Author Archive for homer

From Julie Bosman in the New York Times:

Imagine the perfect library book. Its pages don’t tear. Its spine is unbreakable. It can be checked out from home. And it can never get lost.

The value of this magically convenient library book — otherwise known as an e-book — is the subject of a fresh and furious debate in the publishing world. For years, public libraries building their e-book collections have typically done so with the agreement from publishers that once a library buys an e-book, it can lend it out, one reader at a time, an unlimited number of times.

Last week, that agreement was upended by HarperCollins Publishers when it began enforcing new restrictions on its e-books, requiring that books be checked out only 26 times before they expire.

Economically as well as technologically, all books are not created equal. In a period of change, many factors are shifting in search of a new balance.

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From Daniel B. Roberts in Salon.com:

Tao Lin is the next big thing in urban hipster lit. At least, so say the people that read his books on the subway. “That guy is the next big thing,” announced one last fall to a stranger eyeing his book. “People just don’t know it yet.”

The book he showed off was “Shoplifting From American Apparel,” the novella by 26-year-old Brooklyn, N.Y., author Tao Lin. Of course this exchange happened on the L train, which moves through the heart of hipster Brooklyn, and of course the guy was wearing Converse Chucks, skinny jeans and a tight flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He looked about 27.

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What fame Lin has already achieved is a testament to his ability to master viral and unconventional publicity techniques. In July 2008, Lin sold six shares of “Richard Yates” online. The winning bidders gave him $2,000 each in exchange for 10 percent of the domestic profits that come from “Yates.” As he says with a laugh, “If it doesn’t make very much, that’s their loss.” Inevitably, Stephen Elliott’s Lin-adoring online outlet the Rumpus named “Richard Yates” the August selection for its newly launched book club, four months before the book’s publication. James Frey has endorsed “Yates,” and the New York Observer recently published a profile of Lin written in his own distinctive style.

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From Ken Auletta in The New Yorker:

On the morning of January 27th—an aeon ago, in tech time—Steve Jobs was to appear at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in downtown San Francisco, to unveil Apple’s new device, the iPad. Although speculation about the device had been intense, few in the audience knew yet what it was called or exactly what it would do, and there was a feeling of expectation in the room worthy of the line outside the grotto at Lourdes. Hundreds of journalists and invited guests, including Al Gore, Yo-Yo Ma, and Robert Iger, the C.E.O. of Disney, milled around the theatre, waiting for Jobs to appear. The sound system had been playing a medley of Bob Dylan songs; it went quiet as the lights came up onstage and Jobs walked out, to the crowd’s applause.

In the weeks before, the book industry had been full of unaccustomed optimism; in some publishing circles, the device had been referred to as “the Jesus tablet.” The industry was desperate for a savior. Between 2002 and 2008, annual sales had grown just 1.6 per cent, and profit margins were shrinking. Like other struggling businesses, publishers had slashed expenditures, laying off editors and publicists and taking fewer chances on unknown writers.

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From Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times:

In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book,“Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.

Mr. Shields’s book consists of 618 fragments, including hundreds of quotations taken from other writers likePhilip Roth, Joan Didion and Saul Bellow— quotations that Mr. Shields, 53, has taken out of context and in some cases, he says, “also revised, at least a little — for the sake of compression, consistency or whim.” He only acknowledges the source of these quotations in an appendix, which he says his publishers’ lawyers insisted he add.

“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”

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