HBO is whipping up the anticipation for the third season of True Blood, the series based on Charlaine Harris’ Southern Vampire novels, by posting webisodes on their website.
I’ve gone ahead and embedded it below, despite the fact that it may blow out the margins of this blog, depending on what size monitor you view this on.
It’s work-safe, save for a quick dash of rear male nudity. It’s really quite absurd (Eric and Pam are holding dancer auditions at their vampire club Fangtasia), but if you’re a fan of the show, you will enjoy the next three and half minutes.
If you’re not a fan, this will probably not win you over.
People may find it hard to believe, but there was a time when I kinda liked listening to National Public Radio, and those days, for the most part, ended when announcer Bob Edwards left (but I still have soft spots in my heart for Carl Kasell and Daniel Schorr).
Edwards currently has a show on Sirius XM satellite radio, and since I’m too cheap to spring for it, I have to settle for podcasts after the broadcast.
Last weekend, he began a three-part series on the future of publishing, beginning with separate discussions with erstwhile Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash (check out his new digs at Cursor) and Peter Brantley, director of the Bookserver Project at the Internet Archive.
It’s definitely worth listening to, and you can download it via iTunes or stream it from the link above.
On Wednesday, China Miéville won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for his fantasy -tinged crime thriller The City and the City, which has just been released in paperback (Del Rey PB 9780345497529 $15.00) .
He’s the only author to have received this honor, one of the highest given in the science fiction community, three times.
His response was quintessentially British, saying he was “completely gobsmacked”.
From my point of view, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Miéville is a bookseller’s dream; bending over backwards at his readings to be unfailingly polite to readers and bookstore staff alike.
I still haven’t read the darn thing yet. My copy of the galley sits on my desk, taunting me…
I know that I write a lot about Amazon, and, most of the time, I make them sound like they eat babies while clubbing baby seals.
So, let the record show that while I dislike the Kindle as a reading device, and I find their strong-arming on the subject of ebook pricing loathsome, I thought this was a nice story.
According to a report at GalleyCat, Amazon is giving around two dozen small presses and writing organizations cash grants. In the case of Milkweed Editions, Amazon bestowed a $15,000 grant.
While in my more cynical moods, I would declare this as a crass attempt to curry favor with a small presses, or give them leverage when it comes to product availability, I’m content today to ride a wave Hal Roach-level optimism, and ignore any further urge to speculate.
MobyLives links to a report from Taiwan which claims that Barnes & Noble’s e-reader is shipping a higher number of units than Amazon’s Kindle last month.
It makes sense for two reasons, Moby concludes: A)there is a certain market saturation with the Kindle and B) customers can fiddle with a Nook before buying it, which explains why Amazon will start selling Kindles in Target stores.
Not the most earthshattering news to report, for sure, but it is interesting to see how adding more players to the e-reader game is changing the playing field.
Back in the mid-nineties, I was at a liquidation sale for a bookstore that was going out of business. The literature section had been pretty well picked over, but there was a lone volume of a writer I had never heard of before. For reasons I’ve never been sure of, I picked up the book, which was Collected Stories by Alan Sillitoe.
The cover blurb (from the Scotsman-it was a British edition) stated “No-one who cares for good writing and honest of purpose will want to be without a copy”. Okay; sounds good so far. I open the book and see that the first story is called The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which I had heard was a movie about an angry young man type, but never knew of its literary origins.
It only took the first page to convince me of Sillitoe’s specialness as a writer. He was genuinely sympathetic to the working class, and spoke of a suspicion, not only of the status quo, but of anybody claiming to have the answers. Sillitoe wrote of quiet desperation and celebrated the small, individual victories that ordinary people were capable of achieving.
Needless to say, I am heartbroken to read that Sillitoe passed away on Sunday at the age of 82.
The Guardian has a thoughtful obituary for Sillitoe, extolling his iconoclastic nature.
Sillitoe’s works have been adapted for the big screen. Below is a trailer for the adaptation of his novel Saturday Night, Sunday Morning, followed by the opening of the aforementioned The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, which is mostly credits, but it has some powerful voice-over narration provided by lead actor Tom Courtenay.
These days, Sillitoe isn’t terribly well known in the US, but Vintage has recently reissued some of his work in paperback. Hopefully this can revive Sillitoe’s profile in this country.
I was just reading an article in the current issue of Rolling Stone by Steve Knopper, author of Appetite For Self-Destruction (now in paperback from Soft Skull), about how Amazon and Universal Music are lowering the prices of albums.
For Amazon, it means selling certain full-length album downloads for as little as $4, and for Universal, it means “slashing prices for all CDs to $10 or less”. According to Jim Guerinot, the manager of Nine Inch Nails and No Doubt, “[the record industry] is recognizing that the value of CDs have diminished dramatically. And, if you want to continue to sell them, this is an appropriate price point”.
Now that Amazon (and Apple) have been getting people used to the idea of $10 ebooks, I have to wonder if the publishing industry will follow suit. For readers conditioned to see a $35 dollar price tag for a hardcover too high, perhaps a price of $19.99 may seem a bit more reasonable? If, in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t that much more expensive than an ebook, and you have a copy that will never be corrupted or deleted or require a power supply to read, the purchasing decision may tip in favor of the old-fashioned ink and paper book.
That isn’t to say that there aren’t some folks who simply prefer ebooks (either because they’re easily pirated, or because they’re certainly easier on the back come moving day), but when price isn’t the main motivating factor, which way will the majority of readers decide to go?
When Universal tried a pilot project for this, they discovered that sales increased 100%
And sorry that I can’t link to the article (it’s behind a pay wall), but it’s in the April 29th issue (the one with Black-Eyed Peas on the cover) if you want to check it out.
Maybe I’m really tired after flying in late from Newark, where I got to spend time with a lot of cranky French and Belgian travelers who had spent the last four days at the airport, or maybe it’s just a slow news day. But I honestly don’t think there is anything in the business worth pontificating on right now.
However, I was happy to come across this very interesting article in the New Yorker about the iPad and what it could mean for publishing. There isn’t that much in it that is terribly original, but it is a nice summary of how things in the ebook world got to where there are and where things stand.
One little nugget from the article that left me dumbstruck: “If the same book is available in paper and paperless form, Amazon says, forty per cent of its customers order the electronic version”.
In honor of the occasion, the LA Times has put together a THC-laced reading list. I was surprised that Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City wasn’t on the list (as was an online commenter).
So you’ll have to excuse me while I go to the bookstore, pick up a big bag of little chocolate donuts, and tune out for a while.
The head of Penguin Group Australia, Bob Sessions, called this “a silly mistake”.
Try telling that to your country’s sizable Aborigine population, who, granted aren’t likely to ever come across this mistake in person, could be in the understandable position of taking offense.
Perhaps a better choice of words would have helped. Maybe Sessions could have called it an innocent mistake, an error of due diligence, sloppy workmanship etc..
Guess the corporate damage control could use a bit of proofreading themselves.
Bonus media: I can’t resist the urge to embed this video. Enjoy its New Wave/Post-Punk goodness.
