In the wake of a terrorist attempt on Christmas Day to blow up a passenger airliner, the Transportation Security Administration has been issuing erratic and, admittedly wacky new passenger guidelines.

Most of these are being announced for the first time by pilots and flight crews on various flights, resulting in a very inconsistent comprehension of what is and isn’t permitted on airplanes.

Some flights have prohibited the use of electronic device during all stages of the flight, others permit their use until the last hour or half-hour of the flight.

Many flights were forced to shut down their in-flight entertainment programs, meaning no sitcom reruns or poorly produced infotainment.

The tech site Gizmodo has the following advice in their Unofficial Guide to Flying After the Underwear Bomb :

Bring a book. Not a Kindle, not a Nook, not any other sort of ebook reader, but a plain ol’ low-tech book. Because apparently books are pretty much the only thing you can have in your hands during the final hour of your flight (”the government says ok”) and how the hell else will you keep from falling into a cold and uncomfortable slumber?

Score one for traditional print media.

While I would hate to be seen capitalizing on a potential tragedy (that’s the job of elected officials), it does serve to reinforce one thing that I’ve always felt books had going for them over e-readers, that you didn’t have to shut them down a half-hour before landing (well that and books don’t require charging, copy-protection technology, backlighting, etc.).

But here’s to hoping that the skies become a lot more friendly in the near future. If all we can do is twiddle our thumbs or read Sky Mall, then the terrorists win.

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We didn’t.  Nor did anybody, it seems.

I thought I would have to do some explaining for the very modest initial order that I placed with W.W. Norton, turns out I had to explain why I didn’t order more.

The New York Times covers C.G. Jung’s Christmas miracle.

File this one under: expectations happily defied.

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The Electronic Frontier Foundation has posted their findings on possible privacy issues related to e-readers, particularly those that connect to e-book vendors through wireless connections, such as the Kindle and the Nook.

While it is disturbing what privacy readers are forfeiting by using these devices, I’m guessing that given the amount of data the companies like Google already know about us through our search habits, and the number of EULAs we mindlessly click on, this will probably be of serious concern only to hardcore privacy mavens.

My advice, if you don’t want Amazon to know how long it takes you to finish a book, or if you even finish your books at all, read the old-fashioned way.

(via Gizmodo)

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You don’t want to see me cry, do you? It’s not pretty and very undignified.

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It’s Christmas Eve, and if you’re reading this, I hope it’s because you’ve closed up shop and are getting ready to head on home for a quiet and peaceful holiday (even if you don’t celebrate December 25th, hopefully you at least have the day off).

Publishing news is pretty scarce these days. I’m resorting to listing an article/poll on the Huffington Post about the best book covers of the year. Not best books, just the covers.

I’m enough of a design wonk to be interested…maybe you are too.

Personally, while I’m glad the Penguin re-issue of Wuthering Heights, with cover art by Ruben Toledo, made the cut, I personally would have rather seen the cover to their re-issue of Ethan Frome, with cover art by Jeffrey Brown there instead.

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This weekend, while the rest of us are being told that this is the season for giving, the New York Times ran features, both in the Book Review and on their blog about stealing books.

The big surprise for me wasn’t that people steal the Three B’s of Book Theft (Bukowski, the Beats and the Bible), but that Martin Amis is among the ranks of frequently-stolen authors.

While, as somebody who makes a living selling books, I can’t help but be a bit peeved by the glib responses left in the comments section by book thieves, I do like the one left by somebody who found a copy of The Catcher In the Rye on his grandfather’s book shelf that belonged to a library and had been checked out sometime in the 1970’s.

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If Charles Dickens and A Christmas Carol have proven one thing, it’s that Christmas isn’t really for children, it’s for misanthropes.

Prairie Home Companion host Garrison Keillor, in a Baltimore Sun op-ed piece,  took exception to a Unitarian re-interpretation of Silent Night, making it, as Unitarians typically do, a bit more inclusive.

While I have to admit that I find the idea of this embarrassingly self-important (let’s change the libretto to Handel’s Messiah while we’re at it), Keillor goes off the rails when he inveighs against “all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year”.  The remainder of this piece goes on to insult pretty much every non-Christian faith save for Rastafari, Zoroastrianism, and Satanism.

I know the guy is a humorist, and I’m a big believer that you can make fun of just about anything, but I wonder if he would have had the courage to make these fairly vulgar comments in front of a live audience.

As I white, male, atheist, I don’t have the right to be angry about anything. Still, I can’t tell if this is is just Keillor winding readers up, or if he is having a public anti-Semitic bah-humbug moment.

Personally, I always liked Aaron McGruder’s explanation of Christmas in an episode of The Boondocks, where Huey explains to his grandfather that “Christmas was a pagan holiday, and Jesus would probably hate you for celebrating it”.

*If the Professor Griff reference is lost on you, he was the former “Minister of Information” for the rap group Public Enemy, who made a few anti-Semitic gaffes of his own back in the day.

(via GalleyCat, Photo by Will Ragozzino/Getty Images)

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While other book blogs are mired in thinking about their favorite books of 2009, or their best books of the decade, we’re looking forward to the future…that is when somebody else blogs about it first and gets me thinking about it.

A Commonplace Blog has a quick round-up of some of the high-profile titles due to be released next year.

Personally, I can’t wait to read both the Alasdair Gray’s Old Men In Love: John Tunnock’s Posthumous Papers (due in April from Small Bear Press), and American Taliban by Pearl Abraham.

I would say that I’m looking forward to reading the third book in Steig Larsson’s trilogy, but I’ve already read a copy from the UK.

The author of this post isn’t too optimistic, but I suspect that there will be quite a few things that will take us by surprise.

What about you; anything that you’re looking forward to reading next year?

(via Conversational Reading)

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Yes, it’s a slow news day here in the world of publishing, so here is a little book-related humor courtesy of your friends at The Onion.

Adults Go Wild Over Latest In Children’s Picture Book Series

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Perhaps publishing contracts will soon read “in all media, including those not yet invented, in perpetuity throughout the known universe”.

The New York Times ran a piece over the weekend about how authors (or their estates) are struggling with publishers to take control of e-book rights, and either publish e-books themselves or work with publishers who work with e-books exclusively and tend to pay a higher royalty rate on e-books sold.

What is most telling about this situation is the part in the article that says

While most traditional publishers have included e-book rights in new author contracts for 15 years, many titles were originally published before e-books were explicitly included in contracts.

So publishers have been cognizant that e-books could possibly become a viable format for fifteen years and are only waiting until now to renegotiate (if you could call Random House honcho Markus Dohle’s strong-arm letter agents negotiation) e-book terms for their backlist authors?

I wasn’t around back in the day, but did publishers put up this much of a hissy-fit when audio books emerged?

It seems to me that their big beef is that somebody else, namely Open Road Integrated Media, a new company founded by erstwhile HarperCollins chief executive Jane Friedman, has decided to swoop in and drive a Mack truck through a possible loophole.

Which brings to mind Random House’s strategy. Is this their way of forcing a new start-up into either giving up or face cash-draining litigation?

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