Obits for Octavia Butler are beginning to roll in.

Ryan Bigge gets a last, surprisingly low-key word on his blog, summarizing the whole fiasco with Leah McLaren.

* As I get older, I find that anonymous (or non-anonymous) critiques and even cheap shots bother me far less. In fact, I was heartened to learn that some people don’t care about either me or her — or, even better, have no inkling of who either of us are. That is healthy. That is good. That puts things in the proper perspective. As another person commented, this is a topic interesting only to a select group of Toronto media folk who live within a 10 or 15 block radius of each other. Here here.

My question is this: if they all live so close together, how come this thing never made it to bricks and molotov cocktails through bay windows, huh? Were you guys holding back? I think you were… Like when you bestow a noogie on a beloved fellow gradeschooler in the playground because you can’t express the awkward feelings coursing through your pre-pubescent body any other way. You don’t really want to hurt, but you do want to muss that hair. And sometimes, yes, there are tears.

Journalists are starting to find out that there’s a reason most of the internet is free…

The Internet, as more and more users discover, is not exactly the Library of Congress.

Just because you find information online, and on a credible-looking website, does not mean you can trust the source.

Luckily we aren’t credible-looking, so you KNOW you can trust us. The Star chides the Globe and Mail for pointing this week to an internet video “on the Hamas website” that seems to show very hardline views from Hamas (really?) and opining that Hamas will never moderate itself and the international community should act. But further digging reveals that the video may never have appeared on the Hamas website.

We’re supposed to be professional skeptics who check and recheck before citing sources. It’s our job to dig a little deeper, follow the links and dig some more to see where they all lead.

We all make mistakes of course. Deadline pressures, maddeningly slow computers and a general tendency to trust the Web pages belonging to groups one deems credible — all these conspire to lead us down the wrong cyber path.

Aside from everything else, I love how he tucked a note to his bosses in here… Um, upgrade the computers, TorStar. And this is the first time I’ve seen mention of a mainstream journalist crediting a blogger-type with breaking a story. Thanks.

The people who wrote Dan Brown’s book get their day in court.

Illustrator Michael Cho breaks down the process of creating a window display to advertise a couple of books — one of them his — for Pages bookstore in downtown Toronto. Very educational. (From Drawn)

No, not the X-Wing vs the Viper (or the Tardis). Clive Thompson thinks the video game has eclipsed film as the better vehicle for the creation of sci fi. Or, depending on how much you fetishize it, hot sci fi action. No, not the X-Wing vs the Viper (or the Tardis).

Turn turn turn. Maisonneuve is honing its focus from an international magazine to a city magazine devoted to Montreal. Turn turn turn. And a time for every purpose under heaven. Just not, you know, the whole international magazine purpose. That’s an expensive purpose. (Alternate headline: “Maisonneuve puts its mouth where its money is”)

According to the Independent, you just have to be nice.

Rankin, McCall Smith and Binchy are famously nice to all they meet, as are Joanna Trollope and Jacqueline Wilson. They are prepared to wait until the last fan’s copy of their latest book is signed, and to visit libraries, schools and book festivals in the back of beyond to talk to tiny audiences of enthusiastic readers who will spread the word about them. The result is huge loyalty among booksellers and librarians who are willing to push their work.

Hell, I can fake that.

By James Pinocchio, published by Regan Books.

Said Regan: “Mr. Pinocchio’s story, which he co-wrote with bestselling ghostwriter, screenwriter and studmuffin Pablo F. Fenjves, stretches credibility to the breaking point, but the unbelievable pain, the dirty sex, and the endless amounts of girlish crying make it all worthwhile—and eventually lead to Redemption and Healing (though not for Mr. Pinocchio).”

Twenty-five thousand real, non-fiction, buckeroos to the fella in the big smile. J. B. MacKinnon wins the day with Dead Man in Paradise.

This is going to be fun. Let’s watch the most powerful nerd blog in the world take on an internet security company that’s trying to censor them. My money is on the double B, yo.

HarperCollins moves online.

When HarperCollins’ Amistad imprint wanted a fresh, new way to promote Lolita Files’ fifth novel, Sex.Lies.Murder.Fame, it jumped on the hottest promotional bandwagon in publishing and created its first online book video.

“Consumers are online,” says Amistad’s Gilda Squires, “so that’s where we want to reach them.”

You can view the video here. Meh.

You heard it here first. Again.

E-books are a boon for publishers. While the cost of the content (author, editors, layout artists) remains the same, the cost of production and delivery obviously drops significantly. There’s no paper to buy, no shipping charges to pay, no worries about how big a production run should be.

When they sell you a book, they can easily include, say, 10 pages each from other titles you might like. And they could offer long excerpts of all their titles to bookstores (or whomever sells them) so customers can “browse.”

E-books are a boon to authors as well. For one, self-publishing just got easy, and a self-published book can look as good as a professional one. They also allow publishers to take a chance on unknown writers because of the lower cost of production.

John McGahern, one of my favourite authors, has written a memoir of his growing up. All Will Be Well. Please excuse that this is a review; I felt it had enough of the man to warrant linking to. I saw McGahern and Alistair MacLoed in conversation at Harbourfront a few years ago. It was like having tea with the best granddads in the world. McGahern talked about how his novels all start out at about 800 pages and then he whittles them down and down. The two lovely, crusty veterans spoke their disdain for writers who spend all day at it — MacLoed said four hours at the most and McGahern thought two was just right. Good advice, that.

A happy man, that Samuel Beckett. Here are some friends and acquaintances who remember him fondly:

• One thing that he said was, ‘You know, Francis, my days are filled with trivia.’

• Beckett also said to me that he deeply regretted calling it ‘Godot’, because everybody interpreted it as God. He said it had nothing to do with God.

• Sam told me (and I know he’s told other people) that he remembers being in his mother’s womb at a dinner party, where, under the table, he could remember the voices talking.

Remember how I posted on Friday about the guy winning the lottery? This is even better. Happy Monday.

It doesn’t matter what Shakespeare looked like. I’m glad we’ve all finally arrived at this point. It mists me up, it really does. To agree that looks can be deceiving. How DEEP is that, man? I love you guys.

Copyright lawyers are hoping that they make a lot of money on this. Google’s been slapped in California for publishing imagery that doesn’t belong to them. Come on guys, sharesies. You can have the intellectual property for five minutes and then Google can have it for five minutes. I don’t want to hear another whiney word out of either of you, or I’m taking it away, and neither of you can play with it. One. Two. I get to ten and you’ll be sorry.

“I think the judge’s decision completely sets up the case the authors have against Google,” said Karen S. Frank, a partner at Howard Rice Nemerovski Canady Falk & Rabkin, a San Francisco law firm, who is not involved in the lawsuit.

In the recent case, Judge A. Howard Matz of United States District Court for the Central District of California, said Google’s use of thumbnail-sized reproductions in its image search program violated the copyright of Perfect 10, a publisher of X-rated magazines and Web sites, because it undermined that company’s ability to license those images for sale to mobile phone users.

Hey guys, with great power, comes great responsibility.

Accused of stealing. They’ll cut off his hands if he’s found guilty. His accusers, who could coincidentally be accused of pettiness, will have their noses cut off, to spite their faces. I always find it odd how people get so indignant that their property has been stolen only once they’ve discovered the potential worth of it.

The case threatens the UK opening of the film based on the blockbuster, set for May 19, and could cost his publishers, Random House, millions in damages if it succeeds. Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who wrote The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail with Henry Lincoln, are suing Random House – coincidentally their publishers as well – over the book, which they claim stole the whole “architecture” of their non-fiction work.

Stealing architecture? Love it.

Several blogs are reporting the death of Octavia Butler from what might have a been a concussion from a fall outside her home. Does anyone have any more infomation? If it’s true, she would have only been 58 or so and was recently enjoying a renaissance of interest in her work. [Update: There were no links to mainstream news stories at the time of posting, but subsequently the news is starting to filter down to the newspapers -- Thanks Smilodon]

Here’s an interesting follow-up to our Brokeback Quailgate post. It turns out the magazine was set to run a cover about New Orleans before Cheney went hunting, and the original cover was killed. Ah, but nothing ever stays dead in the era of blogs. (From Neil Gaiman)

The Philip K. Dick android has disappeared.

Philip K Dick is missing.

Not the American science fiction writer whose novels spawned hit films such as Blade Runner and Total Recall — he died more than 20 years ago — but a state-of-the-art robot named after the author.

The quirky android, was lost in early January while en route to California by commercial airliner.

This is obviously a hoax. We all know Philip K. Dick wasn’t real.

In a recent post, Illustration Art said the current darlings of the graphica scene, Chris Ware and Art Spiegelman, can’t draw. This touched a nerve with readers, and Illustration Art responded with a more detailed analysis of Ware’s work.

50 years ago, there were a thousand key line and paste up artists working for subsistence wages in commercial art studios across the country. They would sit at a drawing board with a T-square and a triangle, creating ads for the backs of comic books and other lofty venues. Virtually all of them could draw as well as Chris Ware. Many could draw better. But because that was an era with different standards, they would have laughed at the suggestion that their drawings were good enough to hang in a museum. Today those key liners have all disappeared, swept aside by technology and the invisible hand of Adam Smith. But Chris Ware is hailed for the same mechanical drawing skills.

(From Design Observer)

How do you get away with swearing on television? Make up new, as-yet-uncensored-by-the-paranoid-moral-majority-zealots euphemisms.

“Why this is happening now in prime time is because pressure groups are paying more attention to the family hour,” says Jay. “The other tension is the effort on the part of broadcasters to offer a more appealing, sexy or emotional product that will compete with cable, DVD and movie rental materials.”

Cultural mores have changed dramatically in the past 30 years. In 1981, actor Charles Rocket used the F-word on Saturday Night Live and was later fired. Nearly 16 years later, SNL’s Norm MacDonald let the word enter his Weekend Update bit, but there was no fallout.

But today’s rise in euphemisms also reflects a growing paranoia about regulatory crackdowns.

What the frak are they all afraid of, Apollo?

Charles Taylor Prize for Non-fiction nominees discuss the James Frey fiasco.

Mac Donald, a native of Halifax who worked for years in TV programming in Toronto, said she in fact has some sympathy for Frey. “I can’t blame the guy, because it’s so hard to be heard by publishers down here. The lies are inexcusable, and he has messed things up, but I understand getting sucked into the vortex.”

And then there’s wee Dougie McDougois who wrote Syrup in the Snow, the story of his addiction to Du Maurier cigarettes, his eventual descent from Canadian Club rye to bar browns, his Tourettes-like habit of yelling “Eh, fuck hyou HANGLISH, eh?!”, and the rockbottom night he spent in a Sudbury drunk tank talking with a strange little shaman-like Native man who disappeared with the first light of day, leaving behind only his earthy wisdom…. and hope.

Without getting dressed this snowy Saturday morning. Ninja favourite Lynn Coady reads from her new book at the Globe.

The character we normally play here drips with acerbic cynicism, but I can only be genuinely overjoyed at this distinctly non-bookish video.

Jamaica Kincaid profiled in a Yalie newspaper. (From Black Ink)

Zadie is up for another award. Is it news anymore when she’s nominated?

Lisa Ravary, the Canadian magazine doyenne, is profiled, for some reason, at the Globe. Most interesting here is the comparison between Canadian anglo/franco magazine cultures.

Arguably, Ravary is the most pivotal force in Canadian consumer publishing today. And in both official languages — probably no one else more closely experiences this country’s two cultures of magazine journalism.

One obvious difference, she notes: Quebec has a much stronger celebrity culture than English Canada. Quebec readers spend $3-million a month on locally produced celebrity magazines. Some editions sell as many as 150,000 copies on newsstands. By contrast, few English-Canadian magazines break into the five digits on newsstands; most survive by subscription or controlled circulation. No wonder Rogers Media has turned to a Quebecker in its relentless drive to increase English-language newsstand sales (catnip for advertising dollars).

Another difference: French-language women’s magazines have tended in recent years to be edgier than their English counterparts. Ravary produced her first mainstream magazine article, on plastic surgery and breast reduction, in 1981, submitting it to both Châtelaine and Chatelaine. The Montreal edition bought it; the Toronto editors’ rejection note said the subject was “inappropriate.”

You’re going to cost us our audience! Technology is killing the workday. Hm. And here I thought it was lack of inherited work ethic.

Workers completed two-thirds of their work in an average day last year, down from about three-quarters in a 1994 study, according to research conducted for Day-Timers, an East Texas, Pennsylvania-based maker of organizational products.

The biggest culprit is the technology that was supposed to make work quicker and easier, experts say.

Um, ha ha. Oh, I get what they’re saying! By this, of course, they don’t mean the web, dear readers, they mean… um… ha ha… your email. Which is why you should only communicate with the outside world through our discussion boards. I’m really just thinking of you.

Are all the same. So it’s really him. Unless, of course, he was another he or a she or even some other he he never knew but he fronted for so he or she could write without anyone knowing him or her or the him/her he had hidden behind him. My eyelashes hurt. (Also, he apprarently died of lymphatic cancer.) (Last link from Bookslut)

When you Frey them… damn, I’m really running out of smart-mouthed remarks. James Frey has now lost his Riverhead Books deals. It’s enough to drive a guy back to crack. And by crack I mean, Dr. Pepper.

He says he’s going to use it to flesh out his articles.

What I think I’d like to do is to use this forum to elaborate and comment on and correct and amend things that I have already written. If you look on my website, on the “Blink” page, you’ll see an expanded notes and bibliography, which mostly consists of copies of emails sent to me by readers. Well, I think I’d like to start posting reader comments for everything I write, and this is a perfect place for that. There are also times when I think I’ve made mistakes, or oversights, and I’d like to use this space to explain myself and set things right. Let me give you a small, immediate example. In my October 10th article for the New Yorker, “Getting In” I quoted from a fascinating study done a few years ago on the graduates of the elite Hunter College elementary school in Manhattan. But I didn’t get give the title of the book or its authors. Why? Well, the New Yorker is not an academic publication: we don’t footnote every source the way people do in scholarly journals. There are all kinds of things that any of us who write for the New Yorker read and that influence our writing but that we never acknowledge, because we don’t run bibliographies at the end of articles. That’s a constraint of the popular magazine business, and whether sources get mentioned is up to the judgment of writers and editor. In this case, though, I think I erred. I quoted from the book. I should have referenced it.

The Times Online has a shortlist of 15 artists for a new edition of Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. The illustrations can be seen here.

I used to think Helnwein’s Donald Ducks were the craziest cartoon mash-ups I’d ever seen, with the possible exception of Ron English’s Mickey Mouse-Marilyn Monroe hybrid (possibly NSFW). That was before I saw Corrado Mastantuono’s Donald Duck-Tintin comic (I don’t understand it because it’s in Italian, but that makes me like it even more). (From Drawn)

Further to our earlier post: what was Melville reading?

The project’s Check-List provides access to its online editions of Melville’s marginalia, with bibliographical entries of surviving copies supplying links to two related features: (1) a critical introduction to the copy and its marginalia, and (2) an exact transcription of the type areas and marginalia of every page marked or inscribed by Melville. As a collection of textual and signal transcriptions, Melville’s Marginalia Online is a scholarly edition rather than a digital photographic archive of the actual pages in Melville’s original copies.

HAWT! If’n I’d made this site, I’d have snuck a copy of Penthouse Forum in there somewheres. (From Incoming Signals)

Lakehead University, known for its degree programs in advanced basket weaving and recreational drinking, restricts campus WIFI use because, as president Fred Gilbert says, “The jury is still out on the impact that electromagnetic forces have on human physiology.” I think maybe his phrenologist told him this. I’m not saying he may not be right, I’m just saying there’s a reason Lakehead is known as Last Chance U.

A first in environmentally friendly books. Wait a minute. What’s so environmentally friendly about a plastic book? Here’s how the inventor, William McDonough, who incidentally has two kudos – first plastic book and first self-published plastic book – justifies, I mean explains, it:

He said that he chose to publish this book with plastics for the purpose of recycling and repeated use of resources. Books printed with papers not only consume a lot of lumber, but also give rise to pollution to the nature due to printing ink on the paper when recycled. If the books are printed with plastics, they can be reutilized after the printing ink on the plastics is disposed of in an environment-friendly chemical method.

The world just got dumber.

Some tips for the author whose book is getting no publicity. E.g. You. (From Slushpile)

A compare and contrast essay. A community college dean in the US happened to see both movies in one weekend (how, fellow father, how?) and decided to write a freshman composition “compare and contrast” essay for fun.

Anyway, the monkey follows the man back to New York City. They get into alot of adventures. Just when The Man and Drew Barrymore are about to hook up, George starts firing off a rocket. This is called symbolism. Then they go around the world again and again (The Man and George, not The Man and Drew).

Brokeback Mountain is about two gay cowboys. We know they’re gay cause they have sex. Also cause they don’t like Anne Hathaway, Michele Williams, and that chick who played Lindsay on Freaks and Geeks and is on ER now. They both wear cowboy hats, but not yellow ones.

Very cute. (From Bourgeois Nerd)

The title of a new book of Canadian poetry? No, it looks as though a death mask found in a ragpicker’s shop, c. 1842, belonged to none other than the corpse of old Bill himself. (I think this article has accidentally been truncated. Anyone have a paper copy to tell us how much we missed?)

Google claims its ads, as part of the book scanning program, will generate income; but for whom?

Some in the industry wonder whether Google’s long-term aim isn’t to set itself up as a sort of instant publisher; that once it has all those books in its index, it could generate a print-on-demand shop that would bypass publishers, shipping a book to you even though it is officially out of print

Not for me, that’s for sure.

The hotel servicing authors for the British Book Awards has asked for an “exclusion zone” between two shortlisted authors who have previously gone at it like hyper school kids.

Literary award ceremonies, generally speaking, are not particularly boisterous affairs. This year’s British Book Awards may, however, be an exception. The London hotel hosting the event, Grosvenor House, has asked for an “exclusion zone” between two of the shortlisted authors, Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson, on account of their now legendary personal feud having erupted into fisticuffs at a previous ceremony two years ago. Both men are up for the WH Smith Book of the Year award, Morgan for his memoir, The Insider, and Clarkson for The World According to Clarkson.

I didn’t know most authors could lift their arms above the height needed for a tip of the flask, much less throw a hook. I wonder if it was a slap fight.

Profiled at the CBC.

The Literary Saloon reports on the business of literary estates. The notion of it made me so sad I couldn’t even read the articles. But hey, it must be comforting to starving writers to know that someone may eventually make some money off their creations.

By Canadian actor Sarah Polley.

Canadian actress Sarah Polley is directing her first feature-length film, based on a short story by Canadian writer Alice Munro.

The film, Away from Her, will star Julie Christie, Gordon Pinsent, Olympia Dukakis, Wendy Crewson, Alberta Watson and Michael Murphy.

Polley wrote the script based on Munro’s short story The Bear Came Over the Mountain.

Christie plays a woman married to a philanderer, played by Pinsent. She develops Alzheimer’s and is placed in a nursing home, where she begins to forget him and falls for another man, played by Murphy.

Filming will start in Ontario on April 7. Atom Egoyan, who directed Polley in The Sweet Hereafter, is executive producer.

Soon they’ll be serving lattes at Starbucks, putting English grads everywhere out of work. Actually, they’re already doing that. One summer, when I was a lowly grad student — there is no other kind — I scanned the contents of academic journals for an archiving project. I wanted to kill myself — mainly because I had to proofread the articles to catch the mistakes in the scanning. But it kept me fed in KD knockoffs. Unfortunately, that kind of work is now done by more capable sorts: robots.

Few topics in publishing have received more attention over the past year than book-digitization. And yet, there are essentially only two companies that sell the robotic equipment and hardware necessary to quickly scan and digitize large volumes of books: Kirtas Technologies and 4DigitalBooks. Not surprisingly, major players in the digitization game—Google, Amazon—often employ their own proprietary systems; a spokesman for Google, for instance, says the company uses “some really cool stuff we’ve developed.”

What about the grad students? Will no one think of the grad students?

Now you can find out all the gory details, thanks to the Book Standard’s Book Sales Research Service.

Through the BSRS, users can get weekly and year-to-date sales figures for any edition of any book, from January 2004 to the present. For each ISBN requested, the sales data is broken down based on geographic region, city, suburb and rural sales, and major retailers, plus discount and other stores. The service starts at $85 for one ISBN request and goes up to $600 for 10 titles and decreases as the number of purchases increases.

Consumers simply fill out a form online and results will be sent via email, fax or regular mail. In addition to basic sales data, the personalized service can help with other research needs, like providing The Book Standard’s Bestseller Chart information.

The cost of the scotch you’ll need to drown your sorrows afterward is not included.

It’s bumpf your fellow blogger day here at Bookninja. Apparently. And Jessa Crispin has a kick-ass article on self-published comic books at The Book Standard.

Self-publishing. The term has always had a ring of desperation. With the number of books published annually now reaching the hundreds of thousands, and after seeing the quality of a great percentage of those multitudes, it becomes easy to dismiss anything rejected by all publishers as unworthy. An author going the self-publishing route, then, is just someone not coming to terms with reality.

Except for when it comes to comic books. Some of the strongest writers and illustrators of comics have decided to dip into self-publishing from time to time. What makes that medium so different that going the self-publishing route isn’t so cringe-inducing—but rather a means of heightening credibility?

I hate it when people (mostly nerds like me, in my experience) introduce questions with the word “Question!”, but we’re talking about comics, so allow me to push my glasses up and say, Question: when does success (ie, a build-up of readership) tip you from self-publishing into a businessperson who owns a publishing company that happens to publish a title you create?