I recently gave a talk to the Managers of the various Univeristy Co-op Bookshops in Australia and later this week I will be addressing the Annual Conference in Brisbane of the Australian Campus Booksellers Association. My general theme is on futures in the digital environment for bookshops publishing and libraries. The hot topics at the moment revolve around e-books, e-bookreaders, digital textbooks, global developments in publishing, including the rise of supermarket sales in the UK and US and the learning processes and thus the reading habits of the Google generation.
The supermarket war, which thankfully has not yet broken out in Australia, is discussed below in a piece from the Huffington Post.
"What looks like a simple price war between Amazon, Target, and Walmart over a handful of bestsellers is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in the book business. The larger fight is really over what you get to read. The price war began Oct 15 when Walmart.com dropped its prices drastically on several bestsellers. Amazon.com and Target.com quickly followed suit, and within a couple of days the prices were down to $8.99 and heading lower. At this point, these behemoths were clearly selling those books below cost and engaging in an illegal form of predatory pricing...
The authors affected by this price-slashing were not amused. James Patterson said, "Imagine if somebody was selling DVDs of this week's new movies for $5. You wouldn't be able to make movies." John Grisham's agent added, "I think we underestimate the effect to which extremely discounted bestsellers take the consumer's attention away from emerging writers." (N.Y. Times, Oct. 17, 2009). The American Booksellers Association saw things the same way, saying in a letter to Christine Varney, Head of the Anti-Trust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, that these companies are using books as loss leaders to sell other kinds of merchandise. "The entire book industry is in danger of becoming collateral damage in this war." (Bookweb.org, Oct. 22, 2009)...
Predatory pricing is a means of driving other booksellers out of business. When this happens, the choice of books is one of the first things to suffer. Some readers think that if their favorite store closes they can always buy the book they want somewhere else. But that's a dangerous delusion - the books they want may not be there at all. In fact, these types of disruptions in how books are sold or distributed have a profound effect on what publishers decide to publish in the first place. One of the ironies of the current price war is that it includes The Lacuna, the latest novel by Barbara Kingsolver. But Kingsolver wasn't always a best-selling author. When her first novel The Bean Trees was published in a modest print-run in 1988, independent booksellers recognised it as a literary treasure and sold thousands of copies. After that the chain stores climbed on the bandwagon, but without that first push from independent booksellers Kingsolver's career might never have taken off.
Anyone who loves books should worry that the doors seem to be closing on the Barbara Kingsolvers of tomorrow."
Read more here.
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The Books of Google's Sergey Brin
A posting on the British book blog, Bookride, has been commenting on Sergey Brin's books.
"In an earlier posting Google Books -A Library to Last Forever I suggested that Google co-founder Sergey Brin had accumulated well over 15,000 real books by the time he was 26. He still has a site up from his Stanford days with them all listed - My Favorite Books - a strange but just about credible collection with a heavy emphasis on SF and fantasy fiction although almost all the world's classics are there from Aeschylus to Xenophon. There's Crowley and Huxley, Le Fanu and Lovecraft, Deepak Chopra, most of the Booker authors and an unusual amount of female writers (some romantic or sword and sorcery) for a mere male to possess. I had a vague suspicion that these were not books read by him or even owned by him. How could the poisonous 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' be a favourite book, let alone co-exist with Chris Rock's 'The Bitch Factor' ? Through some data mining aided by Google I ascertained that indeed these were not Sergey's books, but part of an early web search project done while he was at Stanford. Below is the garage in nearby Menlo Park where Google was born and where I had imagined he kept these books.
Sergey Brin did not possess 15,000 books. In 1996/ 1997 he and 3 other Stanford guys were working on something called 'Dual Iterative Pattern Relation Expansion (DIPRE)'. As they put it:
"We begin with a small seed set of (author, title) pairs (in tests we used a set of just five pairs). Then we find all occurrences of those books on the Web (an occurrence of a book is the appearance of the title and author in close proximity on the same Web page). From these occurrences we recognize patterns for the citations of books. Then we search the Web for these patterns and find new books. We can then take these books, find all their occurrences, and from those generate more patterns. We can use these new patterns to find more books, and so forth. Eventually, we will obtain a large list of books and patterns for finding them.
They chose 5 books - Isaac Asimov's Robots of Dawn, David Brin's Startide Rising, James Gleick's Chaos: A New Science, Shakespeare's 'Comedy of Errors' and Dickens's 'Great Expectations'. Each book seems significant in hindsight - and it is likely these data miners in the dawn had great expectations. Anyway it was only the two science fiction books which produced usable patterns (3) and after searching 5 million web pages for these two they found 105 patterns.eventually adding the word 'books' they produced 15,527 titles "with very little bogus data." These are the books listed on the web as 'Sergey Brin's favourite books.' Books were useful for establishing the search code as the author and the title are often close together. To a civilian this stuff is mostly impenetrable but it seems what they were doing was laying the foundations for the code used by Google, truly a licence to print money (so much that he is now contemplating launching a space ship...)
Reading this list without knowing the above it had seemed a strange and wondrous bunch of books. He even had a title that someone asked for this morning - D.E. Harding's mystical classic 'On Having No Head.' It is not impossible for a young person to accumulate 15000 books - if he or she buys 30 books a week from age 15 to 25 and has somewhere to put them they can achieve it with ease. Regular attendance at library sales will help. I have seen such collections, the novelist Hanif Kureishi who used to live near our shop in the early 1980s had about 10,000 paperbacks and he was not yet thirty. I knew a teenage dealer with 20,000 books in a storage unit in the unpromising London suburb of Neasden. So it was entirely credible Brin, a highly educated student, could have this quantity of books.
I first became suspicious when I came across books on the list by the obscure 90s writer Dollie Radford. I knew her books because recently we bought some of her son's library from a relation - he had been a minor poet and a fringe Bloomsbury player (that's him below picnicking with handsome Rupert Brooke and RB's inamorata Noel Olivier and Virginia Woolf in a fetching headscarf.) What was Sergey doing reading Dollie? When I googled the pair of them all was explained. He actually mentions Dollie in one of his papers 'Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web' -noting that 'one of the most surprising results was finding books which were not listed in major online sources such as 'The Young Gardener's Kalendar by Dollie Radford "
http://www.bookride.com/
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Sexist violence sickens crime critic
A leading novelist says graphic depictions of sadistic misogyny have become so extreme she refuses to review any more fiction
Amelia Hill in The UK Observer writes
"Crime fiction has become so violently and graphically anti-women that one of the country's leading crime writers and critics is refusing to review new books. Jessica Mann, an award-winning author who reviews crime fiction for the Literary Review, has said that an increasing proportion of the books she is sent to review feature male perpetrators and female victims in situations of "sadistic misogyny".
"Each psychopath is more sadistic than the last and his victims' sufferings are described in detail that becomes ever more explicit, as young women are imprisoned, bound, gagged, strung up or tied down, raped, sliced, burned, blinded, beaten, eaten, starved, suffocated, stabbed, boiled or buried alive," she said.
"Authors must be free to write and publishers to publish. But critics must be free to say they have had enough. So however many more outpourings of sadistic misogyny are crammed on to the bandwagon, no more of them will be reviewed by me," said Mann, who has written her own bestselling series of crime novels and a non-fiction book about female crime writers.
She said that when a female corpse recently appeared on the jacket of a crime-writing colleague's new book, the author pointed out to her publisher that the victim in the story was actually a man. Mann said the publisher replied: "Never mind that. Dead, brutalised women sell books, dead men don't. Nor do dead children or geriatrics."
More here.
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Manga Library in Japan
Meiji University in Tokyo has announced plans to open a library devoted to the art of manga, the Japanese graphic novel genre.
According to Agence France-Presse, plans for the Tokyo International Manga Library include storage for two million comic books, animation drawings, video games and other artifacts. The library's first phase, to be named after the critic and author Yoshihiro Yonezawa, will house his collection of 140,000 comic books. More here.
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Maggs: History of haunting
As the saying goes: "Any publicity is good publicity." However,the antiquarian booksellers Maggs may have been surprised to discover that last week the bookshop was listed as one of London's most haunted venues,according to The Rare Book Review website.
"A century ago 50 Berkley Square, where the shop is located, was famed for its frequent incidents of haunting. On many occasion, passers-by were startled by eerie light, disembodied screams and the spooky bumping sound of a body being dragged down the staircase. This was the account featured in the Standard:
"On one occasion a new maidservant was given an upstairs room and duly retired to bed," says Richard Maggs. "Two hours later the family were woken by her terrified screams and found her standing in the centre of the room, as rigid as a corpse and with her eyes wide and staring. She was never able to tell what she had seen, for she never regained her sanity. Soon afterwards a young man boasted that he would spend a night in that room and arranged that, should he require assistance, he would ring a bell. No sooner had he gone to the room than the bell began to ring furiously. When his friends raced upstairs they found him dead, his face contorted with terror, open eyes bulging from their sockets."
Following this incident, the house fell into serious neglect. Late one night two sailors broke in to the now derelict house and made their way to the upper room to sleep. They were soon woken by the sound of heavy, determined footsteps, and looked up to see the door bang open and a hideous, shapeless mass oozing into the room. One sailor escaped only to return with a policeman. He found his friend's mutilated corpse impaled on the railings. "The twisted face and bulging eyes were grim testimony to the terror that had caused the man to jump to his death," says Richard."
For more information on Haunted Landmarks in London, click here.
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The Perfect literary gifts
Book cover posters: book jackets as art! Don't just read your favourite books, why not decorate your house with literary art.
Visit www.theliterarygiftcompany.com/
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International Autograph Auctions Ltd is one of the world's top autograph firms. Its October auction of over 750 lots of Autograph Letters, Historical Documents and Signed Photographs saw some remarkable results achieved.
The top ten selling lots were (prices in English pounds)
550 - King Henry VIII - 20,000
336 - Sigmund Freud - 11,000
335 - Sigmund Freud - 4100
468 - Franz Liszt - 4000
725 - Horatio Nelson - 3800
551 - Cardinal Wolsey - 3200
726 - Horatio Nelson - 3100
540 - Lee Harvey Oswald - 3100
777 - Adolf Hitler - 3000
377 - Egon Schiele - 3000
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John Galsworthy is hot, James Joyce is not
How our literary tastes have changed over the years.
John Sutherland writes in the Uk Guardian:
"Eighty years ago the Manchester Guardian (as this paper then was) ran a poll to discover from its readers' votes the "novelists who may be read in 2029". Only another 20 years to go, and the top five are already looking shaky: John Galsworthy (1,180 votes), HG Wells (933), Arnold Bennett (654), Rudyard Kipling (455) and JM Barrie (286).
What of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, DH Lawrence, Henry Green, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Agatha Christie, EM Forster, and Jean Rhys? This distinguished crew either do not figure in the 1929 poll, or clock in with derisory counts (Joyce gets fewer than 10 votes - alongside Max Beerbohm, it's pleasing to note).
Why would our choices be so different from those of our grandparents? Because we see literature as "literature", through the prism of literary criticism and A-level prescriptions. It's "modernism" that was the big bang in the 1920s. Everyone knows that. In 2009.
The feature all the winners have in common is that they were novels of the day. That genre is not to be despised; we have different needs from our future descendants. And we may be prone to the same shortsightedness. At the Man Booker dinner a couple of weeks ago, Jim Naughtie chanced his arm by predicting that the five shortlisted novels would survive immortally in that select 100 or so works which constitute the "canon". He should have thought about the first novel to win a mere 40 years ago (answer at the foot of this column).
Run the Manchester Guardian poll today and the winner would be, as poll after poll has confirmed, Tolkien. In 2109 my guess is the author of the Lord of the Rings will be where he was before the 1960s hippies unaccountably took him up: in that vague ("I've heard of him, but haven't read him") limbo alongside Galsworthy".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2 009/oct/26/how-our-literary-taste s-change
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Mary Beard's blog is now a book
The UK Guardian has a comment "Not every don lives like Mary Beard. Most would struggle to keep up. This enjoyable book is a selection of pithy posts from the past three years of her TLS blog, and it suggests an existence crammed with furious activity. Beard is a professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/25/its-a-dons-life-mary-beard.
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Francesca Simon's top 10 antiheroes
From Just William to Scarlett O'Hara, Tom Ripley to Molesworth, the author of the Horrid Henry books picks out her favourite suspects in a line-up of classic bad behaviour.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/20/francesca-simon-top-10-antiheroes
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Odd book title
The Darjeeling Disaster - its Bright Side. Francis Wesley Warne.
Calcutta. The Methodist Publishing House. 1900.
Libraries Australia report holdings here.