The New York Times reported on Thursday that Bolaño’s widow,  Carolina López, is challenging the author’s self-constructed image as a literary outlaw. It seems that he was not in Chile at the time that General Augusto Pinochet was toppled, and he did not have the appitite for heroin that has been reported.

On one hand, I feel that there is nothing to see here. That Bolaño had manufactured a mythology around himself is nothing new for authors. Furthermore, while it enhanced his reputation, said reputation was not dependent on that myth. He was not selling his life story for twenty-five bucks a copy the way James Frey was.

On the other, I would hate to think that his publishers, translators and literary executors would seek to knowingly profit from manipulating his posthumous fame. The last thing we need is another junkie to romanticize.

What’s the old saying about if choosing between facts and the myth, to print the myth?

I don’t think this is going to be the end of the world. As the article mentions, Bolaño’s narratives are filled with literary detective work, and it seems that if any misinformation about him is going to be perpetuated, it will be done so by the legion of readers who lionize him, but are unable to do a tremendous amount of research due to the language barrier. If all you’re relying on is his Wiki page, then you’re probably going to get a lot of his life story wrong.

(Bolaño photo courtesy of New Directions)

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My favorite geek site io9.com has run vintage SF covers before, but this is a pretty extensive gallery. The theme is Pulp SF Book Covers That Channel Pure Id, and it’s worth a look.

First: I swear that I have seen this image of the woman striping on the cover of Sin in Space somewhere before.

Second: I have said it before, and I’ll say it again: If Random House wanted to make some quick cash, they would reissue all of Philip K. Dick’s novels with their original pulp covers. As the cover for Cosmic Puppets shows, the covers don’t need to have any relation to the material inside.

Credit where credit is due: I ganked the PKD cover from a site called Total Dick-Head

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It is no secret that Alan Moore has detested every attempt to film his comic creations to the point of refusing any Hollywood movie checks that come his way as a result of them. You have to hand it to the man, he walks it like he talks it.

Once can only imagine how far off the Richter scale his blood pressure is going to climb when he gets wind of these Watchmen costumes.

(via Topless Robot)

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John Updike passed away yesterday from cancer at the age of 76.

The New York Times has published a very thoughtful obituary, which is nicely counterbalanced by Carolyn Kellogg’s remembrances of his story A&P.

What really hurt this Gen-Xer is that I haven’t come across a mention of his turn as Krusty the Clown’s ghostwriter on The Simpsons in the obits that I read. The Wiki page on that particular episode (Insane Clown Poppy) has a reference to it, and his discussion about it recorded in Updike in Cincinnati, where he says  “I did notice that Amy Tan and Stephen King got many more lines in the episode than I did”.

(photo taken from Updike’s Wiki page-no credit attributed)

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You can’t say that I didn’t warn you.

Amazon announced Monday that it will cease selling all ebook formats save for their proprietary Kindle and Mobipocket.

This would be like Apple suddenly saying that you can only listen to iTunes on Apple manufactured iPods…oh wait, that’s kinda how it is now. But at least you can burn copies of what you download onto compact discs, which you can listen to anywhere, and subsequently use on any other mp3 player.

In fact, Apple is getting out of the DRM business altogether, so, short of uploading tracks on a download site, you can pretty much do whatever you want with them.

I have to wonder how liberated all those ebook authors will feel when everyone has to buy a Kindle to read their books.

What makes this even more insulting is that Amazon can’t even produce enough readers to go around. So what Amazon is saying is that you have to put your books out in their formats, but they they can’t sell you anything to read them on.

Nice business model, guys.

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This is old news by now, but Sara Neslon, editor in chief at Publishers Weekly, was given the pink slip on Monday by Reed Business Information.

Frankly, I was  never a big fan of Ms. Nelson. I thought at best she was okay, and at worst,  between the side she chose in the Chelsea Green/Obama’s Challenge debacle and her infatuation with Amazon’s Kindle, that she was more interested in publishers than in booksellers. And let’s face it, publishers advertise a lot more in PW than booksellers.

Then again, the magazine is called Publishers Weekly, not Booksellers Weekly. So maybe I’m the one out of line.

I have to wonder if this is the first step in a planed demise of PW. Except for the reviews (especially the children’s titles) and their handful of special issues, the printed magazine is pretty stale  when it arrives in your mailbox. And making Brian Kenney the editorial director of PW, when he already performs that duty at School Library Journal, in effect making him run two magazines, is a dilution of editorial scope. This can potentially sink both magazines.

But maybe that is what Reed is planning. Magazines are losing cash, and I’m sure I’m not the only person to notice how skinny PW has gotten lately from lack of ads.

Nonetheless, I don’t think she should have gotten the axe. Regardless of how I felt about her, she had a lot of supporters and Reed is going to have to work hard to recover a lot of lost goodwill.

(via the New York Times)

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The American Library Association gave out many, many awards Monday at their annual conference in Denver.

Among the highlights:

Newbery Medal- Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman (Harper HC 9780060530921 $17.99)

Caldecott Medal- House in the Night by Susan Marie Swanson (Houghton HC 9780618862443 $17.00)

Coretta Scott King Medal- Author: We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball by Kadir Nelson (Hyperion HC  9780786808328 $18.99),

Illustrator: The Blacker the Berry by Joyce Carol Thomas (Amistad HC 9780060253752 $16.99)

Printz Medal- Jellicoe Road by Melina Marchetta (Harper HC 9780061431838 $17.9

You can find all of the medal and honor books at PW.

All in all, a good day for Harpercollins especially. Good thing they didn’t announce any layoffs the same day.

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Time’s book critic Lev Grossman writes of the changes in the publishing industry in Wednesday’s online edition.

He covers a lot of ground, from Print-On-Demand, to bloggers-turned-novelists,  to keitai shosetsu, a form of the novel in Japan that is written and read on cellphones.

Grossman seems to understand a lot of what is going on in publishing today, but this is the second or third piece on the industry that I’ve read recently that believes publishers pay the freight on books both when they are shipped to bookstores and when they are returned, saying “(p)ublishers suck up the shipping costs both ways”.

First of all, I don’t know a single publisher who pays freight on returns. Secondly, publishers who do offer free shipping to booksellers aren’t sucking it up, it’s worked into the cost of the book and passed on to the customer.

Which is why I would propose that all publishers go free freight and work these costs into the cover price. If my freight bill from a publisher that charges freight goes up, I can’t raise the price of the book to cover the difference. Most of the time, I’m not even paying the publisher for these freight costs, I’m paying FedEx or UPS.

Nevertheless, I have to admire his gimlet-eyed vision of the future of publishing and digital-content driven return to serial novels. I don’t think he’s that far off track, considering that we’re watching content that’s about five minutes long on screens the size of a matchbooks.

(Via io9.com)

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Carolyn Kellogg over at Jacket Copy reports on rumors that former teen idol turned basket case Britney Spears is on the verge of signing a three-book deal with an unnamed publisher for…$14 million.

Ms. Kellogg rightfully asks “who would read a book written by Britney? Who would read three of them?”.  She also mentions that, if the rumors are true, she would be earning more than the $10 million advance that President Bill Clinton received from Knopf.

In a time when heads continue to roll in the publishing industry, I cannot honestly believe that any sane publisher would pony up that kind of loot for an author who, had fate rolled the dice differently, would probably be working at Hot Dog On A Stick.

Although, I could imagine a publisher paying for an Onion-esque parody on the life of Britney.

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While I wasn’t entirely caffeinated yesterday morning as I perused Shelf Awareness, this little gem stood out in the letters. The short version is that the previous day, a reader sent a letter extolling the virtues of her Kindle, and how she was able to achieve instant gratification in getting a novel that she had just heard about. What deterred her from visiting her favorite indie bookseller was that it was ‘cold ‘ and ‘out of the way’. Plus, the book in question was not going to be released until next week. However, within minutes she able to download the book and was happily reading away.

Yes, you read that correctly, a book was available to Kindle users before it was available at traditional booksellers. This disturbed Margot Sage-El, an independent bookseller, and it should disturb us all.

She followed up with the publisher and was assured that it was just a mistake. But, as of this writing, the Kindle version of said book is still available, but the paper and ink version will not be released until next week.

Could we be witnessing a trend in the making? I don’t want to get all paranoid, the end is nigh, Soylent Green is people here, but I think I might be on to something.

The music business is rife with this sort of thing: from iTunes exclusives to artists like the Eagles and Guns N’ Roses having their new albums sold exclusively through Walmart and Best Buy respectively. Is it at all illogical to imagine a publisher contemplating a Kindle exclusive in the near future (that’s one way to eliminate returns). Or what about Amazon themselves? Their pockets are deep enough that they could actually pay a big author like Stephen King to release their newest title solely for the Kindle.

There is no doubt in most minds that publishing is going to shift from a business model based on the production and distribution of printed matter to one based on providing content to an audience that is increasingly becoming platform agnostic. If booksellers wish to remain relevant, it would be wise to be vigilant and mindful of such “mistakes” in the future.

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