Mark Scott said that he originally was not a "twitterer" and wondered how much of value could be transmitted in 140 characters. But now he was a convert and twittered to the conference in the tea break. Scott, however, was also using twittering as an audience reaction to the ABC and said that the twittering that went on in last week's Q&A on internet filtering had been large, while the Gruen Factor also recorded heavy twitters. Scott managed to side track the Canberra Times questioner on the death of newspapers, but said that the most important piece of information he had received from his predecessor was "don't muck about with the Bill on Saturday night".

Year's Oddest Book Title Prize Goes to Dairy Carton Book

The NYTimes reports "To those outside dairy (or container) circles, a book called “The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-Milligram Containers of Fromage Frais” tends to provoke more questions than it resolves. Such as: Why fromage frais? And: “60-Milligram” - is that a misprint? This is the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, sponsored by The Bookseller magazine...The work, actually a statistical report rather than a proper book, was written by Philip M. Parker, a professor of marketing at the French campus of Insead, the international business school. He uses econometric models to publish niche reports in the thousands. “This may turn out to be the highest award that report will ever win,” he said in an e-mail message. The work beat stiff competition from the four actual books on the shortlist: “Curbside Consultation of the Colon,” “The Large Sieve and Its Applications,” “Strip and Knit With Style” and “Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring.”

...In an e-mail message, Dr. Brooks D. Cash, who lost for “Curbside Consultation of the Colon,” part of a medical series, said that he was “honored to be in such august company.” Dr. Cash, chief of gastroenterology at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., added, “I think being beaten by someone with that title is really cheesy."

Psycho music sold

Among the books and manuscripts sold at Bonhams on the 24th March is part of the autograph full score for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film Psycho, The pre sale price was estimated at £30,000-40,000. The manuscript, in all 20 pages, 10 in full autograph, comprises the key elements of Herrmann’s music for Psycho, as reassembled by him for the concert suite 'Psycho: A Narrative for Orchestra' in 1968. It includes the Murder in the Shower scene ('The Murder') known for the infamous screeching strings, and the Psycho 'Prelude', (with the imprimatur of his signature and date of composition).

AUSTRALIAN BOOK TRADE CRITICAL OF PC DRAFT REPORT

The Australian Bookseller and Publisher reports that many publishers and literary organisations have responded critically to the draft report from the Productivity Commission on copyright restrictions on the parallel importation of books, although not all in the book industry agree. Comments at:

Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence

Shelley King in The Times Higher Education Supplement reviews Jenny Holt’s book, Public School Literature, Civic Education and the Politics of Male Adolescence.

"What Holt makes clear is that the nature of school sport and the conceptualisation of the adolescent body changes radically as the 19th century progresses. Tom Brown’s Victorian world of games organised by boys for their own amusement gives way to a world of athletics designed by masters to discipline the boys’ bodies... As Alec Waugh describes it, sport was cultivated ‘in the belief that the boy who is keen on games will not wish to endanger his health, and that the boy who has played football all the afternoon and has boxed between tea and lock-up will be too tired to embark on any further adventures’."

The final ringtone of death

The UK Guardian reports a team of researchers is investigating the changing social trends displayed at modern funerals

"Tastes in funerals do seem to be changing. Alongside live jazz and a bagpiper, the academics have heard a lot of Abba, the Beatles, Elvis and Barry White. Only three of the funerals so far included hymns sung by the congregation. One family chose Red Red Robin, says Adamson, "because the deceased had been a Hull Kingston Rovers [rugby] supporter, and at the funeral mourners wore the red and white [team] colours. Another family chose Walk Through This World With Me because it had been the ringtone on the deceased's mobile phone...Humour in services seems to play an increasing part. "The bereaved families welcomed this as a lightening of the proceedings. It usually came about from a family anecdote," says Holloway. "One [interviewee] said that the things she remembered most about the funeral were the fact that '[it] got a laugh' and 'the fact that everybody was crying'."

What is the purpose of a book review? And are book reviewers writing anything useful?

After compiling my list of the top 20 most annoying book reviewer clichés, Michelle Kerns indulged herself by surfing about the Internet in search of fellow book reviewers in thrall to reviewerspeak. The shocker came when she realized at least 95% of the reviews don't say anything useful at all.

The UK Guardian reports that Britain's libraries face an uncertain future. Many are threatened with closure, others seem more interested in yoga and coffee. Rachel Cooke argues we should fight to keep reading at the heart of our culture.

The UK Guardian reports ten of the best examples of unrequited love

From The Way We Live Now to Enduring Love

The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope

Roger Carbury is good-looking, kind, principled, solvent and every inch a gentleman. He loves his impecunious cousin Hetta and offers her his hand and his lovely old house in Suffolk. She likes, admires and trusts him, but ... she does not love him. Instead she fancies his best friend. Poor Roger fumes and mopes before Trollope makes him help his rival to get the girl.

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan

McEwan describes what it is like being the object of unwanted devotion. Joe tries to save a man in a ballooning accident, only to find that one of his fellow would-be rescuers, Jed, has become fixated on him. Other ages called it unrequited passion; we call it stalking. More at:

The April 9 issue of The New York Review of Books has articles now up online, including 'A Hell on Earth' By Pico Iyer.

"The situation inside Tibet is almost like a military occupation," I heard the Dalai Lama tell an interviewer last November, when I spent a week traveling with him across Japan. "Everywhere. Everywhere, fear, terror. I cannot remain indifferent." Just moments before, with equal directness and urgency, he had said, "I have to accept failure. In terms of the Chinese government becoming more lenient [in Chinese-occupied Tibet], my policy has failed. We have to accept reality."

The ABR website provides a list of End of the World Literature - Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

This include, Blindness by José Saramago (1995)

This novel is worthy of consideration even though it doesn’t detail a global disaster. Saramago’s acclaimed story deals with an epidemic of blindness, like Day of the Triffids, in a single unknown city and how everything swiftly falls to pieces. Turned into a movie in 2008, Blindness helped earn Saramago the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.

And On the Beach by Nevil Shute (1957)

World War III has devastated the Northern Hemisphere with nuclear warheads. The fallout is advancing toward Australia but a Morse code signal emerges from the United States. A submarine heads north in a search for survivors. The characters exhibit acceptance of their fate - suicide is preferred to the desperate bid for survival seen in most post-apocalyptic fiction.

The "Arabic Booker"

The UKUK Guardian reports "The winner of this year's International Prize for Arabic Fiction, dubbed the "Arabic Booker" and worth $60,000, is a writer who has been denounced by religious authorities in Egypt. Attempts were made to have his novel - about religious fanaticism - banned. Yet, contrary to some expectations, the outcry was led not by a mullah but a Christian bishop.

Azazeel, by Youssef Ziedan, purports to be the memoirs of a fifth-century doctor-monk named Hypa, a passionate lover and tortured soul, tormented by the persecution of pagans and heretics after Christianity became the official religion of Roman Egypt in AD391.When the novel was published in Egypt last year, the Coptic church's number two, Bishop Bishoy, said the Muslim-born Ziedan had "intended to destroy authentic Christian doctrine" - not least with his portrayal of St Cyril as a fanatic who kills Jews and pagans.

Ziedan, 50, a scholar and the founding director of the new Library of Alexandria's manuscripts centre, dismisses the priest's view of his novel as "simply wrong. It's not against Christianity but against violence, especially violence in the name of the sacred." Bishop Bishoy, whom he still considers a friend, "hadn't then read the novel. I'm still waiting for him to read it peacefully...Some Muslim sheikhs also weighed in against the novel, he says, for "mixing Christianity and Islam. For me, it's the same substance. There are many links between religions, and no need to kill for them."

Quote of the Week

"Broadway is a branch of the narcotics world run by actors". Bertolt Brecht

Odd Book Title

How to cook husbands. By Elizabeth Worthington. Dodge. 1899.

Debbie Campbell reports that the record exists in Libraries Australia, but without a holding.

US holdings in WorldCat, click here.

Pun of the Week

The Astronomer Royal was once asked about flying saucers and replied "No comet".