 prize will honour an Australian author for the best book of the past twelve months, with the winner to be announced on Monday 6th October 2008.

Tim Winton comments on this prize: “Everywhere else in the English-speaking world, bookselling has become the province of chains, of massive centralisation, of venality and a steady loss of competence on the shop floor. Thank God we still have booksellers passionately committed to our shared reading culture. This is something we must not give up. For nearly thirty years I've made a living from writing fiction in this country with the steady support of independent bookshops. This year I've been lucky enough to have a novel reach the top of the bestseller lists. A literary novel at number one. Hand-sold all the way there by people who take books personally.”

Tim Winton Surfs the Pages!

A major interview with Tim Winton has been published in the Online UK Guardian Review. 'Aida Edemariam talks to Tim Winton about his youth, Australia and why writing is like surfing'.

"Writing a book is a bit like surfing," Winton said. "Most of the time you're waiting. And it's quite pleasant, sitting in the water waiting. But you are expecting that the result of a storm over the horizon, in another time zone, usually, days old, will radiate out in the form of waves. And eventually, when they show up, you turn around and ride that energy to the shore. It's a lovely thing, feeling that momentum. If you're lucky, it's also about grace. As a writer, you roll up to the desk every day, and then you sit there, waiting, in the hope that something will come over the horizon. And then you turn around and ride it, in the form of a story."

Attwood's big prize

Margaret Atwood, who will be one of the guest speakers at the Melbourne Writers' Festival this year has won Spain's main literary prize,the Prince of Asturias literary prize. The jury praised Attwood for work that moves between numerous literary genres "with sharpness and irony", reserving further praise for the political dimension of her work, commending Atwood as an author who "defends the dignity of women and denounces situations of social injustice."

Shakespeare & Company's Paris Literary Festival

Some writers just keep travelling the world. Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt were in Adelaide in March but came under some criticism for lacklustre performances in the recent Paris Literary Festival. The UK Telegraph commented on them as "slightly past-it head-liners". Jeanette Winterson, however, despite appearances at Hay-on-Wye and Sydney in May, came across as a literary trouper.

"She spoke with no notes, in quick, clipped phrases, accompanied by expressive hand-movements. Combining an obvious passion with intellectual rigour and down-to-earth humour, Winterson began with an exploration of 'the poem as lie-detector', which turned into an extended meditation on the role of art in the human condition.

These are the kind of events that make literary festivals worthwhile. Winterson has that ineffable, unfakable thing that musicians call 'soul'. It was obvious her words came from the heart, and they forced one's mind to new places. In both its subject matter, and the spirit of its delivery, this talk distilled the essence of the Shakespeare and Co festival, and was truly inspiring".

Book Collecting Magazines

In the area of serious book collecting, there are two excellent UK magazines. The first is Rare Book Review (for which I must declare I am a regular reviewer), a glossy bimonthly magazine, covering the high end of book collecting. It's website is at and includes a regular news section on the web.

Breaking web news there reveals that the copy of Emma referred to in my first blog has sold for a record £180 000 in auction at Bonhams this week. The three-volume edition was estimated to bring around £70 000 but turned out to be the most profitable Jane Austen novel to be sold at auction yet.

The UK Book and Magazine Collector is an excellently priced monthly magazine, which often runs to over 150 pages. It is a mixture of news, articles on authors and their prices, and a listing of books for sale, usually from British dealers.

In the July issue of Book and Magazine Collector. articles range from Charles Dickens to Anita Brookner to the Beano Comic, all with illustrations and price guides.

The May issue has an excellent long article on Ian Fleming with a sub-section by Richard Dalby on signed and inscribed Fleming items. Incidentally a First Edition, dust-jacketed, fine copy of Casino Royale now brings between 15,000 and 20,000 pounds.

I went to the Imperial War Museum Exhibition on Ian Fleming in May in London, which has the covers and details of many of Fleming's publications. It starts well in a biographical and bibliographical sense, but trails away in attraction to artefacts such as Halle Berry's bikini and Daniel Craig's bloodstained shirt.

Proof Positive or Negative?

From the UK Bookseller

Collecting proofs of first editions can be a lucrative pursuit for those authors deemed collectable. An interesting blog entry, extrapolating from the music world, has commented:

"You may not have heard of Troy Augusto but, like Bosman with football and Kolpak with cricket and rugby, he could become associated with major changes to our industry.

Earlier this month, Augusto was taken to court by Universal Music. He is an eBay trader who specialises in selling promotional CDs online. Universal claimed he was guilty of copyright infringement and that they retained ownership of the discs. Augusto’s lawyers defended the case by referring to the “first sale” doctrine of US copyright law. This states that a CD owner is free to sell it without the permission of the copyright owner.

The court found in favour of Augusto and made it clear that no amount of disclaimers or threats removed the right of the individual to sell, pass on or do whatever they like with the CDs. Universal are lodging an appeal (doesn’t everyone these days?), but most observers seem to feel that the findings will stand. This result could have ramifications beyond America and in other industries, including our own.

Proofs or advanced reading copies have been part of publishing for many years. Sure, piles of unread copies line the corridors of every bookshop and retail head office in the land, but they remain our only real tool for getting booksellers to read stuff. Most still carry threatening warnings about the perils of re-selling. Glancing at a few on my bookshelves, I see phrases such as “violation of law”, “strictly prohibited” and “legal action”. But are such threats now rendered toothless? ?And does it really matter? ...

In my experience, most of the people who buy proofs are dealers who would never have bought the finished item anyway, or hardcore fans who want every possible edition and will usually get the “legitimate” one too. It is also not unknown for publishers to draw the attention of retailers to the black market trade on certain proofs as a sign of future success.

Whatever your position on the sale of proofs, it might well be rendered irrelevant in the coming months by the actions of Mr Troy Augusto. Perhaps he will, unwittingly, prove the catalyst that takes proofs from paper to digital formats. We shall wait and see".

Who Saves the Digital Word?

Robin Derricourt, Publisher and Director of the University of New South Wales Press had a 5 minute slot on the ABC Radio National on July 1st, focussing on the printed book in the on-line era. He concluded...

"And when our own civilisation finally ends, as each civilisation does, where will be the repository that maintains what we now have as knowledge, perhaps even through some future dark ages, for later societies to inherit? They will still have Aristotle, or Darwin, but they may not have the 21st century equivalents to read".

Law in Order Times 200

Revealing that digital can also be useful

The Times newspaper has recently published its entire archive of historical Law Reports which date back over 200 years. The documents have been made available to the public through the website Times Online, which covers the full text of every case reported in the newspaper since 1785, including those such as Oscar Wilde, Derek Bentley and the Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial.

Editor of the Times Archive, Rose Wild, stated, “The launch of the archive is a fantastic opportunity to access 200 years of legal history wherever you are, on your laptop. You can search for specific cases and follow the course of the crime, trial, verdict and sentence, for example, and follow how legislation and attitudes have changed.”

National Public Radio

NPR has expanded the book coverage on its website, adding weekly book reviews, and has hired six new book reviewers,and added more features to an already existing excellent lineup of author podcasts, critics' lists and other book-focused content. NPR senior supervising producer Joe Matazzoni noted they Were building up book coverage "because book content really works for our audience" Whither the ABC?

Finding the Perfect Bookshop? But you need Humphrey Bogart?

Andrew O'Hagan comments on the perfect bookshop in the June 28 Online Guardian Books page:

"Great bookshops are the heart of every literary culture, the chambers where life-giving material is exchanged and where writers and readers deposit and find their secrets...Many years ago, when I was young enough to consider sleep to be a dereliction of excitement, it seemed natural to lay my head on the pillows and think of the movie The Big Sleep. One scene in particular seemed to me a riot of adult concerns, the one in the Acme Book Shop, where Marlowe tries out a few fake titles on a bespectacled Dorothy Malone. It's raining outside, Marlowe is spying on a shop across the road. He has a bottle of whisky in his pocket and the girl has paper cups. On every side there are beautiful books filled with dreams and their costs. Even at the edge of that resented sleep I could picture the bookshop as the perfect marriage of heaven and tomorrow".

Quote of the Week (for top public servants)

If you destroy leisure, you destroy civilisation.

John Kenneth Galbraith