Publishers Weekly report on his new book:

"Harvard University's Library Director starts his treatise on 'the death of the book' this way: I have been invited to so

many conferences on The Death of the Book during the past decade that I think books must be very much alive.

The death notices remind me of one of my favorite graffiti, inscribed in the men's room of the Firestone Library at Princeton University: God is dead. Nietzsche. Then, added in another hand: Nietzsche is dead.

The book is not dead. In fact, the world is producing more books than ever before. According to Bowker, 700,000 new titles were published worldwide in 1998; 859,000 in 2003; and 976,000 in 2007. Despite the Great Recession of 2009 that has hit the publishing industry so hard, one million new books will soon be produced each year.

Yet the general lack of concern for history among Americans has made us vulnerable to exaggerated notions of historic change-and so has our fascination with technology. The current obsession with cellular devices, electronic readers and digitisation has produced a colossal case of false consciousness. As new electronic devices arrive on the market, we think we have been precipitated into a new era. We tout “The Information Age” as if information did not exist in the past. Meanwhile, e-books and devices like the Kindle represent less than 1% of the expenditure on books in the United States.

History shows us that one medium does not necessarily displace another - at least not in the short term.

Manuscript publishing flourished long after Gutenberg's invention; newspapers did not wipe out the printed book; the radio did not replace the newspaper; television did not destroy the radio; and the internet did not make viewers abandon their television sets. Every age has been an age of information, each in its own way. In my new book, The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future [PublicAffairs], I make that very point, because I believe we cannot envisage the future-or make sense of the present-unless we study the past. Not necessarily because history repeats itself or teaches us lessons, but because it can help to orient us when faced with the challenges of new technologies ...

Easily said, I know. Today's publishers, booksellers, authors and librarians struggle against formidable barriers. Anyone who has sweated over a balance sheet or listened to the shoptalk of sales reps is unlikely to have much patience for utopian dreaming. Thus, it helps to put the book's current challenges in perspective. For example, I'm now editing the diary of a sales rep who spent five months on the road in France in 1778, flogging books from horseback. I often think of him when I am challenged to produce a business plan for one of my electronic projects - his horse never made it back to the home office.

Futuristic fantasies will not get you far in the hard world of publishing today, but it also helps to know how tough the business was in earlier information ages".

More here.

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A contemporary view of the book trade comes from Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of The UK Bookseller.

"This is a week in which the polarisation of the trade into winners and losers has never been more apparent. On the one hand we have the gathering momentum of the Dan Brown juggernaut, which Transworld is hoping to make the biggest selling adult hardback since records began. With a bullish initial UK print run of one million copies, there is a huge amount hanging on this single book. Meanwhile, all the signs are that advances for blue-chip authors are escalating. At the other end of the scale, we see mid-list authors having advances cut and books delayed or canceled.

Iain Banks has had the courage to talk openly about taking a cut in his advances, and many others are suffering more quietly as they swallow reductions of a third or more. Within publishing itself, the big houses have lost up to 10% of their staff, with similar if less publicised reductions at smaller publishers, while everywhere we see pay and recruitment freezes biting.

One impact of the recession has been to increase the pace of change. So although the rise of supermarkets and the web, partly at the expense of the high-street chains and local independents, dates back at least five years, it has been accelerated by a greater need for consumers to find value for money. This pressure is now being transmitted to authors by publishers in the form of lower advances. It is not all bad news, however, in that the greater volumes the trade can now deliver for the very biggest authors, partly via the web and the supermarkets, mean their value and hence their advances are going up. Last year the top 50 authors-minus Dan Brown-generated sales of £250m. The top 50’s dominance is reiterated when one considers that the entire top 2000 authors sold just under four times as much (£930m).

This trend of the few getting more and the many getting less has become ingrained in Britain in recent years and now affects most spheres, from executives’ pay to footballers’ salaries. The average pay of the chief exec of a FTSE 100 company has increased by 300% since 1999, compared to just 44% for their staff, meaning they are now paid 128 times as much, compared to 47 times as much a decade ago. Does it matter if the economic model of the book trade is changing from a resemblance to a more egalitarian Swedish model to a winner-takes-all American one? That depends whether you think the trade should be driven by art or by commerce, and that is the oldest debate in bookselling".

More here.

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ReadWriteWeb, has analysed the fivebiggest Web trends of 2009.

"Structured Data. Structured data is rapidly becoming a feature of today’s Web. Companies like Thomson Reuters and Google are enabling data to be structured, and new types of products (like Wolfram|Alpha) will make use of structured data in ways we perhaps can't imagine right now.

The Real-Time Web. This has been probably the most hyped trend of 2009. The Real-Time Web has become a core part of many Internet products this year: Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook, Google, Delicious, Wordpress and many others.

Personalisation. Personalisation has long been a buzzword on the internet. With the glut of information on the web circa 2009, personalisation in this era means providing effective filters and recommendations.

Mobile Web & Augmented Reality. Clearly mobile devices are an increasingly important way to access the Web. What’s perhaps most encouraging however, is the entirely new class of mobile apps we’re seeing. Augmented Reality is the most obvious example. It’s been a big year for mobile, with much promise to come.

The Internet of Things. The fifth and final part of the series is about the Internet of Things, when real world objects (such as fridges, lights and toasters) get connected to the Internet. In 2009, this trend has ramped up and is adding a significant amount of new data to the Web."

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The Dirty Half Dozen: Six Filthy Aristocrats

This may be an oldish web reference, proving that old ones are still good ones, even if not hygienic.

Katherine Ashenburg in the UK Times selected in March the major turning points in the story of hygiene in Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing by Katherine Ashenburg.

"1. The body odour of Henri IV of France (1553-1610) was notorious, as was that of his son Louis XIII. He boasted, "I take after my father, I smell of armpits.

2. Elizabeth I prided herself on bathing once a month, "whether I need it or not."

3. Her successor, James I, reportedly washed only his fingers.

4. Although he did vigorous daily exercise, Louis XIV only took two baths in his long life. He and his age believed he cleaned himself by changing his linen shirt three times a day.

5. It was a toss-up who was dirtier, Samuel Johnson or his biographer James Boswell. When Boswell toured Europe in the 1760s, he reported that the Marquis d’Argens had not taken off his flannel under-waistcoat for four years. When the King of Prussia insisted he remove it, the Marquis obeyed, and pieces of his skin came away with it.

6. When Caroline of Brunswick traveled to England to marry the Prince of Wales, her British escort complained that she "offended the nostrils" by her poor hygiene. He despaired of getting her to wash and change her underwear often enough to meet English court standards".

Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing is published by Profile Books

More here.

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The New York Times Review of Books has a long piece on Norman Podhoretz's new book Why are Jews Liberals?

"In his new book, Norman Podhoretz has some fine exasperated fun with the wildness of interpretation on the Jewish left, and of course spares the Jewish right any culpability for the same sin. So it is worth recalling that a few years ago he published a book about the prophets in which they emerged as the neoconservatives of ancient Israel. Their castigations of the sacrifice of children prompted a reflection on the “pagan practice” of the entry of women into the work force.

Norman Podhoretz loves his people and loves his country, and I salute him for it, since I love the same people and the same country. But this is a dreary book. Its author has a completely axiomatic mind that is quite content to maintain itself in a permanent condition of apocalyptic excitation. His perspective is so settled, so confirmed, that it is a wonder he is not too bored to write. The veracity of everything he believes is so overwhelmingly obvious to him that he no longer troubles to argue for it. Instead there is only bewilderment that others do not see it, too. “Why Are Jews Liberals?” is a document of his bewilderment; and there is a Henry Higgins-like poignancy to his discovery that his brethren are not more like himself. But the refusal of others to assent to his beliefs is portrayed by Podhoretz not as a principled disagreement that is worthy of respect, but as a human failing. Jews are liberals, he concludes, as a consequence of “willful blindness and denial.” He has a philosophy. They have a psychology...

Why Are Jews Liberals? is a potted history followed by a re-potted memoir. The first half of the book, which tells the story of “how the Jews became liberals,” is narrated in “the impersonal voice of a historian - an amateur, to be sure, but one who has relied on a variety of professional authorities for help and guidance.” These chapters are mainly anthologies of congenial quotations. There is something a little risible about the solemnity with which Podhoretz presents encyclopedia articles as evidence of his erudition (“I relied most heavily on one of the great works of 20th-century Jewish scholarship, the Encyclopaedia Judaica”); there is even a reference, slightly embarrassed, to Wikipedia. From his footnotes you would think that the most significant Jewish historian of our time is Paul Johnson. And there is a decidedly insular reliance upon the pages of Commentary, the magazine he edited for 35 years. His parochialism can be startling: Samuel ha-Nagid, the astounding poet, warrior, statesman and scholar in Granada in the 11th century, reminds him of Henry Kissinger! Podhoretz seems to be living the Vilna Gaon’s adage - maybe he can find it in some encyclopedia - that the best way for a man to preserve his purity is never to leave his house".

More here.

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After the fall

"What have we really learned from the worst economic crisis since the war, asks Peter Clarke, while Margaret Atwood, Sebastian Faulks, Fay Weldon and others consider responses to the crash in the UK Guardian.

- Margaret Atwood

As the wave of red ink struck, I was beginning the tour for my book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth, the 2008 Massey lectures. Previous Massey lecturers have included John Kenneth Galbraith, Jane Jacobs, Martin Luther King and Northrop Frye, which is perhaps why I had long dodged the invitation to do them: surely in such illustrious company I'd be a lightweight. But finally, being weak of will, I caved.

I'd been thinking about my subject for a long time. It wasn't only the pass-the-parcel sub-prime mortgages that interested me, however - it was debt as a constant in human societies. Are a sense of fairness, a longing for balance and a drive towards reciprocity - without which no debtor/creditor system can exist - built into the human genome? How central are notions of debt and repayment to religions and the plots of novels? What happens when people don't pay?

Thus, just as the markets plummeted, there I was in the spotlight with a book on debt. In an earlier age I'd have been barbecued at the stake for causing the whole event. People started looking at me funny. There were mutterings about crystal balls; excerpts from Payback appeared in unlikely places, such as the Wall Street Journal.

Businessmen stopped sprinting for the bar when they spotted me and began discussing the deplorable state of affairs, as if I were a serious person. When will things be back to normal? they'd ask. In fact, they're still asking. I've learned not to say, "What is 'normal'?" It does no good. "There need to be fair rules," I murmur sagely. "They have to be enforced." Sometimes I even think I may be right.

- Sebastian Faulks

One good thing about the crisis was that it finished for ever the argument that ran: "You must pay us five million a year, otherwise you'll get people who are no good." We might as well have had school leavers on £5000 a year; they could not have screwed up more comprehensively.

Second, the idea that all aspects of financial services are very complicated and only for the very gifted (and therefore overpaid) is nonsense. There are some very talented people who do specialised mathematical work; there are thousands of very hardworking and decent people who do averagely difficult work. And there are countless people of no discernible ability whatever who place colossal bets on the likely outcomes of work done by the first two groups.

Everybody was to blame. The government, awed by the size of the financial sector, cut it too much slack. Shareholders demanded ridiculous returns from banks. The FSA was incompetent and in any case does not regulate the key areas. The ratings agencies misrated the products because their computer models were wrong. The accountancy firms signed off absurd imbalances, from whose collapse they now profit as undertakers. The bankers, encouraged by their bosses, went for short-term gain, with no concern for how their actions would affect others, including, ironically, their own banks. Hedge funds colluded with banks to give an illusion of risk-limitation by buying credit default swaps on the worst bits of the resliced bonds. Far from providing "cover" for anyone, these swaps became an inverted pyramid of speculation, which helped to crush the whole system.

Deep down I sympathise with the people who invented some of these products. They believed they had squared the circle, found the holy grail - and that must have been exciting: a high return from a low risk, with all downside spread so thin that it could never hurt. Then, they say, the products fell into the hands of barbarians who misunderstood and oversold them. But a moment's humility might have told the inventors that circles can't be squared, that risk-free profit is a chimera. They did not "wash away" the risk; they spread it so thin that they entangled the whole world in it. The sadness is that while the rapacity and foolishness of some people in this sector will now be repaid over a generation of job losses and higher taxes, most of the people responsible are already back in bonus land.

- David Hare

The temptation is to treat the financial crisis as though it were an independent phenomenon, a freak event that can only be interpreted in specialist publications or understood by the trained priesthood of the Harvard Business School. But is it a coincidence that the collapse of the financial system was followed, in this country at least, by a collapse of belief in the political system? Is it chance that the luckless victims of the collapse are never its perpetrators?

We speak of regulation as though it were some abstract, technical phenomenon. The cliché is to say "The financial system got out of control. It needs to be regulated." But what is regulation? Another word for it is "government", and government, until it went to war without the electorate's consent, was once meant to be the expression of the common will.

The priesthood of finance has achieved an extraordinary rhetorical trick in the past 30 years, by managing to argue without significant opposition that the market is pure vitality, and government is nothing but a brake on that vitality. But now even the fundamentalist bishops from Chicago are admitting "Back to the drawing board". Actually, virtue is vitality, and public virtue answers to a sense of justice - something as essential to democracy as prosperity. The big question is: why do we not have a single politician on the front bench of either big party with the guts to start thinking this thing through?

- Robert Peston

A couple of years ago, shortly after the start of the crunch, I thought that the financial and economic crisis would be as significant for the UK and the US as the collapse of communism. I felt we would have to rework the US/UK model of running business, the public sector and the global economy. As it happens, I still think that, although it's taking a little longer than I expected for us to abandon established patterns of thinking, such as the idea that there are no credible alternatives to market-based forms of organisation, or that the best way to incentivise people is with variable remuneration, or that we can thrive indefinitely by consuming more than we produce. A more sustainable model of capitalism is emerging, though painfully slowly.

- Robert Skidelsky

The crisis has vindicated Keynes in three ways. First, he argued that financial markets are inherently unstable, because we cannot have exact knowledge of future events. This insight goes right against today's dominant efficient-market theory, in whose name financial markets were liberated from the controls set up after the Great Depression. The result has been the worst economic crisis since the war.

Second, Keynes showed that when market economies fail, they do not recover automatically, but have to be stimulated out of their trauma. The "stimulus packages" in place today are pure Keynes. Without them, I am convinced that the world would have slid towards another Great Depression. People who now harp on about the dangers of inflation and the burden of future public debt have a duty to explain what their alternative is.

Finally, Keynes argued that excessively unequal income distribution greatly increases the danger of financial instability, leading to economic collapse. He favoured policies of income redistribution to increase what he called the "propensity to consume". Instead, we have allowed median incomes to stagnate and wealth to pile up in the hands of a financial oligarchy, with economic growth increasingly reliant on financial speculation and over-borrowing. In thinking about how to re-balance our economic life, Keynes remains the guide of choice.

- Fay Weldon

My response to the crash was to write a novel, which was published earlier this month. I looked ahead four years to what I thought was coming, and nothing that has happened since has made me change my mind. After the crunch was to come the squeeze, then in quick order the recovery, the fall, and by 2012 the bite. Currencies have collapsed, nations live by bartering, Europe has disintegrated under the weight of mass unemployment, inflation, power cuts and hunger (the wheat fungus Ug99 has spread and destroyed crops worldwide), nationalism is resurgent, parliament is discredited and two elections on we are governed by the National Unity Government, a self-appointed committee composed of psychoanalysts and sociologists. The good news: global warming has solved itself, industrial output and travel being at a standstill. Environmentalists rejoice!

Writers must address economics: the days when we could afford to ignore them are over. We should consider ourselves lucky to be around in such lively times".

More here.

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The Edgar Allan Poe Collection

This digital archive was launched in Austin to accompany the 2009 Poe Bicentennial exhibition, “From Out That Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe” is a joint venture of the Ransom Center and the Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia. The digital collection incorporates images of all Poe manuscripts and letters at the Ransom Center with a selection of related archival materials, two books by Poe annotated by the author, sheet music based on his poems, and portraits from the Ransom Center collections. Poe’s manuscripts and letters are linked to transcriptions on the website of the Poe Society of Baltimore.

Most of the items in the exhibition from the Harry Ransom Center collections once belonged to William H. Koester (1888-1964). Koester, a resident of Baltimore, began collecting first editions and manuscripts of Poe in the 1930s; his major acquisition was the collection of the Richmond Poe scholar and collector J. H. Whitty. In addition to the manuscripts of The Domain of Arnheim, The Spectacles and some of Poe’s most famous poems, the Koester collection includes many letters written by and to Poe, books belonging to Poe (including the author’s annotated copies of the Tales and Poems and Eureka), and a large group of sheet music for songs based on Poe’s works. The Koester Collection was acquired by the Center in 1966."

http://research.hrc.u texas.edu/poedc/

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Q&A: Thomas Keneally in the UK Guardian has some fascinating responses

When were you happiest?

I'd like to say when I was 20 or even 40, but I'm afraid it has been in extended phases since I turned 60. Like all the young, I had too many reasons to be unhappy earlier.

Which living person do you most admire?

It's a test to admire the living. Maybe Seamus Heaney.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

Impetuosity.

Wha t is the trait you most deplore in others?

Intolerance of people. I no doubt dislike it because I have some of it in me, but what I'm talking about is ethnic myth-making about a group, glib but deadly regurgitations of hysteric myths. Really, really hate it.

What makes you depressed?

The sins and gaucheries of the past. Then the decay of life generally.

Who would play you in the film of your life?

Bob Hoskins or Danny DeVito.

What is your favourite smell?

The sea.

What is your favourite word?

"Illimitable."

What would you most like to wear to a costume party?

A Napoleon costume.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?

Some working-class residue of puritanism makes it impossible for me to eat ice cream in public.

To whom would you most like to say sorry, and why?

My father, because we were mutually uncomprehending of each other.

What does love feel like?

In love, death hath no dominion. You don't give a damn about the universe or our eroding solar system. All is in benign and eternal and unquestioning orbit.

When did you last cry, and why?

I was recently in Jaipur talking to an American journalist, and we were discussing how brutal war wounds are in reality as compared with the gallant, lightly bandaged ones seen on war memorials. I spoke of the shock of the first badly wounded person I saw, a 19-year-old Eritrean girl torn apart in the pelvis by AK47 rounds, and the pathetic field dressings applied to try to staunch the mess, and - there at the breakfast table - I began to cry like a drain.

How often do you have sex?

Need I explain that all Australian men between 18 and 80 have sex at least twice a night? We are, however, confused by the total amnesia women harbour about this statistic.

What song would you like played at your funeral?

The Parting Glass. It's an Irish song of refined sentiment, including the idea that the first victim of your flaws is yourself.

What is the most important lesson life has taught you?

Epictetus the Stoic said something like, "Instead of wishing that things were the way you desire, wish they were the way they are and all will do well with your life." That's what I try.

Tell us a secret.

I like older women, but now they're younger than I am.

More here.

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The most popular pirated digital books according to the news website FreakBits

From the Kama Sutra to The Lost Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, the most popular pirated digital books are an eclectic mix of sex and reference which bear no resemblance to conventional bestseller charts.

According to the news website FreakBits, the most downloaded book on BitTorrent so far this year is the Kama Sutra, with the top 10 also taking in The Complete Idiot's Guide to Amazing Sex and Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England!

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Rare Sports books

R.M.Healey on the UK Bookride blog writes "Now that England have regained the Ashes, dealers in cricketiana will doubtless be rubbing their hands in anticipation of the expected surge of interest in cricket-related material. The football season has begun too, but although someone paid £19,000 in 2006 for an FA Cup Final programme of 1889 ( a record for any footballiana ), collectors of cricket books have always had the reputation of being more discerning than their soccer-mad counterparts, and also more willing to shell out big bucks . Most club chairmen would rather put their money into buying a new centre half than building up a collection of late Victorian programmes. Collectors, wealthy or otherwise, of cricket books seem to be more obsessive. In October 2005, for instance, the private library of the fanatical collector Desmond Eager brought some of the most ardent cricket fans to Christies’. Even those who expected strong bidding were astounded at the prices fetched. Celebs in the arts and entertainment figure strongly among the ranks of collectors and I suspect that agents for some (like Tim Rice and Charlie Watts ) may have been responsible for many of the inflated prices on this occasion. It goes without saying that, with a few exceptions, post First World War items are easier to find and very much cheaper, although volumes of Wisden (especially the 1916 issue ) that listed the short careers of those who perished in the trenches command very high prices. Cricket books can be found in the most unlikely places, but generally, I found abebooks a disappointing source, especially of the more obscure material This is possibly because the site is dominated by American dealers and few dealers or collectors across the pond are interested in the game. They don’t know what they are missing. We are the Barmy Army!"

More here.

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Weird Book Room

AbeBooks' brand new Weird Book Room "is a celebration of everything that's bizarre, odd and downright weird in books. Crazy cookbooks, unusual animal books, how to books that will teach skills you never knew you needed, books about hilarious hobbies, and books about every strange aspect of life you could possibly imagine and a few things you can't imagine.

Their Weird Book of the Week - Ductigami: The Art of the Tape by Joe Wilson

Duct tape is possibly the most useful single object in the entire world outside of the wheel and Swiss army knives. Joe Wilson, a modern design visionary if ever there was one, shows us how to rip, cut and fold duct tape to make 18 amazing projects, including a wallet, a barbecue apron, a lunchbox, a tool belt, a cell phone holder, a baseball cap, rain-gear for pets, a toilet roll cover and Halloween masks.We all need a lunch box constructed from duct tape. If NASA insists that every Space Shuttle mission carries at least one roll of duct tape then you need this book to satisfy your creative urges. Buy Ductigami: The Art of the Tape - make something wonderful and gray".

More here.

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ODD BOOK TITLE OF THE WEEK

Arthur Washburn Brown. Sexual Analysis of Dickens' Props. New York. Emerson Books, 1971.

Debbie Campbell from the National Library reports holdings at http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an5479 6. With four copies in Australia, Canberrans will be interested to know that two copies are in Canberra; the National Library and ANU.