Books Articles

Kindle Implications

• SARA NELSON, the former editor of Publishers Weekly, was at a dinner party recently when Ed Rollins, the Republican campaign consultant, arrived carrying a Kindle.And I just said, 'Can I see it?' said Ms. Nelson, also the author of So Many Books, So Little Time. In this honeymoon period of Kindle - when a lot of people don't have them - you can look to see what someone is reading, in the guise of looking at the hardware. (For the record, Mr. Rollins's Kindle was crammed with the day's newspapers.)
  
  Ms. Nelson owns a Kindle and a Sony Reader. And for her, the ownership of an electronic book reader, while not necessarily a badge of literary honor, at least telegraphs a commitment to books. It's really expensive, she said of the Kindle 2, which Amazon sells for $359. If you're going to pay that, you're giving a statement to the world that you like to read - and you're probably not using it to read a mass market paperback.
  
  But to other writers and editors, the Kindle is the ultimate bad idea whose time has come. Anne Fadiman, the author, was relieved to learn that her essay collection, Ex Libris, was not available on Kindle. It would really be ironic if it were, she said of the book, which evokes her abiding passion for books as objects.There's a little box on Amazon that reads Tell the publisher I'd like to read this book on Kindle, she said. I hope no one tells the publisher.
  
  The publishing world is all caught up in weighty questions about the Kindle and other such devices: Will they help or hurt book sales and authors' advances? Cannibalize the industry? Galvanize it?
  
  Please, they're overlooking the really important concern: How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism?
  
  If you have 1,500 books on your Kindle - that's how many it holds - does that make you any more or less of a bibliophile than if you have the same 1,500 books displayed on a shelf? (For the sake of argument, let's assume that you've actually read a couple of them.)The practice of judging people by the covers of their books is old and time-honored. And the Kindle, which looks kind of like a giant white calculator, is the technology equivalent of a plain brown wrapper.
  
  If people jettison their book collections or stop buying new volumes, it will grow increasingly hard to form snap opinions about them by wandering casually into their living rooms.I always notice how many books there are on the bookshelves, and what the books are, said Ammon Shea, who spent a year reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary and published a book about it. It's the faux-intellectual version of sniffing through someone's medicine cabinet.
  
  It's a safe bet that the Kindle is unlikely to attract people who seldom pick up a book or, on the other end of the spectrum, people who prowl antiquarian book fairs for first editions. But for the purpose of sizing up a stranger from afar, perhaps the biggest problem with Kindle or its kin is the camouflage factor: when no one can tell what you're reading, how can you make it clear that you're poring over the new Lincoln biography as opposed to, say, He's Just Not That Into You? Do you lose all kinds of wonderful things about seeing the physical book? said Kurt Andersen, the novelist and host of the public radio show Studio 360. Absolutely. But I don't think it's the end of the world. At least people still pay 10 bucks for the book. (Most books for Kindle are $9.99 on Amazon.com.) Mr. Andersen is proud to live in a two-Kindle household. Giving people a new, other way to read books is fine and good, he declared.
  
  TO some book lovers and editors, there are myriad reasons to deplore the Kindle. Publishers will no longer get the bump that comes when travelers see someone reading, say, the latest James Patterson and say to themselves: I've been meaning to get that. I think I'll buy a copy at Hudson News before I hop on the train.
  
  And as books migrate from paper, it means the death of the pickup line, Oh, I see you're reading the latest (insert highbrow author's name here).Michael Silverblatt, host of the weekly public radio show Bookworm, uses the term literary desire to describe the attraction that comes with seeing a stranger reading your favorite book or author. When I was a teenager waiting in line for a film showing at the Museum of Modern Art and someone was carrying a book I loved, I would start to have fantasies about being best friends or lovers with that person, he said.David Rosenthal, the executive vice president and publisher of Simon & Schuster, recalls the advent of Vintage paperbacks, a line of literary fiction that could fit precisely into the pocket of your Levi's with the title slowing, and it was an advertisement for what kind of intellectual you were.He uses a Sony Reader for manuscripts because it's easier than schlepping them home, but doesn't read books for pleasure on the device. It's certainly convenient, but I still haven't gotten around to reading a finished published book on it, Mr. Rosenthal said. For me, it feels awkward to have a metal tablet as opposed to a book.
  
  Ellen Feldman, who writes literary fiction, worries about what will happen to the ineffable kinship among book lovers if the Kindle becomes ubiquitous. She was having lunch in an Upper East Side restaurant when she saw the man at the next table reading The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson. I started speculating about him, said Ms. Feldman, whose novels include Scottsboro and The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank. I had all these fantasies going - I was trying to think if there was a college nearby and if maybe he was a professor. Nicholson Baker, who writes fiction and nonfiction books, feels much the same way, even though he defines himself by the contents of his (physical) library. Years ago, he walked into a temporary job with a copy of Ulysses. I wanted people to know I wasn't just a temp, he said, but rather a temp who was reading 'Ulysses.'
  
  These days, he said, he is thrilled if people read my books. It doesn't matter how they read them. Given the sorry financial state of the book business, most authors may be willing to set aside any prejudices.
  
  Chris Cleave, a novelist who writes a column for The Guardian, put it bluntly. I love my readers and I want them to read my stuff, he said. I'd write it out longhand for them if necessary..

Biographies

Whose life is it, anyway? This is the problem with memoir, and indeed biography too, to some extent. It is this problem that has caused such outrage around Julie Myerson's The Lost Child, reviewed here much earlier than we thought, the book's publication having been rushed forward by two months to capitalise on the publicity surrounding it.

I have a little experience of this problem, having some while ago written a book about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, Ariel's Gift. Undertaking that task was, of course, my choice, but all the same it was a choice I undertook with no little trepidation. I was aware what a battleground their marriage and working relationship had become, continuing to be so long, long after they parted and since Plath had died decades earlier. Hughes died as I was writing my book; the long silence he kept about his first marriage - broken only by the publication of Birthday Letters, the spur to my own work - fuelled speculation as to what had "really" gone on.

Is my book - which looks at their lives and work through the prism of poetry that is Birthday Letters - another attempt to get to that lost truth? But what truth would that be, exactly? At the time I wrote the book I'd been married for a little while; it had started to occur to me that fond as we were of one another, my husband and I would, most likely, tell quite different stories about nearly anything that had happened to us; events mundane and profound suffer alike from this. Do you remember the time we got lost and you were so worried we'd be late? I've never seen you that upset, one partner says. I was not upset, says the other, I was just trying to make sure we wouldn't miss lunch; what else was I supposed to do?

How, I began to wonder as I started the book, am I supposed to know what's going on in the marriage of two people I never knew, when I couldn't tell you for certain what's going on in my own? The certainty of some other biographers began to startle me in a way it never had; I began to understand a little better the choices that writers of nonfiction must make. A biographer is telling another's story, but she is also always telling, in many senses, her own.

As for memoir, even Robinson Crusoe had his Friday; no man is an island, the saying goes, and writing about one's own life will always drag in the lives of other people. Not long ago, when I spoke to Doris Lessing, she told me that she would not even consider writing a third volume of memoir. To bring her own story into the present would compromise the lives of other people, people still living, people she cared for. In any case it was clear to me that she regarded her autobiographical works - however much they had been pored over by a public always eager for personal details - as having rather less value than her books of fiction. There is an argument to be made that truth - such as it is - can only be found, not in memoir or biography, but in fiction. Fiction recreates the world not in fragments, but miraculously as a whole; you will learn more about life, your own and other people's, from Middlemarch, Madame Bovary or Moby-Dick than you are likely to from yards and yards of memoir.

Blogs

Blogs - an ugly word, but now unavoidable - were born with the internet. As soon as people started to use the technology that would link computers, they started leaving messages. In the 1980s, these were pinned on virtual bulletin boards. Then, in the early 1990s, online diaries appeared, personal journals to be seen by the entire online world. As internet use spread, people were dazzled by their power to connect and communicate. But they didn't just want to stare at pages. They wanted, above all, to make their mark on the explosively expanding world of cyberspace. So, in the mid-1990s, the online diary became the web log, or blog.

Blogs let you jot down what you think, feel or know and, at the speed of light, publish it to the world. They now cover everything from quantum theory to politics to low-life celebrity gossip and intimate personal confessions. They can be vast publications written by teams of writers, or fragmented jottings from a student pad. They are the most successful, addictive, potent and radical application of all the new technologies and applications spawned by the personal computer.The total number of blogs is thought to be approaching 200m, 73m of them in China.

I can see no reason why there shouldn't be hundreds of millions more, because, you see, blogging is like smoking or gambling - hard to give up. Ever since I started blogging (March 15, 2006), I've been trying to stop. It's not that it's time-consuming - I'm a casual blogger. Nor do I feel intimidated by the brutal worldwide abuse from other bloggers that every blogger of any prominence inevitably attracts. I don't even feel it's much of a burden: if I don't want to post, I don't post, and on a couple of occasions I've handed over my blog to others.

No, the reason I keep wanting to quit is the intimacy and exposure of the blogscape. (Blogosphere is the name everybody else uses, but I've invented my own, slightly better word.) I am, because of my blog, out there in a way that, three years ago, I would have found inconceivable, terrifying. I still do. I am also, thanks to Thought Experiments (the title of my blog), exposed to the tribulations of an enormous extended family of commenters, linkers, gypsies, tramps, thieves and, worst of all, intellectuals.

Being a nuclear type myself, this is traumatic.I sent a guy in LA out to buy a book in the middle of the night; he liked it. Commenters e-mail me their visions and problems. Some flirt, some try to get me to go down the pub, some send me their writing for approval. Chinese people ask me about English usage, Americans ask me if I know Bill Nighy, Australians ask me about the afterlife. Everybody wants to know what I eat and why, inmates of Folsom Prison weep and rage at me because of my loathing of tattoos, Darwinians become entirely irrational in my (virtual) presence. And, a week or two ago, a regular commenter on my blog killed himself.

So the blogscape is not for the faint-hearted. Start blogging and you will initially be lulled into a false sense of security by the ease with which you just knock out a few paragraphs and click Publish Post. At once, there it is, out there for all to see. Remember, I do mean all. There's a shocking disconnect between one fact - you sitting at your computer - and the next - what you just wrote being instantly visible to the entire world. Try to think of it as like stepping out of the toilet to find yourself standing on the centre spot at Wembley on cup-final day.

Yet the disconnect is the point. Blogging, says the supreme blogger and Sunday Times contributor Andrew Sullivan, is the spontaneous expression of instant thought. In addition, as Matt Drudge, one of the originators of the form, puts it: A blog is a broadcast, not a publication. The true value of blogs is the combination of that initial, unconsidered improvisation, done on the spur of the mood and the moment, and its ensuing broadcast to the largest audience ever created - about 1.5 billion internet users.

There is an important distinction to be made here between wayward solo bloggers, like me, and the more or less official blogs that appear on newspaper and magazine sites or on a giant blog aggregator such as Huffington Post. The latter are closer to - often coextensive with - traditional journalism. They tend to involve large staffs and to stick tightly to the news schedule, and they are required to fit into certain categories, usually politics, and not, like me, to wander randomly from technology to metaphysics to politics to the iniquity of all breakfast cereals (except porridge).

For these official bloggers, the vertiginous sense of the disconnect between Wembley and the toilet has faded, to be replaced by something like normal publication. It's the respectable end of the business. It's blogging, captain, but not as we know it.

So, leaving those official types to one side, what is it that keeps me and all those millions of others blogging? The answer is those very things that make me want to stop - intimacy and exposure. They are, in fact, the same thing. Once you are exposed in this way, intimacy tends to follow. The blogger is able to show important aspects of himself to the world in a way that was hitherto unimaginable. Blogging is a novel form of being.Yet from the most intimate to the most functional, the important thing about blogs is connection.

This is what lies at the heart of the intimacy/exposure nexus. It takes time to get the hang of this. The way to get your blog going is to use connectivity. Link to other blogs and place comments. They'll come back to you. Once they do, a few will stay. You will acquire regulars. You'll get to know them. If they stay away for a while, you'll miss them. You'll feel, if you're a sucker like me, somehow responsible for and to them.

This is weird, I know, but then good things start to happen. I reviewed a couple of books for the Philadelphia Inquirer. One was a collection of John Ashbery's poems. This resulted in my resuming my own connection with that great artist. Connections pile upon connections. I inspired two commenters to start their own blogs - the physicist Gordon McCabe (mccabism.blogspot.com) and the ineffable Nige (nigeness.blogspot.com).

In finest familial style, the former turned on me rather savagely over Darwinism. I was at one with King Lear: How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is / To have a thankless child!

One discovers unexpected soul mates. I found Patrick Kurp via a mutual love of the novelist Ford Madox Ford. And then - very naughty, this - I arranged a few small raids on Jeffrey Archer's blog (jeffreyarchers.blogspot.com). My commenters went over there and posted comments saying how great he was. Sorry, Jeff, it's my child within. Throughout, I was accumulating this faithful band of commenters, most of them bloggers themselves. I would name a few, but those I missed out would get all tetchy, so I'd better not.

The striking thing about this little community is how, over time, we got to know each other in surprising detail. We trend, bend and blend together. I can do irony on the blog in ways I would never get away with in this organ, and I can assume quite a high level of knowledge. This latter is hugely helped by the world-changing technology of the hyperlink - I don't have to quote an article, I can just link to it. We are, thus, all instantly informed about the same things This, combined with the relief involved in getting something instantly off my chest, is what keeps me blogging.

I want to quit, I really do. I dream of going cold turkey, I even once posted my resignation. But someone somewhere always says something stupid or funny, Lord Jeff emits another post or I am stunned by some unexpected fragment of beauty and truth - and, once more, I am lost in the limitless land of fancy now known, to me, anyway, as the blogscape.

Self Publish With Blurb

To make a book using an online publishing service, you create the design, add text or images, pay the fee, and in a few days or a week, the finished product is delivered to your door.

But there is the nagging question: Will it look homemade?

Blurb, a popular self-publishing company based in San Francisco, has tried to assuage that fear by planting a pop-up store, its first, in the middle of SoHo in New York. It will be there until the end of the month, complete with displays of finished books created by real customers.

What we want people to understand is, this is not a scrapbook, this is not a photo album, this is not a handmade craft thing, said Eileen Gittins, the chief executive of Blurb. All of those things are very lovely in their own right. But we make you a real book.

Self-publishing is a small but growing slice of the book business, allowing consumers to print their own books easily and relatively cheaply, without the help of a literary agent or trade publisher. In 2009, Blurb created and shipped more than 1.2 million books, and reported sales of more than $45 million, a spokeswoman said.

For its first pop-up store, the company chose a lofty space with enormous windows, hardwood floors, white leather couches and tangerine-colored walls at the busy intersection of Broome and Mercer Streets in SoHo. Last week, hours before the store opened to the public, employees were busily checking e-mail, arranging books and preparing for what they hoped would be an onslaught of curious passers-by. (Lest anyone mistake it for a bookstore, the walls are painted with the words, Learn how to make your book and Real books. Made by you.)

On the shelves are cookbooks, photography collections, fashion books and slim volumes of poetry, along with the occasional novel or nonfiction book, like Kicking Breast Cancer Butt, by Tom and Veronica Vrotsos.

Throughout this week, Blurb is offering workshops on self-publishing and personal help from employees who can explain how to get the process started. A large, heavy book with premium paper and color could run $250. A tiny, 5-by-8-inch comic book starts at $4.99.

The company does a good deal of business around the holidays, for people who are designing books to give as gifts. Throughout the year, there are sales to hobbyists, photographers and newly married couples who want their wedding pictures in a book, not an album.

Ms. Gittins said books may have a greater impact in an increasingly digital world. There's something about giving the gift of a book, she said. It's difficult to gift a link.

Harry Potter and Theology

The world of religion was not, at first, particularly enthusiastic about the arrival of the Potter boy.

For several years, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series topped the American Library Association's lists of the most-challenged books (reasons cited in 2001: anti-family, occult/Satanism, religious viewpoint, and violence). Evangelical Protestants were skeptical: would the positive depiction of wizardry mislead children? And some Catholics were worried too, ranging from Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), who warned that subtle seductions in the text could corrupt the Christian faith, to the Rev. Ronald A. Barker, a Wakefield priest who yanked the books from his parish school library.

But over the last several years, religion writers and thinkers have warmed to Harry - both Christianity Today, the evangelical magazine, and L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, have praised the latest film. The Christian Broadcasting Network, home of Pat Robertson, now features on its website a special section on The Harry Potter Controversy, with the acknowledgment, Leading Christian thinkers have disparate views on the Harry Potter products, and how Christians should respond to them.

At the same time, scholars of religion have begun developing a more nuanced take on the Potter phenomenon, with some arguing that the wildly popular series of books and films contains positive ethical messages and a narrative arc that is worthy of serious scholarly examination and even theological reflection. The scholars are primarily interested in what the books have to say about the two big issues that always preoccupy people of faith - morality and mortality - but some are also interested in what the series has to say about tolerance (Harry and friends are notably open to people and creatures who differ from them) and bullying, the nature and presence of evil in society, and the existence of the supernatural.

Scholarly interest in the Harry Potter books began long before the series was finished, and shows no signs of slowing. There have been several academic books, with titles such as The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon and Harry Potter's World: Multidisciplinary Critical Perspectives.' The American Academy of Religion last fall offered a panel at its annual convention titled The Potterian Way of Death: J. K. Rowling's Conception of Mortality. And there is a raft of articles in religion journals with titles including Looking for God in Harry Potter and Engaging with the spirituality of Harry Potter, as well as the more complex, Harry Potter and the baptism of the imagination, Harry Potter and the problem of evil, and the crowd-pleasing Harry Potter and theological libraries.

There is a whole burgeoning field of religion and popular culture, not just looking at what exact parallels there are, does it jibe with religious beliefs or is it counter to religious beliefs, but looking at these stories as a reflection of the spiritual or religious sensibilities of the culture, says Russell W. Dalton, an assistant professor of Christian education at Brite Divinity School in Texas and the author of Faith Journey through Fantasy Lands: A Christian Dialogue with Harry Potter, Star Wars, and The Lord of the Rings.

When stories become as popular as the Harry Potter stories, they no longer simply reflect the religious views of the author, but become artifacts of the culture, and they say something about the culture that has embraced them, Dalton says. And that is certainly the case with Harry Potter.

The academic interest in The Boy Who Lived is part of a larger search by religion scholars and writers for signs of faith, and in particular for echoes of the Christian narrative, in culture. The search is not new, though scholars have historically concentrated on high art - like painting and literature. More recently, religion journalists have turned their attention to popular culture, authoring books with titles like The Gospel According to the Simpsons, by Mark Pinsky, and The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers, by Cathleen Falsani, while scholars are examining the role of religion in Madonna's videos, in the Star Trek series, and on Lost.

We have to be engaged with the conversation that's going on in the public, says Jeffrey H. Mahan, a professor of ministry, media and culture at the Iliff School of Theology in Colorado and an early proponent of studying religion and popular culture.

There is also a long history of children's literature being used as a form of religious pedagogy. Amy Boesky, an associate professor of English at Boston College, says that the use of children's literature to teach moral values goes back at least as far as Erasmus, who wrote during the Renaissance, and includes children's classics from The Pilgrim's Progress, published in 1678, to A Wrinkle in Time, published in 1962. The best known example is the seven-volume Chronicles of Narnia, written in the early 1950s by the Christian apologist C.S. Lewis, which, in addition to being entertaining fantasy literature, is often read as a Christian allegory featuring Aslan, a heroic lion and obvious Christ figure.

Although some scholars now see Harry Potter as a Christ-like figure, the parallels are subtler, and, undoubtedly, for many readers vastly overshadowed by a dizzying torrent of magical spells, strange creatures, and Quidditch games. Harry is, himself, a complex adolescent hero, haunted by the murder of his parents but at times conflicted about his own role in the world and unsettled, as anyone would be, by his mind's strange connection with that of the series's evil antagonist, Voldemort.

The Potter books are not explicitly religious in the way that C.S. Lewis's Narnia tales are, but there is a strong sense of evil, and issues of good and evil are not only philosophical issues but also theological issues, says Gareth B. Matthews, a professor of philosophy at UMass Amherst.

Some scholars take the search for Gospel themes in the Harry Potter series quite far. Oona Eisenstadt, an assistant professor of religious studies at Pomona College, offers a particularly elaborate analysis, arguing that Rowling explores the complex natures of biblical characters by presenting two versions of each in the Potter books. Snape and Malfoy, she argues, represent competing understandings of Judas - each seeking to kill Dumbledore, but one because he is serving evil and one because destiny demands it. Eisenstadt sees Dumbledore and Harry, in different ways, as Christ figures - perhaps Harry representing the human Jesus, and Dumbledore the divine. And she posits that the New Testament depiction of elements of the Jewish community is represented by the goblins (unappealing bankers) and the Ministry of Magic (legalistic and small-minded).

Rather than offering a one-to-one allegory which would shove a theology down the throats of her child readers, Rowling's role doublings, her one-to-twos, are an invitation to them, and to us all, to think, Eisenstadt writes.

Some religion scholars seem most interested in the Potter series as social commentary - in particular, they focus on Harry's refusal to take part in the anti-Muggle bias demonstrated by some pure-blood witches and wizards, as well as the hostility toward giants and ghosts and other menacing magical creatures that some characters in the series evince. One of the overall themes of the Harry Potter series has to do with race and race-based persecution, says Lana A. Whited, a professor of English at Ferrum College in Virginia and the author of The Ivory Tower And Harry Potter. And Dalton, of Brite Divinity School, takes the argument a step further, suggesting that the series's association of tolerance with the heroic characters is a critique of fundamentalism.

To Dumbledore and Harry and his friends it didn't matter whether you were Muggle-born, or whether you were a giant, Dalton says, whereas clearly the Death Eaters, the evil ones, were intolerant of people who were unlike them.

But not all scholars are quite so enthusiastic. Elizabeth Heilman, an associate professor of teacher education at Michigan State University and the editor of Critical Perspectives on Harry Potter says that, unlike Hermione, who adopts the cause of the house elves, you don't see Harry Potter ever taking up a cause for the sake of the downtrodden. He's really a reluctant hero, and I'm not convinced the narrative has him effectively going beyond personal motives.

The interest of religion scholars in the Potter series has intensified in the wake of the much-anticipated seventh and final book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which was published in 2007. The question of whether Harry would die (Spoiler Alert!) was much debated before the book was released, and it does'nt require a divinity degree to see the themes of sacrifice and resurrection in the resolution of that question.

I remember anticipating book seven, and having conversations with my kids about whether Harry Potter would die, and a lot of that conversation was about to what extent Rowling was going to make this a Christian book: was Harry going to die and save the world? says Stephen Prothero, a religion professor at Boston University.

The denouement (really: Spoiler Alert!) is the starting point for many religion scholars, because in the final scenes, Harry realizes that his job was to walk calmly into Death's welcoming arms, Rowling writes. Harry allows himself to be killed - or at least struck by a killing curse - in order to save the wizarding world, but then returns to life, egged on by a vision of Dumbledore that tells Harry, by returning, you may ensure that fewer souls are maimed, fewer families are torn apart. Harry then vanquishes Voldemort, and is described in the book as being seen by the crowd that witnessed the final battle as their leader and symbol, their savior and their guide.

At the end of the last book, we have a dying and rising Potter - he has to be killed to deliver the world from the evil personified by Voldemort, says Paul V.M. Flesher, director of the religious studies program at the University of Wyoming and the author of an article about Harry Potter for the Journal of Religion and Film. There's a Christian pattern to this story. It's not just good versus evil. Rowling is not being evangelistic - this is not C.S. Lewis - but she knows these stories, and it's clear she's fitting pieces together in a way that makes sense and she knows her readers will follow.

Rowling herself, in the wake of the final book's publication, says she thought the religious themes had always been obvious, and scholars note there were at least two unattributed quotations from the New Testament in the series, one on the tomb of Dumbledore's mother and sister (Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also, from Matthew), and one on the tomb of Harry's mother and father (The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death, from I Corinthians).

Harry's ultimate struggle with death has cemented the romance between religion scholars and the Potter series, the initial controversies over wands and wizardry now largely overshadowed by discussion of Harry's character and life choices.

Rather than decrying as wicked certain elements of the series - as far too many Christians have done - we ought to be inviting our communities into deeper appreciation of both the similarities and the contrasts between the stories and our Christian faith, Mary Hess, of Luther Seminary in Minnesota, writes in the journal Word & World.

Sure enough, Leonie Caldecott, writing in Christian Century a few months after the publication of book seven, opines, As is revealed in 'Deathly Hallows,' far from trying to cheat death, Harry willingly embraces death when he comes to understand that this is necessary to save others, and not just those he particularly loves.

Dumbledore, early in the series, makes clear his own views on this subject, saying, To the well-organized mind, death is but the next great adventure.

At the American Academy of Religion conference, panelists mined the final scene, as well as other depictions of death in the Potter series, for meaning. Paul Corey, a religious studies lecturer at McMaster University in Canada, rhetorically asked, What is the difference between a Christian and a Death Eater? as a starting point for thinking about how Voldemort's quest to conquer death might differ from, or resemble, the desire of Christians for eternal life in heaven. And Lois Shepherd, a bioethicist at the University of Virginia, said she found in the series an argument against prolonging physical life at all costs - a rejection of what she called a quest to avoid death that she said was played out in the real-world debate over Terri Schiavo.

Death, in the philosophy of the series, is not to be feared, Shepherd says. It is in fact those who fear death the most - Voldemort being the supreme example - who engage in unspeakable acts of evil.

Mad Comics

Mad Comic's Will Elder

'Twas a week before Christmas in 1953 when the artwork of Will Elder stirred the attorney general of Massachusetts to ban a comic-book adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore's treasured piece of holiday piffle, A Visit From St. Nicholas. The outlawed comic, titled Panic, was a spinoff of Mad, the wild and wildly successful year-old magazine for 14-year-old minds. Panic's crime was having published Moore's much-reprinted public-domain text, verbatim, to the accompaniment of outrageous, incongruous, stream-of-consciousness illustrations by Elder. None of the four-legged creatures that Elder drew in the opening panels were stirring, because all of them were dead - half-butchered carcasses of hogs, a goat, a baby elephant, a lion and the requisite mouse, all dangling from meat hooks, gushing blood. One of the animals, a small lamb, was still alive but stewed - that is, drunk from guzzling moonshine out of a jug nestled between its hooves. The sugarplums dancing in the children's heads were Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, and when the narrator of the tale settled down for his nap, he did so with a tall iced nightcap and six bottles of hooch scattered around his bed, alongside a sexy mama kerchiefed like a belly dancer.

I had a good time thinking of every kind of wild way to interpret all the words of the poem, Elder recalled a few years before he died. I thought it was funny, but it happened that some other people didn't agree. There were people out there who really didn't like the idea that we were doing something for kids . . . [that] made fun of things that were supposed to be sacred, like Santa Claus. The people who disagreed with Elder included not only Massachusetts state officials but also members of the New York City Police Department. A few days after that Christmas, cops entered the offices of Panic's publisher, EC Comics, asked to buy a copy of Panic and arrested the receptionist for being willing to sell them one. The charges were unclear and dubious, but the transgression indisputable: the aesthetic lawlessness of Will Elder's cartooning.

Elder was a master of an art beloved by kids and despised by their parents for its almost-criminal juvenility. Along with his childhood lunchroom buddy Harvey Kurtzman, the founding editor of Mad, Elder was a primary creator of the gleefully rude, perennially adolescent, unaffected smart-aleck humor that would forever be thought of as the sensibility of American youth. With his art for Mad, for Panic, for lesser-known humor magazines like Trump and Help! and, finally, for Playboy, Elder found a window to the junior-high-school soul and chucked rocks through it, exposing that teen spirit in all its confused, hyperactive, self-absorbed glory and scariness. Earlier comic-book artists like Joe Shuster and Bob Kane may have invented the superhero, but Will Elder made possible Superbad.

Will was the one who gave Mad magazine its look and style, which were different from any comic book that had been created before, Kurtzman wrote in his memoir, My Life as a Cartoonist. He was the one who started filling the margins of every page with hundreds of tiny cartoons. They had nothing to do with the story on the page.

Connoisseurs of Elder's style call it chicken fat, so named by its inventor for the part of the soup that is bad for you yet gives the soup its delicious flavor. Elder's art was one of perilous excess. Elder was the funny pages' answer to Charlie Parker and Allen Ginsberg and Lord Buckley, and he served as inspiration not only to the comix artists of the underground movement, like Robert Crumb, but also to rock musicians in their aesthetic neighborhood, like Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead. Indeed, Garcia, who idolized Elder, once sought him out and invited him to a concert (at which Elder wore earplugs) and commissioned his idol to paint his portrait in oils. I always liked that thing of overdoing it, Garcia explained in an interview about Elder, and here's a guy who really understands what overdoing it is all about.

The sleek, hyperrealistic portrait Elder did of Garcia, along with further evidence of his range and prolificacy in and out of comics, appears in the first of two books of Elder's art: The Mad Playboy of Art and Chicken Fat: Drawings, Sketches, Cartoons and Doodles. Both books reveal a craftsman of stunning ability, which Elder applied with cheerful randomness. He had the skill to render anything he saw so realistically that he left one early portfolio painting (a portrait of the old character actor John Carradine) unfinished, so it would not be mistaken for a photograph. Raised in poverty in the Bronx during the Depression, Elder had as much pride in his professionalism as he had in his artistry, and he always took the work he got, providing unfailingly meticulous and unexpectedly funny illustrations for slick magazines like Pageant.

I had a family to feed, he explained not long before he died. But I always wanted to try to do a good job, and I always took the job seriously, and it was very important to me to be as silly as I possibly could be. I was very serious about that.

As he grew older, his cartoons never lost their breathtaking immaturity. Indeed, the same impulses to excess and abandon that made his early comics feel like dizzying playground fun made much of his later work seem miraculously, sometimes maddeningly, infantile.

Elder spent the last decades of his professional life applying his extraordinary technical facility, his appetite for juvenility and his indiscrimination to the service of Playboy magazine. He wasted a quarter of a century collaborating with Kurtzman to produce the Little Annie Fanny comic strip, which has earned a place in pop-culture history as the most painstakingly executed piece of garbage ever to disgrace the names of comics and sex. Creatively, Will Elder died, at midlife, from too much chicken fat.

Kraken Superbooks

It is tempting to describe the output of Kraken Opus as the ultimate in coffee table books - but you would need a heavily reinforced coffee table.

These enormous books are limited editions on subjects such as Manchester United (the venture's first publication), the fashion designer Dame Vivienne Westwood and the Super Bowl. The cheap ones retail for thousands of pounds each. The expensive ones . . .

This is where the superlatives kick in. The Opus on Man U has just changed hands for £1 million, making it the most expensive sports publication on record.

Another Opus, a diamond-encrusted pictorial account of the Prince concerts at The O2 arena last year, is expected to break the record sale price for a printed work when it comes up for auction this year.

A third, on the 100 greatest boxing matches, will cost $100,000 , is limited to 100 copies, measures 1.5m (5ft) square and, at 160kg (350lb), must be the weightiest tome ever published, requiring special machinery to install. The forthcoming volume on the Burj Dubai hotel, to be kept there, will, at 5m (16ft), be the world's tallest book.

We've been asked to think about doing another 12, each to go to prominent institutions around the world, like the Guggenheim, said Karl Fowler, the former City derivatives and tax expert who set up the business that owns Kraken Opus in 2005.

It's a work of art, he added. We don't publish books. I don't wish to sound arrogant, but an Opus is just that. It isn't a book.

We are standing in the shop he opened before Christmas in Covent Garden to sell the works, and assorted memorabilia, photos, artworks, guitars and, on one wall, a framed poster with the signatures of the 35 surviving recipients of the Most Valuable Player award, the greatest honour in American football.

The Opus on the Super Bowl, limited to 400 copies, sells for $40,000. You have to wonder, surveying 2009's crop of bust retailers, collapsing banks and redundancies, just what planet Mr Fowler thinks he is living on. Yet he claims that his niche market will prove to be resilient to almost any economic downturn.

Take the United volume. Of the promised limited edition of 10,000, more than half have been published. They cost between £3,000 and £4,500 - there are varying degrees of lavishness. More will be published when the necessary orders come in.

On the assumption that each purchaser paid £3,000, this means that Kraken has already received more than £15 million for the work, which cost $5 million to assemble, ahead of printing costs. Each Opus is guaranteed to contain at least 50 per cent original material, such as photographs, which can never appear anywhere else.

A request received by Kraken to use an image of the footballer Ronaldo in an advertising campaign for a huge fee, for example, was politely rebuffed.

For a United fan, with an expensive season ticket, £3,000 is not a lot to find, Mr Fowler claimed. He pointed out that 85 buyers of the Super Bowl Opus elected to pay their $40,000 in monthly instalments over two years. These aren't people who could simply put it on their Amex card.

That £1 million United edition, incidentally, was bought by a collection of wealthy Gulf investors, including a member of the Dubai Royal Family. It was copy No 777, seven being a lucky number in the Arab world.

The first in the print run for the forthcoming Prince work will have the squiggle adopted by the performer etched in platinum on the front; inlaid in that will be diamonds with a retail value of $10 million. The diamonds are the rare purple type, naturally, and the book is being produced in conjunction with Asprey. When it is auctioned at Sotheby's, there is expected to be a reserve of $5 million to $6 million, to cover the wholesale value of the gems.

Buyers also get a private performance for 50 guests from the diminutive star at his Los Angeles home.

A forthcoming work on Barcelona Football Club will probably be offered first to the club's 110,000 season ticket-holders. They will have the option of buying the number of the run that matches their seat number.

Other forthcoming subjects include the Rolling Stones, Celtic Football Club, Ferrari, the Vatican (with the cooperation of the private library in Rome), the journey to Mecca and Diego Maradona.

This is where it gets surreal. The first 100 copies of the latter book will contain a sample of Maradona's blood and his hair. Inside there is a depiction of his DNA. Not only are we telling you the story of your god; we're taking you inside the icon, Mr Fowler said.

The son of a Coventry car worker turned, after redundancy, window cleaner, Mr Fowler went to university in London and was picked up on the milk round by Morgan Stanley. I wanted to get into advertising. I sent hundreds and hundreds of letters to ad agencies - couldn't get in. I didn't even know what investment banking was. It was good training.

Morgan Stanley posted him to foreign exchange trading. I spent my first year ripping up telex confirmation slips and putting them into envelopes.

He moved to Goldman Sachs, specialising in using derivatives to limit client's tax bills. In 2002 he left to set up the Guernsey-based Kraken Group, which would offer similar services to individuals who were rich, but not rich enough to interest bulge bracket banks such as Goldmans. These clients were sportsmen and other entertainers - Mr Fowler refuses to disclose names. He then started advising them what to do with the money that Kraken saved them, and how to use their brand, their personal intellectual property, to make money from licensing, merchandising and publishing.

From this grew Kraken Opus, which was to be the antithesis of the typical sports publisher, launched with $5 million of his own money and capital from friends and family. A sportsman brings out an autobiography. They're not even written by them; there's nothing in them; there's nothing between the covers. It's pile it high, sell it cheap, Mr Fowler said. Our gamble was simple. I attempted to create a brand from the start, but we had to invest so much of that capital in making sure our first Opuswas what we wanted it to be. He wanted passionate, iconic stories, with large demographics. The typical budget is around $3 million.

There is, given Mr Fowler's background, the inevitable derivatives angle. He plans 50 Opus for Life Reserve Bonds, for $250,000 each, fully tradable and giving the right to acquire, and have stored for you or sold at once on the open market, a copy of every forthcoming Opus.

He is concerned about diluting the brand and mentions, dismissively, a couple of middle division football teams that would not pass muster. If this was all about money, I could do 15 football clubs tomorrow and I could get away with regurgitating photographs that have been used before. That's not what we're about. As my old boss at Morgan Stanley used to tell me, the business you don't do is more important than the business you do.

Richard Prince & the Cock Book

ONE of the world's most dedicated bibliophiles is planning to give away a multi-million-dollar collection of 20th-century literary treasures, many of which have never been displayed in public.

Richard Prince, the American contemporary artist best known for his controversial plagiarism of magazine advertisements - notably his Marlboro cigarette cowboy series - has been assembling what New York book dealers describe as one of the most valuable and distinctive modern libraries in private hands.

Basically, my collection is about sex, drugs, Beat [poets], hippies, punks - and great reads, said Prince, who keeps his most valuable manuscripts, letters and autographed literary memorabilia in a fireproof, waterproof, room-size vault near his studio in northern New York state.

Not content with run-of-the-mill first editions, Prince, 59, has spent the past 25 years seeking out the rarest - and often most expensive - examples of some of the best-known books, magazines and other publishing ephemera of the past century.

To literary jewels such as a signed first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses and Vladimir Nabokov's personal, annotated copy of Lolita, he has added a letter written by Sylvia Plath the day before the American poet killed herself; the original manuscript of Mario Puzo's The Godfather, complete with a letter from an editor suggesting Puzo change its original title, The Mafia; and the legendary, unpublishable, handwritten Cock Book, a one-off portfolio of erotica produced by one of Andy Warhol's acolytes and depicting the genitalia of various celebrities of the 1970s and 1980s.

Prince revealed last week that he has begun negotiating with the Morgan library in New York, with a view to donating his collection in return for a long-term exhibition. The artist is also working on a catalogue of his 3,000-item collection, which includes a hand-painted psychedelic motorbike crash helmet signed by Ken Kesey, writer of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Sometimes it seems like this collection is too good to be in private hands, Prince said. Collecting like this is a full-time hobby, and I have other things I want to do.

It was in 1977 that Prince first sprang his rephotography techniques on a stunned New York art world. Formerly employed in the cuttings department of Time-Life magazines, Prince kept many of the advertisements he cut out, then photographed parts of them for his own artworks.

He promptly sparked an enduring debate about authorship, copyright and the relationship between art and advertising. In 2005, one of his rephotographs of a Marlboro cowboy became the first photo ever to sell for more than $1m at auction, despite critics arguing that it technically violated copyright laws.

Fame and a sizeable fortune followed. In 2007 another Marlboro image sold for $3.4m, and a Prince painting, Millionaire Nurse, based on a pulp fiction paperback cover, sold last year for $4.7m.

With money seemingly no object, Prince became every rare-book dealer's favourite customer. He paid $175,000 for the Cock Book in 2005; spent another $175,000 on the only known copy of Dashiell Hammett's The Glass Key with its original dust cover; and added the first issue of Zap Comix, a 1960s underground comic, for $15,000. His copy of Ulysses is estimated to be worth more than $400,000.

Prince's collection is mostly limited to works published between 1949 - the year he was born - and 1984, the year that acted as the title of George Orwell's masterpiece (I've got a great copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four, he said). If the negotiations with the Morgan go well, it will become the only library in the world where visitors can inspect a copy of Plath's first published book of poems, The Colossus, dedicated to her husband, Ted Hughes, the English poet.

Another signed, first edition of The Colossus, dedicated by Plath to the US poet Theodore Roethke, is now on sale at a New York dealer for $65,000. But Prince's copy, like so much else in his collection, bears an irresistible flourish: Plath drew a little heart next to Hughes's name.

Self Help For Lovers

Let me admit it. There was a time, not so long ago, when I thought self-help books were for ninnies.

It's not that I believed that people didn't need help. But having grown up among literary-minded college professors -- my father taught Russian literature, my mother taught journalism and social theory and most of their friends were academics and book lovers -- I assumed that any coping strategies I might need as I blundered through life could be found in the novels that I devoured.

By the age of 6, I had absorbed pioneer stoicism from the "Little House" series: Where there's a will, there's a way. In Jane Eyre, I saw that a bookish loner who was ostracized by coddled children could educate herself into a richer life than her blinkered peers imagined.

Later, reading Dostoyevsky, Naipaul, Flaubert, Balzac, Fitzgerald, Graham Greene, Anne Tyler, John Irving, and ... um, Tom Robbins ("Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" was a teen favorite), I anticipated the freighted entanglements of romance, sex, adulthood, and parenthood -- with their joys, despairs, perfidies, and compromises.

What torments could I possibly face that my literary heroes and antiheroes hadn't already thrashed out for me on the printed page?

Besides, my own family background predisposed me to keep a stiff upper lip. Descended from a long line of German-American Midwesterners, I instinctively adopted the family motto: If you're looking for a helping hand, look at the end of your own arm.

This didn't mean that any of us, or all of us (I have two brothers), did not melt down from time to time (well, not my dad...). It meant that when we did, we sorted ourselves out without the benefit of any dime-store manual about the color of our parachutes or about which planets our romantic nemeses came from.

Furthermore, as someone who wanted to write, I superstitiously believed that psychological knots in the mind were best left tangled. I feared that if I were to avail myself of over-the-counter psychology, my thoughts would become so clear to me that my own inner life would bore me. Childhood is the writer's bank balance, Graham Greene had written. What if organizing the accounts emptied it?

And then, early in 1999, in the wake of the old-fashioned husband-hunting manual, "The Rules" -- volumes 1 and 2 -- I came across a breathtakingly elegant, jaded, and useful book called "The Technique of the Love Affair," published in 1928 by a sultry British newlywed in her early 20s named Doris Langley Moore. (She later divorced, I read in an online biography.) In her author photo, she looked like the luscious, sly heroine of a Noel Coward play. Her book begins with a dialogue between a sophisticated minx named Cypria and a naive damsel named Saccharissa.

"It is desirable for the happiness and well-being of a woman that she should be frequently, or at any rate constantly, pursued," Cypria declared.

At the time, I was young, divorced, and enmeshed in my first serious postmarriage relationship. I wondered: Could I follow Moore's instructions so that, as Dorothy Parker had written when she reviewed the book decades earlier, I might become "successful instead of just successive?"

Cypria's lessons were pointed and unsentimental. Chastity was not necessary to earn a man's loyalty, she explained, but teasing and reticence were de rigueur. "We dare not give rein to our generosity," she said, "for men, like children, soon tire of what is soon obtained." Saccharissa, Cypria's sappy sidekick, was horrified. "Your cynicism has shocked me," she whimpered. But before long, she was won over.

I took less convincing.

Captivated by Moore's antique Realpolitik on the battle of the sexes, I proposed an essay to my editors at The New York Times. The piece appeared on Valentine's Day. "At last," I wrote, "a self-help book for women who don't need help, not for women who are past it."

Then the phone began to ring. My friends wanted to be walked through "The Technique." (They already had "The Rules.") I lent my marked-up book to one friend; she kept it. I bought another, and soon lent that out as well (it also failed to find its way back to my library). I am currently on my sixth copy.

Later that year, my editors called. Would I review a book called "A General Theory of Love," on the neurological basis of romance? I was leery of falling into a "love" beat. I wanted to write on general, gender-neutral subjects. Would writing about relationship books twice in 12 months pigeonhole me?

But "A General Theory of Love" beguiled me. Like Moore's book, it was written in an artful literary style -- the authors began their explanation of the workings of the limbic brain by reaching back to Pascal's Pensees. See? Not for ninnies.

Also, my postdivorce relationship had just ended, and I was soothed by the doctors' news. The brain forges neural pathways in response to anyone you love, they explained. Over time, the pathways are reinforced by repeat exposure, and before long, tributary associations begin to connect with the main path, deepening and expanding its tracks.

Their message was clear: To haul yourself out of the limbic rut of a lost love, you must forge new neural paths with new people. This insight was useful. It also helped explain why my friends and I had found it so difficult in the past to shake memories of previous relationships.

Even when you want to forget, the limbic brain remembers. Sheepishly recalling the cocky essay I'd written about Cypria and Saccharissa, and the people who "don't need help...," I thought to myself, "Now, just who might that be?"

I had always shunned self-help sections in bookstores, but my respect for the wisdom in those two books began to erode my suspicion of the genre. When a friend confided to me that she was enduring a rending crisis with her parents and siblings, I went online, plugged in some of her concerns, and found a relevant book called "How You Can Survive When They're Depressed."

Walking to my local Barnes & Noble, I mumbled the title to the clerk, afraid of being overheard. He directed me to the proper section. Once there, I looked around furtively to make sure no friends were nearby -- being seen would have felt like being spotted in a particularly sordid aisle of an adult boutique.

Spying the title, I whisked it under my elbow and hustled it to the register. My friend loved the book. It lacked the lyricism of the bellwether titles that had lured me and had none of the style of the 19th- and 20th-century novels that paint such a detailed map of human woes.

But my friend was not a character marching through a predetermined series of imagined events; she was a real person who needed up-to-date strategies to address problems no novelist could resolve.

This is not to say that I am a complete convert. As a critic, I read a number of books a week, nearly all of them literary novels, biographies or books of social commentary. A self-help book makes it into the mix perhaps once a month.

But two years ago, I became a columnist for the Styles section of the Times, reviewing books on lighthearted, provocative or glamorous subjects that fit the Styles brief. As word went out to publicists, shipments of unsolicited books, many of them volumes of self-help, began to land on my doorstep. Reader, I read them.

Some I laughed at and threw out -- smug men preaching the virtues of open relationships, supermodels sharing man-catching tips (as if anyone so magically endowed had secrets that could be transferred to mere mortals), or scarred veterans of the war between the sexes writing screeds about how to dump pond-scum partners.

Others I thumbed through, getting hooked against my will. These books were, well, helpful. From Dalma Heyn's "Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy," I learned to identify certain kinds of boyfriends I was susceptible to. One was the "Easygoing Guy," or EGG -- "so friendly, so attractive, so subtly, characterologically mysterious," who's "present, but not entirely, not all the way." The EGG, she concluded damningly, was "a performer acting casual in order to ward off relationship."

Wised up by Heyn, I informed my then-boyfriend (an EGG) that I had noticed his evasiveness. "You're in the shower with a raincoat on," I said. "I think it's time to either take off the raincoat or get out of the shower." We are still friends, though we are not "involved."

From Debbie Magids and Nancy Peske's "All the Good Ones Aren't Taken," I learned about women who sabotage their own romantic chances -- the "Old Faithful" who hangs on to an old love and never makes room for a new one; the "Standstill," too shy and cautious to step into the fray and the one I recognized myself in, with a sting of regret, the "Whirlwind Dater" -- busy and social, prone to serially monogamous relationships that have little likelihood of working out long-term.

Anna Karenina left her husband for Vronsky, I thought. If she'd had a career in New York at the turn of the 20th century, would she have put her head on the tracks when the liaison soured, or gone on to ... the next Vronsky? Literature alone is not enough to sort out contemporary mores. "The end" is a fiction. The reality is: What's next?

Last summer, while I was visiting friends at a beach house, the hostess, who'd recently landed her hard-to-get boyfriend after a complicated courtship, sat next to me poolside, explaining what had turned the tide in their affair.

The relationship had been touch and go for a long time, she admitted. But a year before, she had read a review of a book titled "It's Called a Breakup Because It's Broken," which had convinced her that she needed to kill her relationship to save it.

Talking further, we realized it was my review that had led her to the book. She never had believed in self-help books before, she said, but with my apparent sanction, she had dared.

"I was too proud to buy it, so I was reading it in the Barnes & Noble coffee shop, concealing the cover," she told me. "Afterward, for weeks, I did just what the book said, avoiding the places I knew I'd see him, not calling, not being available. I would repeat after myself like a mantra, 'It's called a breakup because it's broken, it's called a breakup because it's broken.. .' "

It's not broken now, for her. I'm delighted if my tardy embrace of the relationship genre can help any of my friends and with any luck, someday I'll acquire the ingenuity to make it work for me.

For the moment, though, I'm still struggling to keep EGGs at bay and waiting with curiosity (not unmixed with dread) to see what wisdom the next unsolicited manuscript on my doorstep may contain. If it's not a self-help book, that's okay: It's high time I reread "The Technique" anyway.

Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab

The point may soon come when there are more people who want to write books than there are people who want to read them.

At least, that is what the evidence suggests. Booksellers, hobbled by the economic crisis, are struggling to lure readers. Almost all of the New York publishing houses are laying off editors and pinching pennies. Small bookstores are closing. Big chains are laying people off or exploring bankruptcy.

A recently released study by the National Endowment for the Arts found that while more people are reading literary fiction, fewer of them are reading books.

Meanwhile, there is one segment of the industry that is actually flourishing: capitalizing on the dream of would-be authors to see their work between covers, companies that charge writers and photographers to publish are growing rapidly at a time when many mainstream publishers are losing ground.

Credit for the self-publishing boomlet goes to authors like Jim Bendat, whose book Democracy's Big Day, a collection of historical vignettes about presidential inaugurations, enjoyed a modest burst in sales in the hoopla surrounding President Obama's swearing-in.

After failing to secure a traditional publishing deal in 2000, Mr. Bendat, a public defender in Los Angeles, paid $99 to publish the first edition of his book with iUniverse, a print-on-demand company. He updated the book in 2004 and 2008, and has sold more than 2,500 copies. IUniverse takes a large cut of each sale of the book, currently on Amazon.com for $11.66.

As traditional publishers look to prune their booklists and rely increasingly on blockbuster best sellers, self-publishing companies are ramping up their title counts and making money on books that sell as few as five copies, in part because the author, rather than the publisher, pays for things like cover design and printing costs.

In 2008, Author Solutions, which is based in Bloomington, Ind., and operates iUniverse as well as other print-on-demand imprints including AuthorHouse and Wordclay, published 13,000 titles, up 12 percent from the previous year.

This month, the company, which is owned by Bertram Capital, a private equity firm, bought a rival, Xlibris, expanding its profile in the fast-growing market. The combined company represented 19,000 titles in 2008, nearly six times more than Random House, the world's largest publisher of consumer books, released last year.

In 2008, nearly 480,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from close to 375,000 in 2007, according to the industry tracker Bowker. The company attributed a significant proportion of that rise to an increase in the number of print-on-demand books.

Even if you're sitting at a dinner party, if you ask how many people want to write a book, everyone will say, 'I've got a book or two in me,' said Kevin Weiss, chief executive of Author Solutions. We don't see a letup in the number of people who are interested in writing.

The trend is also driven by professionals who want to use a book as an enhanced business card as well as by people who are creating books as gifts for family and friends.

It used to be an elite few, said Eileen Gittins, chief executive of Blurb, a print-on-demand company whose revenue has grown to $30 million, from $1 million, in just two years and which published more than 300,000 titles last year. Many of those were personal books bought only by the author. Now anyone can make a book, and it looks just like a book that you buy at the bookstore.

To be sure, self-publishing is still a fraction of the wider publishing industry. Author Solutions, for example, sold a total of 2.5 million copies last year. Little, Brown sold more than that many copies of Twilight by Stephenie Meyer just in the last two months of 2008.

But in an era when anyone can create a blog or post musings on Facebook or MySpace, people still seem to want the tangible validation of a printed book.

I wanted the satisfaction of holding the book in my hands, Mr. Bendat said.

As a result of his iUniverse book, the British news channel Sky News asked Mr. Bendat to provide live commentary on Inauguration Day. A group of Washington hotels ordered 500 copies to give to guests who were in town for the event.

O.K., it's not a best seller, Mr. Bendat said, but I'm happy for what's happening.

Vanity presses have existed for decades, but technology has made it much easier for aspiring authors to publish without hefty upfront costs. Gone are the days when self-publishing meant paying a printer to produce hundreds of copies that then languished in a garage.

Now, for as little as $3, an author can upload a manuscript or collection of photos to a Web site, and order a printed book within an hour. Many books will appear for sale on Amazon.com or the Web site of Barnes & Noble; others are sold through the self-publishing companies Web sites. Authors and readers order subsequent copies as needed.

The self-publishing companies generally make their money either by charging author fees - which can range from $99 to $100,000 for a variety of services, including custom cover design and marketing and distribution to online retailers, or by taking a portion of book sales, or both.

Some, like Lulu Enterprises and CreateSpace from Amazon.com, allow the author to create the book free, but then make their money on a small printing markup and a profit split with the author.

For some authors, the appeal of self-publishing is that they can put their books on the market much faster than through traditional publishers.

Of course, authors who take this route also give up a lot. Not only do they receive no advance payments, but they also often must pay out of their own pockets before seeing a dime. They do not have the benefit of the marketing acumen of traditional publishers, and have diminished access to the vast bookstore distribution pipeline that big publishers can provide.

Still, many self-publishing companies allow authors to take more than the traditional royalty of 15 percent of the cover price on hardcovers and 10 percent or less on paperbacks.

Michelle L. Long, an accountant who advises small businesses, published Successful QuickBooks Consulting, a guide for others who want to help businesses use a software package made by Intuit through CreateSpace a little more than a year ago. She said she had earned 45 to 55 percent of the cover price on each sale and had made $22,000 in royalties on the sale of more than 2,000 copies.

During an economic downturn, books tailored to such narrow audiences may fare better than titles from traditional publishers that depend on a more general appeal.

A lot of this niche content is doing fairly well relative to the rest of the economy because it's very useful to people who have a very specific need, said Aaron Martin, director of self-publishing and manufacturing on demand at Amazon.

For many self-published authors, the niche is very small. Mr. Weiss of Author Solutions estimates that the average number of copies sold of titles published through one of its brands is just 150.

Indeed, said Robert Young, chief executive of Lulu Enterprises, based in Raleigh, N.C., a majority of the company's titles are of little interest to anybody other than the authors and their families. We have easily published the largest collection of bad poetry in the history of mankind, Mr. Young said.

Still, the dream of many self-published authors is that they will be discovered by a mainstream publishing house - and it does happen, however rarely.

When Lisa Genova, a former consultant to pharmaceutical companies, wrote her first novel, Still Alice, a story about a woman with Alzheimer's disease, she was turned down or ignored by 100 literary agents.

Ms. Genova paid $450 to iUniverse to publish the book and sold copies to independent bookstores. A fellow author discovered the book and introduced Ms. Genova to an agent, and she eventually sold Still Alice for a mid-six-figure advance to Pocket Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, which released a new edition this month. It had its debut on the New York Times trade paperback fiction best-seller list on Sunday, at No. 5.

Ms. Genova likened her experience to that of young bands or filmmakers using MySpace or YouTube to attract a following. It's really tough to break into the traditional model of doing things, she said.

Louise Burke, publisher of Pocket Books, said publishers now trawl for new material by looking at reader comments about self-published books sold online. Self-publishing, she said, is no longer a dirty word.

Diamonds in the rough, though, remain the outliers. For every thousand titles that get self-published, maybe there's two that should have been published, said Cathy Langer, lead buyer for the Tattered Cover bookstores in Denver, who said she had been inundated by requests from self-published authors to sell their books. People think that just because they've written something, there's a market for it. It's not true.

Do-It-Yourself Magazines, Cheaply Slick

PALO ALTO, Calif. - For anyone who has dreamed of creating his own glossy color magazine dedicated to a hobby like photography or travel, the high cost and hassle of printing has loomed as a big barrier. Traditional printing companies charge thousands of dollars upfront to fire up a press and produce a few hundred copies of a bound magazine.

With a new Web service called MagCloud, Hewlett-Packard hopes to make it easier and cheaper to crank out a magazine than running photocopies at the local copy shop.

Charging 20 cents a page, paid only when a customer orders a copy, H.P. dreams of turning MagCloud into vanity publishing's equivalent of YouTube. The company, a leading maker of computers and printers, envisions people using their PCs to develop quick magazines commemorating their daughter's volleyball season or chronicling the intricacies of the Arizona cactus business.

There are so many of the nichey, maybe weird-at-first communities, that can use this, said Andrew Bolwell, head of the MagCloud effort at Hewlett-Packard. Samir Husni, a journalism professor at the University of Mississippi who plans to use the technology in his classroom, said, We're not talking about replacing the Vanity Fairs of the world. But it's a nifty idea for a vanity press that reminds me of the underground zines we had in the '60s and '70s.

Should the service take off, Hewlett could expand its lucrative business of selling huge digital printers to companies that would print the magazine and then ship its profitable inks by the barrel instead of the ounce.

It is not clear how big a market there is for small runs of narrow-interest magazines when so much information is available free on the Internet. So far, users of the service, which is still in a testing phase, have produced close to 300 magazines, including publications on paintings by Mormon artists, the history of aerospace, food photography and improving your personal brand in a digital age.

Aspiring publishers must handle their own writing and design work, sending a PDF file of their creation over the Internet to the MagCloud repository. H.P. farms out the printing jobs to partners scattered around the globe and takes care of billing and shipping for people who order the magazine. While H.P. charges the magazine publishers 20 cents a page, they can charge whatever they like for the completed product.

Traditional printing presses are fast and can produce large quantities of publications for much less than 20 cents a page. But the business model and technology relies on replicating a single, fixed image in volume to achieve cost-effective scale.

With digital presses like those made by Hewlett's Indigo unit, a company can print one copy of 10 magazines or 10 copies of one magazine for about the same price. It is simply a matter of turning on the press and hitting a button.

Doreen Bloch, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, who created and runs a fashion publication, said MagCloud had made it much easier to produce her magazine, Bare, on a tight budget.

Ms. Bloch used to send final versions of Bare to a print shop in Arizona. If the editors noticed a typo or wanted to make a last-minute change, they had to pay $60 a page. If we needed to change the cover because it had the wrong date, they gave us so much trouble, Ms. Bloch said. With MagCloud, the editors can fiddle all they want free.

MagCloud could also open up new opportunities for local print shops.

Progressive Solutions in Santa Clara, Calif., has bought five of H.P.'s Indigo presses, which range in price from $300,000 to $600,000 a machine, in the last five years. It produces custom documents for companies like Tiny Prints, a popular service that lets people design their own invitations, stationery and announcements.

According to Scott Feldman, the co-owner of Progressive, the company needs to run its presses eight hours a day to break even and 12 hours a day to make money. It has been printing about 50,000 pages for MagCloud a month, including Bare.

The creators of Bare and other publications warn that it takes a lot of work to produce each issue, and some of the early MagCloud customers have had little success selling their publications online.

H.P. has developed technology in its research labs that could smooth the publication process. It has software that relies on algorithms to automate part of the design process, arranging photos in a way that is pleasing to the eye and suits a page packed with text. Down the road, H.P. might add such applications to the MagCloud service.

H.P. is also using technology similar to MagCloud to help publishers make out-of-print books available. It scans old books, cleans up the images and sends them off to the digital presses.

By using electronic processes rather than humans, we were able to get our costs down from $2,500 per title down to about $50 per title, said Phil Zuckerman, the president of Applewood Books in Carlisle, Mass. He said he can now afford to print single copies of old titles.

For H.P, MagCloud is also a way to provide customized service at low risk. And if the niche does not thrive, the company will simply move on. We are trying to experiment with these new types of business models, Mr. Bolwell said.

Storytelling

Once upon a time storytelling was something we all took for granted. Now there are fears that one of the oldest human activities is heading for an unhappy ending as the incessant chatter of the internet, mobile phones, video games and multichannel television erodes our ability to cope with and create satisfying narratives.

Hollywood veterans and experts from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) are so concerned that they have set up a $25 million laboratory to save the old-fashioned story.

Matt Damon, who co-wrote his breakthrough film, Good Will Hunting, about an MIT janitor, is understood to be in talks about taking a seat on the board of the new organisation.

The Centre for Future Storytelling sounds like something from a novel by George Orwell or Aldous Huxley, but its founders say that its mission is benign. Our big question is, can the story survive? David Kirkpatrick, the former president of Paramount Pictures, said. Civilisation needs stories as much as it needs wheels, fire and fibreoptics. We're not talking about going back to campfires. We want to use technology to keep storytelling alive.

At the centre, part of MIT's Media Laboratory, engineers, inventors and IT experts will work with artists, directors, designers and local school-children to build storytelling tools.

It will be based initially on the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. From 2010 it will have a second department 50 miles away at Plymouth Rock Studios, a film and TV studio that Mr Kirkpatrick co-founded. Plymouth Rock is investing $25 million in the project over the next seven years.

Nobody is really looking at the way that narrative is told or distributed in the modern world, Mr Kirkpatrick said. There were no CDs in 1980, no Google employees in 1997, no DVDs in 1998, no YouTube viewers in 2003. This incredible crunch of change has produced a snack culture sensibility which has got us grazing through life.

We are not saying that literature is dead or that long-form narrative is finished. We are just reading the tea leaves and they are alarming.

Mr Kirkpatrick cited a screenwriter friend with a PhD who used to reread her favourite book, The Great Gatsby, every year for inspiration. Now she can't get through it. She can't actually read 200 pages, he said.

Mr Kirkpatrick's own epiphany came while watching Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in a cinema this year. I found myself texting somebody during the movie - something I would never have done as a young man.

This is a very interesting phenomenon for those of us in the storytelling business. How do we make meaningful entertainment for people who cannot focus? Our brains are very elastic and change constantly. I find I look at a movie now as opposed to feeling it and skim a book rather than read it, so what's going to happen to stories in another 50 years?

Hollywood has become an interpreter of pop culture rather than a home for original work, he said.

Among the hit films that Mr Kirkpatrick worked on in the 1980s were Top Gun, An Officer and a Gentleman, Footloose and Witness, all of which were original stories. None of them would have a chance of getting made now, he said.

Frank Moss, the director of the MIT Media Lab, believes that technology is both a serious threat to traditional narrative and a vehicle for renewing it. He said that in ten years time storytelling would bleed across media much more than it did at present, and that stories would be experienced not only in the virtual world, but in the real world too.

He added: The challenge is to acknowledge the inevitability of change, that kids especially take media in small chunks continuously now. My dream is that the depth of stories to convey meaning, importance and emotion can be preserved in this world of on-the-run multiple media. Storytelling is at the very root of what makes us uniquely human.

What Gets Shoplifted

At one time, Waterstone's plastered a quote from Gunter Grass across its plastic bags: Even bad books are books, and therefore sacred. Perhaps this was meant to deter book thieves, who might be more influenced than the average shoplifter by Grass's words. If so, it probably didn't work. An estimated 100 million books - a black market worth about £750 million - are stolen from bookshops in the UK every year.

Most of us wouldn't dare to steal a book, of course. After all, libraries still provide them free - and today Public Lending Right (PLR), the government-funded group that arranges payment to the authors of books stocked in public libraries, reveals its annual list of most-borrowed books. Predictably, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final work in J.K. Rowling's epic series, turns out to be Britain's most borrowed book.

It is not, however, Britain's most stolen book. That accolade belongs to the London A-Z, at least according to a straw poll of more than 50 independent bookshops across Britain (the giants, such as Waterstone's and Borders, say that they don't keep figures).

I've been in bookselling for 20 years and the London A-Z is the most stolen book in the world, says Patrick Neale, who worked at a Waterstone's in London before setting up Jaffe & Neale bookshop in Chipping Norton, Oxfordshire. A-Zs were like porn - you had to keep them under the till.

This makes sense. Everyone needs map books, they are in plentiful supply and don't date rapidly. And, perhaps, stealing an A-Z would feel somehow less personal than taking a work by a named author. Certainly, reference books feature strongly in our most-stolen Top Ten. Local Ordnance Survey maps, the Oxford English Dictionary and the Highway Code all make the grade.

The worst theft we've had was of The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World, which was worth £100, says Peter Donaldson, the owner of Red Lion Books in Colchester, Essex. How someone had a big enough coat to walk out with that under it I really don't know.

The pocketing potential of a book seems to relate to its resale value. Many of the booksellers who took part in the survey are convinced that a thriving black market for books exists - according to them, illicit sales are made mainly in pubs, where disorientated consumers are happy to buy maps, travel guides and the latest Harry Potter for their children from a network of book thieves selling at bargain prices.

Paranoia or conspiracy? In 2004 a man was jailed after it was revealed that he ran a gang of thieves who stole Lonely Planet travel guides to order. He had sold an estimated 35,000 stolen books a year.

In April last year, a Glasgow man was jailed for 26 months for selling stolen books worth £50,000 on eBay, under the pseudonym easypeesy. Gary Little, 44, admitted taking the books when he was working as a forklift truck driver at a HarperCollins publishing plant. When an annoyed book trader found deluxe bound editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Silmarillion collection, which usually sold for £100, on offer at £30, he contacted Little's bosses and the jig was up.

Crime books are extremely popular. According to PLR records, James Patterson, who mostly writes cop thrillers, is the most borrowed author from libraries. And books about crime are also frequently stolen - hence the works of Martina Cole, a prolific crime writer, appear high on the list. Her books are also among those most read in prisons, and she claims to be perfectly happy to be a target for thieves: I think it's great, personally. If people want my books badly enough to go and steal them it's a compliment, really.

Some bookshops complain that true crime books, and works that appear to glorify illegal activity, including those by Cole, attract the criminal element.

My books are quite moral, actually, if people bother to read them properly, says Cole. They are not handbooks for criminals. I think people read them to find out about that world, though, and they can associate with the characters.

I've never said that I wanted to create great literature. I just want to write a good yarn.

Literature thieves come in all shapes and sizes. A bookseller from Bakewell in Derbyshire recounts how an unassuming, doddery old lady would come to the shop every week and steal a novel byTerry Pratchett, the author of the hugely popular Discworld fantasy series - who, incidentally, is the most stolen author in the UK. Police eventually found some 60 Pratchett books on the old lady's shelves.

Another bookseller, in Ross-on-Wye, Herefordshire, claims that a religious bookshop had to move away from a cathedral because the priests stole so many books.

In cities it seems that drug addicts are often the culprits, looking for books to sell on quickly in exchange for money for their next fix. Some authors may even have encouraged addicts and others to lift their books. In Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, Renton explains to a sniffy judge that he stole books from Waterstone's because of his growing interest in existentialism. So you read Kierkegaard. Tell us about him, Mr Renton, says the judge.

I'm interested in his concepts of subjectivity and truth, and particularly his ideas concerning choice; the notion that genuine choice is made out of doubt and uncertainty, without recourse to the experience or advice of others, answers Renton.

His friend Spud admits that he stole to fund his heroin habit. Renton receives a suspended sentence. Spud is jailed for ten months.

We got the feeling with Trainspotting that readers were being encouraged to steal, says Patrick Neale. Like many booksellers, though, he reports that Abbie Hoffman's 1971 anarchist treatise Steal This Book is rarely stolen nowadays: I've just walked over and it's still sitting there.

Students are sometimes to blame. Brian Schwartz, who used to own the Offstage bookshop in Camden Town, North London, says that when particular plays cropped up in their course syllabuses, drama students would cherry-pick the texts from his shelves.

For a while I put up a sign reading 'We're a mom-and-pop organisation; don't steal from us. If you need a book, I'll lend it to you', he says. It didn't work, though.

Children's books can be targeted, too. Jacqueline Wilson, the most borrowed children's author in the UK, is also among the most stolen. In times gone by, Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit books were often pilfered, too. Booksellers blame underfunded teenagers, and young mothers with prams in which to hide stolen goods, as the main culprits.

Regional variations also come into play. Books about the local football club are a popular target for sneak thieves, and in the sleepy village bookshop of rural Middleton-in-Teesdale, Co Durham, light-fingered visitors pocketed a 19th-century book on salmon fishing. In Glastonbury, the home of New Age spirituality, among the most stolen works from one bookshop are those by the late Aleister Crowley (1875-1947), the occultist once dubbed the wickedest man in the world.

Finally, there are some thefts that simply elude comprehension.The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding by Arnold Schwarzenegger was stolen from Liverpool Central Library so often that eventually the librarians stopped restocking it. And Pam Jones from Troutmark Books in Cardiff reports that someone stole The Devil a Monk Would Be: a Survey of Sex and Celibacy in Religion.

It was about nuns and monks getting hot under the collar when thinking about the opposite sex, and had tips to calm them down, she says. One piece of advice was to sit in an icy pond. I was gutted when that went missing because I was reading it.

Book theft can be such a senseless crime.

Don't take a leaf from their books

Book theft is a crime - a serious crime ... but it can also be kind of cool. Over the course of three years in the early 1960s, the playwright Joe Orton and his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, stole 72 books from their local library in Islington, North London. They then not-so-subtly corrupted the covers before returning them to the shelves: a volume of John Betjeman poems was given a dust jacket featuring a tattooed old man in his underwear, and the faces of Great Tudors were replaced with monkey heads. Orton and Halliwell were arrested in 1962 and sentenced to six months in prison. The vandalised books are now the most valuable in the Islington Library Service's collection.

The American activist Abbie Hoffman made a valiant attempt to keep the countercultural book-theft ball rolling with his 1971 work Steal This Book, which offered tips on everything from growing marijuana to stealing credit cards, making pipe bombs and obtaining a free buffalo from the US Department of the Interior. Although it didn't include a tip on how to purloin literature, so many people took its title at face value that at one time many bookshops refused to stock it.

Not so cool, however, is David Slade, 59, a married father of two and former president of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association, who was jailed for 28 months this week for stealing 32 books from the private library of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and selling them at Christie's for nearly £233,000. He had been hired by Sir Evelyn himself to catalogue his collection.

Perhaps Slade should have taken a leaf out of Farhad Hakimzadeh's book. The 60-year-old Iranian academic, former director of the Iran Heritage Foundation and a published author, stole dozens of individual pages from about 150 ancient books held at the British Library, the Bodleian and elsewhere. He used a scalpel to cut them out, then hid them in his own books. It was eight years before a British Library reader raised the alarm. Hakimzadeh was jailed for two years in January.

Still on the loose is Cambridge University and London Library scourge William Simon Jacques, also known as Mr Santoro. And David Fletcher. And Tomb Raider. In 2002 he was jailed for stealing £1.1 million worth of antique books from the two establishments in the space of five years. He was later arrested again for stealing a 12-volume set worth more than £50,000 from the Royal Horticultural Society's Lindley library - but while on bail, like the books, he disappeared without a trace.

What Readers Expect From Characters

Alexander McCall Smith Article from: The Australian

A FEW weeks ago, on a book tour of Australia, I found myself signing books in Sydney.

As the line of readers moved, two young women presented copies of books for signature. These books were from a Scottish series I write, one featuring a heroine called Isabel Dalhousie. Isabel, who is in her early 40s, has a boyfriend considerably younger than she is -- by 14 years, in fact.

As I signed their books, one of the women mentioned that she thought that this relationship between Isabel and Jamie, the younger man, was not a good idea at all.

I defended Isabel's choice. "Why shouldn't they be together?"

The answer came quickly. "Because it's not going to go anywhere."

"But I thought it was going rather well," I protested.

Again my reader lost no time in replying. "No, it isn't," she said emphatically.

That was me put in my place. After all, I was merely the author. As it happens, Isabel's relationship with Jamie had not been my idea in the first place but had come about because at an earlier stage in the series I came under attack from a journalist -- another woman -- for not allowing Isabel to become romantically involved with Jamie. I had originally intended that theirfriendship be platonic but had been told in the course of an interview with this journalist that I really had to allow something closer to develop. "Your readers will expect it," she said. "And it would be so empowering for them."

Not one to stand between my readers and their empowerment, I had decided to let Isabel develop a romantic liaison, only to be taken to task later by my Sydney critics for exactly this. This, and many other similar experiences, has made me think about the whole issue of the novelist's freedom and responsibility. The conclusion that I am increasingly drawn to is that the world of fiction and the world of real flesh-and-blood people are not quite as separate as one may imagine. Writing is a moral act; what you write has a real effect on others, often to a rather surprising extent.

The issue of reader expectations is one with which writers of crime or mystery fiction have long been familiar. Poet W.H. Auden is among many critics who have commented on how novels in this genre follow a classic pattern: first there is peace, then this peace is shattered by the occurrence of a crime, usually a murder. This leads to a search for the wrongdoer, his apprehension and punishment, and finally a return to peace.

We need to see the moral balance restored, said Auden: a view also expressed by P.D. James, one of the greatest crime writers of our times. According to James, the traditional detective novel reassures us that we live in a moral universe, one in which the detective is the agent of justice. In this respect, she suggests, the detective novel is really doing the work of the old-fashioned morality play.

Although the vast majority of mystery novels follow this well-established pattern, not all do. In some instances, we know all the way through exactly what the wrongdoer has done -- there is no mystery element here -- and the real questions are why he acted as he did and whether he is going to get away with it. If he does go unpunished, then the conventional pattern in such books is turned on its head.

Patricia Highsmith's Ripley books do just this. Tom Ripley, like many of Highsmith's characters, is a very credible sociopath, coldly capable of disposing of anybody who gets too close to his secrets. It is easy for him to kill, and the fact he does so while living the haut-bourgeois life in an elegant French house adds to the fascination we have for him.

Of course we know that it all started with the murder of Dickie Greenleaf, and as we see his life unfold over the series of novels we may cherish hopes that sooner or later Ripley's criminal past will catch up with him. But it does not and after several novels I suspect that many readers are actually unwilling for that to happen. Why? Because we are fond of Ripley? That is hardly likely; Ripley may be charming and urbane but he is not really very likable.

Perhaps we merely want his story to continue because we are enjoying it so much. If Ripley had been arrested or disposed of by somebody he had crossed, then that would have been the end of the series and that would have been am disappointment.

As it happened, Ripley survived his creator and presumably still is living in Belle Ombre, his house in France, awaiting some author to approach the Highsmith estate with a request to continue to record his dubious doings.

Of course a sociopath who gets away with it is unlikely to be tormented by guilt. For the non-sociopathic wrongdoer who goes unpunished by the law, authors often have an alternative form of punishment up their sleeve. Raskolnikov, the student turned murderer in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, initially gets away with his crime but then, tripped up by his conscience, eventually confesses to what he has done.

To be tortured by guilt is perhaps unpleasant enough to satisfy our desire that crimes be paid for, but in some cases the wrongdoer does not appear to suffer even that. Edgar Allan Poe's short story The Cask of Amontillado involves a particularly cruel murder -- the immuring of the victim in a cellar -- and, 50 years later, when the perpetrator tells the story, he does not appear burdened by regret or guilt. That, of course, is how things sometimes are. The guilty and the unpopular get away with it in real life.

Why is the writer of detective fiction put under such pressure to deal out just desserts to wrongdoers? The truth is that for many of us fiction is in some sense real and that what happens to fictional people is, in a curious way, happening in the real world.

We all remember being told as children: It's just a story. I recall being exposed as a boy to that most frightening of children's books, The Struwwelpeter. This collection of dark stories includes delights such as the story of the scissor-wielding figure who would bound gleefully into a room and cut off the thumb of any unfortunate child sucking his thumb at the time. Freudians would find little difficulty in seeing this as being all about castration fears, but for me it was a simple matter of what might happen to you if you engaged in thumb-sucking. I really believed in him and was suitably frightened.

Although we eventually learn to distinguish between the world of make-believe and the real world, I suspect that many of us continue to experience fictional characters and events as being, in some way, real. This is because the imaginative act of following a story involves a suspension of disbelief as we enter into the world it creates. When Anthony Minghella showed me a moving scene he had just filmed for the pilot of The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency, I found myself weeping copiously, right there on the set. I felt rather embarrassed -- it was only a story, after all -- but he put a hand on my shoulder and said that was exactly what he had done over that particular scene.

For the author, this sense that the reader has of the reality of the story has serious implications for how characters are treated in novels. It is one of the jobs of fiction to report on the sorrows and tragedies of this world. This must be done, though, from a morally acceptable standpoint. A writer who told a story of, say, rape or genocide but did so from a neutral or, worse still, complicit position would be given very short shrift indeed. Readers and critics would be on to him in no time at all; indeed, a book such as that would be unlikely to be published at all. Why? If it is only a story, where is the harm?

Stories have an effect in this world. They are part of our moral conversation as a society. They weigh in; they change the world because they become part of our cultural history. There never was an Anna Karenina or a Madame Bovary, even if there might have been models, but what happened to these characters has become part of the historical experience of women.

When J.K. Rowling revealed in New York that Professor Dumbledore was gay, the announcement was widely welcomed. One would have thought it would make no earthly difference to anything whether a fictional character had a particular sexual preference, but it did; people applauded and applauded. That must have been because they felt this announcement had some significance for the real-life issue of fully accepting gay people.

It can be very inhibiting for authors if they know that what happens in fiction is going to be taken so seriously. I write serial novels in newspapers and have learned the hard way that people will readily attribute the views expressed by characters to their authors. In one of my Scotland Street novels a character called Bruce, a rather narcissistic young man, makes disparaging remarks about his home town. Although these were not the views I hold about that particular town, I was roundly taken to task, with the local member of the Scottish Parliament suggesting that I should be forced to apologise to the offended citizens. I pointed out these were the views of a fictional character, who was just the type to make such remarks. That did not help.

In another novel, I had Isabel Dalhousie give up breastfeeding rather too quickly for the liking of the leader of a pro-breastfeeding organisation. Again I was told that I should make a public apology to those who believed in persisting with breastfeeding. That sort of thing is quite alarming and it is such people who need to be told, politely but firmly, that it is just a story.

Mind you, I still have my doubts as to the wisdom of creating scissor-men who cut off children's thumbs. Perhaps an apology is called for.

Towards A Digital Library

ON Tuesday, Denny Chin, a federal judge in Manhattan, rejected the settlement between Google, which aims to digitize every book ever published, and a group of authors and publishers who had sued the company for copyright infringement. This decision is a victory for the public good, preventing one company from monopolizing access to our common cultural heritage.

Nonetheless, we should not abandon Google's dream of making all the books in the world available to everyone. Instead, we should build a digital public library, which would provide these digital copies free of charge to readers. Yes, many problems - legal, financial, technological, political - stand in the way. All can be solved.

Let's consider the legal questions raised by the rejected settlement. Beginning in 2005, Google's book project made the contents of millions of titles searchable online, leading the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers to claim that the snippets made available to readers violated their copyrights. Google could have defended its actions as fair use, but the company chose instead to negotiate a deal.

The result was an extremely long and complicated document known as the Amended Settlement Agreement that simply divided up the pie. Google would sell access to its digitized database, and it would share the profits with the plaintiffs, who would now become its partners. The company would take 37 percent; the authors would get 63 percent. That solution amounted to changing copyright by means of a private lawsuit, and it gave Google legal protection that would be denied to its competitors. This was what Judge Chin found most objectionable.

In court hearings in February 2010, several people argued that the Authors Guild, which has 8,000 members, did not represent them or the many writers who had published books during the last decades. Some said they preferred to make their works available under different conditions; some even wanted to make their work available free of charge. Yet the settlement set terms for all authors, unless they specifically notified Google that they were opting out.

In other words, the settlement didn't do what settlements are supposed to do, like correct an alleged infringement of copyright, or provide damages for past incidents; instead it seemed to determine the way the digital world of books would evolve in the future.

Judge Chin addressed that issue by concentrating on the question of orphan books - that is, copyrighted books whose rightsholders have not been identified. The settlement gives Google the exclusive right to digitize and sell access to those books without being subject to suits for infringement of copyright. According to Judge Chin, that provision would give Google a de facto monopoly over unclaimed works, raising serious antitrust concerns.

Judge Chin invited Google and the litigants to rewrite the settlement yet again, perhaps by changing its opt-out to opt-in provisions. But Google might well refuse to change its basic commercial strategy. That's why what we really need is a noncommercial option: a digital public library.

A coalition of foundations could come up with the money (estimates of digitizing one page vary enormously, from 10 cents to $10 or more), and a coalition of research libraries could supply the books. The library would respect copyright, of course, and it probably would exclude works that are now in print unless their authors wanted to make them available. It would include orphan books, assuming that Congress passed legislation to free them for non-commercial use in a genuinely public library.

To dismiss this as quixotic would be to ignore digital projects that have proven their value and practicability throughout the last 20 years. All major research libraries have digitized parts of their collections. Large-scale enterprises like the Knowledge Commons and the Internet Archive have themselves digitized several million books.

A number of countries are also determined to out-Google Google by scanning the entire contents of their national libraries. France is spending 750 million euros to digitize its cultural treasures; the National Library of the Netherlands is trying to digitize every Dutch book and periodical published since 1470; Australia, Finland and Norway are undertaking their own efforts.

Perhaps Google itself could be enlisted to the cause of the digital public library. It has scanned about 15 million books; two million of that total are in the public domain and could be turned over to the library as the foundation of its collection. The company would lose nothing by this generosity, and might win admiration for its good deed.

Through technological wizardry and sheer audacity, Google has shown how we can transform the intellectual riches of our libraries, books lying inert and underused on shelves. But only a digital public library will provide readers with what they require to face the challenges of the 21st century - a vast collection of resources that can be tapped, free of charge, by anyone, anywhere, at any time.

Robert Darnton is a professor and the director of the Harvard University Library.

Harry Potter Changed Publishing

The Boy Who Lived also helped breathe new life into the struggling publishing industry. Even before Harry Potter became one of the most successful movie heroes of all time, the Potter books were turning countless people into readers. But that's not all they did.

J.K. Rowling's book series about the boy wizard who's destined to confront the monster who killed his parents caught people's imaginations. Potter became an addiction, in a way that few television shows or movies ever can. And in the process, Harry Potter changed the publishing industry, and the way we think about books, forever. So here are some of the ways that the Harry Potter books changed publishing: Potter got adults reading again. Seriously, everybody talks lately about how Potter got children into reading. But what about adults? The Potter series got grown-ups who hadn't picked up a book, or prose fiction of any length, in years. They became vital watercooler discussion material in offices around the world, and any adult who didn't want to seem hopelessly out of the loop had to buy into Pottermania. The more recent adult obsessions with books like Hunger Games all started with Harry. A.S. Byatt, writing somewhat disapprovingly about the popularity of Harry among adults, speculated in 2003:

Ms. Rowling, I think, speaks to an adult generation that hasn't known, and doesn't care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don't have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.

But I think Byatt was selling the imaginative strength of the Potter books, and their value as a gateway drug, short. With Potter, adults who had not exercised their imaginations, in the way that only a book can really facilitate, were suddenly given a workout. Grownups who had switched themselves off from the imaginative possibilities of fiction were suddenly reconnected. Speaking of which...

Potter helped create the huge niche of young adult novels.

As we've written about before, a lot of the most interesting, most challenging storytelling right now is happening in young-adult novels. Including genres that are far from Harry's wheelhouse, like dystopian and post-apocalyptic futures. The Potter books helped to prove that books aimed at middle-grade and young-adult readers could gain a sizeable audience, of all ages - and that they could deal with fantastical and speculative topics. As Tamora Pierce told Malinda Lo in 2009:

Publishers discovered with Harry [Potter] that kids will read a lot of fantasy, and they'll read big books. And rather than just publishing books like Harry, they just started to publish fantasy and take chances on unusual fantasy. So we are really having a golden age.

Just by themselves, the Potter books forced the New York Times to add a children's bestseller list, because they were crowding out other titles on the regular bestseller list. Potter was "a gateway book" for a lot of young readers, Michael Fox with the Joseph Fox Bookstore in Philiadelphia told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

They brought book cosplay into the mainstream

Cosplay has been with us since the dawn of civilization, probably - but cosplay based on a book property, rather than a movie, TV series, comic book or cartoon, is arguably a bit rarer. You could probably go to any science fiction convention, going back decades, and see people dressed up as characters from Philip Jose Farmer novels or whatever. But the idea that people dressing up as characters from a book series would become a public phenomenon, at bookstores, at Halloween or whenever, is pretty extraordinary. And yet there are plenty of press photos of public Hogwarts cosplay, going back to well before the first movie came out. Which brings us to...

The "release date party" phenomenon

People do all sorts of hullaballoo for a movie's release, including premiere parties and red carpets (and probably Satanic rituals.) But book events have been pretty low-key affairs, even for books aimed at younger readers. The idea of having a giant party, in bookstores all over the world - and opening at midnight before the release date, to let everybody buy the book early - was pretty revolutionary. It helped people treat books more like events and less like things that just sort of emerged into the world. And this especially helped smaller independent bookstores, which were struggling to compete with larger sellers like Amazon that offer deep discounts. Independent bookstores had to offer something that Amazon couldn't - and cool celebrations were a big part of that.

Harry Potter helped bring a new generation to fan-fiction

A lot of people got into writing fanfic as a result of Harry Potter, and some of the most ambitious fanfic projects of the past decade or so have involved expanding the world of Hogwarts and adding new depth to characters like Snape and Draco Malfoy, among others. A lot of writers have transitioned from writing Potter fanfic into creating their own successful young-adult book series, helping to expand the huge list of authors who were inspired or launched by Potter.

The books showed that a series could grow up with its readers

As Dana Gioia told the Newshour in 2007:I think that's almost unique with this series, that someone has written a series of books in which the characters age as the readers age, and as the level of the difficulty of the books increases with the age of the readers.

The books become longer and more complicated, and the characters get darker and the issues they deal with get more tricky. The idea that a book series could take for granted that its readers were growing up along with it was new, but is sure to gain some imitators.

Pottermore could create a new model for e-book sales

J.K. Rowling's website Pottermore was a huge letdown when she finally announced it - we were all expecting an MMO, or a new Potter book, or maybe a digital Hogwarts with online classes. But Pottermore could still change the way big authors sell e-books. The site is basically a sales platform for the e-book versions of the Potter books, bypassing iTunes and Amazon.com, with a digital watermark to (slightly) discourage piracy. (But no DRM, hurray!) But to get you to come to the site and hopefully buy new copies of the books you already have in physical format, Rowling is offering tons of immersive content, including a digital Sorting Hat and Wand Chooser, and tons of newly written material about Hogwarts. You can follow Harry's journey from the first book onwards through a series of "moments" (with new illustrations) that let you join Hogwarts as Harry does. Even if this site winds up being a bit of a disappointment, it will probably sell a ton of e-books, and prove that publishers don't need to go through the main existing retail channels, for a property with enough buzz.

New Service for Authors Seeking to Self-Publish E-Books

The Perseus Books Group has created a distribution and marketing service that will allow authors to self-publish their own e-books, the company said.

The new service will give authors an alternative to other self-publishing services and a favorable revenue split that is unusual in the industry: 70 percent to the author and 30 percent to the distributor. Traditional publishers normally provide authors a royalty of about 25 percent for e-books.

The service arrives as authors are increasingly looking for ways to circumvent the traditional publishing model, take advantage of the infinite shelf space of the e-book world and release their own work. That's especially the case for reviving out-of-print books whose rights have reverted back to the author.

Bloomsbury, a publisher based in Britain, said on Wednesday it had created a new publishing arm that would release digital-only titles. Companies like Open Road Integrated Media have successfully published digital editions of backlist books whose rights were not held by a publisher. The new Perseus unit, called Argo Navis Author Services, will be available only to authors who are represented by an agency that has signed an agreement with Perseus. David Steinberger, the president and chief executive of the Perseus Books Group, said that the company had made an agreement with one major literary agency: Janklow & Nesbit Associates, whose authors include Ann Beattie, Anne Rice and Diane Johnson. Curtis Brown Ltd., which represents Karen Armstrong and Jim Collins, is also close to signing an agreement to make Argo Navis available to their authors. Perseus is in discussions with more than a dozen other agencies.

"Fundamentally, it comes out of a concern that we've been hearing from authors and agents that they're looking for another alternative," Mr. Steinberger said. "We've heard from authors that they may have a book that's never been published, but it doesn't fit what their existing publisher is looking for."

He emphasized that while Argo Navis provided distribution and marketing services, the author remained the publisher. While authors get a much higher share of the revenue under this arrangement, they'll receive fewer of the services, and financial support, provided by publishers under more conventional contracts.

In an effort to solve the problem of how to help readers discover e-books without print counterparts on tables in bookstores, Argo Navis will provide basic marketing services, like placing product pages on retailer Web sites. It will also make more extensive marketing services available for a fee.

E-books will be distributed to retailers including Amazon, BN.com, Google, Kobo, Sony and Apple. Jack W. Perry, a publishing consultant, said that the service could appeal to authors who wanted their e-books published with wide distribution. "A lot of times when people go in and work with e-books, they have to do a lot themselves," he said. "Perseus is trying to take on a lot of that." No authors have signed up yet, Mr. Steinberger said.

Tim Knowlton, the chief executive of Curtis Brown, said the service was an appealing option for authors whose books had gone out of print or books for which the author held the electronic rights.

"The ability to select which books an author or an heir would like to put into print, and to do so relatively inexpensively, is very appealing," Mr. Knowlton said. "For any book that has potential for significant sales, it's going to be a good opportunity to explore."

Pricing Books

Soon, there will be three kinds of books on the Kindle.

$1.99 ebooks. This is the clearing price for virtually all ebooks going forward.

$5 ebooks. This is the price for bestsellers, hot titles and books you have no choice but to buy because they were assigned in school.

$10 ebooks. This is the price you will pay to get the book first, to get it fast, to get it before everyone else. There might even be a subset of books for $20 in this category.

For example the new Steve Jobs book. The only reason it wasn't onsale two weeks ago is that the publisher needed to move tons of molecules from the printer to the store. That means ebook readers have been waiting so that the paper readers could get their copy.

The analogy is paperback and hardcover. You paid extra for the hardcover because it was first and because it was a classy thing to display on the wall. A year later, the very same book is half the price or less as a paperback.

One of the unused features of digital ebooks is that the price can change easily, daily, by volume and by demand.

Starting soon, you'll pay extra for the hot, fresh ebook (at $20, the publisher can do quite well for two weeks while we wait for the hardcover, thanks very much) and you'll pay a lot less when it's on the clearance rack.

How much should an ebook cost?

This is the wrong question.

The right question is: How much will an ebook cost?

Because the answer isn't up to one author or one publisher or even a price-fixing cartel. It's up to the market, which is a far more complicated entity. There are no shoulds in the market, just reality.

On one hand, the marginal cost of delivering a single ebook is close to zero. It might cost Amazon and B&N a dime to transmit it, but it certainly costs the publisher nothing.

(People who disagree with that statement don't understand the concept of marginal cost and should look it up before participating in this discussion. Marginal cost is very different from opportunity cost or sunk cost or lost profits.)

In a market where the marginal cost is close to zero, prices tend to race to zero as well. Except -

Except when there are no substitutes. If you want Elvis Costello to call you on the phone and wish you a happy birthday, he can charge you whatever he wants, because even though it costs him very little, you have no alternatives. If you want Elvis, well, there's only one. Take it or leave it.

So our analysis begins with the notion that there will be at least two price points for ebooks. One will be super cheap, perhaps a dollar, for ebooks where there are substitutes. Genre fiction, diet books, manuals, instruction guides, travel books - if you can't tell them apart before you read them, then of course you should buy the cheaper one, all other things being equal (and those other things might include reviews, reputation, etc.)

But what about books where there is no obvious substitute. A Neil Gaiman book, or a Tiger Mother, or even that one Ellery Queen book you haven't read?

(In fact, in most cases there are substitutes. You can download just about any book from the torrents - pirate websites like the mp3 music ones of a decade ago. Neil Gaiman said that he had been very upset with people pirating his stories on the web because he feared that unless he opposed these actions he'd lose his copyright, which he later learned was untrue. What he noticed though was that in Russia where his books were being translated onto the web, was that his sales actually went up as result. He came to see piracy as a just another form of lending and advertising for his books.)

Here, we need to take a moment and think about the nature of substitute. Of course, there is no substitute for Neil (outside of the pirated versions on the torrents). On the other hand, at $100 a book, most of us would make do and move on to our second choice. So there is a substitute, just not a perfect one or an easy one.

For books that come with a provenance, with a brand we seek out, I think there are again two price points. One is for the book we need to read right now, the hot one, the one for which there is buzz. These books can demand a premium and probably will. Certainly less than $20 (a 'moral' ceiling related to the price of a paper copy) and probably more than $10 (which is the floor set by Amazon as the price of a bestseller on the Kindle). In a moment, I'll riff on how this buzz might come to happen more productively from the point of view of the publisher.

For books that aren't hot, that aren't new or fresh or filled with buzz, it's hard for me to see how profit and volume can be maximized at a price like that. All the data I've seen and produced in experiments shows me that trial and purchase and conversion goes up significantly at less than $10. Certainly, at zero there's a huge boost: perhaps 100 or 1,000 times as many copies a day are sold at zero than at ten dollars. While zero gets you volume, you make nothing, so that's not sustainable in the long run.

I'm guessing that market for backlist titles where there are possible substitutes is going to settle in at $7. Low enough to be less than $10, to indicate that this is a bargain, at least psychically, but high enough that selling a few thousand of a five year old title is just fine.

Which leads to my guess/proposal for creating buzz, particularly for unknown authors with great books. That category (call them UAGB) is the most interesting in all of publishing, because it's about buzz and breaking open a new idea/author.

I would start those books at ZERO and raise the price a penny for every ten purchases until I got to $15 and then hold it there for three months.

If the book really is great, the first 1000 readers (who are easy to find, because they love to read and love a bargain and have to hurry before the price exceeds a dollar) either start raving about the book or they don't. If they do, then the next few thousand readers are going to stampede along. Still a bargain, but moving fast.

Now, by the time the book hits $15, it's been read by 15,000 people (understand, please, that in the book business, 15,000 readers in a week is a national bestseller, a huge hit), and you've just created a new must-read author.

That means that pricing of the future looks like:

Zero: promo titles

$1: backlist service titles, useful but not irreplaceable

$7: backlist titles from authors you love

$15: current best sellers

There's probably no form of media that has as much history of crazy pricing as books. There are $100 art books on the bestseller lists and 3 cent Chick tracts handed out every Sunday. Most of this is related to the fact that the marginal cost of a printed book varies so much (records, movies and videogames vary not at all). Now that books are entering the same space as these other sorts of media, expect that the pricing follows suit.

The Future

I recently bought a book about the future of books. It's called The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, and features twenty-six authors (including two n+1 editors) describing what they think might become of literature. Given the collection's prophetic subtitle, and that I was reading it on my new, still-extraterrestrial-seeming iPad, I was surprised to find that very few of the authors mention e-books. Those who do tend to regard them with dread and disgust, like a farmhand studying a handful of fallen locusts. One author compared e-books to astronaut food; another to Mortal Kombat. Another suggested that perhaps we could create e-readers that would exactly resemble books, with cardboard covers and hundreds of papery pages and so on, but whose cover graphics and print could morph from Salinger to Tolstoy in a click.

Peering through smudges of finger grease on the iPad screen, the notion of an actual electronic book held a certain whimsical allure. Then I read the collection's penultimate contribution, by the novelist Reif Larsen. In it, he makes an obvious but often unmentioned point: the book is a technology born of its circumstances, and ancient ones at that. Around the first century B.C.E. in Rome, the codex's bound papyrus or leather membranae replaced the polyptych's wax or wooden tablets (imagine the world's bulkiest three-ring binder), making it possible to compile information at greater length and less weight. Unlike wax tablets, books didn't break or melt, and unlike scrolls, they could be quickly thumbed through to locate a desired passage. Students could carry them to their lectures, generals could mail them to the hinterland, and pagans could hide them in their robes. It was a revolutionary invention. But now consider the e-book, displayed on a slim electronic tablet, which can relay exponentially more information at even less weight, with even greater functionality. The proponent of paper books will one day sound "like a Victorian-era man arguing the benefits of candelight over Edison's newfangled electric lanterns," Larsen writes. Indeed, an e-book needs multiple pages and a cardboard cover like a lightbulb needs wax.

Larsen begins his essay by highlighting the many literary experiments that paper made possible - from 15th-century illuminated manuscripts to the proto-hypertextuality of Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch and Christopher Manson's Maze. He then imagines what territory e-books might explore once they grow into their new shells. An innovative e-book could burst the fixed boundaries of the page. Images could 'ghost in' behind words, or float above them. Instead of book covers, we could have multimedia 'trailers.' The text could be 'heavily supplemented' by multimedia elements like narration, music, videos, and even several risque deleted scenes, options to improve the story on your own, and a sidepanel of real-time Twitter reviews.

"From a storyteller's point of view," Larsen concludes, "the opportunities to engage a reader in new story-worlds seem simultaneously limitless and horrific." The trick, he writes, is "knowing when to harness the power of the new media and when to let the simplicity of the text work its magic." He speaks from experience: last spring, Penguin published an 'amplified edition' of his cartography-obsessed, lightly hypertextual first novel, The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet (2009). After reading Larsen's essay, I downloaded a copy of the Spivet iPad app. The novel's opening screen (cover?) played a hokey theme song. That screen faded into a table of contents of sorts—fourteen chapters, arranged horizontally, like a row of flypaper strips dangling from the ceiling. I opened up the first chapter. The paragraphs were formatted in the 'fluid vertical plane' that Larsen envisioned in his essay, with long columns of text running unbroken down a tea-toned background. Further amplifications: videos of barns, semi trucks, and people wordlessly playing horseshoes.

Like in the novel itself, the pages of the app come packed with marginalia penned by the precocious 12-year-old narrator. But due to the narrowness of the iPad screen, you can't read the marginalia without first dragging them to the middle of the page - they can become unglued, like Post-It notes - obscuring the main text. I quickly grew to resent these little pieces of paper that kept slipping around, pulling my attention from the story at hand. It was like flipping through a scrapbook, except no one had bothered to tape anything down.

The more innovative the e-book, it seems, the more it falls apart.

The e-book is usually said to have been invented in 1971, when an undergrad at the University of Illinois, Michael S. Hart, decided to upload The Declaration of Independence onto an ARPAnet server. Sitting in the Materials Research Lab among hulking, warmly breathing Xerox Sigma V processors, Hart went on to input and share, with a quixotic singularity of purpose, text after text, from Peter Pan to The Tempest. Few saw the revolutionary implications of his actions until years later, when his Project Gutenberg - which by then had uploaded thousands of books - began to attract copyright lawsuits and became a figurehead for the fledgling hacktivist and open source movements.

Today, more than two million e-books are available for free download on the internet. Pair this abundance with an increasingly cheap (and perhaps one day soon, free) Kindle, and you have some counterweight to the dwindling local library. If those noble institutions exist at all in thirty years, our children will probably know them as quiet places to use computers and read e-books. You can already walk into one of 11,000 public libraries, from Manhattan to Missoula, and have e-books loaned to your Kindle.

The e-book's fate was not always assured. For more than a decade after its invention, the format languished in the digital backwaters. Without affordable personal computers, a worldwide web, or e-readers, there was simply no market for it. That market gradually opened in the early '90s with the production of a series of ill-fated e-readers, like the Rocket e-book and Sony's Data Discman, but the e-book remained a bete noire for traditional publishers. They argued that the devices were prohibitively expensive and provided an inferior reading experience, which largely remains true. They also spent a lot of time discussing intangibles that turned out not to matter to most consumers, like the musty perfume of paper and the jouissance of a well-appointed bookshelf.

For Hart, who died last fall, the book was not sacred. It was simply an easily digitizable object. Inspired by the 'replicator' devices he saw on Star Trek, Hart wanted to make all of the world's design objects - anything that could be scanned and reproduced - available for free on the internet, where they could then be downloaded and reconstituted using 3D printers. He called this shift the 'Neo-Industrial Revolution,' and predicted it would occur by the year 2040.

Traditionalists attack e-books because they are not enough like print books. The electronic literary vanguard tends to dislike e-books because they are too much like real books. Electronic writers have long defined their craft as any piece of digital writing except e-books, which they consider mere scans of paper. They have perhaps overlooked some of the e-book's creative possibilities, but they have helped to define what e-book connotes. If an e-book mutates too far from its physical progenitor, then it becomes electronic literature.

The field of electronic literature began as a hundred loose strands, which briefly appeared to braid into a new art form called hypertext fiction. The influential hyperfictionist Stuart Moulthrop's Subjective Chronology of Cybertext, Hypertext, and Electronic Writing cites as the form's founding influences a 1945 Atlantic article by Vannevar Bush that envisioned a machine for organizing and linking information; a 1961 computer game called Spacewar!; the writings of Robert Coover, Milorad Pavic, and Thomas Pynchon; the work of hypertext pioneer and theorist Ted Nelson; and Donna Haraway's 1991 A Cyborg Manifesto. Those influences collided in the mid 1980s, when a novelist (and early PC adopter), Michael Joyce, working from his home in Michigan, grew frustrated with the constraints of his word processing software. For decades, experimental writers like Coover had been pushing against the static linearity of the page - a restriction that, Joyce quickly realized, ceased to exist in a digital space. "In my eyes, paragraphs on many different pages could just as well go with paragraphs on many other pages, although with different effects and for different purposes," Joyce later wrote. "All that kept me from doing so was the fact that, in print at least, one paragraph inevitably follows another."

When Joyce met a young computer scientist named Jay David Bolter at the Yale Artificial Intelligence Lab in 1984, they began working on such a program. They called it StorySpace, because it allowed readers to navigate a text spatially rather than sequentially, by following hypertextual threads like corridors in a labyrinth. Partly to test out the new software, Joyce wrote "afternoon, a story"(1987), which is known as the world's first hypertext novel.

The early hypertextualists - Joyce, Moulthrop, Judy Malloy, Shelley Jackson, Rob Swigart, J. Yellowlees Douglas - wrote about interconnectedness, flux, immateriality, and sprawl, themes that reflected the structure of StorySpace, the program most of them used to craft and publish their work. Yet the hyperfictionists also managed to bend the technology to their own political and artistic whims, using its disruptive nature to splinter notions of linearity and authorship. These early forays shaped the imperatives of the new art form, even as its pioneers retired to the relative plushness of print media and teaching positions. Subsequent generations of electronic writers have pursued these ends to dreamy new places. This cadre of author-programmers, clustered around a handful of progressive universities and museums, continue to engineer word toys, interactive fiction, and various forms of digital poetry - poems that shiver and collapse; poems that read themselves; poems that crawl across gallery walls; poems encoded within poems; poems randomly generated by algorithms; poems fully abstracted into constellations of floating individual letters. The end result has been a corpus of texts so hard and shiny they could chip a tooth.

For all of the critical attention it received, nobody ever got rich off hyperfiction; it devolved first into an academic exercise, then into a quaint gimmick - as in the case of Paul LaFarge's recent online 'hyperromance,' Luminous Airplanes, which he used to promote a paper novel of the same name. But concurrent with the rise of hypertext was the development of a more populist art form, the 'expanded e-book.' The expanded e-book was created by Bob Stein, who had made his reputation inventing the Criterion Collection (the laserdisc predecessor to the modern, bonus-laden DVD), which he imagined as a more bookish version of film: a movie with chapters and layers of commentary that you would want to return to again and again. The idea came to Stein when he saw how, on laserdisc, one could move in slow motion through the seven opening shots of Citizen Kane, and in the process, deconstruct how Welles achieved the effect of the camera seeming to glide up to that lighted window of Xanadu. Stein's vision for Criterion was in a way similar to Michael Joyce's for StorySpace. "What's great about books is that the power is in the hand of the user," he once told a Wired reporter. "What we do [at Criterion] is transform a producer-driven medium into a user-driven one."

In late 1990, Stein turned his thinking to e-books, and how to sell them. Using the Criterion model, he founded Voyager Expanded Books. The business transposed popular titles like Jurassic Park and tech-niche darlings like Neuromancer onto diskettes and CD-Roms. In many ways, these books resembled modern e-books: they were searchable, annotatable, and featured variable typeface sizes. Like current enhanced e-books, they even contained interactive multimedia elements. In Jurassic Park, for instance, the illustrated dinosaurs could roar, growl, and squeak. Unfortunately, it took about three seconds to turn the page.

Progressive and well intentioned as Stein was, nearly all of the missteps that e-book publishers have made and continue to make can be traced back to Voyager. Stein revolutionized home movies by making them more like books, but crippled books by trying to make them more like DVDs. Take the way Larsen envisioned the future of books, stuffed with 'extras': trailers, commentary, and deleted scenes. Stein's impulse was always to add, rather than to adapt. The e-book is still trying to extricate itself from that legacy.

Our Choice, a multimedia book app from PushPop Press, opens with a video of Al Gore's tanned, waxen face speaking directly into the camera. "Welcome to Our Choice," he says, making a point to refer to it as an app and not a book. He then presents a tutorial on how to read the book, or app, which I found mildly patronizing the first time I launched it (part of the fun of electronic literature lies in mastering a new text's mechanics) and downright annoying the second and third time. (I did not open it a fourth.)

The tutorial would be necessary for no one under the age of 65; the thing is pretty damn intuitive. Swipe left, and you see the 'cover' - an image of a rotating 3D model of a familiar blue-green planet. "In my faith tradition, in the book of Deuteronomy, God says, 'I am giving you the choice of life or death. You can choose either blessings or curses,'" sermonizes the voice of Gore. "We are at a crossroads. We must choose the type of earth our grandchildren will inherit." Tap again, and the land breaks out in a rash of yellow, ecru and cocoa - a scorched planet, its oceans haunted by swirling many-tentacled clouds. Although I tend to dislike zoomed-out imagery that abstracts the terrifying effects the climate catastrophe will have on our human-scale lives, it is impossible to deny that this is starkly effective visual storytelling.

Another tap leads to the book itself. When Gore says it's interactive, he isn't exaggerating. This is a stunning piece of programming. The pages are arrayed in a horizontal strip along the bottom of the page beneath a big banner image. Inset into the text of each page are photos, which can be unfolded and enlarged by un-pinching your fingertips. Occasionally, these images lurch to life as BBC News-style videos, audio slideshows, or brilliantly conceived infographics. Other times, they open into pixelated computer animations that look like they were ported in from The Sims. In a particularly clever infographic about wind energy, the reader can blow on the iPad's screen and prompt a windmill to spin.

The problem with Our Choice is that among the elephantine hi-def images and infographics, the text gets buried. Reading it feels like flipping through a coffee table book: grazing the lush images, you avoid eye contact with the daunting gray bricks of text. If this is the future of the book, then the book is indeed doomed. Writing is a miraculous technology all its own - a code that, when input through the optic nerve, induces structured, coherent hallucinations. An equivalent experience does not exist. Words have shape and musicality. They almost have a flavor. But they are too easily drowned out by stronger stimuli.

The danger of Our Choice is not that it's bad, but that it does a bad thing so well. It threatens to convince publishers that PushPop has succeeded in its mission to change the way we read books. Fortunately, we won't have to worry about the company's next assault against the written word. After publishing just one title, PushPop was absorbed by larger forces. "We created a new way of publishing and exploring text, images, audio, video and interactive graphics, then teamed up with Al Gore to create a new kind of book," read a message on PushPop's website shortly after they were bought out. "Now we're taking our publishing technology and everything we've learned and are setting off to help design the world's largest book, Facebook."

Amazon recently released the Kindle Touch, which looks like the old Kindle, only with fewer buttons. But tucked away behind its (to my eye, still rather Game-Boyish) screen is a new mechanism. Amazon calls it X-Ray, and promises it will show you the bones of the book. By this they mean X-Ray will show you a detailed set of metadata pertaining to any given word, theme, or passage ('Dr. Philip Philippovich,' say, or 'Soviet-era Russia,' or 'transmogrification') that you can then use to navigate through the text - an index-cum-glossary, graphically represented and hyperlinked back to the text itself.

The trend towards meta-analyzing books, while a boon for academics practicing distant reading, likely will not change our experience of reading. But one can envision writers using this model to create truly mammoth texts with visible architectonics the reader could trace at will. A reader could trace various routes through the same text, tailoring the reading experience, slicing off digressions or exploring dead ends. The effect would be somewhat like reading a hypertext, but with map in hand.

A handful of start-ups are trying to further connect the dots, not just within books but among them. Small Demons' 'storyverse' aims to create a searchable catalog of every cultural, artistic, or geographic reference within every book, while IDEO's Nelson project would stitch together multiple political or philosophical tracts to give the sense of a debate unfolding over time. In 1945, Vannevar Bush argued that the work of navigating the world's information would one day fall to a professional caste of hardy souls "who find delight in the task of establishing useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record." Google rendered that profession unnecessary, but not obsolete; our current obsession with online curation has only begun to fulfill this prediction. What is an anthology if not trail-making? What are websites like Longreads and Byliner? What is the allusive poem? And what, in fact, is the essay? The revelation of the X-Ray is to bring these connections to the surface.

Those more skeptical of the expanded e-book model might be at least partly converted by the new, best-selling app version of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, by Touch Press. Eliot's poem comes swaddled in diaphanous layers of multimedia, which rise or recede upon command, including critical interpretations, Eliot's own scribbled-upon drafts, and live readings by the author, Ted Hughes, Alec Guinness, Fiona Shaw, and Viggo Mortensen. Upon release, the app quickly topped the iTunes list of best-selling book apps, and for good reason. It is the best enhanced e-book yet devised, revivifying a text long buried under its own accumulated dust. And yet it still feels chimerical, incongruous - an old man with cyborg arms.

Another, neater reincarnation is Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 (1961). Originally published as an unbound box of pages to be shuffled and read in any order, Saporta's novel has been turned into an iPad app. The app consists of stark black text against a white background, nothing more. Open the book and the pages begin to flash by, too quickly to read, like the spinning of a slot machine's wheels, until you press your finger to the screen, and they freeze. Finger tensed against glass, I read the first page, necessarily engaged in a way the paper book does not demand. Then I lifted my finger, and the pages again started shuffling. A little page counter in the bottom right hand corner counts up to 150.

In this way, I went through a mosaic narrative of resistance fighters, complacent office workers, and German soldiers living in occupied France. The gimmick doesn't always work. Certain scenes run sequentially across multiple pages, and when these pages abut, it's clear the chronology has become scrambled. These instances are rare, however, and the overall effect is one of poetic parataxis, disjunctive but coherent.

I'd feared the stochastic arrangement might lessen the overall thrust of the piece - why read to the last page when any page could be the last? - but I hurried to reach the ending. Another reader may have ended on a note of circularity. ("The couch, along the wall, is covered with a Mexican serape. Dagmar is sitting there with her legs folded under her. Above her head, contrasting violently with her blond hair, the dark abstract painting with clots of color that seem to be on fire is still unfinished. It is called Composition No. 1.") My Composition ended with a bloody ambush of a hideout by the Germans, while two French fighters, sitting quietly out in the woods, listened to the screams. The last line - "A tall German woman with queenly bearing nonchalantly crosses the barnyard. She would be beautiful without her uniform." - might have had little significance elsewhere, but here I was stunned by its eerily flat tone and sculptural asymmetry. It was not so much what the author did that was impressive, but what he, deliberately, did not.

eBooks Blue

• A translation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace appears in the Nook e-reader with the word "kindled" replaced throughout with the word "Nookd."
  
  The embarrassing gaffe on the part of Barnes & Noble, the US book store chain that makes the Nook, was spotted by blogger Philip Howard. Since War and Peace is translated from the original Russian, the first time Howard saw the word "Nookd" he simply dismissed the quirk as either a mistranslation or a glitch in software.
  
  The first instance of the word in the Nook edition reads: "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern ...", where in fact it should read: "It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern ...". "Thinking this was simply a glitch in the software, I ignored the intrusive word and continued reading," writes Howard on his blog. But after coming across the mysterious word several more times, it became apparent that the problem was more widespread than first thought. "I was shocked. Almost immediately I found it hilarious ... then outrageous ... then both," says Howard.
  
  It is likely that the glitch was caused by the publisher, Superior Formatting, rather than Barnes & Noble.One commenter on Howard's original blog post explained that it was likely a Kindle version of the eBook was created first. When the novel was moved across to the Nook platform, the publisher probably copied and pasted "Nook" for "Kindle", failing to realise that the word "kindle" appears a total of eight times in the English version of War and Peace.

More Than Just Text

BOOKS may appear to inhabit a flat, monochromatic space. But Sarah Werner, a director at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, stresses that they carry a wealth of information which pours out only on close inspection, by looking, touching or even smelling a physical copy. They also change over time. This richness cannot - at least not yet - be captured in book-scanning projects.

At the moment, these focus on the quantity of titles. This is understandable - and it makes sense. Most mass-produced editions from the 1800s to early 1900s (when copyright protection ends in many countries) tend to be indistinguishable. Scanning one copy is as good as scanning any other.

But Dr Werner has long argued that older books are different. Printed in smaller quantities, each physical copy has unique properties. Dr Werner carefully opens a printed in 1631 edition of Christopher Marlowe's "Doctor Faustus" in a conference room at the Folger's building, adjacent to the Library of Congress. She turns to a page with a handprint on it. The stain had to be that of a printer's devil, as a young shop assistant was known in those days. The handprint extends into the binding (see picture), so it must have been made before the book was still in large sheets (called signatures) and before it was folded and bound, she explains. In "Incipit textus Sententiarum", a book printed in Basel in 1482, she shows your correspondent a similar handprint on an outer margin. That was probably smeared at a later stage, possibly by a reader.

In a 1691 volume of often earthy poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, Dr Werner notes how several pages were cut out and replaced, and that there is a gap in folios, or page numbers, before a play appears at the end. The play is printed on slightly different paper, too. Dr Werner compared a Google Books scan to one of the replaced pages in the Folger copy, and found that two verses (more blatantly erotic than the rest of the ode of which the page is part) were added at the end of the poem. Such titbits are invaluable to scholars.

Dr Werner points out the laid lines and chain lines, artefacts of paper-making, which indicate the orientation of the paper in the frame in which it dried. Wilmot's book has a section in the play where, curiously, the lines on the paper across several signatures are perpendicular to the rest of the book. (Cheaper paper cut to the wrong size? An error? Signatures left over from an unpopular printing of a play that was appended to more popular poems?)

The assembly is important. Previous centuries treated books and manuscripts interchangeably, Dr Werner says, and some books were delivered as loose pages that were folded, sewn and bound. Books had their covers and bindings removed at times, and were rebound into new forms that suited the owner. Dr Werner picks up a collection assembled from ten French and Latin works from 1575 of slightly different sizes, then another, a minuscule dos-a-dos, or back-to-back volume containing parts of the Old Testament, New Testament and Psalms (from 1626, 1630 and 1632, respectively) and used as a prompt during church services. Meanwhile, dirt and wear can shed light on how the book was read, while its aroma offers a hint of the compounds used to prepare paper to accept ink, and thus of the printing technologies used. A digital scan would mask many interesting differences in the patchwork edition.

Thanks to higher-resolution scanning, detail down to the grain of the paper can be captured, albeit at present this entails considerable costs. Three-dimensional scans are becoming routine and will soon be good enough to show cut pages, emendations, layers of ink and even details of the paper. Dr Werner appreciates such efforts, as well as the more humdrum ones by Google, ProQuest, Cengage Learning, the British Library, France's Bibliotheque Nationale and others (including the Folger's own). These have allowed many more academics to study many important aspects of books, not least their text, without damaging fragile copies. It is also helping safeguard their contents for posterity. But she worries that in the headlong march to preserve only books' words, people may lose sight of their less obvious attributes. They, she says, speak volumes, too.

Raymond Chandler

Can you make yourself a writer just by willpower? Raymond Chandler's example suggests you can. In 1932, aged 44, he was fired from his highly paid job as a Los Angeles oil company executive and decided to eke out a living by writing thrillers for pulp magazines, a craft he knew nothing about. He signed up for a correspondence course in short-story writing and, for practice, took an Erle Stanley Gardner crime story to pieces and (he later told Gardner) rewrote it sentence by sentence to discover how it was done. Within a year he had a story accepted by Black Mask, the most famous of the pulps. His first novel, The Big Sleep, appeared in 1939, narrated by a cynical, shoot-from-the-lip private-eye called Philip Marlowe. After that, detective fiction was never quite the same again.

Chandler's astonishing midlife makeover has diverted attention from his formative years. But Tom Williams's outstanding debut biography astutely notes how early components of the Chandler phenomenon started to crystallise. His father, a Chicago railway engineer, was a violent drunk, and his mother Florence eventually fled with Raymond to her family in Ireland, only to find herself shunned as a fallen woman. Young Chandler's closeness to her and his sympathetic observation of her sufferings engendered, as Williams sees it, his Sir Galahad complex - protective towards women and repelled by sexual impurity - which rubs off onto Philip Marlowe, and which seems to have retarded, or maybe permanently hindered, Chandler's ability to develop an adult sexual relationship.

An uncle offered to send Raymond to Dulwich College, so, in 1900, mother and son moved to London. It was at Dulwich that Chandler discovered his gift for languages. He learnt Latin and Greek, dabbled in Armenian and Hungarian, tacked a chart of Mandarin ideographs over his bed and spoke fluent French and German. Ideally, he said, he should have been a comparative philologist. When he came to write for the pulps this linguistic facility flowered. He treated American English as a foreign tongue, making lists of slang usages he found in newspapers and hoarding them in notebooks. All he wanted when he began writing crime fiction, he told a friend, "was to play with a fascinating new language", using gangster slang to say "things that are usually only said with a literary air". That was the linguistic key that turned pulp into art.

After Dulwich, and before going back to America in 1912, he tried to be a poet, publishing in British literary magazines. The results, to judge from Williams's samples, were pretty dire - mostly concerned with knights, ladies and fairies. But his dedication to his art endured, and was vital to the mature Chandler. Williams is fascinating about his writing methods. He typed triple-spaced on narrow paper strips, with no more than 150 words on each, so as to give his prose the spare, punchy rhythms he coveted. It is easy to miss the poetry in the novels because it sounds too flip and caustic to be poetry. But when he writes, for example, about a flashy hoodlum looking "as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food", the poetic idiom is as defiantly modern as TS Eliot's famous comparison of the evening sky to a patient etherised on an operating table. What both images signify is the jettisoning of the old Georgian poetic claptrap that Chandler's literary-magazine verses revelled in. The soulful celebrations of women were abandoned, too, and replaced by crisp Chandlerisms - "She had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain", "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looked by moonlight."

Williams's overall assessment is admiring, but he acknowledges and tries to explain Chandler's faults. His chronic drink problem, which began in the 1920s, and lost him his oil-executive job, was almost certainly the residue of the first world war. A naturalised British citizen, he had joined the Canadian army and witnessed horrors on the western front. His habitual grumpiness was related to this, but also, Williams thinks, to "a peculiarly British form of arrogance", bound up with being a Dulwich College old boy. Even when down on his luck he sported a silver-topped cane and a straw boater beribboned with Dulwich's colours.

The 1940s were his grumpiest years, when he worked intermittently in Hollywood, notably with Billy Wilder on James M Cain's Double Indemnity, often cited as the original film noir. Chandler considered himself superior to film people, and his demands could be lordly. Once, writing a script for Paramount, he insisted that two Cadillacs, with chauffeurs, should wait night and day outside his residence, and six secretaries, working in relays, should attend exclusively to his needs. Williams, with a nice touch of understatement, admits Chandler lacked charm and patience in dealing with colleagues, and recounts, as illustration, that when Alfred Hitchcock left at the end of a stormy visit Chandler yelled "Fat bastard" after him as he got into his car.

Through all this, and through one or two unGalahad-like flings with office secretaries and the occasional suicide attempt, his wife Cissy stuck by him. They married in 1924, just after her divorce from her second husband, the West Indian pianist Julian Pascal. Cissy had been a pianist, a painter and an artists' model, and was 54 to Chandler's 35. It is not clear he realised how wide the age gap was, but that, it seems, was secondary because he valued her as an ideal to be worshipped rather than as a sexual partner. Unlike his stoical alter-ego Marlowe, he could not endure loneliness, and when Cissy died in 1954 he went to pieces. He was drunk almost nonstop until his own death five years later.

Williams writes sensitively about the Cissy relationship, and delves illuminatingly into the composition of Chandler's masterpieces, Farewell, My Lovely, The Little Sister and The Long Good-Bye. But he also commands a broader sweep, detailing the real-life criminal conspiracies and financial scams that lay behind Chandler's depiction of 1920s oil-boom Los Angles as a pit of corruption, controlled by underworld bosses and bent policemen. We are used nowadays to fictional detectives who can never truly win, because the crimes they investigate are only a small part of an evil system they can't completely see or understand. But this, as Williams notes, is Marlowe's recurring plight. He was an early sufferer from the paranoia about power and corruption that we all live with now. Williams's subtitle is from a description of Los Angeles's sinister side in The Big Sleep. But thanks to his biography Chandler himself is a less mysterious something than he was.

The Book Monitors the Reader

Ever since the first ancient Mesopotamian curled up in bed with his favourite clay tablet, reading has been, in essence, a solitary, mysterious and wholly private activity. The relationship between the reader and the word on the page is a confidential, personal communion.

When you read a book, no one else can know which bits you skipped or skimmed, which parts you loved and tried to remember or when you finally flung it down and never opened it again. How fast you raced through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, how some bits of Lady Chatterley's Lover caught your attention more than others and how slowly you waded through Ulysses are secrets known only to you and your bookshelf. No one else knows at what point you gave up reading War and Peace, again.

But now, with the arrival of the e-book, your reading habits are an open book. Devices such as the Kindle, the Kobo, the Nook and the Sony e-reader are now providing publishers and booksellers with a mass of raw data that reveals not just what we are reading, but how.

Your e-reader knows how fast you read and when you get bogged down. It knows which passages you have highlighted, bookmarked and missed out. It records when you finished one book and how quickly you bought and read the sequel. It knows, in a way that even you do not, just how many books in your library remain unread. And it is passing on that knowledge to the people who make books.

Digital information on reading patterns is being aggregated and studied in a way that is unprecedented. Users of the Kindle, for example, sign an agreement giving Amazon permission to store information from the device, but many consumers of e-books remain unaware that their reading is now subject to marketing analysis, uncovering specific reading patterns for the first time. As a headline in The Wall Street Journal put it, "Your e-book is reading you".

The volume of data is growing at astonishing speed. E-book sales in the UK increased by 366 per cent last year to more than £90 million and more than 100 million people in the US read on e-reader or tablet.

Hitherto, the only way to gauge the success of a book was through sales; feedback came formally through reviews, and informally through rude or admiring letters or postings from readers. Now collected e-book figures can measure if a book is readable or heavy-going, the point at which readers tend to stop reading, the popularity of certain characters and plotlines, and which passages within books attract most attention.

Amazon.com has a feature called 'most highlighted passages' that shows which lines have been picked out with the highlight button on the Kindle. For authors of a solipsistic temperament (ie, all of them) this provides new opportunities for introspection. Running one of my own books through the search, I discovered that one line ("Deception is a sort of seduction. In love and war, adultery and espionage, deceit can only succeed if the deceived party is willing, in some way, to be deceived.") had been highlighted by 61 readers.

My pride was slightly dented by the discovery that a line from The Hunger Games trilogy - "Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them" - has been highlighted 17,784 times. Indeed, 16 of the top 20 most highlighted passages are from the Hunger Games series, which probably proves nothing at all except that readers of those sorts of books enjoy highlighting things.

Civil liberties groups have complained that amassing information about reader behaviour is an invasion of privacy, another way for digital businesses to garner valuable information. Others fear that readers will shy away from controversial subjects such as sexual behaviour if they feel under literary surveillance.from The Hunger Games trilogy - "Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them" But if the e-reader has made reading habits more public, in some ways it has enhanced reading discretion. Fifty Shades of Grey, the erotic "mummy porn" novel by E. L. James, is the bestselling Kindle book of all time, which may have less to do with its negligible literary merits than the fact that you can read it on the bus without your neighbour sniggering at you.

Most writers will have mixed feelings about the arrival of quantifiable evidence of consumer tastes in an industry that has traditionally relied on subjective judgment, imagination and the strange alchemy that turns one book into a bestseller and another into a turkey. Other forms of entertainment - television, film, computer games and mobile apps - already rely heavily on consumer feedback to shape and adapt their products.

Writing reduced to a market-led formula almost always flops, but there are signs that the surge in digital feedback is already having an impact on how books are produced. Some publishers release a digital version to road-test a book and then adapt the print version in the light of the online response.from The Hunger Games trilogy - "Because sometimes things happen to people and they're not equipped to deal with them" One US publisher, Coliloquy, has gone farther, producing something called 'active fiction': this deploys an algorithm through which readers choose from various narratives and characters, which are then fed back to the author who can incorporate the choices into a genuinely customised book, written by a writer but shaped by the tastes and preferences of its readers.

This sounds grimly artificial, but the relationship between writer and reader has always been interactive and all authors chase a market, melding the demands of art with those of their readers. Nineteenth-century authors also tested their writing through one medium, newspaper serialisation, before publishing in book form. Dickens himself wrote alternative endings to Great Expectations, exploring his readers' expectations.

Most authors are eager to learn what readers like, without in any way compromising what they write. They read their Amazon reviews avidly (while pretending not to, and sometimes writing their own praise). Writers flock to literary festivals, arguably the most significant cultural development of the past decade, in order to maintain and nurture a conversation with the people who read them.

The advent of a machine that logs your tastes while expanding your mind is another way to improve books and sell more of them to people who might actually finish them.

Discovering that most readers fall asleep in Chapter 3 might be a new and painful experience for an author — and also a valuable wake-up call.

Mark Haddon and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Mark Haddon on why he's letting experts turn his novel about a boy with behavioural issues into a film and play.

I am often asked what I feel about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time being made into a film, or about the book being included on a list of banned books, or being given to trainee policemen to help them deal with people with Asperger's. A weird zen-like detachment is my usual answer. I suspect that I'm no different from most writers. A new novel is like a child, this fragile thing to which you've recently given birth. Good reviews make your heart swell. Bad reviews are like seeing your daughter heckled during the nativity play. If you're lucky enough for the book not to slide into oblivion, it becomes gradually stronger and more independent. For me, Curious now feels like a 25-year-old who moved out a long way back. We talk every so often, but it doesn't need my support and my opinions are largely irrelevant.

Except that it all began freakishly early with Curious, this sense of the book having a life of its own. I recall being in a black cab with Clare Alexander, my agent, doing a short tour of interested publishers. Her dog, the late and much lamented Arnie, was drinking from a bowl on the floor of the taxi and Clare was taking a clearly Curious-related phonecall. She explained that she had been getting a live update on the Italian auction. Me, I was still getting used to the possibility of the book being published anywhere by anyone. It was the only moment in my life when I felt as if I was living in a Woody Allen movie. The sales and the prizes were entirely unexpected and hugely appreciated but, if truth be told, they're part of the grandiose dreams in which all authors indulge to keep themselves slaving at the coalface.

There were other stranger things, however, which took me completely by surprise. The letters, for example. They started straight away and they keep coming even now. Some were from people with Asperger's who said the novel had helped their families understand them better. Some were from people who said that the novel had helped them understand their son, or daughter, or husband, or grandson. Some less complimentary letters took issue with the mathematics in the book. Incorrectly, I should add.

One woman wrote to me saying that she enjoyed the novel but that Christopher should have been put down at birth.

I remember being told that three pirated Persian translations were available in Tehran. I remember stumbling on a website displaying photos of a lo-tech dramatised version of the novel by a class at Bristol Grammar School (it's still up there; I particularly recommend the scene, "From a bush, Christopher observes his mother"). I remember getting a copy of the edition published in the Faroe Islands. I remember a fan of the book who sent me their own 400-page novel written entirely in numbers.

Conan Doyle, from whom I stole the title, should share the credit, but I knew that some kind of milestone had been passed when the headline The Curious Incident of X in the Night-time was posted above a press article about a public figure who had been robbed in a park while cruising in the small hours.

I was entertained when I heard about the occasional furore caused by the profanity and the atheism in the novel. It usually happened in America and often when Curious was chosen for a One City One Book reading event.

A concerned parent would read the novel in advance, be shocked by the content and complain to the mayor. The mayor would publicly berate the librarian. The librarian would ask him whether he had read the novel, which he inevitably hadn't. Rinse and repeat.

I was equally entertained when I stumbled across a Blackwell's Christmas catalogue in which the young adult edition - simply the adult edition in a different cover with a different ISBN number - was described as a special version written for children with a lighter tone and a more heart-warming ending.

It is the prospective film, however, which generates more interest than anything else, not least because Brad Pitt owns Plan B, who are co-producing the film with Warner Brothers and Heyday Films. I was always rather proud of the fact that that the novel seemed unfilmable, so I'm intrigued as to what they will do with a text that seems so rooted in a very particular voice and very glad that I'm not in the shoes of Steve Kloves, who is writing and directing. Mostly it's the zen-like detachment again. If you're worried what a film company will do with your book then don't accept the cheque. If you accept the cheque, make sure you have a good agent and don't complain.

As it happens I think the project is in very good hands - Kloves wrote Wonder Boys, one of my favourite films - but if things go wrong, as they often do in Hollywood, I suspect the book will carry on regardless, spreading inexorably round the globe like a benign version of bubonic plague.

There are very few downsides to having written a bestselling novel. One of them is talking about the book too much. Interviewers don't want long, considered, honest answers. Interviewers want pithy. But if you comply too often, your soundbites begin to obscure your original memories of what it was like to write the book. Eventually the novel starts to die on you. I re-read it recently shortly before Simon Stephens began working on the adaptation for the National Theatre. It was an odd and slightly upsetting experience. I was aware of sections a reader may find funny, or moving, or intriguing, but I didn't feel amused, or moved, or intrigued, whereas I can still read parts of The Red House and enjoy it as a reader. It is an experience I'll try to preserve by doing fewer interviews and disappointing interviewers by giving long, considered and honest answers whenever I can.

Which is the first reason why I never considered writing the stage play. I simply can't see it clearly any more. The second reason is that surgeons are quite rightly forbidden from operating on members of their own family. You need to be brutal and you need to be objective. The third and most important reason is Simon himself. He was always my first choice. He is unsentimental, and sentimentality is the great pitfall around which any adaptation has to steer. He also has the rare ability to inhabit characters completely while retaining a voice that is all his own.

Consequently, one of the things that excites me about sitting in the Cottesloe as the lights go down, is seeing the novel reborn, rather like Doctor Who, the same person but coming back in a different body and with a new assistant. Hopefully, that eerie magic you get only in the theatre, will wipe out the soundbites and make the book new again.

Most Influential C19 Novelists

THINK of the great 19th-century novelists and names like Dickens, Hardy and the Brontes immediately spring to mind. In terms of influence on other writers, though, the biggest hitters of the era were behind what some call sigh-worthy romance novels and a boyhood adventure yarn.

That's according to a new method of analysing texts using a customised version of Google's PageRank algorithm. Fans of Pride and Prejudice (see picture) and Ivanhoe will be delighted: the system claims the era's most influential authors are Jane Austen and Walter Scott.

The finding is based on a study of digitised copies of over 3500 novels published in English between 1780 and 1900. To gauge influence within this set, Matthew Jockers, now at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, developed software that categorises novels according to the frequencies with which certain words appear, as well as how the words are grouped to form themes. The result is a series of "fingerprints", each made up of 600 data points, which characterise the novels.

To make sense of the result, Jockers assembled the novels into a network in which the strength of the links between two books is determined by the similarity of their fingerprints.

He completed the process by adapting PageRank; the algorithm Google uses as the cornerstone of its strategy for identifying the importance of web pages. His modified algorithm singled out novels with the strongest and most numerous links to works that came after them, and it declared Austen and Scott top.

"The signals introduced by Austen and Scott position them at the beginning of a stylistic-thematic genealogy; they are, in this sense, the literary equivalent of Homo erectus or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve," Jockers wrote in a paper that was presented at the Digital Humanities conference in Hamburg, Germany, last month.

The result may surprise some readers, since Austen is often attacked in popular culture for her focus on romantic themes. But it makes a lot of sense to scholars of Victorian literature. "In some sense it is an eerie return to some of the histories of the novel written by Victorians themselves, which tended to single out Austen and Scott as progenitors," says Nicholas Dames, chair of the department of English and comparative literature at Columbia University in New York.

The finding comes with some caveats, says Jockers. Austen and Scott appear in the earlier part of the period covered by the data, for example. This does not put the pair's powerful influence in doubt, but does reduce the data on writers who influenced them. There are also other methods, aside from the Google algorithm, of gauging which nodes in a network are the most influential. These might produce different answers. "Everything is experimental and preliminary," says Jockers. "The big picture is still to unfold."

Despite such uncertainties, the technique is being welcomed by many as a new way to study literature. "The big promise of such work is its ability to give us a sense of something like the entirety of, say, 19th-century fiction, rather than the small percentage of canonical texts that are usually taken as exemplary," says Dames. "What Jockers is doing is forcing us to re-evaluate if our canonical subset is really as influential, or as central, as we think it is."

Jockers developed his techniques at Stanford University in California, where he worked with literature researcher Franco Moretti, who pioneered the use of automated large-scale analyses of digitised texts, a process he calls "distant reading".

The term contrasts with the traditional technique of close reading, in which individual texts are examined in detail. "The two methods are complementary ndash; one helps us understand the system of literature, the other helps us understand why literature is important," says Laura Caroll at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.

Character Names

James Bond was a well-known ornithologist. His Birds of the West Indies is an unusually rich source of names. According to Bond, the Sooty Tern is also known as the Egg Bird; Booby; Bubi; Hurricane Bird; Gaviota Oscura; Gaviota Monja; Oiseau Fou; Touaou. But when the keen birdwatcher Ian Fleming needed a name that sounded as ordinary as possible, he had to look no further than the title page of Bond's great work. Why does the name of an actual ornithologist sound so right as the name of a fictional spy? Why couldn't Fleming have used another pair of common monosyllables - John Clark, say? Bond is a solid, blue-chip, faith-giving kind of a name. Who wouldn't prefer a government Bond under their mattress (we're talking AAA British) to a petty clerk? Is your word your clerk? I don't think so. Bond. It's in the name.

More than most literary phenomena, names in fiction seem very straightforward until you start to think about them. The simple question, "why does a name sound right?" leads to a whole range of questions. Are there rules about how names are given to characters? Do naming practices differ in different periods? Are they specific to particular genres? Do different authors use names in entirely different ways? There are also anxieties to address: is discussion of names in fiction snagged in a feedback loop, in which we think James Bond is such a good name for a spy because that's what we know it to be? The answer to all these questions is probably yes, which means that however fascinating literary names are as a subject it's extremely hard to write a book about them. If there are general principles to literary naming, and yet everybody does it differently, then it may turn out to be a practice as mysterious as language use and as idiosyncratic as aesthetic appreciation: there may well be underlying principles, but variations may be so extensive that instance and rule are always pulling against each other. One of the many things Alastair Fowler shows in the course of this fantastically learned and occasionally perverse book is that to think about literary names you have to think about more or less the whole literary system; and when you do so, individual instances of literary names rarely turn out to exemplify general tendencies.

For some realist writers the best names are invisible. Henry James was a great fretter over names, as you might expect from someone who had the same names as his father, both of which could be interchangeably a surname or a first name. He wanted his characters' names to have a tang of truth but not too much overt significance. The name Moyra Grabham he thought had "a little too much meaning" to be used in The Ivory Tower. Even James had his Archers and his Goodwoods early in his career, though, and listed 'Remnant' and 'Masterman' in his notebooks as potentially useful names when he found them in the Times. Jane Austen favoured names which give almost nothing away about status or nature (Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse), but she could in some circumstances use names which suggest meaning: the wild Marianne Dashwood is an early example of a flighty heroine lost in a moral forest, and Mr Knightley, well, he's not going to be a cad, is he? The fact that Austen called the knightly Knightley 'Knightley' suggests the way the choice of a name can follow from the particular nature of a specific work, and may also feed back into a larger literary design. The point of the one-off over-explicit name is that Knightley's knightliness is utterly obvious to the reader every time his name is mentioned, but it passes Emma by. That was a strong enough reason for Austen to break one of her unwritten rules about naming.

Some fictional names are filled with semantic clues about the nature of their owners: you know that someone called Gradgrind will not be an advocate of child-centred learning, and that Luke Skywalker will not stay long on Tatooine. A character called Henleigh Mallinger Grandcourt is likely to be able to offer a girl a big house, though 'Mallinger' suggests it will come at a price. But there are still mysteries. Even "invisible" non-significative fictional names can seem right. Quite how they do so is as mysterious as the reason why in any given year several thousand parents will simultaneously become convinced that their daughter "looks like" a Joanna or a Niamh. P.G. Wodehouse apparently took the name Jeeves from a Warwickshire cricketer. Did the name sound right for a valet simply because it rhymes with sleeves? Wodehouse became rich by sounding ultra-British to an American readership. Perhaps "Jeeves" so well suits the ultimate English gentleman's gentleman because his name coolly eschews early 20th-century US slang: "Jeeves" is definitely not Jeeze or Gee, but contains hints of both. Or is this just fantasy? What are the rules when it comes to names?

"Rules" is probably the wrong word. There are some loose generic principles which influence the choice of literary names, and which most readers of fiction will have grasped whether or not they are aware of having done so. Aristotle claimed that characters in comedy tend to have ordinary names, and this seems to have been largely true of the New Comedy of Menander. But comic dramatists also often seem to have been attracted to what Anne Barton has called Cratylic names - those which appear to endorse the view of Plato's Cratylus that there is an intrinsic relationship between name and nature. Aristophanes has Dicaeopolis ("just city") and Lysistrata ("disbander of armies"). Plautus has a braggart soldier called Pyrgopolynices, whose name suggests either "conqueror of many fortresses" or "many burning conflicts", but either way is audibly over the top. Anticipatory nominative determinism - where a name tells us what someone is likely to do - is probably more common in plots with comic outcomes than in other types of fiction, and comic names tend to be rich in semi-relevant associations. Bertie Wooster, audibly something of a waster, has a first name which associates him with the womanising Edward VII, but with that surname, a cockerel with a weak r, a Wooster trying to be a Rooster, he could never hope to be a hit with the ladies. As for his friend Gussie Fink-Nottle (whose name suggests Wodehouse learned a trick or two from Evelyn Waugh, for whom double-barrelled names tend to be for dimbos): no one with a name quite so obviously heedless could enjoy more than a walk-on part even in a 20th-century comedy. The more delicately named Jane Eyre is both the invisible element we breathe and (finally) heir to the whopping fortune which enables her story to end as a comedy of sorts.

But, as Fowler showed so well in his earlier work, literary genres tend to be rule-bound only in the way that language is rule-bound. Theorists might insist that some names are distinctively pastoral (Tityrus, Meliboeus, Corin), but the conventions are in general tolerant of intelligent transgression. Indeed 'literary' effects, as against genre-following diligence, are often the result of an author's appreciating the existence of a convention and playing with it. So in comedies a name does not have to show a fate or a characteristic. The name Philip Pirrip, known as Pip, sounds like the cry of a bird: a pirr is both a name for and the cry of a tern, which Pip might well meet in the Kent marshes, along with the odd "melancholy gull". As Fowler notes, pips can grow big and move upwards too. The opaque cheeriness of the name augments the mystery of the great expectations promised by the novel's title and feeds the unfolding mystery of its plot: the pip grows, but it all comes back to the landscape of terns and gulls, to Pip's encounter with Magwitch on the marshes. Tom Jones, on the other hand, gives its hero the least interpretable name you could imagine. This hero sounds not just ordinary but so ordinary he must eventually become as significant as his guardian, the over-aptly named Allworthy. Giving a character a completely flat name in a comedy can have the effect of delivering a joke in a deadpan voice: it creates a calm before the punchline.

Comic novels can also hybridise names in ways that deliberately obscure their narrative purpose. The vintage example is Tristram Shandy, who acquires his first name because a maid can't get the word "Trismegistus" out, and a curate, all set for the baptism, thinks she must mean "Tristram" (his own name), for which Shandy senior "had the most unconquerable aversion - thinking it could possibly produce nothing in rerum natura, but what was extremely mean and pitiful". So Tristram acquires a knightly name, a form of Tristan, by accident. It's no accident, though, that the name he was supposed to have, Trismegistus, is a name for Hermes, the god of interpretation, who is in Plato's Cratylus associated with Hermogenes, who believes that names are given arbitrarily. By surname he is "Shandy" or "wild, half-crazy" (the lemonade and beer mixture was the invention of a later age). The combination pulls a reader all over the place, as does Tristram Shandy, which is a wild transformation of knight errantry into verbal and narrative digression.

Fiction never quite presents anything as simple as an absolutely straight Cratylic name, which instantly manifests a character and a nature in a word. In a narrative or a drama there is necessarily some delay between the revelation of a name and the manifestation of a character's nature. Even in allegories - which it's tempting to regard as grounded in a simple conflation of name and nature - a personification often appears, acts and is described before he or she is given an appropriate name. The same tendency to make names part of a drama of recognition can also be apparent in narrative fiction. Gradgrind gives us his aria on Fact before he reveals his name, and even this arch literary empiricist curiously insists that his first name, Thomas (rather than his surname), is the real sign that he is a person of no nonsense: "You might hope to get some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas Gradgrind - no, sir!"

In tragedy the significance of names tends to bleed out belatedly, as part of a larger process of recognition enacted by both the audience and the characters in the fiction: Oedipus means "swell-foot", but the sense "know-foot" hidden in his name becomes painfully audible towards the end of his story. Ajax hears the resemblance between his name and "aiai", a cry of agony, in Sophocles' tragedy about his death. The meaning "misfortune" in the name Desdemona (dusdaimonía) is not remarked on by any character in Othello, but is a horrible accident waiting to happen, while Othello himself, perhaps haunted by the "demon" hidden within his wife's name, comes to regard her as a devil. Ophelia's name derives from the Greek for "help", of which she gets little, though again that irony is left as a silent suggestion. This belated or fleeting recognition of the appropriateness of names by no means has to happen in tragedy: it's a potential element in the generative grammar of tragedies. It is certainly possible to write a tragedy about a character with a completely transparent or apparently Cratylic name, as Arthur Miller did with Willy Loman. Here the 'wrongness' of the name for its literary kind is a way of marking the adversarial relationship between Death of a Salesman and tragedy as traditionally practised and conceived. The name insists that Loman's death is as much a tragedy as a tale about the fall of princes.

Names in parodies and mockeries tend instantly to sound wrong, and the more heavy-handed the satire the more loudly significant the names tend to be. Fielding's Shamela makes Richardson's Pamela a sham. The name Austin Powers suggests that his prototype James Bond is really just a crappy English car fitted with a turbocharger, while his enemy Dr Evil is, well, too silly even to discuss. The spoof fairy-tale romance The Princess Bride has a heroine who defies convention by being called Buttercup and not being a cow. It also has a character called the Dread Pirate Roberts, which is not just deliberately wrong (we all know pirates have names that suggest facial hair or booty) but wrong in being hereditary, like 'caesar'. We discover that previous Dread Pirate Robertses have included a man originally called Ryan, who inherited the name from someone called Cummerbund (it's nice that the dynasty stretches back only as far as a slightly out of date item of clothing). The Rape of the Lock, a more delicate exercise in literary pastiche, has names that flitter rather than crash through literary boundaries. Pope gives his sylphs Spenserian names (Zephyretta, Momentilla, Crispissa) which, like that of the heroine Belinda, seem to have wandered into epic from pastoral romance, where women with Italianate names which have diminutive or gerundive endings are a speciality.

The practices of literary name-giving are also dependent on the kinds of information available to different writers in different periods. When a relatively small but influential part of the population knew Greek it was possible to give names with thinly veiled significance, such as Philanax ("dear or friendly king") and Euarchus ("good ruler"), to characters in an Arcadian romance, as Sir Philip Sidney did. Or, like Edmund Spenser, whom Fowler sees as the great originator of English characteronyms, you might mingle popular pastoral names such as Colin in among the Red Cross Knights of allegorical narrative and the Belphoebes born of royal panegyric. You could import from Arcadia a frenzied Pyrochles and bring in the odd Italianate name (Duessa) for a whorish sorceress, as well as cautiously admitting a touch of the Irish (Sir Ferraugh, and perhaps even the holy Una, whose name may try to bring the Irish Oonagh into the unity of the English Church). Spenser belonged, as Shakespeare did, to the period in which William Camden was at work providing etymologies for many names, and that is part of the reason he was so alive to the resources and buried senses of nomenclature. Writers in the 19th and 20th centuries could scour newspapers (and in Dickens's case council education lists too) for names to mine for fictional use. This technique, along with so many other conventions of realist fiction, Joyce mischievously transformed when in Ulysses he composed a spoof list of names invited to the marriage of the grand high chief ranger of the Irish National Foresters, which includes Mrs Barbara Lovebirch, Mrs Poll Ash, Mrs Holly Hazeleyes and other arborial frolics.

As it lists and explores literary names, riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, this rich book seems itself sometimes choked by the riches it reveals. It tells you about the names of slaves, about pseudonyms (Thackeray wrote as Charles Yellowplush, Ikey Solomons, Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Bashi-Bazouk, Folkestone Canterbury, George Savage Fitz-Boodle, Dr Solomon Pacigico and Launcelot Wagstaffe), about Homeric catalogues, about allegory, about Milton and Spenser and Shakespeare and Joyce and Nabokov. Some pages are so drily compressed that the jacket of a second edition perhaps might warn its readers to dilute it before reading.

Fowler is convinced that poetry written before the Enlightenment is rich in various forms of "silent language": numerological principles which determine how names are arrayed in lists, or cryptograms which might run through poems written before the regularisation of spelling and the rise of rationalism spoiled the party. Poets and patrons in the 16th century could take delight in visible acrostics and plays on patrons' names, as Sir John Davies's "Hymns of Astraea", which inscribe "ELISABETHA REGINA" in the first letters of each of their lines, exhaustingly show. The point of such acrostics was that they were readily noticeable displays of artifice which poets might hope their patrons would see and reward. But did Renaissance poets also create less visible anagrams? Fowler believes so, and cites with approbation an article by Roy Winnick ("now I cry ink") which he says "startled the scholarly world" by revealing anagrams which spell out the name WRIOTHESLEY buried throughout Shakespeare's Sonnets. We are told "Thy louers withering, as thy sweet selfe grow'st" contains all the letters of "Wriothesley" twice over, and that this "remarkable fact" is very unlikely to be a result of chance. For Fowler this suggests not only the identity of the young man, but that Shakespeare was our greatest anagrammatist as well as our greatest poet.

The problem with the hermetic view of the Renaissance, of which Fowler has been the leading magus for many years, is that it invites us to believe that 16th and 17th-century literature followed utterly alien conventions. But once the all-learned hermeneut is brought in to crack the literary code, the obscure text is reduced to a single and simple truth: all the minor characters in The Faerie Queene are identifiable individuals; most characters in satires and epigrams are also real people; the young man in Shakespeare's Sonnets is beyond all doubt Henry Wriothesley.

Shakespeare certainly liked what we call wordplay, and took both it and names seriously. But taking something seriously in fiction can mean regarding it as a way of creating character and drama rather than believing it to be the best way secretly to encode the truth about who your patron or your lover might be. When poor old Malvolio is taunted with a letter that says "M, O, A, I, doth sway my life" and believes it means him, Shakespeare is making a joke about cryptograms and anagrams and the wishful thinking that sees names in strings of letters. Much of the music of Twelfth Night emerges from its not quite anagrammatical names (Malvolio, Olivia, Viola; Illyria, Elysium) from which the rude corporeality of the names Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek are pointedly excluded. The fluidity of names anagrammatically reassembled was without doubt a powerful theatrical resource for Shakespeare, and names could suggest and feed his plots. The asymmetrical pair of Edgar and Edmund suggest likeness and opposition: more of the world ("mundus") can be heard in Edmund, and Camden records the sense of the name Edgar as "happy or blessed honour". The trio of Goneril, Regan and Cordelia (which Shakespeare inherited rather than invented) suggest the outlines of a story, since only one of the sisters has in her name a heart, a cor. Shakespeare's comic names again tend to tell rather clearer stories than their tragic counterparts: a Dogberry is a little dogged but probably quite sweet if you pluck and eat it, Mistress Overdone speaks for herself, as does Mistress Quickly, while Sir John Falstaff has an impotent droop (as well as false stuff) which cannot equal the proud Shaking of a Spear implied in the name of his creator. A Caliban is a cannibal who has elementary problems with literacy, but who, were he aware of Greek, might hear beauty (kalos) within his name. A cannibal who can't quite manage to be a cannibal is a more likeable thing than a cannibal who can, and even when drunk poor Caliban can't make a cannibalagram of his name: Ban, Ban, Cacaliban, he sings, transforming the beauty of his name (kalos-ban) into ugliness (kakos-ban) once a libation has filled his middle (Caliban). He never realises that a cannibal "can" rebel, and, remarkably, never utters the word "can" at all, although the powerful Prospero uses it ten times. There is in all these names, and the shimmer of sounds which surrounds them, much brilliance and beauty, but there is no sign that Shakespeare wrote fictions in which names of real people were anagrammatically concealed like Easter eggs.

This is not surprising. Ben Jonson, who didn't always practise what he preached, denounces logogriphs, palindromes and anagrams. George Puttenham in his Arte of English Poesie describes anagrams or "poesie transposed" as a pleasure fit for ladies, and presents his efforts to make prophecies out of the name of "Elissabet Anglorum Regina" as trifles that made him smile. Sir Philip Sidney's Apology for Poetry (which has no time for cryptograms) positions fiction between the generality of philosophy and the specificity of historical example. This means that what Sidney calls "poesy" (which was what fiction was called in the Elizabethan period) does more than refer under veiled names to specific individuals. It presents individuals who are representative of wider classes, who have proper names but who can function analogously to common nouns in encompassing a range of individual instances which might share a family resemblance. Philisides in Sidney's Arcadia is not just Sir Philip Sidney, nor is Astrophil, the lover of Stella ("a star, an aster"), in Astrophil and Stella. He is a name for a kind of lover that includes aspects of Sidney without being exclusively Sidney. There was no radical break, no moment of Enlightenment rupture in which the cryptic Renaissance was killed off. It never existed. The ability to encompass a general type within a specific instance is, and more or less always has been, the foundation of fiction, and that combination of the specific and the typical is often also a feature of fictional names.

But if Fowler is sometimes lured from the path of sense by his own profound learning, this book is nonetheless something of a marvel. It shows why names in literature matter, and how they participate in some of the most delightful and tantalising qualities of literature itself. They appear to be part of a system which has conventions over which all players of the game have some sort of grasp. But there are so many conventions and associations at work in literary naming (genre, social decorum, historical position, semantics, etymology) that even someone who could successfully use those conventions would not be able fully to articulate them in the form of precepts. Naming is a practice connected to so many different pieces of knowledge and belief, indeed, that each individual performance of the practice might appear to be sui generis. But when we meet a name that just seems right for its person, its genre, its time and the work in which it appears, a peculiar magic happens that is related to aesthetic pleasure: the instance both modifies and validates the invisible conventions that we didn't know we knew.

Seth Godin on Promoting A Book

Hits are more valuable than ever, mostly because they're more rare than ever.

The Zipf Distribution, also described in Chris Anderson's Long Tail, helps us understand just how valuable hits can be.

A bestselling book/record/movie/consultant/tech startup might make a thousand times more profit than one that's only seventy or eighty rungs lower on the bestseller list.

Simple example: In 2010, Toy Story 3 took in more than $400,000,000 at the US box office, turning a profit of more than a quarter of a billion dollars, while just about every one of the thousand movies below #80 on the list lost money.

While this makes it clear that there's a huge reward to being seen as the one, the best in your field, the current sensation, it also gives us a chance to wonder about how important it is to invest in dressing up your work with the trappings of the inevitable winner. Not for nothing did Toy Story 3 sell more tickets in the first 48 hours than just about any other movie did over its entire run... that's the result of expectation, distribution and marketing, not just in being good.

Shawn Coyne shows us how some of this math works in book publishing. Having the biggest book of the year translated into enough profits for Random House to not only pay for bonuses for everyone, but to bank millions more. We can all agree (I hope) that 50 Shades isn't the best book published this decade, but it's certainly one of the biggest.

The question (sorry it took so long to get here) is this: how much should the author have invested in creating an environment where this was more likely to happen? Shawn argues that she gave up a fortune by selling the ebook rights cheap in order to get a big bookstore push. Which is true. But, and it's a huge but, did the imprimatur of a huge publishing house help her avoid the chasm of being merely popular? Did the bookstore distribution and hype and media attention provide the magic that made her book tip?

Every industry is filled with agents, marketers, promoters, retailers and associations that promise just that--the little bit of magic, the last bit of straw, the finger on the scale that will turn a good product into the biggest hit ever. That celebrity endorsement or joint marketing venture might just work... This scaffolding is expensive, but worth every penny when it works.

Here's the error and the challenge:

The error is in thinking that once you figure out how to pay for the scaffolding, you're sure to cross the chasm to hitsville. This is easily disproven by glancing at just how many non-wins were published by Random House, represented by CAA or given shelf space at Walmart. There may be some causation, but there's also a lot of credit-grabbing correlation going on as well. (And yes, credit to publishers who take chances and pay money and support authors when they need it most...)

The challenge is in investing enough in the scaffolding of expectation and distribution that you don't damage your chances at the same time you keep overhead low enough to profit even when you don't make the top 100. Which, given the odds, is more likely than not.

Today, it's easier than ever to put your work into the world. Easier to have a blog, to share your technology, to sing your songs, to connect, with no middlemen. So, the question is: how much should you give away/pay for the scaffolding that promises to take you over the hump to the other side of the tail?

The magic of the long tail is that it's open to everyone. The danger in overinvesting in the hype machine and the turboboost of outbound marketing is that it may just distract you from what actually creates viral videos, hit books and freelancers in high demand: genuine excitement from a core group that won't rest until they tell their friends.

My take is that the benefit for winner-take-most markets is that anything you can do that realistically increases your chances of being the winner is a smart move--unless (double emphasis intended) the cost decreases your opportunity to do it again soon, or the compromises you're required to make undermine the very excitement you're trying to create.

No obvious answer, no map. Asking the question is the essential first step in finding a path.

(Seth Godin has interesting ideas on a wide range of topics - see more here)

The Book of The Future - Sliced and Diced

At the Digital Book World conference, held in New York last week, one could hardly pass muster by holding up a stack of pages bound together. The crowd's sensibility was more conceptual; the word that filled the air was 'content.' This was a fairground for companies like Innodata, DigiServ, Biztegra, and Datamatics, with booths snaking through the hallways of the Hilton Hotel. They passed out business cards and flowcharts, decked out with spritely taglines: "Unleash your inner book ~ just $99." In a conference room, Linda Holliday, the C.E.O. of a digital publishing company called Semi-Linear, leaned against a presenter's table, having just wrapped up a panel discussion on "Making Content Searchable, Findable, and Shareable." She spoke in an excited stream. "A book is an amount of knowledge that I feel good about finishing," she told me. "A book is a clump of knowledge that goes together."

"Look at a book as a bag of words," suggested Matt MacInnis, another panelist, who had been working on education projects at Apple before forming an interactive-book company called Inkling. "Bag of words," he pointed out, is a computer-science term: a model by which a machine represents natural language. "Computers are terrible at natural language," he said. "Humans are shitty at multiplication and division." For a reader searching the Internet for information, he explained, "the word rank is going to be terrible for a bag of words of book length." But a book that is broken up into component parts would show up higher in an online search result, because each discrete section coheres around a single idea, which can be tagged, indexed, and referenced by other sites. This is known in the business as 'link juice.'

During the conference, on Wednesday, Inkling announced it was launching a new 'Content Discovery Platform,' which would draw searchers from Google into broken-off sections of a book. They've divided about four hundred titles into one hundred and fifty thousand indexed 'cards,' as they're called - hacked-up book parts organized into key topics. Readers who reach a card through Google can click around on a limited basis. From there, individual cards are available for purchase - and link out to the rest of the chapter, or the whole book. MacInnis explained this to the audience: "We delude them" - customers - "into believing that they're in a book. They're in a Web page." There was a ripple of laughter, cut off by the moderator, who asked, expectantly, "But you want to sell them a book?" "We'll sell them a book," said MacInnis. "Or a cow. Or a monkey. We'll sell them the content."

When I first spoke to MacInnis, several months ago, he told me that today's digital shelves are the equivalent of a mechanized horse and carriage. "What they're selling is essentially a book," he said. "They haven't added anything. Who cares?" He described his approach to publishing as a shift from being a book to being software. I don't know where that line is, but I think we've already crossed it. Around that time, Holliday's company came out with a publishing platform called Citia, which breaks up a book into modules, pared down, CliffsNotes-style, "without so many illustrative examples," she said. Citia has two book-chunk collections on the market now - "What Technology Wants" and "Predictably Irrational" - with a few more in the works. Speaking on the panel, Holliday threw up her hands, wishing to dispel the myth that a book is a straight line, or a string of pages, as publishers see it. "Nonfiction is a constellation of ideas that you have to string into a straight line," she said. Holliday envisions a Pinterest-type board, where readers could post their favorite cards. "They might read pieces of hundreds of thousands of books, and not one whole book," she said.

MacInnis, Holliday, and others on the panel were quick to emphasize that they give their attention to nonfiction. In particular, MacInnis said, "we focus on content that people use. You don't use Fifty Shades of Grey." He paused, letting the joke sink in. Inkling's titles include textbooks, how-to guides, and cookbooks. "Tasting Beer," displayed on one of Inkling's iPad stations, in its booth at the D.B.W. Expo, begins, "The history of beer is a wide and deeply fascinating subject and deserves a great deal more attention than I'm going to be able to give it in this short chapter." There is more to nonfiction than a mash of facts, after all. A hand shot up in the back of the audience: "What do you think about the impact on readers?""Curiosity is gasoline," Holliday said. If you change the way you assemble a book, "everything sparks some kind of curious sidebar." "Organize the Internet in the way the human brain operates," MacInnis added. "You can enter at just the point you want, and that, to me, is the point of this structure."

Often, in this bright future of the book, what you get is something more like a book in its nascent stages. Cards with disparate facts, details, ideas - they are, essentially, notes. Holliday told me that when she pitches Citia to writers, they say, "This is how I work." Each stack of digital files - tagged with search terms, scattered across the Web - can be redistributed as fragments from a book-as-mothership, to which a reader might never return. So what happens to writing? "Some people are such great writers," Holliday said, dreamily. "Like Steven Pinker. I could read every word he writes." She has been in touch with him about doing a series of book cards for Citia. "He said he would want to write his own. And I was like, great!"

Dave Barry Interview New York Times

What was the best book you read last year?

Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals.” I’m probably the last person on the planet to read it; I loved the movie “Lincoln” and wanted more. I am awed by the amount of research that went into that book. Most of my research consists of brief Google forays in search of factoids that I can distort beyond recognition.

When and where do you like to read?

I like to read at the beach, but the beach always turns out to be too relaxing, and I fall asleep after two pages. So I wind up doing most of my actual reading at night in bed, where I sometimes get through as many as three pages before I fall asleep.

Who are your favorite authors?

Robert Benchley and P. G. Wodehouse. Also (it goes without saying) Proust.

What’s your preferred literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

I like nonfiction, mostly history. My guilty pleasure is tough-guy-loner action novels, like the Jack Reacher series, where the protagonist is an outwardly rugged but inwardly sensitive and thoughtful guy who, through no fault of his own, keeps having to beat the crap out of people.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

“The Brothers Karamazov,” by Dostoyevsky. I was required to read this book in English class during my freshman year at Haverford College, but I never finished it. I seriously doubt that Dostoyevsky ever finished it. So I figure if the president read it, he could tell me what happens.

Paper or electronic?

Definitely paper. I say this because we authors get smaller royalties on e-book sales. So I’d like to start a rumor that electronic books cause fatal diseases and sometimes explode. This must be true, because it’s printed right here in The New York Times.

Who are the funniest writers alive? Roy Blount Jr., Carl Hiaasen, Steve Martin, Andy Borowitz, Alan Zweibel, Gene Weingarten and Nora Ephron (she’s alive in my heart). Also the Onion guys, and the folks who write South Park, Modern Family, The Office, Parks and Recreation and Portlandia. Also a surprising number of Internet commenters.

What’s the funniest book you’ve ever read?

I’m not sure I could pick just one. The Code of the Woosters is up there. And A Confederacy of Dunces almost made me wet my pants on an airplane.

What makes a good humor book?

The most critical element in any work of humor — this is something Plato talked about — is that at least one of the major characters should be an orangutan.

What were your favorite books as a child? Do you have a favorite character or hero from one of those books? Is there one book you wish all children would read?

I read a lot of comics when I was a kid — Batman,  Archie,  Richie Rich, pretty much anything unlikely to inspire intellectual development. I bought comics for a dime each at the Armonk Stationery Store and read them walking home. I also bought a lot of mail-order products advertised in the back of the comics, such as the X-ray vision glasses. It turned out that these glasses did not actually give you X-ray vision. But the Joy Buzzer, used properly, was an effective prank device.

Later on I became a big fan of Mad Magazine. I also read (it goes without saying) a lot of Proust. But the books I read most as a child were the Hardy Boys and Tom Swift series. I wish that children would read Tom Swift books today, so they would learn that electricity is a powerful force to be used against evil — as in “Tom Swift and His Photo Telephone” — and not just to download Justin Bieber songs.

You have a 12-year-old daughter. Do you recommend books to her or vice versa? Any recent crossover successes?

I think the last book I recommended that she liked was The Very Hungry Caterpillar. She reads a lot, but she prefers The Hunger Games and other works belonging to a genre I would describe as "books that do not generate royalties for her father."

What book had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

The first time I read a Robert Benchley collection (I don’t remember which one it was; my father had a bunch) I thought, "This is what I want to do."

Disappointing, overrated, just not good: what was the last book you hated? Do you remember the last book you put down without finishing?

I'm not a big fan of the Twilight series. I can't get past the premise, which is that a group of wealthy, sophisticated, educated, highly intelligent, centuries-old vampires, who can do pretty much whatever they want, have chosen to be . . . high school students. I simply cannot picture such beings sitting in a classroom listening to a geometry teacher drone on about the cosine. I have more respect for vampires than that.

Which of the books you've written is your favorite?

This may seem self-serving and promotional, but it's true: I really like the way Insane City came out. It has heart, and — more important — an orangutan.

Are you a rereader? What books in particular do you find yourself returning to, and why?

Maybe someday I’ll go back and tackle The Brothers Karamazov again, if the president drops the ball.

What’s the one book you wish someone else would write?

"Dave Barry: The Greatest Human Ever."

Informational Cascades and Sex and the City

Curiously, an old book entitled Love Letters of Great Men and Women: From the 18th Century to the Present Day, which in 2007 suddenly climbed the Amazon.com bestseller list, provides a good example of group behavior set in an online context:

“What generated the huge interest in this long forgotten book was a scene in the movie Sex and the City in which the main character Carrie Bradshaw reads a book entitled Love Letters of Great Men — which does not exist. So, when fans of the movie searched for this book, Amazon’s search engine suggested Love Letters of Great Men and Women instead, which made a lot of people buy a book they did not want. Then Amazon’s computers started pairing the book with Sex and the City merchandise, and the old book sold in great numbers,” Vincent F. Hendricks points out.

“This is known as an ‘informational cascade’ in which otherwise rational individuals base their decisions not only on their own private information, but also on the actions of those who act before them. The point is that, in an online context, this can take on massive proportions and result in actions that miss their intended purpose.”

Dictionaries In The Digital Age

For Peter Sokolowski, a high-profile event like the 9/11 attacks or the 2012 vice-presidential debate is not just news. It's a "vocabulary event" that sends readers racing to their dictionaries.

Sokolowski is editor at large for Merriam-Webster, whose red-and-blue-jacketed Collegiate Dictionary still sits on the desk of many a student and editor. In a print-only era, it would have been next to impossible for him to track vocabulary events. Samuel Johnson, the grand old man of the modern dictionary, "could have spent a week or a month writing a given word's definition and could never have known if anyone read it," he says.

Today, Sokolowski can and does monitor what visitors to the Merriam-Webster Web site look up - as they're doing it.

With the spread of digital technologies, dictionaries have become a two-way mirror, a record not just of words' meanings but of what we want to know. Digital dictionaries read us.

The days of displaying a thick Webster's in the parlor may be past, but dictionaries inhabit our daily lives more than we realize. "There are many more times during a day that you are interacting with a dictionary" now than ever before, says Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press. Whenever you send a text or an e-mail, or read an e-book on your Nook, Kindle, or iPad, a dictionary is at your fingertips, whether or not you're aware of it.

For dictionary makers, going electronic opens up all kinds of possibilities. It's not just that digital dictionaries can be embedded in the operating systems of computers and e-readers so that they're always at hand. They can be updated far more easily and often than their print cousins, and they can incorporate material like audio pronunciations and thesauruses. Unsuccessful word "look-ups," or searches that don't produce satisfying results, can point lexicographers to terms that haven't yet made their way into a particular dictionary or whose definitions need to be amended or freshened. Online readers can click a button and contribute their own word lore, extending a tradition that dates back at least as far as the late 19th century, when James Murray and his team compiled the first Oxford English Dictionary with the help of thousands of word slips sent in by the public.

The Professor and the Madman - the story of the creation of the OED(and one of its surprising contributors)

Merriam-Webster Inc. began to track what words readers search for in 1996, when it first moved some of its dictionary content online.

"The first thing we noticed were these enormous spikes of interest around a big news event," beginning with Princess Diana's death and funeral in 1997, Sokolowski says.

The royal tragedy triggered searches on the Merriam-Webster Web site for "paparazzi" and "cortege." When Michael Jackson died in 2009, "emaciated" became the most-looked-up word of the following month—July—and the second-most-looked-up word of the year. ("Admonish" took first place, Sokolowski recalls, after the White House said it would "admonish" Rep. Joe Wilson for interrupting a speech by President Obama.)

Look-ups during a major news event suggest cultural narratives. "There's something sort of poignant about what people were seeking in lexicographical terms after 9/11," he says. In the immediate aftermath, people looked up words associated with the direct, visceral nature of the event: "rubble," "triage." In the days and weeks after the attacks, as the country reacted to and tried to make sense of what had happened, users sought out more philosophical or abstract words like "surreal."

More recently, when Vice President Joe Biden dropped "malarkey" ("insincere or foolish talk: bunkum") into his debate with Paul Ryan, the GOP vice presidential candidate in October 2012, look-ups of that colorful word surged on the Merriam-Webster site. The pattern reflects the public's strong interest in "public and pointed utterances," Sokolowski says.

To track that interest, he live-tweets major political debates as well as events like the National Spelling Bee. The dictionary also carries a weekly Trend Watch feature on its Web site that allows readers to see the most-searched-for words. "Plantagenet," for instance, has made a strong showing since the news broke that researchers in Britain had identified the bones of Richard III.

Sokolowski can't always figure out what specific event or public utterance causes look-ups of a particular term to soar. In such cases, he often asks on Twitter for clues: whether such-and-such a word just aired on a TV show, for instance, if he notes a spike in look-ups of it during prime time.

Some look-up patterns suggest what people are doing at the time. For instance, traffic to the mobile Merriam-Webster site "increases substantially after work hours," with the word "qi" among the most-looked-up words on the mobile site, Mr. Sokolowski says. "A reasonable conclusion is that people use their smartphones to look up words more often when they are away from work and that they play Scrabble or Words With Friends when not at the office during the day."

Word lovers need not fear for their privacy, though. Sokolowski does not track the identities of dictionary users. "I don't care at all who's looking it up," he says. "I'm simply looking at raw numbers."

The usage patterns Merriam-Webster's team tracks could be fascinating for language scholars to analyze, but so far those patterns have been examined only for in-house research. (Sokolowski points out that he and many of his colleagues are "academic refugees" with literature or linguistics backgrounds.) Outside researchers have not asked to use the look-up records, according to Sokolowski. It's not clear they'd be able to use the information if they did ask. Merriam-Webster considers it "valuable proprietary data, and we do not make it freely available to the public," he says. But, he adds, "it is conceivable that under the right circumstances we might try to find ways to work with qualified researchers and scholars."

No dictionary commands more respect than the Oxford English Dictionary. The second edition of the OED came out in 1989. A couple of years ago, a rumor spread that Oxford would not produce a print version of the third, which has been in the works for years. (Major new editions of dictionaries are not quick-turnaround projects.) According to Martin, the company's head of U.S. dictionaries, the third edition won't be completed for a decade or more, and it's far too early to say whether there will or won't be a print incarnation. "If you ask anyone who's working on a big dictionary project right now, it's the same," she says. By the time the third edition is finished, she jokes, "we may all be communicating through chips in our brains."

Oxford's dictionaries, including the OED, already have a strong online presence, though, and Martin is enthusiastic about the many possibilities digital dictionaries present.

"I can tell you it's a robustly growing business," she says. "There are some people who still really like their dictionaries in print," but that's not where the growth is. According to Martin and others, Oxford and other major dictionary publishers have been pursuing partnerships with Amazon, Apple, and other big players on the digital scene. For instance, American and British Kindle users probably don't know it, but their devices come with Oxford's New Oxford American Dictionary and its New English Dictionary embedded. "Right now the race among publishers is to have their product embedded in these platforms," says Steve Kleinedler, executive editor for the reference group at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which publishes the American Heritage Dictionary and recently acquired Webster's New World Dictionary.

Most dictionary publishers haven't yet gone as far as Macmillan Education, which announced in November that it would no longer make print dictionaries at all. "Exiting print is a moment of liberation, because at last our dictionaries have found their ideal medium," Editor in Chief Michael Rundell said when the news was announced.

This month Merriam-Webster unveils a new Web site for its subscription-only unabridged dictionary, a product largely supported by universities and libraries. According to Sokolowski, this marks the first time the company has really considered its print and online products as two distinct entities. "Some of the changes we're making are substantial, and there are really good reasons to do it," he says. The company will update the online Unabridged several times a year to keep it as timely as possible. He notes that the first release of updates took place March 1 and includes about 5,000 newly defined words, 100,000 new author quotations, and 200 new paragraphs on usage, not to mention "updates to thousands of existing entries." Beyond that, lexicographers have room to stretch online and add more usage guidelines and examples when they're writing new entries. That all means the online dictionary "will grow increasingly distinct" from its print relative, Sokolowski explains.

Despite the Macmillan editor in chief's argument that digital is ideal for dictionaries, no medium is perfect. Print offers pleasures that pixels don't. It's hard to electronically recreate the joy of browsing a printed page of definitions and "finding something you didn't know you were looking for," Martin says.

Dictionary makers are working on electronic simulacra. If you're using the Merriam-Webster phone app, for instance, you can turn your device horizontally and get a scrolling list of words that mimics browsing in the vicinity of a word in a print dictionary.

As Martin sees it, there are compensations for what's lost in the jump from page to screen. Online look-ups liberate dictionary users from the straitjacket of the alphabet. "For most of its life, the dictionary has been limited by alphabetical order," she says. "That was the default way to navigate through the text."

No longer. Now that the OED has an online presence, readers can explore its accumulated linguistic riches in ways that don't depend on A-B-C order. For example, the OED has played to its strength as a historical dictionary, which preserves the past uses and meanings of words, by integrating its historical thesaurus. That "puts all of the enormous content of the OED into a taxonomic structure," Martin explains. "So if you wanted to see all the terms for, say, a loose woman that were used in the 19th century, with a couple of clicks you could get all that information. It helps unlock the dictionary in a new way."

That can be a huge boon for historians, linguists, novelists, screenwriters, and anybody with an interest in how language shifts and changes.

Blending once-discrete references online creates a "kind of blossoming map of words and meaning" that readers can explore, says Ben Zimmer, a linguist and executive producer of the Web site Visual Thesaurus and its sister site Vocabulary.com. He chairs the New Words Committee of the American Dialect Society and writes columns on language for The Boston Globe. "Dictionaries are not just static entities anymore," he says. "You have to be able to react to current events, how people are going to look things up."

On Vocabulary.com, Zimmer and his colleagues serve up not just a standard dictionary definition but what he calls "blurbs," chattier and sometimes whimsical explanations designed to help a reader understand and remember what he or she looks up. Look up "hirsute," for instance, and you get this: "What do Santa Claus, Bigfoot, and unicorns have in common? Aside from the fact that they're completely real, they're also hirsute: very, very hairy creatures," the site explains. "The word is pronounced 'HER-suit,' so if you see a woman wearing a furry jacket with matching pants, you could say, "Her suit is hirsute." Just make sure it's actually a suit and not her real hair."

Like online versions of print dictionaries, sites like Vocabulary.com also give users the sounds as well as the meanings of words. (Trained opera singers "are perfect for this kind of work," Zimmer says. "They know how to enunciate.") And in the handy bells-and-whistles category, quizzes and other extras reflect the enthusiasm for language-learning games that's taken hold among students and educators, he says. "You have to meet young learners on the terrain they're comfortable with."

The flexibility and expansiveness of digital dictionaries allow their makers to adapt more quickly to current usage, as well as to changes in science, technology, and culture. "The big advantage is that we issue updates" twice a year, says Kleinedler of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Kleinedler's team undertakes periodic subject-area reviews to make sure that the dictionary reflects the latest terms and discoveries in certain fields. In the past six months, the publisher has updated a quarter of the biochemistry terms in the American Heritage Dictionary, he estimates. For instance, it added "aromatase inhibitor" and "docosahexaenoic acid" and will add "cathinone" and "prohormone" this spring.

The updates go beyond new words, though. "There's a lot of existing terminology that gets revised," Kleinedler says. Occasionally definitions need to be updated to do away with old cultural biases. Words like "tan" or "windburned," for instance, might have been defined with a white-skin bias in older dictionaries.

If the digital environment puts an abundance of material within easier reach of dictionary users, it channels useful information back to dictionary makers as well. "It's become a new way for us to identify gaps in our coverage," Oxford's Martin says. For instance, Oxford's lexicographers noticed that people were searching for compounds like "departure lounge" that spring up in everyday life before they make it into a dictionary. That kind of passive feedback "was never available to dictionary makers in the print age," she says.

Lexicographers have long counted on field research and what we now call crowdsourcing to collect examples of words and usages. Those practices can be continued and expanded online.

Most online dictionaries invite readers to nominate new words and slang. The OED maintains an "appeals" page where it asks readers to submit earlier records of words the editors are documenting. American Heritage's Open Dictionary Project calls on readers to suggest new words for consideration.

Beyond crowdsourcing, the digital era makes it easier to pull together "corpus data," large amounts of linguistic evidence that lexicographers draw on to analyze parts of speech and grammatical relationships between words. This is Big Data, dictionary style.

With good corpus data and the tools to analyze them, lexicographers can spot differences in idiomatic use from era to era and from place to place. Think of the differences between American English and British English. "To monitor changes like 'snuck' as the past tense of 'sneak,' which is historically irregular but has become very much accepted in American English, we're using very large segments of texts to make judgments about what's happening over time," Martin says. The texts used can be almost any form of written expression: specialized academic journals, blog posts, newspaper articles, and more.

Via e-mail, Ingrid Goldstein, Oxford's head of language technology, described the process of gathering linguistic data. Her team trawls or "spiders" the Web in search of fresh material for the corpus. "We remove foreign-language material, and remove repeated stretches of text," she explains. "We analyze the texts in order to make further information about each word available," like identifying which part of speech it is.

After these "preparatory processes," the gathered material is fed into what Goldstein calls "a corpus tool" that allows lexicographers to do many things with the words: conduct basic searches, retrieve concordances, and summarize the "collocational behavior" of each word—meaning how it's arranged with or works alongside other words. (From collocation, defined on the free Oxford Dictionaries Web site as "the habitual juxtaposition of a particular word with another word or words with a frequency greater than chance.")

For all the digital tools and enhancements they have to work with, dictionary makers still do a great deal of their work by hand and by eye. "It's like taking a census of the language," Sokolowski says. At Merriam-Webster, machine-reading of data comes after human reading. "We read everything. We read as much as we can," he says. "We do something which is a little anachronistic, which is we mark it by hand. We notice new words, new uses of old words."

What they notice gets entered into the Merriam-Webster database. Electronic corpora and tools support and enhance what the editors pick up on. "We just find that relying on editors to edit is the most efficient way," he says. "It also works for presenting the information, because the reader isn't an algorithm either."

The more embedded the dictionary is in our lives and devices, the more useful it will be to the casual reader—and the less likely we are to think about it. The differences among dictionaries are harder to see and appreciate when you're discovering words via a Google search.

Students, in particular, often don't discriminate between sources. An undergraduate who just wants a quick definition is much more likely to turn to Dictionary.com than to the OED, and won't see much difference between the two, says Michael Hancher, a professor of English at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, who organized a panel on digital dictionaries at this year's Modern Language Association meeting. "The evidence is that they make casual use of the online resources," he says.

To anyone who has paged through a thick dictionary, that sounds like a radical departure from the look-up practices of the past. But to Lisa Berglund, a professor of English at Buffalo State College, dictionaries' shift online continues an expansive Anglo-American tradition that dates back to the 18th century, when Samuel Johnson helped regularize English spelling in his great dictionary, and the early 19th, when Noah Webster created a linguistic resource for a new country. "Webster's dictionary was the best-selling book in America, after the Bible, for decades," Berglund says. It helped provide "the basis for a shared community, a shared basis of knowledge, in forming a new nation."

Dictionaries are not created equal, though, and the most readily found definition will not always be the most robust or up-to-date. Who's behind the definition that turns up on a quick Google search or embedded in your digital device? Online it can be very hard to tell how reliable a source is. Berglund serves as the executive secretary of the Dictionary Society of North America, and she thinks it's more vital than ever to equip students with the literacy skills to be able to distinguish a good source from a mediocre one. Whatever form future dictionaries take, she wants professors as well as their students to take them seriously. "We tend to forget that the dictionary is one of the most valuable tools for humanistic study," she says.

Berglund sees many advantages to online dictionaries. But some aspects of the print experience will never make the leap online. "You lose things, you gain things," Berglund says. "You can't use your computer dictionary as a doorstop. You can't press flowers in it. You can't necessarily insert your Valentine into the page next to the word 'Love,' which is the kind of thing people do."

Enid Blyton

Wealthy, imperious, hard-working, right-wing, resistant to criticism, adoring her father but on bad terms with both mother and daughter, possessing a strong sense of right and wrong before succumbing to Alzheimer’s disease; in character terms, Enid Blyton was the Margaret Thatcher of children’s literature. She is to be celebrated at an exhibition from May 4, hosted by Seven Stories, Newcastle’s National Centre for Children’s Books.

Blyton published 800 titles over 40 years before dying in 1968. Still in print today, with awkward references to golliwogs and gypsies erased, and clothes changing from shorts and short-sleeved shirts to jeans and anoraks, her books continue to be enjoyed by children revelling in plots where young characters get the better of crooks; often with the help of hidden passages and pet dogs. While she was a formidable adult, Blyton became a child when she was writing, producing stories young readers would have written themselves, had they the technical ability. For tales of wish-fulfilment conveyed at a spanking pace in easy to read language, she remains unrivalled — an opinion she would have been the first to endorse.

The Enchanted Wood

This much-loved story features three children who climb the magic faraway tree, where they meet diverse characters from Moon-Face to Angry Pixie. At the top, via a ladder, there are imaginary countries from the Land of Birthdays to the Land of Dame Slap, an excitingly aggressive headmistress worth escaping from.

Five on a Treasure Island

For many, the best Blyton adventure story — four children and a dog wrest a hoard of gold from a criminal gang. Briefly kidnapped, the children only just win through, led by the ever-defiant George, short for Georgina — a character based on Blyton’s affectionate and approving memories of herself when young.

Mr Pink-Whistle Interferes

Blyton’s titles could be unconsciously entertaining. There is also a story of decline and fall starting with Don’t Be Silly, Mr. Twiddle! and ending ominously in Well, Really, Mr. Twiddle! Also eye-catching, Enid Blyton’s Gay Story Book and The Queer Adventure. Who said she was behind the times?

Hurray for Little Noddy

This anodyne character, described by one testy critic as a “witless, spiritless, snivelling, sneaking doll”, still deserves a mention. Driving around in a toy car before returning to his own little house weighed down by approving comments from all he meets, Noddy always gets the last laugh.

First Term at Malory Towers

Set in a castle on the Cornish coast, this all-girls boarding school has everything going for it including a swimming pool around which many of the mini-dramas take place.

The Mystery of the Disappearing Cat

The Five Find-Outers, one of Blyton’s many fearless groups of youngsters, overturn an unjust accusation after following up some clues. In a final denouement they are congratulated on their cleverness by everyone except Mr Goon, the village policeman and butt of their at times cruel humour.

Neil Gaiman

His confusing childhood in a household of Scientologists has not held back Neil Gaiman, once dubbed “the most famous writer you’ve never heard of”. These days the British author is a global cult in his own right.

To his worshipping multitudes the 52-year-old has been the equivalent of a rock god since his Sandman comic books were first published 25 years ago. In the meantime he has written Doctor Who episodes and the Neverwhere miniseries for the BBC, co-scripted the film Beowulf and won a shedload of awards for his dark fiction fantasies. His 2005 book Anansi Boys went straight in at No 1 in the New York Times bestseller list.

Gaiman’s first novel for adults in eight years is thus a big publishing event and will be read by the actor Michael Sheen on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime next month. Expectations are high — not least the author’s. He believes it is his “best” and “most personal” book. Early reviewers, while mostly positive, are in two minds over whether he is appealing to the child in adults or the adult in children.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane concerns the extraordinary events that befall a seven-year-old boy when his parents’ lodger commits suicide in their car — an incident borrowed from Gaiman’s own past. The death stirs up ancient powers, best left undisturbed, that can be laid to rest only by three women.

Portsmouth, which is near the author’s Hampshire birthplace, has come up with a cracker of an idea in the hope of winning a place on the book lover’s map — renaming a seafront street after the novel’s laborious title.

The tale not only confirms Gaiman’s mastery of the horror genre but also raises the familiar question of where such gruesomeness springs from. To outward appearances the writer is “an immensely likeable man”, according to one interviewer, although there is something of the night about his proclivity for black boots, black socks, black jeans, black T-shirts and black jackets.

If Gaiman resembles the hero of Sandman, which he recast for DC Comics between 1988 and 1996, his numerous female fans pride themselves on adopting the black clothing and elaborate eye make-up of the main character’s elder sister, Death. Such is the clamour surrounding Gaiman that when he once appeared at a convention with Angelina Jolie, who played the mother of the monster Grendel in Beowulf, he put the actress in the shade.

Jon Levin, Gaiman’s film agent, has recounted that he realised the extent of his client’s popularity during a meeting at Warner Bros when all the secretaries rushed to ask for autographs. Someone remarked: “That never happens when Tom Cruise is here.”

Cruise, of course, is the poster boy for the Church of Scientology. It’s a subject on which the normally chatty Gaiman has little to say, other than that he is not a Scientologist. His discretion is understandable: his two sisters are still active in Scientology. One, Claire Edwards, works for the church in Los Angeles; the other, Lizzy Calcioli, helps to run the family business, a vitamin shop.

For more than 20 years Gaiman has lived in a huge, Addams Family-style house in Wisconsin, where he moved with his first wife, Mary, in order to be close to her family. They have three children and she is now reported to live in a cottage on his property. In 2011 — three years after their divorce — he married Amanda Palmer, a songwriter and performer, who enlivens his public readings with dark chords and naked, bloody images of herself projected on a wall.

It is all a long way from East Grinstead in West Sussex, which was the centre of English Scientology when Gaiman moved there with his family at the age of five. His father, David, a grocery owner, and his mother, Sheila, a pharmacist, were taking classes in Dianetics — Scientology’s self-help approach to mental health. In 1977 they founded their G&G vitamin shop on East Grinstead’s High Street. David, who died in 2009, began working for Scientology’s public relations wing, rising to a prominent position within the organisation.

The Gaiman children found their beliefs difficult to explain — the family was Jewish, of Polish descent on David’s side. “Most of our social activities were involved with Scientology or our Jewish family,” Neil’s sister Lizzy once recalled. “It would get very confusing when people would ask my religion as a kid. I’d say, ‘I’m a Jewish Scientologist.’”

Neil was equally uncomfortable. At seven he was banned from entering Fonthill School for boys in East Grinstead. The headmaster cited government measures taken in 1968 declaring L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, persona non grata in Britain and forbidding foreign Scientologists to enter the country.

Among the sources of inspiration Gaiman has credited for his writing — CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien and GK Chesterton, among others — he has seldom mentioned Hubbard, a prolific writer of science fiction and fantasy whose influence pervaded his childhood home. However, Gaiman once made an interesting confession: if he had not been a writer, he would have liked to design religions (rather like Hubbard, in fact): “I’d have a little shop, and people would phone up or come into the shop and they’d say, ‘I’d like a religion.’ And I’d say, ‘Cool, OK. Where do you stand on guilt, and how do you want to fund it?’”

From the outset it seems that Gaiman had his own views on religion. Born on November 10, 1960, in the Hampshire town of Portchester, he has described himself as “a feral child” who learnt to read at an early age and devoured books. He was “a much weirder kid than I ever thought I was”. Rather than study for his bar mitzvah, he prevailed upon his teacher to concentrate on Bible stories such as the Leviathan and the Behemoth.

He was educated at several Church of England schools, including Whitgift School in Croydon, south London. Leaving home, he lived in Edgware for two years and “did the starving writer thing, producing a bunch of short stories and a children’s novel that everyone rejected before I realised that I hadn’t written enough, lived enough”.

He then had three happy years working as a freelance journalist for publications such as Time Out, “living off chicken wings at film screenings” and interviewing the likes of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett — both of whom were to collaborate with him on books.

By his mid-twenties the pull of comics had become irresistible. Through a chance meeting with Alan Moore, whose work on Swamp Thing was transforming the comic book into something more literary, Gaiman found a berth at DC Comics, where he was asked to rework Sandman. The comic had first appeared in 1939, telling the story of an everyman crime fighter. In Gaiman’s hands it took on a more otherworldly spin, steadily introducing readers to seven siblings who shape human lives. The writer Norman Mailer said: “Sandman is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I say it’s about time.”

After a spell of working on non-graphic fiction, Gaiman followed Neverwhere, his six-part BBC television series of 1996, with a debut solo novel of the same title. A glimpse of a shooting star inspired Stardust, a fairy tale that became a comic miniseries, a novel and finally — after the model Claudia Schiffer read it and beseeched her director husband Matthew Vaughn to film it — a movie. Another fantasy, Coraline, was also adapted for film and nominated for an Oscar.

Gaiman’s literary stock rose sharply in 2008 with The Graveyard Book, which recounts the adventures of a boy who after his family is murdered is brought up by dead people. The parallels with Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book are unmistakable — reworking classic stories is a Gaiman trait, although he succeeds by refusing to remain faithful to their genres.

He admits that his success is due in part to frenetic blogging — he often tweets a dozen or more times a day. He evidently needs the company: he once explained that he blogs “because writing is, like death, a lonely business”.

Evolution of Book Stores (Seth Godin)

ACT 1: The Book of the Month Club.

After World War II, a wealthier, better educated country started engaging in more culture, more often, in a more widespread way. We were more likely to watch the same movies, more likely to listen to more music, and much more likely to want to read the books others were reading. Paperback books really came into their own, making reading portable and cheap, and the Book of the Month Club began to dominate.

It’s difficult for us to imagine just how influential the board of the Club was. If they picked a book to be a main selection, it would be read, by default, by millions of people, discussed at the dinner table and at bridge club and instantly become part of the dominant culture.

This doesn’t have a lot to do with bookstores, except for the fact that as the Club faded due to the long tail of choice and the fracturing of the monoculture, the stores were there to pick up the slack.

ACT II: The magic of the dominant bestsellers.

Here’s the magic formula for a successful bookstore industry: Every month, a few new hardcover books are hand-sold, recommended by the local store. A few catch on and become bestsellers. Within its own cultural pocket, each book becomes a must-read, with the only source being the full-price local bookstore. The result? With a 40% profit margin and full return privileges, the local store can thrive. They don’t need to carry every book, just the books that sell. And in the early 1960s, it wasn’t unusual for a book to be a bestseller for a year or more.

ACT III: The New York Times bestseller list and Barnes and Noble end this magic moment

The insight was pretty clever—give up the juicy margins on the bestsellers and make up the profits in volume. Barnes and Noble had more inventory than just about any independent bookstore, but they needed traffic. So, they announced that if a book made the Times list, they’d sell it at 40% off (basically, at their cost).

This was a nuclear bomb for the independent seller. Suddenly, their core source of profit was in danger. Barnes and Noble was able to make juicy profits on the other stuff you’d buy in the store, and aided by the Times list, they bifurcated the market. Most people, most of the time, bought only the books on the bestseller list (the average American was buying and reading just a few books a year), but that’s okay if you’re the dominant player in a given town.

Harry Potter was the last gasp for many independents. They made that book happen, following their tried and true hand-selling approach. The word of mouth kicked in just as it was supposed to. With a profit margin of $6 or more on every book sold, the upside was nearly a hundred million dollars—but they got almost none of that, because Barnes & Noble (and the big box stores, which stole their strategy) sucked all the profit out of the bestsellers.

My mom used to run the independent bookstore she helped build at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. I met sales reps when they came to our house for dinner, and saw the workings of what we think of as the ideal bookstore. Even during the pre-Amazon days, this was never a good business–without bestsellers sold at full price (and how many art books become bestsellers) it’s almost impossible to sell enough volume to make a small bookstore work.

THE END: Amazon and infinite selection, better service, more information and better prices, too

If you love books, it’s hard to see Amazon as a villain. More books sold to more people for more reasons than any other retailer in history. More cross-selling, hand-selling and up-selling too. The web pages of Amazon, on average, are better informed than many bookstore clerks.

Before Amazon and the web, we were on track for the bestseller inventory to totally dominate bookselling. Wal-Mart and Price Club and B&N had figured out how to dump huge quantities of certain books at really low prices, and there was pressure to avoid the long tail, and to guard shelf space zealously. I was new to the book world then, and there was just huge pressure to be on the right side of the bestseller line–everything else didn’t matter. Amazon fixed this, by embracing the long tail and carrying everything. If you love books, Amazon was a dream come true.

But if you love bookstores, Amazon is the final nail. In fact, it was the clumping the Times enabled, combined with the discounting that B&N started that did the stores in, but Amazon’s work in getting more books to more people meant that the discounts and selection they brought to readers removed the last bit of opportunity the stores had left.

Great independent bookstores deserve to thrive, and I hope they will. But they won’t thrive as local substitutes for Amazon. They will make it if they become hubs, connectors and gift shops. The book-as-gift concept is just now entering an important stage, and we don’t have to dumb down our local store to get there. More important, though, is the idea of a local place where smart people go to meet each other and the ideas they care about. We shouldn’t have that because it’s the last chance of the local bookstore, we should have that because it’s worth doing.

Vilifying Amazon, though, makes no sense. More people can read and write more books today (ebook and print) than at any other time in history.

I miss the magic of the local bookstore, but I would miss books more.

(Seth Godin has interesting ideas on a wide range of topics - see more here )

Careful What You Write!

A warrant has been issued for the arrest of a pensioner who failed to turn up to be sentenced for throwing ink at a best-selling author over a 28-year grudge.

Sandra Botham, of Hendon, Sunderland, did not attend the hearing at the city’s Magistrates’ Court yesterday over her attack on Val McDermid, author of The Wire in the Blood, at a book signing event last year.

At a previous hearing, the court heard how Botham, disguised in a blonde wig and a hat, ambushed the author at Sunderland University last December. Ms McDermid, 58, who has written 31 books including crime novels, short stories and children’s books, told magistrates that she was giving a lecture promoting her latest novel Vanishing Point when she noticed Botham, 64, sitting on the end of a row.

At the book signing afterwards, Botham produced “a dog-eared copy” of another book, A Suitable Job for a Woman, and asked her to dedicate it to “Michelin Man San”. It later emerged that she had objected to a paragraph in the book.

Botham produced another book, Ms McDermid said, “that looked like an old Top of the Pops annual, and opened it at a page with a picture of Jimmy Savile on it. She asked me to sign that too.” Botham then pulled a container of ink from her pocket and threw it at the author, ruining her clothes.

Ms McDermid, from Kirkcaldy, Fife, said: “She then said to me something like, ‘You are my female equivalent of Jimmy Savile’, before walking off.”

The attack was said to be over a paragraph which Botham claims criticised her and her family. It was a grudge she was said to have carried for 28 years. The paragraph refers to a woman called Sandra who was shaped “like a Michelin Man”.

Ms McDermid told the court she had never experienced “anything like this before”. Earlier this month at her trial, Botham, representing herself, hurled obscenities at the writer. She branded her a “fat liar” and told her: “I will see you in hell.” She stormed out of the building and was convicted in her absence of common assault.

Short Story Club

I always hated short stories.

I considered reading a short story like going out to dinner and only ordering an appetizer.  Want a real meal?  Eat a goddamn novel.

But then something happened in my life, something wonderful, and, when it was all over, I found myself the president and founder of a governmentally recognized non-profit short story organization that dispatches classic short stories, every Thursday morning, to thousands of members across the world.

What happened?

I got fired from my goddamn job.

Obviously, though, more than that happened.

I’ve worked in the hotel business my whole life, mostly front desk.  Wrote a memoir about it.  It sold super well.  I’m very proud of it.  But before I even started the first draft of what would become Heads in Beds here , I was just an unpublished novelist working at a hotel and doing a shit job at it because I was burnt out.  And so they fired me.

But I fought to get my job back and, because I was a card-carrying dues-paying union member, they were forced to hire me back.

You ever been fired from a job and then rehired?  Lemme tell you: You walk into work everyday with disdain for your life.  Meanwhile management attempts to use every available opportunity to fire you again.  It’s a pretty lame way to limp though life.  So I stood at the front desk, acutely unmotivated, and had to pass the hours of the day in some way.

It was important, if I wanted to keep my job, that I kept my head down.  And I did.  I kept my head down.  But guess what was down there.  A computer terminal.  A stapler.  Keycards.  Some hotel stationery.

Pretty boring, visually.  Extremely boring, mentally.

So I decided to print out a short story from the Internet.  That way, when I read it, it would look like I was working and mentally I would be stimulated.  Plus I’d never read many short stories.

I didn’t get past the first paragraph before a bellman came up and interrupted me (bellmen are always, constantly, up in your goddamn business):

“What you reading there, chief?”

“A short story,” I told him.

To this he said nothing.

I was about to open my mouth and offer a bit more clarification when he let out something unexpected:

“Well, pass it to me when you’re done then.”

So I did.  And I watched him take it to the corner of the lobby and start reading.  I knew him very well personally, his interests, his hobbies, and reading literature (reading anything) was certainly not a part of his life.  But after reading the last sentence he flipped to the first page again and stared at it (as you do when you finish something) then walked over and fluttered the print-out onto my desk.  I figured he hated it.

“What’s next?” He asked me.

That was the moment of genesis.  The very start of my short story organization.

We read four short stories that day.  And when we were done with a print-out we passed it to other bored people at work.  When they were finished they asked for the next print-out.  We were all reading the same stories and it was fun.  Work was super fun that day.

Then the bellman took two weeks off.

Then, the day he came back, he walked up to me and asked:

“What’s next, chief?”

I knew exactly what he meant.  But this time I knew I should start curating.  If I wanted to nurture this non-reader’s interest in literature, I couldn’t afford to dispense any shitty stories.  No garbage.  So I took my time and found a great one.  And (using company paper and toner!) I printed out a short story on a Thursday morning.  We got paid on Thursdays.

So there it was: Every Thursday, at my hotel, you got a paycheck and a short story to wash it down with.  I named it Short Story Thursdays and soon everyone started calling it SST.  It grew to about 20 members at the hotel, encompassing many departments; telephone operators, people in the accounting department, one lady in the sales department, the concierge desk and more.  People who felt they had no time to read, or didn’t even think themselves capable of understanding or enjoying literature were looking forward to Thursday’s story.

Then I quit my job.  To write the hotel book.  And there was immediate concern about the future of Short Story Thursdays.  I collected email addresses from all 20 members and promised to send a dispatch every Thursday morning to introduce the story, and the story itself would be formatted and attached.  I told them, as a joke, that the email would come from shutyourlazymouthandread@gmail.com.  We all thought that was funny.

That ended up not being a joke.  Or it’s still a joke but it’s now a high-functioning joke.  Pretty soon they started signing up their friends and family.  I signed up my friends and family.  People told people.  I started getting emails from strangers wanting to join.  I created business cards.  I partnered with a bar in Brooklyn to establish a home base.  I moved the organization over to an official and substantially longer email address:

shutyourlazymouthandread@shortstorythursdays.com

We became a governmentally recognized non-profit (though I haven’t figured out how to get funding so I still do it alone and for free).  Today I am more proud of SST than anything I have ever done in my life.  I love it, you guys.  People are reading again.  Finding time.  On the subway.  On their smartphone.

All from public domain literature.  Dusty shit that was just lying about on the Internet.  Funneled through an email account.  An organization composed solely of words and electricity.

I love short stories now.  In today’s world, for some people, it is the only option.  All they have time for.  And they are making time for it.

I love short stories now.

And anyone who says differently?

I will punch them in the mouth.

If that joke bothered you: You might not like SST.  But today in America you gotta have an edge to cut through the noise.  And we’ve got that.  Anyone reading Book Riot is a reader, no doubt, and doesn’t need any help or encouragement to read.  Carry on, motherfuckers.  But every reader knows 400 non-readers.  And that’s a goddamn tragedy.

It’s time to start punching people in the mouth, every week, with literature.

Goodreads - Authors vs Readers

A couple of weeks ago, Goodreads — a massive social networking and cataloging site for books, readers and authors — announced a change in its moderation policy. From now on, the site’s administrators would be deleting “reviews that were created primarily to talk about author behavior.” This was a big change. In the past, Goodreads has been largely unmoderated, despite terms of service stating, “You agree not to post User Content that [...] contains any information or content that we deem to be unlawful, harmful, abusive, racially or ethnically offensive, defamatory, infringing, invasive of personal privacy or publicity rights, harassing, humiliating to other people (publicly or otherwise), libelous, threatening, profane, or otherwise objectionable,” and reserving the rights to remove any post violating those standards.

The impetus for all this is a raging feud between relatively small groups of reviewers and authors. (Goodreads has about 20 million members, although only a fraction of that number actively uses the site.) That conflict, mostly carried out far from the public eye, rose to a little prominence over the summer when Lauren Pippa (aka Lauren Howard), a self-published author about to release her first book, challenged a Goodreads member who had given her book a two-star rating. Goodreads explicitly permits members to rate books that have yet to be published, and publishers often distribute advance copies to those they deem influential in the community. Furthermore, some members use the star system to flag forthcoming books they want either to seek out or to avoid. Pippa later claimed not to have known about this custom.

The comment Pippa posted to the member’s rating and complaints she made in a Goodreads forum garnered some scathing responses from other commenters and a rash of one-star ratings from their friends. This in turn prompted some of Pippa’s friends to fling insults at her critics, which led even more Goodreads members to include her forthcoming book in their “do not read” lists. Pippa complained about all of this on Twitter, which led to even more retaliation, until finally she announced on her blog that she’d been “bullied” into canceling the release of her book and threatened with violence. Later, Pippa reconsidered that decision, admitting that she was mistaken about being threatened and blaming her reaction to the whole affair on PMS.

I hope you’re still with me through all these convolutions, because, as with all flame wars — and Pippa’s story is merely one skirmish in the Byzantine reviewer-author flame war currently ongoing on at Goodreads and beyond — the terrain is a maze of accusations and counteraccusations, often misleading, and reactions and counter-reactions, often out of all proportion to the original offense. You could spend hours following the trail of a single dispute, through smoking battlefields of interlinked comments threads and screen shots and blogs where the message “this post has been deleted by its author” stands like a tombstone over the grave of the one witness who can tell you what really happened. I know, because I’ve wandered extensively over this blasted heath in the past couple of weeks.

What’s been going on at Goodreads and in Amazon discussion boards and on Twitter are more than just the usual Internet mishegoss, however. These are epochal convulsions, writ small. They’re the result of significant changes in the relationship between authors and their readers, and those changes have two causes: the boom in self-publishing and the rise of social networking.

Not all of the authors involved in these flame wars are self-published by any means, but most of the more active author-combatants are. More often than not, the self-published author has no publicist to advise against responding to negative reviews or to otherwise buffer the writer’s encounter with the unpredictable public. An anonymous website devoted to identifying and punishing Goodreads reviewers perceived as abusive, Stop the Goodreads Bullies (STGRB), claims to be maintained by “readers, bloggers, and Goodreads members (not authors)” — let alone self-published ones — but the comprehensive and furiously impassioned nature of the site indicates otherwise. On the other side, the equally anonymous blog, BBA Whisperer, offers cascades of invective and in-jokes targeted at the STGRB crowd — or BBAs, badly behaved authors, as the reviewer faction calls them — pinning snarky nicknames on people who are already using pseudonyms, and rendering itself pretty much incomprehensible to the average reader. (Not that this matters, as the blog was recently set to “invited readers only” status.)

Yet none of these people would know and hate each other so well were it not for the social networking features of Goodreads. The site, recently purchased by Amazon, is both a giant catalog of titles and a means of discussing, reviewing and sharing information about books. Some members use it simply to compile lists of the books they own or want to own, have read or plan to read. They can organize those lists into digital “shelves” with labels like “historical-fiction”or “re-read.” Others use the site to network with like-minded readers, posting reviews or ratings and creating shelves called “swoonworthy-alpha-male” or “postmodern-fiction.” Heavy readers of genre fiction — people who consume a lot of books, often with similar titles, or who have specific formula preferences — seem to find the shelf system particularly useful.

As these readers see it, Goodreads exists for them to keep track of their books and reading and to exchange thoughts about it with fellow readers and friends who share their tastes. The shelves — which were a key issue in the Lauren Pippa affair — are like the shelves in their own homes: their business and no one else’s, apart from invited guests. These users create most of the content that makes Goodreads more than a mere database of book information, and furthermore their relationships with each other are in many ways the true locus of the site’s value. Amazon most likely bought Goodreads for the consumer data it can extract from it, but consumers wouldn’t be going to the trouble to input all that data if there weren’t actual people there they wanted to share it with. They do all of this for free, and see no reason why they shouldn’t do it in any way they see fit.

As authors view it, Goodreads is one of the few venues in which they can present their work to a sizable audience regardless of their resources. It’s particularly attractive to self-published authors, who can rarely get their books into stores and who are constantly being instructed that they must actively promote their work if they hope to realize their dreams of replicating the success of indie authors like Amanda Hocking and John Locke. Authors also use Goodreads to network, offering each other moral support, advice and — though not all will admit it — glowing reviews to fill up book pages that might otherwise stand empty. For an author, the Goodreads page for her book is its public face, and sometimes the only platform it has beyond its Amazon page. Last, but certainly far from least, Goodreads can offer something Amazon can’t (quite), a form of word of mouth, via the interconnected relationships among readers — and everyone in publishing knows that word of mouth is the only way to really sell books.

Perhaps, when the situation is described this way, the impending collision looks obvious, even before I explain that shelf names, ratings and reviews, however casually awarded, can and do appear on the home page for any given book. If the shelf name is something like “craptastic” or “could-not-finish,” the author, who may be inexperienced or hot-tempered, sees a highly visible slur. Some cannot resist responding or complaining to friends or fans who head over to respond for them, perhaps impoliticly. (One of Pippa’s associates suggested the reader stick his hand in a blender.) The readers regard this as an intrusion into a space where the author has no business. Chalk some of this up to inept community design on Goodreads’ part, but the problem doesn’t end at Goodreads’ borders. All across the Internet, authors and readers seem to be at each other’s throats.

It wasn’t always so. A few years ago, publishing pundits began celebrating the Internet’s ability to connect authors and readers in new ways. As far back as 2009, Richard Nash, former editor in chief of the successful small literary publisher Soft Skull Press, announced a new project by saying, “Everything we publish will have to flow through the community. In the end, the community is the publisher. The community is the one hustling word-of-mouth for the books. So I, as the editor, exist to help the community express itself.” Self-publishing advocates rejoiced that e-book publishing programs allowed authors to connect directly with readers, bypassing those pesky gatekeepers at literary agencies and publishing houses, with their old-fashioned, arbitrary, mercenary and clique-ish standards.

Soft Skull’s readers, Nash told Publishers Weekly, “loved our authors. They wanted to learn from those authors, to meet them, to share with them, to be among them.” But Soft Skull publishes for a particular community of readers, and what subsequent years have shown is that not all reader communities want authors to join them, not even their favorite authors, whose presence might be intimidating or inhibit a free discussion. And they certainly don’t want random authors (or their friends or sock puppets) poking their noses under the tent in a quest to drum up reviews or sales — essentially, spam — which is something Goodreads’ power users have complained about for years. Above all, they do not welcome an author who jumps into a review’s comments thread or any ongoing conversation about his or her book to quarrel with remarks made about it.

The very asset that makes Goodreads reviewers influential — their interconnectedness and ability to stoke each other’s enthusiasm about a book — can also be used as a weapon against an author who offends that community. This is what happened in certain sectors of Goodreads, particularly in the overlapping genres of YA (young adult), romance and fantasy. As retaliation against what they see as meddling or abusive authors, the most active and indignant reviewers coordinated attacks in which books were suddenly given a rash of one-star ratings or shelved under labels like “i’d-rather-die” or “author-harasses-reviewers.” Reviews were posted that consisted of little more than indictments of the authors’ actions on Goodreads, personal blogs or other social media networks. This is the sort of content the new Goodreads policy is meant to eradicate. The reviewers involved counter that such tactics are their only recourse against authorial misbehavior and also serve the purpose of warning other reviewers away.

The reviewers say that the “bullying” condemned by Stop the Goodreads Bullies consists of legitimately critical reviews, and without a doubt, authors — traditionally or self-published — can and do respond in catastrophically self-defeating ways to negative reviews. (Or even not-so-negative ones.) STGRB insists that it targets only the practice of ganging up on authors for transgressions against what it maintains is an arbitrary and unfair code of behavior imposed by the reviewers. It does seem to be the case that reviewers are now gunning for an opportunity to flex that power. But most disturbingly, reviewers point out that irate authors have moved their retaliation off Goodreads (from which some of the most egregious offenders on both sides have been banned) and onto no-holds-barred sites like STGRB, where they’ve posted personal information about so-called toxic bullies. That includes real names, places of residence, employers’ names and other identifying information. This practice, known as doxxing, constitutes the “nuclear option” of Internet culture, a weapon of last resort.

Each side claims the other started this feud, and each has behaved badly. In their own self-selecting conversational bubbles, they work each other up into heightened states of outrage, losing their grip on the facts along the way. By the time Lauren Pippa blundered onto the scene, reviewers had developed a hair-trigger sensitivity to any sign of authorial interference. Like single people whose long stint in the dating trenches leaves them acutely alert to any sign of misbehavior or maladjustment in a potential romantic partner, they immediately assumed the worst, and Pippa’s efforts to get Goodreads to delete the two-star rating only confirmed their suspicions that she was invading their community and trying to usurp their control over it.

Three years ago, I wrote a piece about how the self-publishing boom might affect average readers, who, now that agents and editors can be bypassed, would be exposed to the horrors of the slush pile for the first time. A techno-utopian colleague assure me that in the absence of professional tastemakers, amateur alternatives would arise in the form of bloggers and other experts — or, in the case of sites like Goodreads, “the crowd.” “People will find new ways to decide which books merit their attention,” he said, and I’m sure he had plenty of company in that hopeful sentiment. Gatekeepers of some kind are necessary simply because there are way too many books chasing far too few readers, and people have to choose among them somehow. But it’s unrealistic to expect professional behavior from people who not only aren’t professionals but are not even aspiring to professionalism and have no obligation to accountability. The whole point of a hobby is to do as you please.

Authors may secretly dream of banning all negative feedback about their books from sites like Goodreads, but such a site would be of little interest to readers and eventually lose its ability to influence them. Reviewers giving single stars to books they haven’t even read may be striking a blow on behalf of reviewers’ freedom from authorial interference, but they’re not helping readers who don’t plan to review the book, or who couldn’t care less about negative comments from authors or their fans. The Goodreads flame wars represent just one corner of the shifting landscape between authors and readers, a landscape I plan to write more about in the coming weeks, but there could not be a better illustration of that old adage: Be careful what you wish for because you just might get it.

Some cool bookish places are just so cool they make you ache. Bookworm Gardens certainly fits that bill. The park, located in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, a quick hour’s drive north of Milwaukee, is a theme park totally dedicated to children’s literature. The park has six “Gateways” organized by literary theme, including Woodlands, Animal Gardens, Memory Gardens, etc.

The park features more than 60 books, each of which is displayed in its own “stone book pillar” at the entrance to each Gateway. The books include children’s classics like The Giving Tree, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs (my personal favorite), and Winnie the Pooh. Here’s a map of the gardens:



Admission to the park is free. The park is funded fully with donations and memberships.

A friend of mine visited this past weekend with his daughter, and gave the place a full ringing endorsement. “Talk about a place to get lost in books,” he said. “There was everything from scenes that are depicted in stories to interactive things like houses/barns and even a place to write a letter to the mouse called Twitch. It was the kind of place you can plan to pack a lunch and let your kid get lost all day in fantasy.”      

eBook Bestsellers

He is one of the world’s most prolific and successful authors, having published one book every five weeks for the past 30 months, earning something in the region of $1.5 million — but he has never had a publisher.

Craig Osso, a retired American property developer, is the latest super-star in the world of self-publishing. The 52-year-old writer, who lives in Mexico and writes under the pen name Russell Blake, does not need a publishing contract because he sells his novels in electronic form through Amazon.

Mr Osso wrote one of his best-selling thrillers — Jet, about a former Mossad agent — in just 16 days. Last month he released new two titles — a noir detective tale featuring a Hollywood gumshoe, and an action-packed international spy thriller. He has sold about 450,000 e-books in the past 30 months.

He is currently in sixth place on Amazon’s chart of thriller authors, just behind Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy and Dan Brown. Being an author in the digital age, Mr Osso believes, is like being a shark: “You keep swimming or you die.” Mr Osso’s success is exceptional, but it signals a seismic shift. In 2012, there were estimated to be 391,000 self-published titles.

Last year, self-published books accounted for about a third of the 100 best-selling e-books on Amazon.com. Many traditional publishers and booksellers argue that Amazon is killing their industry. Writers who produce fine works that do not appeal to large audiences are less likely to be offered advances, they say.

Mr Osso sees publishers as elitist gatekeepers who a few years ago would have locked him out.

His output of 26 books published in 30 months ranks him alongside history’s most prolific authors. Agatha Christie wrote a book about every eight months. Dame Barbara Cartland wrote 722 novels, averaging one every 40 days or so.

Mr Osso insists that his hellacious pace is driven by his creative process, not market pressures. “I find it easier to be coherent if I’m fully immersed in the story,” he says.

He frequently works from 8am until midnight, using a desk attached to a treadmill. He warns would-be novelists that writing still usually doesn’t pay. “It’s hyper-competitive,” he says. “Remember, you have people like me, working 14 hours a day.”      

Stephen King "On Writing"

Renowned author Stephen King writes stories that captivate millions of people around the world and earn him an estimated $US17 million a year.

In his memoir, “On Writing,” King shares valuable insights into how to be a better writer. And he doesn’t sugarcoat it. He writes, “I can’t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lots of bad writers.”

Don’t want to be one of them? Here are 22 great pieces of advice from King’s book on how to be an amazing writer:

1. Stop watching television. Instead, read as much as possible.
If you’re just starting out as a writer, your television should be the first thing to go. It’s “poisonous to creativity,” he says. Writers need to look into themselves and turn toward the life of the imagination.

To do so, they should read as much as they can. King takes a book with him everywhere he goes, and even reads during meals. “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot,” he says. Read widely, and constantly work to refine and redefine your own work as you do so.

2. Prepare for more failure and criticism than you think you can deal with.
King compares writing fiction to crossing the Atlantic Ocean in a bathtub, because in both, “there’s plenty of opportunity for self-doubt.” Not only will you doubt yourself, but other people will doubt you, too. “If you write (or paint or dance or sculpt or sing, I suppose), someone will try to make you feel lousy about it, that’s all,” writes King.

Oftentimes, you have to continue writing even when you don’t feel like it. “Stopping a piece of work just because it’s hard, either emotionally or imaginatively, is a bad idea,” he writes. And when you fail, King suggests that you remain positive. “Optimism is a perfectly legitimate response to failure.”

3. Don’t waste time trying to please people.
According to King, rudeness should be the least of your concerns. “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered anyway,” he writes. King used to be ashamed of what he wrote, especially after receiving angry letters accusing him of being bigoted, homophobic, murderous, and even psychopathic.

By the age of 40, he realised that every decent writer has been accused of being a waste of talent. King has definitely come to terms with it. He writes, “If you disapprove, I can only shrug my shoulders. It’s what I have.” You can’t please all of your readers all the time, so King advises that you stop worrying.

4. Write primarily for yourself.
You should write because it brings you happiness and fulfillment. As King says, “I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”

Writer Kurt Vonnegut provides a similar insight: “Find a subject you care about and which you in your heart feel others should care about,” he says. “It is this genuine caring, not your games with language, which will be the most compelling and seductive element in your style.”

5. Tackle the things that are hardest to write.
“The most important things are the hardest things to say,” writes King. “They are the things you get ashamed of because words diminish your feelings.” Most great pieces of writing are preceded with hours of thought. In King’s mind, “Writing is refined thinking.”

When tackling difficult issues, make sure you dig deeply. King says, “Stories are found things, like fossils in the ground … Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world.” Writers should be like archaeologists, excavating for as much of the story as they can find.

6. When writing, disconnect from the rest of the world.
Writing should be a fully intimate activity. Put your desk in the corner of the room, and eliminate all possible distractions, from phones to open windows. King advises, “Write with the door closed; rewrite with the door open.”

You should maintain total privacy between you and your work. Writing a first draft is “completely raw, the sort of thing I feel free to do with the door shut — it’s the story undressed, standing up in nothing but its socks and undershorts.”

7. Don’t be pretentious.
“One of the really bad things you can do to your writing is to dress up the vocabulary, looking for long words because you’re maybe a little bit ashamed of your short ones,” says King. He compares this mistake to dressing up a household pet in evening clothes — both the pet and the owner are embarrassed, because it’s completely excessive.

As iconic businessman David Ogilvy writes in a memo to his employees, “Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious arse.” Furthermore, don’t use symbols unless necessary. “Symbolism exists to adorn and enrich, not to create an artificial sense of profundity,” writes King.

8. Avoid adverbs and long paragraphs.
As King emphasises several times in his memoir, “the adverb is not your friend.” In fact, he believes that “the road to hell is paved with adverbs” and compares them to dandelions that ruin your lawn. Adverbs are worst after “he said” and “she said” — those phrases are best left unadorned.

You should also pay attention to your paragraphs, so that they flow with the turns and rhythms of your story. “Paragraphs are almost always as important for how they look as for what they say,” says King.

9. Don’t get overly caught up in grammar.
According to King, writing is primarily about seduction, not precision. “Language does not always have to wear a tie and lace-up shoes,” writes King. “The object of fiction isn’t grammatical correctness but to make the reader welcome and then tell a story.” You should strive to make the reader forget that he or she is reading a story at all.

10. Master the art of description.
“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s,” writes King. The important part isn’t writing enough, but limiting how much you say. Visualise what you want your reader to experience, and then translate what you see in your mind into words on the page. You need to describe things “in a way that will cause your reader to prickle with recognition,” he says.

The key to good description is clarity, both in observation and in writing. Use fresh images and simple vocabulary to avoid exhausting your reader. “In many cases when a reader puts a story aside because it ‘got boring,’ the boredom arose because the writer grew enchanted with his powers of description and lost sight of his priority, which is to keep the ball rolling,” notes King.

11. Don’t give too much background information.
“What you need to remember is that there’s a difference between lecturing about what you know and using it to enrich the story,” writes King. “The latter is good. The former is not.” Make sure you only include details that move your story forward and that persuade your reader to continue reading.

If you need to do research, make sure it doesn’t overshadow the story. Research belongs “as far in the background and the back story as you can get it,” says King. You may be entranced by what you’re learning, but your readers are going to care a lot more about your characters and your story.

12. Tell stories about what people actually do.
“Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do — to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street,” writes King. The people in your stories are what readers care about the most, so make sure you acknowledge all the dimensions your characters may have.

13. Take risks; don’t play it safe.
First and foremost, stop using the passive voice. It’s the biggest indicator of fear. “I’m convinced that fear is at the root of most bad writing,” King says. Writers should throw back their shoulders, stick out their chins, and put their writing in charge.

“Try any goddamn thing you like, no matter how boringly normal or outrageous. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, toss it,” King says.

14. Realise that you don’t need drugs to be a good writer.
“The idea that the creative endeavour and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time,” says King. In his eyes, substance-abusing writers are just substance-abusers. “Any claims that the drugs and alcohol are necessary to dull a finer sensibility are just the usual self-serving bullshit.”

15. Don’t try to steal someone else’s voice.
As King says, “You can’t aim a book like a cruise missile.” When you try to mimic another writer’s style for any reason other than practice, you’ll produce nothing but “pale imitations.” This is because you can never try to replicate the way someone feels and experiences truth, especially not through a surface-level glance at vocabulary and plot.

16. Understand that writing is a form of telepathy.
“All the arts depend upon telepathy to some degree, but I believe that writing is the purest distillation,” says King. An important element of writing is transference. Your job isn’t to write words on the page, but rather to transfer the ideas inside your head into the heads of your readers.

“Words are just the medium through which the transfer happens,” says King. In his advice on writing, Vonnegut also recommends that writers “use the time of a total stranger in such a way that he or she will not feel the time was wasted.”

17. Take your writing seriously.
“You can approach the act of writing with nervousness, excitement, hopefulness, or despair,” says King. “Come to it any way but lightly.” If you don’t want to take your writing seriously, he suggests that you close the book and do something else.

As writer Susan Sontag says, “The story must strike a nerve — in me. My heart should start pounding when I hear the first line in my head. I start trembling at the risk.”

18. Write every single day.
“Once I start work on a project, I don’t stop, and I don’t slow down unless I absolutely have to,” says King. “If I don’t write every day, the characters begin to stale off in my mind … I begin to lose my hold on the story’s plot and pace.”

If you fail to write consistently, the excitement for your idea may begin to fade. When the work starts to feel like work, King describes the moment as “the smooch of death.” His best advice is to just take it “one word at a time.”

19. Finish your first draft in three months.
King likes to write 10 pages a day. Over a three-month span, that amounts to around 180,000 words. “The first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months, the length of a season,” he says. If you spend too long on your piece, King believes the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel.

20. When you’re finished writing, take a long step back.
King suggests six weeks of “recuperation time” after you’re done writing, so you can have a clear mind to spot any glaring holes in the plot or character development. He asserts that a writer’s original perception of a character could be just as faulty as the reader’s.

King compares the writing and revision process to nature. “When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees,” he writes. “When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.” When you do find your mistakes, he says that “you are forbidden to feel depressed about them or to beat up on yourself. Screw-ups happen to the best of us.”

21. Have the guts to cut.
When revising, writers often have a difficult time letting go of words they spent so much time writing. But, as King advises, “Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

Although revision is one of the most difficult parts of writing, you need to leave out the boring parts in order to move the story along. In his advice on writing, Vonnegut suggests, “If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.”

22. Stay married, be healthy, and live a good life.
King attributes his success to two things: his physical health and his marriage. “The combination of a healthy body and a stable relationship with a self-reliant woman who takes zero shit from me or anyone else has made the continuity of my working life possible,” he writes.

It’s important to have a strong balance in your life, so writing doesn’t consume all of it. In writer and painter Henry Miller’s 11 commandments of writing, he advises, “Keep human! See people, go places, drink if you feel like it.”      

Harry Potter

If you’re on Facebook, there’s a big chance you’ve seen a friend list 10 books “that have stayed with them in some way.” And if you’ve seen such a list, there’s a big chance the “Harry Potter” series by J.K. Rowling was among the 10.

Facebook’s data team crunched the numbers on the viral Facebook meme that asked users to share books that have somehow affected them, and the series about the Boy Who Lived was on a whopping 21 percent of the 130,000 lists, making it what some have called “the most influential book in the world.” Harry Potter topped such standards as Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” J.R.R Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” and … the Bible.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise — the responses likely came from readers of a generation that pretty much grew up with the Harry Potter series. A new study from the PEW research center shows that millennials read more than any other generation. And despite reports that they are leaving Facebook, trying to hide from employers or their parents, millennials still constitute the majority of active Facebook users.

For those who may call it the end of civilization, or at least the demise of high culture, a new study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology may provide reason for pause. Researchers from several European universities found that reading Harry Potter may make young people more tolerant. In the study “The greatest magic of Harry Potter: Reducing prejudice,” psychologists led by Loris Vezzali at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia say that reading “Harry Potter” improves attitudes toward stigmatized groups, such as immigrants, gays and refugees.

The books examine such social issues as “opposing identities, prejudice and conflict,” and the researchers wanted to see whether the books could work as a tool to improve “out-group” attitudes. Harry’s world, they write, with its “strict social hierarchies and resulting prejudices,” has clear parallels to our society. Muggles — those without magic powers — are discriminated against, as are “half-bloods” and “mud-bloods,” or those wizards who have one or no magical relatives.

“Harry has meaningful contact with characters belonging to stigmatized groups. He tries to understand them and appreciate their difficulties, some of which stem from intergroup discrimination, and fights for a world free of social inequalities.”

In the first experiment, the researchers studied attitudes toward immigrants, people often discriminated against in Italy, among a group of 34 elementary-school age Italian children. The children were first given a survey about immigrants and then divided into two groups: One read passages from “Harry Potter” that included prejudice (Harry’s nemesis Draco Malfoy calling Hermione, Harry’s friend, a “filthy little Mudblood”), and the other read neutral excerpts. Among those who read the first passage and identified with Harry Potter as a character, tolerance toward immigrants improved.

In the following studies, the researchers measured attitudes toward homosexuals in an Italian high school and toward refugees among British university students. Both showed a more positive outlook on the stigmatized group among “Harry Potter” readers. In the first two studies, which included younger participants, these attitudes were associated with identifying with Harry Potter as a character. Among the university participants, who were older than Harry, the researchers attributed the lower prejudice to dissociation with the negative character Voldemort.

“Of course there are many factors that shape our attitudes toward others: the media, our parents and peers, religious beliefs,” writes Bret Stetka at The Scientific American. “But Vezzali’s work supports earlier research suggesting that reading novels as a child — implying literary engagement with life’s social, cultural and psychological complexities — can have a positive impact on personality development and social skills.”

Mr. Stetka cites a study published last year in the journal Science that showed that reading fiction improves our ability to empathize with other people.

The European study also partially supports the findings of Anthony Gierzynski, a political-science professor at the University of Vermont and the author of the 2013 book “Harry Potter and the Millennials: Research Methods and the Politics of the Muggle Generation.”

Interested in how entertainment consumption influences our political views and, Mr. Gierzynski told Op-Talk, in “what sort of politically relevant lessons are within the stories that we read or watch,” he devised a research study along with his students to find out the moral teachings of “Harry Potter” and the series’ influence on millennials.

“Harry Potter was one of the great cultural events of our generation’s time,” wrote his students, cited in the book. The series “helped raise the children of our generation by instilling in them some of the basic moral conceptions of right and wrong.”

The lessons that Mr. Gierzynski identified in the series included diversity and acceptance, political tolerance and equality. Through surveys of 1,141 college students in the United States, Mr. Gierzynski and his associates found “Harry Potter” fans to be more tolerant, but also “to be less authoritarian, to be more opposed to the use of violence and torture, to be less cynical, and to evince a higher level of political efficacy. They are also more liberal, with a more negative view of the Bush years.”

Perhaps most provocatively, Mr. Gierzynski asked whether the series had anything to do with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, considering the millennials’ overwhelming support for Mr. Obama in the vote.

Controlling for a number of factors, including parental encouragement to read the books, as well as party and ideology, Mr. Gierzynski found that “Harry Potter” fans were more likely to vote for Mr. Obama in 2008 than nonfans. “I’m not saying, Rita Skeeter-like” — a tabloid reporter in the series — “that ‘Harry Potter helped Obama get elected’ or that ‘Harry Potter books brainwashed millennials,’ as much of the coverage of my research has suggested,” Mr. Gierzynski writes for The Conversation, referring to headlines in The Daily Mail and The International Business Times.

His research shows correlation between the series and voters’ decisions, but, as he told Op-Talk, he strongly feels there is also a causal relationship.

When asked about the study that links fiction reading in general to a more empathetic attitude, Mr. Gierzynski told Op-Talk that those findings only support his research. “‘Harry Potter’ got a lot of people in the millennial generation to read,” he said. “That fact itself shows a powerful impact, helps to verify the findings more than anything.”

So should “Harry Potter” be introduced to official school curriculum?

Mr. Gierzynski found that to be a controversial idea, pointing out the opposition of many Christian groups to the series. “I will leave that to political philosophers,” he said. But the European researchers write in their study that “educational interventions” based on fantasy books similar to “Harry Potter” “may improve relations with several types of stigmatized groups.”

With the help of teachers, they say, “encouraging book reading and incorporating it in school curricula may not only increase the students’ literacy levels, but also enhance their prosocial attitudes and behaviors.”      

Shitfaced Shakespeare

The man behind the latest production of Macbeth does not like to take all the credit for his show. “Once it starts, you never know what’s going to happen,” said Scott Griffin, 34, standing backstage at a theatre near Times Square.

This is partly thanks to the magic of the stage. But it is also because his actors are drunk. This is the Drunk Shakespeare Society, a company that hopes to make the Bard more accessible to New Yorkers with the aid of alcohol.

Beside the stage, a barman was preparing drinks and a waitress flitted across the boards and through the crowd, serving both the audience and the actors.

Whit Leyenberger, 28, from Pennsylvania, who was MacBeth, was only slightly merry when Lady MacBeth suggested regicide. After the bloody deed was done, however, he had a double whisky. He was still reeling when Banquo’s ghost arrived at his dinner table: it was not clear which spirit had left him more disturbed.

He had moved on to beer when Macduff strode into view on the battlefield at Dunsinane. “Hold that,” he said, passing the bottle to a woman in the audience. “Don’t drink it!” he shouted, aghast, for she had taken a sip.

According to the rules of the society, only one member of the cast is actually required to be drunk each night, and on this evening it was the turn of Elissa Klie, 25, from New Jersey, who was playing Macduff. She had been made to down five shots during the course of the play as well as the witches’ brew, which was supposed to contain an eye of a frog and a lizard’s leg, but seemed to be mostly white wine.

“Your face is red,” said MacBeth, as they fought.

“I’m pissed,” she gasped back.

She had become steadily more loquacious and often felt moved to break from the script and address the audience. Mr Griffin, the producer, said this initially took him by surprise.

“The drunk person is dealing with the complexity of the plot and they start using contemporary English to explain it to themselves,” he said. “A lot of drama teachers come to see this and say: ‘I wish I could show this to my kids’.”

At times the show resembles an elaborate Jacobean drinking game. For the sake of his actors’ livers, he has two casts of five performing on alternate nights.

A great many actors applied for the job. “We had 1,300 people audition for ten positions,” he said. “Some brought their own alcohol to the audition.

“They would slam a beer and then launch into a monologue.”

Initially they performed in bars. He recalled a handful of shows early on where the drinking got out of hand and “it’s gone beyond the point of people having fun”. This month they transferred to a theatre.

James Nord, 30, the founder of a fashion company, who was in the crowd, (and had drunk “four shots of whisky and then beers”), said he had seen Shakespeare performed in the Bard’s home town.

“This sucks a lot less than Stratford upon Avon,” he said. “You stop focusing on the language and start focusing on the themes, right?”

He said the drinking fostered a spirit of camaraderie. “You think: ‘We are going to try to get through this complex thing together,” he said.      

Fifty Shades of Grey

Awoman movie director told me about a problem with a sex scene in her recent thriller. She’d shot it to convey desire and pleasure in both parties but the first cut — by a big-shot Hollywood film editor — focused mainly on the actress’s breasts. Eventually, unable to make him understand what was wrong, she hired a woman editor. Her recut showed the man’s longing looks, his hand caressing skin and both beauteous bodies in the buff.

The London premiere of Fifty Shades of Grey was filled with fans of EL James’s books. Glad-ragged gangs from Essex and Swansea who whooped when Jamie Dornan pulled off his shirt cheered at Christian Grey’s po-faced ardour: “I don’t make love. I f***. Hard.” Unlike the critics who’d watched in Berlin, concocting their bitchy bon mots, these women weren’t concerned with daft dialogue or shonky plot. They were electrified by a unique cultural moment: someone had bothered to make a movie intended to turn them on.

Far funnier than a heroine who expletes “Holy cow” are literary snoots who miss the point. Salman Rushdie once said he’d “never read anything so badly written that got published”. I wonder how the actors speak in Salman’s own masturbatory milieu: in Proustian prose or iambic pentameter? The internet is awash with the pornographic fantasies of men and most seem to lack Bookerwinning eloquence. Baser businesses don’t require great writing, indeed as the Bad Sex Prize shows, literary writers are most likely to get it wrong.

What can we deduce from the stark and astonishing fact that the Fifty Shades books have sold 100 million copies? Not women’s low critical standards; rather that James has somehow tapped into a collective female sexual fantasy. Which is not about being strapped up and spanked with a riding crop or submitting to a dominant monster (the domestic violence protesters outside the premiere can stand down). The true fantasy is about finding that mythical beast: a man who knows what you want without having to be told.

And not just in bed. Much of Fifty Shades concerns brokering a sexual contract between virginal Anastasia and powerful Christian. Clauses demand Ana sleeps seven hours minimum, eats well and exercises so she is healthy (NB: he doesn’t say lay off the cake and drop 10lb). He is attentive, tender, almost paternal. He holds back her hair when she’s sick, butters her toast, buys hangover cures, mends her computer, picks her up from a Saturday job at a hardware store in his helicopter! What putupon mother striving to satisfy a family’s myriad needs hasn’t dreamt of a gorgeous stranger focused only on hers.

Beyond the leather-lined room the real submissive is Christian. And even there, until we get to the heavier botty-beating, the pleasure is mainly hers. The defining coital act of our age is the blow job: sex not as reciprocal pleasure but quick, efficient man-maintenance. But in Fifty Shades, Christian goes down more than Ronaldo. Critics whine that it took 112 pages or 40 screen minutes to get to the shagging. Yes: women call it foreplay.

There are no blurred lines of consent here: Ana goes through the fine print, crossing out beastly acts she won’t perform. As for the notion that Fifty Shades preaches complicity in physical abuse, when Christian goes Saudi on her ass, she doesn’t stick around to be rape-murdered as in most TV fiction; she walks out.

While men have Hollywood and the multibillion dollar porn industry churning out new iterations of their interior sex script, women have had to circulate the dirty bits in Jackie Collins or Jilly Cooper or Shirley Conran, novels that, whatever their sales figures, are derided as chick lit or trash. “Mommy porn” they called Fifty Shades for its prissy descriptions of Christian’s high thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, while a fastidiousness about life’s finer things counts as glamorous in James Bond. As for films, women have had to feast upon cultural crumbs. When Steven Soderbergh released Magic Mike, this gritty exposé of the dark side of male strip clubs did OK until women twigged that it featured Matthew McConaughey and Channing Tatum gyrating in thongs. The art-house audience was replaced by whooping, lecherous hen-night crowds. Magic Mike was a sleeper hit.

You’d think film studios might take note; instead they churn out the same old story. But then as Daniel Bergner notes in his book What Do Women Want? the meagre research into female desire has surprising, unsettling results. Scientists found straight men were only aroused by images of women. But women were excited by gay male sex, bonking bonobo monkeys, indeed any scenario as long as they could detect genuine sexual desire. It is not that women aren’t — as always assumed — visually excitable but that mechanical, joyless, faked, man-made porn ain’t buttering their bread.

Book and film, Fifty Shades is a festival of arousal. Christian tells Ana in practically every scene how she stiffens his ardour, how her own flushed complexion betrays her passion. The only worry for the movie is it lacks an erect penis, the ultimate signal of desire. But still I suspect the office girls-only outings and book club parties will turn up to guffaw and whoop and return moistened to the marital bed.

For that reason alone, men should praise EL James rather than sneer. The latest knocking story is that charity shops are overwhelmed by copies of her books as women give them away. But as Bergner reports, unlike men, who scientists find are reliably aroused by the same piece of porn until the DVD falls apart, women require novelty. If they are bored with Fifty Shades there is a gap in the market. A dark, cavernous, throbbing, slippery gap. Who will dare fill it?      

There Are Only 6 Plots

(Part 2)

Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native is happy-sad-happy-neutral-happy. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is first happy, then extremely sad (as visits to prostitutes followed by hellfire sermons tend to be), then a bit happy, then neutral. And Moby Dick has a similar plot, emotion-wise, to a 1990s pulp crime novel.

A professor of English has identified the six basic plots of our literary canon. But unlike other English professors who have claimed similar feats, he has done so through quantitative analysis of more than 40,000 novels.

Matthew Jockers, from Stanford University, uses computer programming to gain insights into literature. His program, Syuzhet, looks for the emotional content of texts, and records how it changes over time. What he found was that there appeared to be only a few natural plot archetypes.

His inspiration was a lecture by Kurt Vonnegut, in which the novelist argued: “There’s no reason why the simple shapes of stories could not be fed into computers.” Elaborating on a blackboard, Vonnegut drew a Y-axis that he called the “Good Fortune” axis — with sickness and poverty at the bottom, and wealth and health at the top. Then he plotted how stories developed over time.

He hypothesised that a typical novel would be a curve looking like a valley — which he called “Man in Hole”, and described as “Man gets into trouble, man gets out of it”.

“People love that story,” said Vonnegut. Professor Jockers’s work has identified that around half of novels are indeed “Man in Hole”, but with distinct groups within that.

A typical example is A Portrait of the Artist: “The beginning is slightly positive, but largely neutral.” It then goes up a little bit . . . when he wins an essay contest.” The protagonist starts visiting prostitutes, and Catholic guilt intervenes. Sermons about how he will burn in Hell are “a major trough”. Finally, he confesses his sins and becomes happy before, this being Joyce, entering another minor malaise.

The remaining half of novels are variants of “Man on Hill”, in which the central emotional content of the book is positive. Professor Jockers describes these two archetypes as, broadly speaking, comedies and tragedies.

He is not the first to try to categorise plots. In 2004, Christopher Booker declared in a book that there were seven — including “Rags to Riches”, “Overcoming the Monster” and “Rebirth”. Robert McKee, formerly a professor at the University of Southern California, built his career on a “Story Seminar” that promised to distil the essence of good storytelling.

Professor Jockers differs in that he lets a computer do the work. His program is a variant of software developed to distil customer reviews online, and he accepts that it is not without its limitations. Even so, Professor Jockers says, “On the whole, Syuzhet gets it right.”

Some might be surprised at its conclusions. Moby Dick, for instance, is another variant of the Man in Hole type — just with a rather longer period in the hole. Its shape is apparently similar to the murder mystery Loves Music, Loves to Dance, by Mary Higgins Clark. Its synopsis has little to do with whales: “New York’s trendy magazines are a source of peril ,” the blurb says, “when a killer enacts a bizarre dance of death.” Professor Jockers is not prepared to vouch for this match. “Ahab was certainly in a hole,” he said. “I have not read the other book.

(LT Editorial on this): A wearied reviewer of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot described it as a two-act play in which nothing happens, twice. Not so, it turns out. Plots are ubiquitous in the literary canon; and there are surprisingly few of them. Matthew Jockers, a professor of English at Stanford University, has built a computer program that can handle a huge amount of literary data. It has analysed more than 40,000 novels and concluded that there are six essential plots.

It may seem surprising that there are fewer literary plots than there are deadly sins. And Professor Jockers has not so far disclosed what they are. Yet he does not quite mean “plot” in the sense of stuff that happens. Instead, he means the general emotional cast of a novel. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness may, on balance, be a less uproarious work of the imagination than PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves in the Offing. But both can be analysed on the same scale by looking at the sentiments implied by certain words.

Does this seem a dehumanising enterprise? It should not. The art of telling stories is a constant of civilisation. Such epics as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey have held listeners’ (and readers’) imagination for millennia because they recount recognisable human characteristics. The novels of Jane Austen retain vast popularity not because of idiosyncrasies of time and place — for she is famously unconcerned with the Napoleonic wars and other defining historical events — but because her characters and their foibles are instantly and always recognisable.

What Professor Jockers has done is of wider significance even than giving insights into literature. His computer program and analysis are a fine example of using “big data” to illuminate the humanities. Science and the arts are not after all two cultures, as CP Snow said, and never have been.

(Part 2)

Almost the entirety of Western literature can be fit neatly into just six story arcs, according to a new data-mining study.

From the panoply of novels that Western society has produced, distinct narrative patterns emerge, and many attempts have been made to pin down the shape of a story and categorize a protagonist’s journey. French writer Georges Polti claims there are 36 different types dramatic stories, while others have counted seven narrative arcs or 20.

But new research from the University of Vermont utilizing data-mining techniques suggests that the majority of the Western canon falls into one of six basic categories.

A Story’s Path

Researchers from the Computational Story Lab looked at over 1,700 books from Project Gutenberg for their study, winnowing out books such as dictionaries or those with less than 150 downloads. They analyzed the content of each book by taking samples of text, what they called “windows”, from throughout the story. They used the aptly named “hedonometer” , also developed by the Computational Story Lab, to compile a list of over 10,000 words and rate them on a spectrum of positive to negative using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. They published their results last month on arXiv.org.

Adding up these windows over the course of a whole book produced graphs of characters’ fortunes — the highs and lows — throughout a given novel, and generated a broad visualization of the arc the story takes. According to the researchers, theses are the six story arcs that appear time and time again in Western literature:

“Rags to riches” (the story gets better over time);
“Man in a hole” (fortunes fall, but the protagonist bounces back);
“Cinderella” (there’s an initial rise in good fortunes, followed by a setback, but a happy ending)
“Tragedy” or “riches to rags” (things only get worse);
“Oedipus” (bad luck, followed by promise, ending in a final fall)
“Icarus” (opens with good fortunes, but doomed to fail)

While some stories don’t fit into these archetypes, the researchers say that the majority of Western classics fall into one of these categories. The “man in a hole” and rags-to-riches storylines seemed to be the most prevalent, depending on which statistical technique they applied to the data.

The researchers do note that their technique will only track broad changes in emotional valence over time, ignoring shifts that occur on the level of the sentence or paragraph. For example, they provide a detailed breakdown of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which doesn’t fit neatly into any one of the categories.

However, the seven-book series, when taken as a whole, produces a more definite “rags to riches” story that fits in with established arcs.

In addition, their process cannot separate the fortunes of multiple characters, which could be a problem for books with multiple story lines — their program would definitely struggle with something as complex as Game of Thrones. Instead, their algorithm lumps the characters into one and tracks the overall emotional tone of the book from beginning to end.

How We Talk About Ourselves

The Gutenberg Collection is a compendium of classic works, however, more modern stories were not sampled. To call back to Game of Thrones again, there are many modern novels that tell more complex tales and which embrace emotional ambiguity, muddying the story’s arc and making a precise definition difficult.

In addition, the researchers looked only at works from the Western canon — analyzing stories from other cultures may produce very different trends and hint at diverse preferences. They say that they hope to include novels from other countries in future studies.

While their work hints at some of the broader patterns of thought that dominate Western culture, the researchers say that it could also help to teach computers how to communicate better. Teaching artificial intelligence to construct stories that follow popular arcs could allow them to form better arguments and relate concepts with more accuracy. The AI authors out there, even those trained on Shakespeare, fall somewhat short of engaging — or even comprehensible. Reading the stories that emerge from a particular culture gives unique insights into norms, practices and overall patterns of thought. If we want to teach computers to think like us, they’ll need to understand how we see the world.      

Fan Fiction

Annie Proulx got ficced. In a recent interview in the Paris Review, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author confessed that she wishes she’d never written her most famous work, the short story “Brokeback Mountain,”about the star-crossed romance between two cowboys. Having fans is a good thing, especially for authors of ­quiet, spare realism — not exactly a cohort with a healthy surplus of readers. But in the last few years, writers, filmmakers, and other artists have seen fans seize control of their creations and reimagine them as fanfiction, or fic, as its aficionados like to call it. Proulx first got ficced when a whole new audience came to “Brokeback” after the Academy Award–winning film adaptation was released in 2005. Less reverent than her typical reader, these fans have busily set themselves to producing what Proulx has termed “pornish” fiction based on her story’s two main characters, Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar. “Unfortunately,” she said, “the audience that ‘Brokeback’ reached most strongly … can’t bear the way it ends — they just can’t stand it. So they rewrite the story, including all kinds of boyfriends and new lovers and so forth after Jack is killed.” The resulting stories, Proulx grumbled, “just drive me wild.”

Proulx is far from the only mainstream artist being dragged unwillingly into a new, fan-dominated world. Once exiled to obscure corners of the internet, fanfiction — amateur fiction based on characters from preexisting works or real-life celebrities — has lately become a force driving popular culture. As Proulx realized, fans these days aren’t satisfied to just sit back and consume. They want to participate. They want to create. And they don’t want to wait for anyone else’s permission to do it. Millions of fanfiction stories have been uploaded onto vast online archives where other fans read, rate, and comment on them. Romances, often torrid, between ostensibly straight male characters like Harry Potter and his onetime nemesis Draco Malfoy are especially popular, and there’s an entire category of fanfiction, called mpreg, in which beloved male characters and celebrities (e.g., One Direction singer Harry Styles) are able, bizarrely, to get pregnant. Fandom’s untrammeled imagination is also colonizing the wider world. EL James’s Fifty Shades of Grey started as Twilight fic. And what are J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek and Star Wars reboots — which take the original source materials (called “canon” in fic circles) and shape them to new ends — if not examples of the fanfiction spirit when enabled by hundreds of millions of dollars?

Although human beings have been stealing and reworking each other’s stories for millennia, fanfiction as we now know it began back in the days of Star Trek fanzines, on whose mimeographed pages female Trekkers wrote of Mr. Spock swooning in the arms of an ardent Captain Kirk. For decades, fanfiction communities — soon to migrate en masse to the web — functioned as a subset of science-fiction and fantasy fandom, where they were treated, by the mostly male nerds who ran things, like a younger sister best banished to her room whenever company came by. The internet changed all that by ushering in the era of the networked fan, often a girl who sampled her first taste of fic in Harry Potter fandom. Like it or not, the once-Olympian creators of the canon — known among fic writers as TPTB, or “the powers that be” — now have little choice but to listen to them. Robust, established online networks of Harry Potter and Twilight fans played a significant role in making The Hunger Games books into best sellers and, after that, blockbuster films.

Censoring Swearwords

Jared and Kirsten Maughan, two members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from Twin Falls, Idaho, have developed an app that censors profanity in ebooks. They did this after their daughter came home from the library one day looking upset. She had inadvertently subjected herself to “some pretty significant swearwords”. The Maughans searched the internet for an antiswearing app but couldn’t find one. “Well, shoot,” Jared thought, “maybe we could do something like this.”

Their Clean Reader (“read books, not profanity”) has three settings: clean, cleaner and squeaky clean. Clean swaps only “major swearwords”, including “all uses of the F-word we could find”. Squeaky clean offers the full Mormon. So Lady Chatterley’s Lover becomes Lady Chatterley’s Distant Acquaintance, sex becomes love, and the potting shed is for the occasional “freak” and that is all.

Bravo Two Zero reads like Five Go to Iraq (“Darn it, I can’t see jack faeces”). And Fifty Shades of Grey? Much improved.

On learning of the existence of the Clean Reader, many writers went bat droppings. How dare these people tinker with their prose? Leading the charge, Joanne Harris, the author of Chocolat, said this sort of thing would lead to “burning libraries and erasing whole civilisations from history”. Start tinkering with text and before you know it, everything’s gone to Taliban.

I’m not bothered about the removal of swearwords. Films are routinely dubbed to keep the easily mortified unmortified. Explicit rap songs are bleeped into oblivion when they’re aired on Radio 1. Profanity is censored all the time and everywhere, so why not some books? It’s hardly Fahrenheit 451. The problem is the algorithm. It’s the automation of censorship. Words are not blanked or asterisked on a case-by-case basis. They are replaced en masse with absurd, awkward, attention-drawing alternatives. In a flash, whole books, whole libraries are translated into the prissy gospel of our Idaho restorationists.

This was all happening in the same week Yahoo announced its intention to give emails emotions. In coming years, sensors will measure all sorts of things — stress levels, temperature, heart rate, etc — and then incorporate them into the emails you send. So your missives from an exotic holiday might arrive red hot and those from the end of a drinking session might arrive blurred. “If my wife is emailing me about going to the doctor, should my watch indicate that her blood pressure is higher?” asked the chap from Yahoo. Well, no. Clearly.

Computers translating our emotions. Computers controlling the words we use to describe our genitalia. The smarter these algorithms get, the more dystopian our future.

I logged onto Clean Reader yesterday because I wanted to have another laugh at the Idaho version of Fifty Shades. But there were no books available. None at all. The online shop that supplied it had withdrawn, if we’re allowed to use that word, “in support of authors, readers, books everywhere”.

For those of you with the sensibilities of Mary Whitehouse, it’s back to the Tipp-Ex. Or, another thought . . . if you find a book too profane, stop reading it.

Colouring Books For Adults

The No. 1 and No. 2 best-selling books on Amazon right now are coloring books for adults. Let that sink in for a few minutes. And it’s not just a fluke – there are several other coloring books for adults now hitting the bestseller lists around the world. In fact, in the UK, five of the top 10 titles are now adult coloring books.

What’s going on here?

The best theory offered to date is that best-selling adult coloring books such as “Secret Garden” and “Enchanted Forest” are all about easing stress and calming one’s inner child. From this perspective, coloring is all about regaining mindfulness and getting a digital detox. And, indeed, the best-selling Scottish illustrator and “ink evangelist” behind these books, Johanna Basford, recently told The Guardian: “I think it is really relaxing, to do something analogue, to unplug … Coloring books are also an easy way to flex our creative muscles in a way we likely haven’t since our good old paste-eating elementary school days.”

However, explaining the phenomenal success of coloring books for adults in such a way can’t also explain the strange evolution in reading tastes around the world, which has seen an explosion in the popularity of certain genres that might have been considered “childish” just a generation ago. After all, it’s not just coloring books that are hot — it’s graphic novels, comic books and especially, young adult titles such as “Harry Potter” and “Hunger Games.” In 2014 alone, young adult titles represented the fastest-growing segment of the book market, as well as the fastest growing genre amongst all e-books.

So here’s an alternative theory for why a coloring book is No. 1 on Amazon these days: our digital reading habits are breaking down what might once have been the embarrassment of reading certain kinds of books. In other words, the relatively anonymous experience of purchasing books online and reading them on e-readers is making it easier to consume certain types of content. Nobody really knows what you have on your e-reading device, and so you can experiment in ways that people won’t judge you for later. That assumption is borne out, to some degree, by looking at the data for young adult novels. It’s actually old adults, not young adults, who are purchasing these books in the greatest numbers. And e-book sales are up nearly 53 percent in the YA/Children’s book category.

Adults, quite simply, are buying ebook versions of YA/Children’s books. And that leads to a positive feedback cycle, in which books purchased online and downloaded to e-readers — both from the comfort and anonymity of the bedroom – can give a boost to certain genres. That freedom to experiment is opening the floodgates for certain types of content to go mainstream — not just “young” content but also “mature” content.

Would people really have read “50 Shades of Grey” in such high numbers if they had to hand over a physical copy of the book to a sales clerk to purchase at the nearest Barnes & Noble instead of purchasing online? “50 Shades of Grey” is now the best-selling book on the Amazon Kindle ever, selling over 1 million copies. Thanks to the e-book format, “50 Shades of Grey” has singlehandedly changed the way we consume pornography.

In the case of the coloring books, of course, there are no e-books to download and no way to read them on a Kindle. But you still order them online, and that’s where the viral nature of the Internet comes into play, breaking down the sense of embarrassment that readers might have had about purchasing coloring books. Once an item starts trending online, it acquires its own form of momentum and a seal of approval from the crowd.

“Secret Garden” – which has gone on to sell over 1.4 million copies since it was published in March 2013 – isn’t your ordinary coloring book – it has become a mini-Internet sensation. Basford’s books have been mentioned by celebrities such as Zooey Deschanel, and due to their beautiful illustrations, often appear on Pinterest and Instagram. Once these pictures show up in social networks, it makes them easier to trend. And once readers see a coloring book trending online, it makes it safer for them to purchase it as well. It suddenly becomes “cool” rather than “embarrassing” to buy a coloring book.

Of course, there’s another, more depressing explanation for why coloring books have taken over the world. Maybe Google really is making us stupid — the endless Internet parade of silly cat photos, infantile comments and adolescent memes has dumbed us down. We’re all stuck in The Shallows, mindfully coloring books to counter the existential angst of living in a digital society. If that’s the case, get ready for a deluge of book genres from our childhood – pop-up books, fairy tales and maybe board books for adults. This could get fun.

The good news is that we now have the opportunity to sample more books than ever before, thanks to e-readers. And now comes signs that we’re reading and experimenting with our reading habits in ways never before possible. Whole new genres are potentially on the cusp of being created and discovered. So maybe it’s time to celebrate the rise of the adult coloring book. The big picture view is that we may be reading the books we want to read, not just the books that we think others want us to read.

Library Thefts

Rare books, maps and manuscripts are routinely being stolen from libraries. Librarians and lawyers consider the problem so severe that they have organised a high-level conference at the British Library.

Chris Marinello, whose company Art Recovery International seeks to return items to their owners, said that tens of thousands of historic books and manuscripts have gone missing.

He said that thieves were tempted by escalating prices, such as the $14.2 million (£9 million) paid for The 1640 Bay Psalm Book at Sotheby’s in New York in November 2013. The sale smashed the auction record for a book, previously set at $11.5 million by John James Audubon’s Birds of America.

“In the past, libraries were aware of the value of their books, but not necessarily their contents,” Mr Marinello told The Observer. “That material was never really catalogued or scanned. Library security has to improve. They’ve been kind of shocked into that.”

Some criminals, such as Edward Forbes Smiley, have used razor blades to cut valuable items from old documents. Smiley, an American who confessed to stealing 97 maps from six institutions in America and Britain, was caught in 2005 at the British Library. He had become the subject of an international investigation after he left his blade behind at a reading room at Yale University, Connecticut.

William Jacques, who became known as the “Tome Raider”, had a simpler technique of stuffing rare volumes under his jacket. He was jailed for three and a half years in 2010 for stealing works worth £40,000 from the Royal Horticultural Society. He had previously been sentenced to four years in the 1990s for thefts of volumes worth up to £1 million. Norman Palmer, QC, the keynote speaker at next month’s conference, entitled The Written Heritage of Mankind in Peril, said: “We hear a lot about the theft of art and antiquities.

“Less prominent are illegal takings from libraries. Books, manuscripts and archives have tended to be — certainly in terms of legal scrutiny — a bit of a Cinderella.” He and other lawyers from various countries are working on the recovery of rare and valuable items stolen from the Royal Library of Sweden, which have been scattered across the world in recent years. Anders Burius, a librarian at the library in Stockholm, was caught in 2004 after stealing the 16thcentury Wytfliet atlas that featured some of the earliest maps of the New World.

A similar crime was carried out by Marino Massimo De Caro, the director of the Girolamini library in Naples, who was sentenced to seven years in 2013 for arranging the disappearance of hundreds of books and destroying records.

Howard Spiegler, a lawyer who helped to organise the conference, described the volume of thefts as devastating. “Theft is a real problem that plagues almost all national libraries. It goes beyond the actual monetary value of these works because they’re really priceless. Once they’re lost, a good chunk of a country’s history is lost. Often it’s an insider. It’s hard to find out about that when somebody has the ability to cover all his tracks.”

Making Stuff Up

Sir Tom Stoppard has admitted including a made-up quotation from an invented professor in the programme for one of his most famous plays after he could not find one that fitted the bill.

Speaking at the Althorp Literary Festival, Stoppard said that after he wrote Arcadia, which had its premiere at the National Theatre in 1993, he wanted to include in the play’s programme a quotation that summed up a particular literary notion.

“It was to do with the distinction between romanticism and classicism. And in the end I couldn’t find a quotation which quite said what I meant,” he said. “So then I made it up and attributed it to a professor whom I also made up. And then I kind of sat back and waited for somebody to [notice], but it hasn’t happened to this day. “It was something pretty smart-arse like, ‘ The romantic is an idea, but it needs a classicist to have it.’ Or something like that.”

Examination of the original programme from 1993, held by the National Theatre, reveals a paragraph about the difference between romanticism and classicism, which concludes with a quotation that reads: “‘Romanticism’ is an idea which needed a classical mind to have it.” It is attributed to a JF Shade, cited as living between 1898 and 1959. A search online reveals only one reference to the quotation, included in a blog post written 20 years later, which exactly cites the paragraph from the Arcadia programme. Sir Tom also made a second admission to the audience, when talking about the book he had most often lied about having read.

“I wrote one play [in 1974] which had James Joyce among the cast of characters. Travesties, it was called. And it’s full of allusions to Ulysses, his masterpiece.” After writing the play, people started to treat him as “a sort of Joyce expert”, he said, but Stoppard confessed: “I hadn’t actually read Ulysses, actually. I just, as it were, found things in it at random.”

He said, however, that, about a quarter of a century after writing the play, he did finally read the book all the way through while on a week-long trip on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Vladivostok.

Fake Books and Fake Reviews

ANYONE browsing new ebooks in Amazon’s gardening section last weekend may have been drawn to Everything Bonsai! standing proudly at the top of the bestsellers list.

The self-published title certainly came highly recommended with a series of glowing customer reviews, each marked with Amazon’s “verified purchase” quality stamp, which is intended to show that they were written by a genuine buyer.

In fact, Everything Bonsai! had been ghostwritten in three days in Bangalore, India, at a cost of just £65. The book was riddled with inaccuracies, grammatical errors and spelling mistakes. In one instance the word “bonsai” had even been misspelt.

The positive reviews had also come at a price. They were purchased for just £56 from people who openly advertise their willingness to fabricate recommendations. Despite assurances from Amazon this weekend that it does all it can to combat such cheats, the investigation exposes the risk that its millions of customers are being deceived by a vast network of paid-for reviewers, phoney Facebook “book clubs” and fake expert authors.

An undercover investigation by this newspaper into the robustness of Amazon’s safeguards with regard to selfpublished books was mounted following complaints from customers and authors. One reader described buying a bestselling chess guide purportedly written by Matt Sigs, a physics teacher and chess coach at the prestigious California Institute of Technology and accompanied by more than 100 positive “verified” reviews. However, the book was riddled with errors including confusing knights for kings. The Sunday Times established that no one by that name has taught at Caltech and that the reviews were as fake as his biography.

Online blogs and forums feature self-published authors boasting to have made tens of thousands of pounds from such scams. On one, a so-called Kindle gold rusher bragged of earning $150,000 a year from ghostwritten ebooks accompanied by paid-for positive reviews. Some even provided a blueprint on how to secure a slot on Amazon’s “bestseller” lists, which use an algorithm to rank the top 100 books in a range of categories. It included advice to choose niche topics where there is less competition, raising the chance of a prominent listing and higher sales.

The Sunday Times placed an online advertisement for an inexpensive ghostwriter who could quickly provide a 10,000-word non-fiction ebook about bonsai trees. Within a few hours, 17 people had applied for the job including the young woman from Bangalore who agreed to produce the book over a weekend for $100. An online profile page for the book was created describing its fictitious author, Mary Ann Evans, as “a skilled practitioner in bonsai care”.

Fake review writers were then contacted through Freelancer and Fiverr, websites where work can be advertised. Those willing to perform the task were quick to respond with one claiming he could post 300 positive reviews. On the advice of the fake authors, Everything Bonsai! was offered free for five days using Amazon’s free promotional period. During that period, 17 positive reviews for the book, purchased from four different dealers for a total of £69, were posted. Only two were removed by Amazon. Although our fake reviewers were able to download the book free, their posts were still marked as coming from a “verified purchase”.

The Sunday Times actually overspent. It took just eight positive reviews, costing £56 in total, to help the book to top place in the garden and horticulture category of the free ebook section of the Amazon UK Kindle store. The fake reviewers used a variety of tactics to get round Amazon’s safeguards. One dealer based in America had created more than 70 Amazon accounts by harvesting names and photographs from people’s Facebook profiles. They included a group of British schoolgirls as young as 15 whose identities were then used to review ebooks and other products on the site.

Everything Bonsai! was withdrawn by The Sunday Times at the end of the free promotional period to prevent any genuine customers losing out financially. Had it remained, the book and its positive reviews would have been moved to the “paid” category. While it would have faced more competition there, according to other authors the same tactics could still be applied to fix the chart. The fake reviewers had downloaded the book more than 200 times, leaving them poised to add more glowing tributes over the coming days. An analysis of the numerous accounts used by the four fake review dealers suggests more than 500 authors on Amazon may have enlisted their services to deceive customers.

David Morrison, of Publish-Nation, which provides advice and support for genuine selfpublishing authors, said: “Reviews and bestseller rankings are so important to an Amazon author’s success, but this whole system is built on trust. “Ultimately it is Amazon’s customers who are being cheated by those using fake reviews and it is in the company’s interests to tackle it.”

Amazon insisted tackling fake reviews was a priority and it would consider legal action against those involved. “Our goal is to make reviews as useful as possible for customers,” it said. “We use a number of mechanisms to detect and remove the small fraction of reviews that violate our guidelines, close abusive accounts, and in some cases take legal action. The specific accounts in question have been closed.”

Patricia Cornwell

Suited (in expensive black wool) and booted (red Prada high-tops), Patricia Cornwell, America’s queen of crime, sits hip and vigilant on the 17th floor of the UK arm of her publishing house. Her customarily high-end attire is today embellished with a skull motif. There are tiny bijoux skulls sparkling on the black socks that are peeking — just so — out of her leather trainers; skulls winking from her bangles, glistering on her necklace, looming large in diamante studs on the front of her black top; the skulls bulging on her badass knuckle-duster rings — they must be very hard to write in.

“People,” she says, “like to paint me as coming across as slightly freakish, but I don’t care.” British people, in particular, I notice — that is if they are journalists and feel cowed by Cornwell’s outspoken self-belief and competitiveness, the expense and effort that has gone into her face and her hair, or her delight in un-novelistic pursuits such as owning Ferraris and shooting guns.

She loves skulls, she says, because, as is decreed by various religions, and also in Hamlet, “you’ve got to look death in the face, and not be afraid. And that’s certainly something I have to do on a regular basis” — in self-willed, scrupulous, scalpel-wielding forensic detail, it must be explained, in case you haven’t read her books.

Cornwell, 59, is highly security-conscious because of the large quantities of human carnage she’s seen (mostly on mortuary slabs). “If you’ve seen the carnage like I have, there’s no way you ever live with thinking it doesn’t happen to people or that it won’t happen to you.” There are authors with schtick that you can tell they have adopted to widen their appeal. Cornwell’s pale blue glassy stare and lifelong interest in firearms suggests she isn’t one of them. She is drawn to this stuff. She lives it. Thinks about it all the time. Suck it up: “If people don’t want to see bodies cut up on a table and smell it in their sleep, don’t read my books,” she says, with composure and some vehemence.

By “it” she means the rapes and slayings, paedophilia, wanton sadism and unrepentant psychopathy that drive the plots of most of the 34 books she’s written (although not the two cookbooks and children’s books), that together have made her both a stalker magnet and a multimillionaire. It’s left to Kay Scarpetta, her complex heroine, a medical examiner, not always likeable, to make sense of what’s left of the victims’ mutilated, headless, electrocuted, etc, bodies.

When Cornwell sold her first book, Postmortem, someone high up in publishing suggested that she might try a more gender-neutral author’s name, given the graphic nature of her subject-matter: “P Cornwell?” She didn’t take kindly to the suggestion and responded in the same blunt and defiant way she did when years later, in 1996, with her reputation established, another publisher suggested that she might boost sales of her books by pretending to be heterosexual.

There had been a public relations crisis: Cornwell, who was divorced, had been outed as a lesbian (she had been having an affair with a female FBI agent and that agent’s husband was convicted of the attempted murder of his wife, forcing the relationship into the open). “Someone very prominent in my profession called me — it was more than a suggestion — and wanted me to show up on the arm of Tom Clancy at some big black-tie event and thought it would be really good for appearances’ sake.”

Clancy, at the time at the peak of his own groundbreaking crime-writing career, had just separated from his wife and was signed to the same publisher as Cornwell. “I am just not going to get into this game of all this fakery bullshit,” she tells me, and presumably also told the very powerful man in publishing. “You know why? Because I’m a female author. If you don’t like me because I’m gay, if you don’t like me because my character is a woman, then we have a problem.”

Besides the glassy blue unblinking stare, the attention to detail, every word she says is shot through with such rock-steady self-belief that I can understand why the very powerful man who wanted his star author not to be gay backed off. “It was just a gimmick, but from the get-go I was given the impression that a lot of the things that I am didn’t measure up. Being female and then being a gay female.”

Talk of Machiavellian publishers is distracting us from the subjects at hand, which, as ever, are death, danger, being worried and all the bad things that could happen to you even if you’re careful. In Depraved Heart, Cornwell’s latest, there is a home invasion: a young millionairess is found dead, half naked, her skull crushed in her own luxury pad.

Cornwell wants you to know that you’re lying to yourself if you don’t think it could happen to you: “Someone who’s minding their own business, walking back into her locked apartment, not knowing that someone’s hiding in the closet.” Has her research spooked her? “I know what goes on out there. It’s not made up — right? And has that affected me? Of course it has. It’s not that I’m paranoid. It’s like someone who’s been in a war and you know that you could get shot at if you’ve been shot at before, so to speak. It’s about having an awareness that’s rooted in experience that causes you in some instances to pay more attention than other people might.” From up here on the 17th floor we can see the whole of central London. Does she feel safe here? Saf-er. There are fewer guns.

After graduating from Davidson College in North Carolina, she married her English professor, who was 17 years her senior. The couple divorced in the late Eighties. She married her girlfriend, Staci Ann Gruber, a Harvard medical school neuroscientist, in 2005. Now that Cornwell and her wife live in — moderately safe — downtown Boston, she relies on an elaborate security system but no longer owns an arsenal of guns. “But if I were living on 40 acres in the middle of nowhere — yes, I would have my own home protection.”

Gun laws in the US need to be tightened to prevent pyschopaths getting their hands on them, she says. “We have a problem in the United States that goes beyond gun laws, in my opinion: that people are committing crimes for attention. We have developed a whole new breed of killer that decides that it’s worth the price of their life to have 15 minutes of fame because you get the instant pay-off — even the White House acknowledges what you just did.”

She’s a great friend of George Bush Sr but didn’t seem to think much of his son when he was in power. One of his mistakes, she believes, was to set a precedent for American heads of states to acknowledge the deeds of mass-murderers. “I said at the time, BIG MISTAKE. Because this feeds the fantasies of the next disturbed person in line who’s thinking of going out in a blaze of bloody glory. And for these people, the pay-off for them is the fantasies in advance.” What about just abolishing guns? “You almost need to take a magic magnet and take it to outer space and airlift them all away because how are you going to get rid of them?”

In the name of verisimilitude, Cornwell, who was formerly a journalist and assistant to a chief medical officer in Virginia, does the novelist’s version of all her own stunts. In the name of staring death and, I think, some unpleasant childhood experiences, in the face she forces herself to witness things that most people, especially her, find frightening.

Often her characters make her do it, she says. Kay will decide she needs to work a crime scene off the coast of Bermuda, and Cornwell will have to learn how to scuba dive. “I mean, everything’s scary, if you’re going to learn to fly a helicopter, you’re going to learn to scuba dive, you’re going to ride a motorcycle — and I’ve had my share of injuries from these things too. If you’re going to do all that, you’ve got to get beyond fear.”

That said, she’s been on strike from flying a helicopter for a year because, “I’m not having a drone fly into my tail rudder and kill me. I’ve seen too many people ordering this crap off the internet and they get out there and, ‘Oh, that will be funny, here’s a helicopter landing, let me go up and film it,’ and it will go — boom!” She owns a drone for research purposes, but “my cop friends keep it for me”.

Her childhood didn’t set her up for the confidence she now exudes. Her father left on Christmas Day when she was five, leaving his three children to be raised by their mother, who suffered from depression. Her mother’s difficulties with raising children put Cornwell off motherhood: “I was worried I would be a bad mother.” Her mother’s depression meant she was often absent and so, “I got molested by somebody when I was five because I was wandering the streets in Miami by myself and it was a substitute patrolman. It turns out he was a paedophile.”

The family moved to a small town in North Carolina. “We were just sort of on our own. So that creates fear. Especially if you’ve already been victimised once. And I didn’t even understand what had happened too much except that it was something bad because a policeman came to the house and then I had to go to a grand jury proceeding and my shorts were being passed around the room. So that begins to plant the seeds of fear, ‘I don’t live in a safe environment’ and maybe even ‘It’s my fault.’

“For me you get to a point where you just have to go beyond — you can’t give in to it any more. I mean, if you grow up with a lot of instability, it follows you, in terms of worrying about things or thinking the bomb’s going to drop any minute or the rug is going to be pulled out from under you. No matter how stable my environment is now, it’s not the way I grew up. So my first reaction to a lot of stuff is: how’s this going to hurt me? How scary is this?”

She used to be very angry with her father, but since his death she seems to have come to like him more and no longer claims that, for instance, he only visited her out of spite after she was involved in a car crash in Los Angeles, driving drunk. She also says that she was outed all those years ago by jealous journalists who also spread rumours that she was bipolar (spending sprees, alcohol binges). She has talked about being bipolar before but now insists that it was all a smear campaign.

“I never, quote, ‘came out’. The real truth is I was outed by other people,” she says. “There were some people who took it upon themselves to try and sabotage me every possible way they could, including outing, and that’s when all the news started about me being bipolar, which I’m not.”

She did drink too much — “self-medicating”. As for the spending sprees: “I was earning $27,000 a year as a full-time employee of the medical examiners, living in a tiny apartment and driving a Honda, then living in the wealthiest neighbourhood in Richmond [Viriginia] and driving a Mercedes. So, did I act like a drunk Elvis? Darn right I did. I did whatever the hell I wanted. The sky was the limit. I could go into Armani. I could go into a car dealership and buy anything I wanted. I could fly on private planes. So did I go to town on all of that? Yes, I sure did.” It wasn’t very wise, perhaps. “But I had a lot of fun.”

How unintuitive publishers can be about readers. It’s precisely Kay’s gender that made her stand out, and Cornwell’s gender that made her successful. “Most of our clients or patients [she means murder victims] are women or they’re children. It’s a form of nurturing and caretaking to have a woman physician taking care of them when they have been violated in the worst way imaginable.

“I was stunned that people had trouble with this. When I was a journalist I was running after serial killers and shoot-outs and I grew up with boys. I played on the boys’ tennis team at school. I’d always been competing with males, so I didn’t understand the reaction. I mean, it really startled me.”

She was irritated when she heard through the grapevine that Tom Cruise had said how much he’d have loved to play Kay Scarpetta if only the fictional medical officer had been a man. “I remember thinking at the time: ‘Well, that’s disappointing. So no one wants to play her if she’s not a man.’ ”

Given that she’s sold more than 100 million books, it’s mysterious why it’s taken so many years to get Scarpetta on to the big screen. Angelina Jolie is the latest actress to be almost absolutely definitely about to play her. At last the powerful men in film may be about to learn the lesson that their colleagues in publishing did almost twenty years ago.

Trouble in the Bronte Society

Next time Dame Judi Dench drives up to West Yorkshire, she should pack her copy of Wuthering Heights (Oliver Moody writes). Only the savage psychodrama of a Bronte novel could be an adequate preparation for taking over at the most bitterly divided fan club in Britain. Under any normal circumstances, the appointment of a celebrated actress to the honorary presidency of a literary charity would barely trouble the local newspapers.

Yet the Bronte Society is no ordinary charity. So many resentments have festered within its walls that it has succeeded in losing a president, a chairman, an executive director and almost half its trustees in the space of 12 months.

As the society approaches a spate of 200th anniversaries — on Friday a wreath was laid at Westminster Abbey for Charlotte, the eldest of the Bronte sisters, on the bicentenary of her birth — Dench’s diplomatic finesse will be sorely tested.

Not only is the charity torn between warring cliques, it also faces the spectre of a 120 home estate being built close to the parsonage where the family spent most of their lives.

After a faction of the 123-year-old society’s members fell out with the leadership, and the leadership fell out with the villagers in Haworth, the Brontes’ family home in West Yorkshire, a cascade of resignations came at the annual general meeting last summer. The exodus was led by Bonnie Greer, the playwright and critic who held the charity’s presidency, and was at one point reduced to using the heel of her Jimmy Choo shoe as a gavel to keep order.

The new cadre of trustees, fronted by John Thirlwell, a former BBC television reporter, have pledged to make the society more professional and to heal its fractured relationship with local residents.

John Huxley, chairman of Haworth, Cross Roads and Stanbury parish council, said that much of the ill-will had dissipated but the proposed housing development, which is partly on the greenfield land around the grade-II listed Bridgehouse Mill, would be a tricky obstacle. In the past the charity has been fiercely committed to keeping “Bronte country” much as it was in the 19th century, but it may be fighting a losing battle. The council has to find space for at least 400 new homes by 2020.

“This development will radically change the aesthetic, and it will also change the flood plain, which is what we’re concerned about,” Mr Huxley said. “If you change the aesthetic you will have a big impact on the literary legacy of the Brontes, because we’re starting to change a landscape here that Patrick Bronte and his family would still recognise.”

There are cultural problems, too. Joolz Denby, a punk poet and novelist who helped to organise the Radical Brontës festival in 2006, said the society’s old guard had fought tooth and nail to maintain a “sanitised” image of the writers and the wild Pennine hills around their home.

She said that the three sisters and their novels had been profoundly modern in their violent passions, but the Brontë Society had resisted any attempts to update the works for the 21st century. “They want to keep the Brontës ‘safe’ from the likes of me and my ‘inappropriate’ interpretations,” she said. “Naturally I doubt they’d ever say anything publicly, but privately it’s perfectly clear. It’s their private club for nice, middle-class people — I’m middle class, so it’s not me being classist — headed up by Ms Dench.

400 Years From Now

‘He was not of an age, but for all time,” said Ben Jonson of Shakespeare. So it has proved: look at us four centuries on, not only in the throes of global celebration but daily looting his words and images — bag and baggage, fancy-free, not budging an inch, breaking the ice, in cold blood or blind love . . . Refuseniks can’t even mutter “good riddance” to the anniversary without pinching that phrase from him too. Not that he didn’t steal stories and words himself: there is a most enjoyable donnish argument about how far to credit Shakespeare with tidying up the Elizabethan variants of the Spanish “el lagarto” (the lizard) by coining “alligator” to fit his line.

He has outlasted four centuries of change in language, attitudes and fashionable taste. It is fun to watch the intelligentsia of the intervening years trying to debunk him. Pepys called A Midsummer Night’s Dream insipid and ridiculous, Restoration know-betters messed around with the plays. Orderly 18th-century minds lamented: he “wanted taste” wrote Horace Walpole, and Dryden tied himself in knots over Shakespeare as a Janus with two faces — “you have scarce begun to admire the one, ere you despise the other”. Voltaire called Hamlet “a coarse and barbarous play” by a “drunken savage” whose works would only be appreciated in London and Canada. Closer to our own time Tolstoy, Shaw, even DH Lawrence had complaints. Yet look where it got them: 2016, and a world still immeasurably grateful to the actors Heminge and Condell who collected and printed the First Folio and passed the genius on.

It makes it irresistible to wonder how much of our own culture will still please anyone in the year 2416. The RSC tribute show on Saturday began by threatening to be a bit too down-wid-da-kidz: a West Side Story medley to reassure the nervous, an overwrought balcony scene and some Horrible Histories crassness to keep imaginary yoof on-message. Yet Gregory Doran’s production rapidly returned to the familiar serious gaiety and strength that always marks this director, and it became honourable and brilliant. The present age, though, must always pat its own back: among good examples of other art inspired by the plays, there were a few overcooked lines such as Catherine Tate saying that, after him, “today’s linguistic geniuses” are rappers. Really? Rap is fun: cleverish wordplay disguising clunkiness with tongue-twisting speed and dance tracks. It evokes and serves a particular 21st-century western urban world, which will be replaced. It does not dig deep. I doubt that in 400 years there will be a Jay-Z Birthplace Trust and Eminem Festival.

On the other hand, the tunes and lyrics of Lennon and McCartney, especially the gentler ones, dive with unpretending simplicity into universal desires. So as long as human beings love and suffer there will be a place for Yesterday and And I Love Her. Likewise some dramatists from the past century or so seem able to play on into an unimaginable future. Whether 2416 turns out to be a time of robots and immortality, or mud huts in post-apocalyptic desolation, I can imagine audiences for Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Rattigan, Ibsen, Chekhov, Sondheim. Less sure about Pinter: for all the skill, there’s a self-satisfied sourness that in the end might make him fade. Frayn or Hare? Maybe. As for the newest dramatists, male and female, there are some terrific voices, but hard to guess until their back catalogues are longer.

As for visual arts, my hunch is that figurative painters and sculptors, currently the poor relations, will outlast the Emins and Hirsts by a hundred generations. Similarly, among novelists it will not be the moody stylists but the best storytellers, the ones who make you care what happens to their characters. It has always been so, since Homer and Beowulf.

In general, what I would lay survival bets on is, simply, heart. Whether in light comedies, tragedies or histories Shakespeare focused on human hopes, dreams, absurdities, cruelties, kindnesses, doubts: the inwardness of lives. Just as Byrd and Tallis can move unbelievers now (and Tavener probably always will) so can writing that touches our depths. It works even when, as with the Elizabethan and Jacobean canon today, its story is set in a world with unrecognisably different codes of warfare and sexual honour. Remember too that Shakespeare was a populist. Books and plays getting prizes today from elite committees, obsessed with craft, new forms and challenged boundaries, may not last nearly as well as moving or minatory tales well told, with the clarity Orwell called “good prose like a windowpane”. Clever old Dryden is hard going now, yet the border ballads still raise a tear. Poems created to ring and sing with scansion and euphony may lead distant future-people to their own inwardness.

Perhaps arts always need energy, reckless populist exuberance, to drive them forwards down the centuries. The fizzing, outpouring, inventively explosive firework writing in Shakespeare made Ben Jonson grumpily complain of his friend that he never could resist a quibble, following a metaphor like a luminous vapour on a marsh until bogged down. He lamented that the man never struck out a line, “Would that he had blotted thousands!” He cavilled that his “excellent phantasy, brave notions and gentle expressions . . . flowed with that facility that sometimes it was necessary he should be stopped”.

Terry Pratchett Movies

TERRY PRATCHETT once described life as a film you’ve walked into ten minutes late, and whose plot you have to work out from the clues. It was announced last week that, after more than 70m books sold, translations into 37 languages and merchandise ranging from board games to cookery books, one of his “Discworld” novels was to be made at last into a feature film. A newcomer to Pratchett would be forgiven for feeling a little baffled: how could such a commercially successful series, matched only by “Harry Potter” and “Twilight”, have avoided the siren call of Hollywood for so long?

The will-they-won’t-they saga of bringing Pratchett to the big screen is almost as long as the 41-strong novel series itself. In 1992, Pratchett was approached by an American production company about his novel “Mort”, a dark comedy about the skeletal, scythe-wielding figure of Death taking on an intern. (A fan-made graffiti painting of Death, based on the artwork of another book, “Reaper Man”, is above.) “We’ve been doing market research and the skeleton bit doesn’t work for us, it’s a bit of a downer,” Pratchett recalled the producers saying, “We love it, it’s high concept—just lose the Death angle.” The film went no further.

Over the years, the hopes of fans have been raised and dashed. Earlier this year, concept art surfaced which showed that Disney had been considering another “Mort” adaptation in 2010. The book that is now being adapted by the Jim Henson Company—“The Wee Free Men”—is a gleefully impious tale of a nine-year-old witch and her drunken, rowdy Scottish pixie clan. It has already been through the workflow at least once; Sam Raimi, an American director, was attached to it in 2006. The project fell through when it became clear that everything the book was against—following dreams, finding princes, neat endings—was exactly what film-makers had in mind for it.

One explanation for the Sisyphean back-and-forth might be just the fiercely anti-Disney, sceptical bent to Pratchett’s writing. Any book which has as its guiding credo the line: “If you trust in yourself…and believe in your dreams...and follow your star…you'll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren't so lazy” is going to find it tough to maintain its integrity once the studio has made it commercially palatable.

Or so we might have thought. But Hollywood is rapidly turning subversion of its own tropes into its chief box office asset. “Frozen”, a Disney princess story about the bond between two sisters that made more than $1 billion worldwide, cheerfully rewrote all the accepted kid-friendly rules about dreams and true love. It has ushered in an irreverent revisionist wave from “Into the Woods” to “The Lego Movie” that would comfortably incorporate a strong heroine uninterested in romance, much like “The Wee Free Men”’s Tiffany Aching. The irony and subversion powering Pratchett’s writing has never had a better time to flourish in Hollywood.

Yet even with this change, Pratchett’s works resist easy adaptation. Much as Douglas Adams’s “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” long resisted a film version (and even then produced a mediocre result), Pratchett’s authorial voice is hard to convey on the screen. Pratchett in particular relies on paratext—a novel commenting on being a novel. Reading him is to be endlessly second-guessed. The brilliance of a quip like “Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set fire to him and he's warm for the rest of his life” lies in its subversion of expectation, but in a particularly literary way. Its force depends on the eye crossing the page, not a viewer watching images on a screen.

However hard Hollywood now wishes to deconstruct its own clichés, it has a limited capacity to convey such metafictional tricks; it is hard to see “Discworld” working without some kind of narrator figure who could perform this function. Dealing with the authorial voice, especially one given to diversions, paratext and self-awareness, has always been a problem for Hollywood when attempting to adapt satirical novelists. “A Cock and Bull Story”, which features film-makers struggling to adapt Lawrence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy” (an 18th-century novel so prone to digression that the narrator takes several volumes to reach his own birth), skilfully manoeuvred the problems of adapting a book about writing a book. They made a film about a film failing to get made, and in doing so, ingeniously translated the spirit of the original.

Pratchett’s writing, too, is often about writing itself. If “Discworld” has a central theme it is that all the lies we tell ourselves, the stories and fantasies, have value in and of themselves. A talking skeleton can’t be written out merely because kids will be scared of it: the whole point is that humans young and old have always used phantasms and ghouls to talk about, and face, their fears. Pratchett's version of Death—humane, decent, occasionally befuddled—offers the hope that there is in fact nothing to fear out there in the dark. This "stories about stories" theme of “Wee Free Men”, and any adaptations that follow it, will be hard to render accurately on film. The signing of Rhianna Pratchett, the late author’s daughter, to write the script may yet provide hope; she, at least, is unlikely to sacrifice her father’s vision to the gods of market research.

In “Moving Pictures”, the tenth book in the Discworld series, a power-mad director announces that he wants “a thousand elephants” for one of his films. After a Herculean effort, someone actually manages to fulfil his insane request. Having moved a herd of elephants across several continents, he finds that the movie business has moved on by the time he arrives. Getting to the point where Pratchett’s impish style might find a place in Hollywood has been a long journey—we can only hope it will have time to find its voice before the trend passes.

Read Books, Live Longer

“Do not read,” the French novelist Gustave Flaubert once said, “as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”

He was literally right, according to a study that claims people who read books enjoy a significant “survival advantage” over those who do not. Ominously, they also appear to live longer than magazine or newspaper readers.

Researchers argue that the sheer intellectual effort of “deep reading” — following the arc of ideas, characters or plot over several hundred pages without forgetting which one Gandalf was or why the workers of the world should bother uniting — keeps the brain active and helps people to make better decisions well into later life. Books can also sharpen “empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence”, which have been linked in previous studies to longer lifespans, possibly because they curb stress.

Public health experts at Yale University in Connecticut pored over 11 years’ worth of data on the health and reading habits of 3,600 men and women over the age of 50. Just over a quarter of the participants died during the course of the survey.

Previous research in the area has given a mixed picture of the relationship between reading and longevity, but this is the first study to look at whether it matters what kind of reading you do.

It turned out that the longer people spent reading books each day — even as little as half an hour — the longer they lived. By the time a fifth of the participants in the survey had died, the book-readers lived on average for nearly two years more than the others. This effect might be expected, given that book-readers tend to be slightly wealthier and better educated and therefore likely to eat better diets, avoid smoking and do other things that are generally conducive to sticking around on this mortal coil.

Even after the academics ripped these factors out of their data, however, reading books still seemed to make a significant difference in its own right.

Avni Bavishi, the study’s lead author, said that when her team looked at the time participants spent reading at the start of the survey and then compared it to how their performance in cognitive tests changed over the next few years, it looked as though the books had helped to keep them alive for longer.

There are two drawbacks to the analysis. One is that it does not distinguish between poetry, fiction and non-fiction, or between different genres of novel. It is not clear whether Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol — described by one reviewer as being written in prose “so leaden you could tile church roofs with it” — will keep you upright for longer than Flaubert’s Madame Bovary.

The other is that the authors are still not quite sure why books would have any useful impact on human biology. “We believe that reading books engages the brain more than magazines or newspapers, and it’s this cognitive engagement that extends your life expectancy,” Ms Bavishi said. “But we don’t have specific details about exactly what it is about that cognitive engagement.”

The study is published in the journal Social Science & Medicine.

Lesesucht: An Addiction to Reading

Go ahead, crack the spine. Run your hand up and down the page. Smell the binding. You know you want to. It’s the intoxicating smell of a new book, like heroin if we financed public institutions to allow you to borrow as much heroin as you wanted and bring it back when you were done with it. Also, if it didn’t kill you and you couldn’t become physically dependent on it. There is a German word for that sweet, sweet book addiction.

LESESUCHT: AN ADDICTION TO READING

Shockingly, that’s not the only word the Germans came up with for this particular dependence. There’s also Lesewut (reading rage) and Leserei (reading mania). They all mean the same thing — and they weren’t invented to say anything nice. In fact, Lesesucht and its synonyms came to be in the late 1700s, when a boom in literacy brought on a wave of establishment disapproval. “Before, people read religious texts and practical books,” explains Frank Furedi, author of Power of Reading. “Now they were reading literature.” Establishment minds worried about the tendency of young women to read romance novels and of the underclass’ potential to stay idle while reading novels all day. Disapproval rained down from all over the political spectrum — left-wing commentators worried that the masses were reading trash instead of philosophy, and right-wing thinkers decried the abandonment of the Bible for secular texts.

The decrying of reading mania was in itself a sort of mania — a classic moral panic. Considering that modern moral panics about reading tend to focus on how young people aren’t reading enough — what, Twitter doesn’t count? — it seems quaint that so many people were so concerned about young people ruining their minds with books. But it happened: Countless pearls were clutched over a supposed international epidemic of suicides sparked by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, in which the hero offs himself over unrequited love. In fact, Furedi says, almost all the articles written about this panic track back to a single British case with very sketchy details. Still, knockoffs of Werther’s clothes were banned, just in case.

And while this has a retro feel, it’s still happening — and the panic about the pollution of young minds remains focused on young people and women. “In the late 1700s, books were the new media form, and people weren’t really sure about them,” says Dr. Lena Heilmann, an independent scholar of 18th-century German literature. Today’s parallel wouldn’t be books but rather the fear of violent video games or Snapchat. However, the concern over content, one that seems to balloon when female readers are involved, is there too — witness editorials worried about women being drawn into abusive relationships because they read Twilight. In the 1700s, Heilmann says, “They were worried that women would identify too much with the characters, lose themselves in the novels and become very emotionally involved.” Holy déjà vu, Batman.

Despite Lesesucht’s overblown origins, there’s room for reclamation here. After all, the women of 1790s Germany kept on reading their romance novels, and you can keep reading your One Direction fanfiction. If someone tries to stop you, tell them you can’t control yourself: You have an addiction, and they don’t make rehab to wean you off a really good story.

Detective Stories

n his short essay, ‘A Defence of Detective Stories’ (1901), GK Chesterton said part of the appeal of the genre is that, while we might be tempted to see criminals as glamorous and exciting rebels, these stories remind us that the law itself is ‘the most romantic of rebellions’.

In nature, might is right, and for much of human history lawlessness (or the law of the powerful) was the rule. For Chesterton, then, ‘it is the agent of social justice who is the original and poetic figure; while the burglars and footpads are merely placid old cosmic conservatives, happy in the immemorial respectability of apes and wolves. The romance of the police force is thus the whole romance of man. It is based on the fact that morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies.’

There is a lot in that. It was in part a desire to explore the interplay between morality and rebellion, crime and the law, that drove me to write my novel, That Existential Leap: A Crime Story, whose two main protagonists are a self-defined criminal and a detective. For the criminal, the law long ago lost whatever allure it might once have had. A century on from Chesterton’s Victorian optimism, the idea that the police represent morality seems absurd. Instead, he experiences the law as little more than an invitation to conformity. His friends tell him not that his criminal fantasies are immoral, but merely unrealistic. And he wonders why ‘realism’ dictates he should be less free than apes and wolves.

The detective might have more sympathy for Chesterton. And perhaps many of us do. After all, detective stories are more popular than ever. The idea of the police as the thin blue line between order and chaos has drawn generations of readers and viewers to detective stories, crime novels, cop shows and films. It is morally satisfying to see evildoers get their comeuppance, and reassuring to find mysteries resolved. But immediately, two objections present themselves.

Crime fiction reminds us that the law itself is ‘the most romantic of rebellions’

First, much contemporary crime fiction is morally ambiguous. The modern detective’s appeal often has more to do with his or her flaws than any particular virtue or integrity. And to the extent that he or she does represent justice, the detective is often fighting a losing battle against corrupt politicians, businessmen and indeed other police officers.

This grittier form of the genre was pioneered by the American hardboiled school, writers like Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. As Chandler wrote in his essay, ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (1950), ‘The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities… It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it.’ Patterns, mind you, but not necessarily resolutions, morally satisfying or otherwise.

Writing today, the Indian journalist Sandipan Deb argues that, fundamentally, there are two different kinds of detective story: the British and the American. The former is typified by Agatha Christie and involves a ‘closed system’ (you know the killer is one of the 10 guests staying at the country house), while the American (or hardboiled) format involves an ‘open system’, with the detective drawn from one crime into a larger, often murky plot.

Deb also cites the famous true story about William Faulkner, then working as a screenplay writer adapting Chandler’s novel The Big Sleep, who asked the author for clarification about who had killed the chauffeur. Chandler had to admit he had no idea. Nevertheless, readers and viewers have continued to find the story compelling, and, as Deb says, the quality of writing and characterisation means it’s a book that can be rewardingly re-read in a way more conventional detective stories perhaps cannot.

And that brings us to the second objection to Chesterton’s defence of detective stories. Does the satisfaction of a mystery solved really have anything to do with morality? Or is it more aesthetic: the pleasing sense of everything coming together in the end, unlike in real life? Indeed, might neatly tied ends actually militate against the realism of a Chandler, who, even if unwittingly, reflected the reality that many murders remain unsolved? Perhaps the real ‘romance of the police force’ would be better dramatised without the aesthetic embellishment of mysteries solved, which, after all, rarely satisfies more than once.

Then again, perhaps a writer who disdains the solving of mysteries has no business writing detective stories. The English crime writer Dorothy L Sayers gave a lecture in Oxford in 1935, called ‘Aristotle on Detective Fiction’. There she entertainingly applied the lessons of Aristotle’s Poetics to the detective story, taking it to be the contemporary form of classical tragedy (1). This was necessary because ‘today, we get many examples exhibiting a rather slender plot and a good deal of morbid psychology’ (reading this, the author of That Existential Leap shifts uncomfortably in his seat).

Channelling Aristotle, Sayers insisted that plot must take precedence over character, and that plot developments should occur unexpectedly, but also in consequence of one another. The trick is to use paralogism – aka leading the reader up the garden path – so that readers are seduced by the wrong conclusions, even when the correct ones are in plain sight. As a result: ‘Even though at the end we are to feel surprise on discovering the identity of the criminal, we ought not to feel incredulity; we should rather be able to say to ourselves: “Yes, I can see now that from the beginning this man had it in him to commit murder, had I only had the wits to interpret the indications furnished by the author.”’

I can’t help but wonder what Sayers (or Aristotle) would have made of the BBC crime drama Line of Duty, which recently finished its fourth series. Line of Duty combines compelling characters with internally coherent but wildly improbable plots, and straddles Deb’s British and American styles by focusing on a closed system of suspects, while gradually revealing a wider plot involving sinister unseen characters.

For me, the appeal is less in the tortuous plots than in the characters themselves. The main protagonists are not merely detectives, but anti-corruption detectives. Their suspects are fellow police officers. In most police dramas, especially American ones, the ‘rat squad’ is universally despised. It’s almost paradoxical: why should the police object to being policed? But it’s not quite a paradox, because the point is that as people committed to protecting the public, to being the good guys, cops tend to see themselves as a special case. It’s not that they don’t think seriously corrupt officers should be punished; it’s that they feel decent cops should be given the benefit of the doubt to get on with their jobs without undue interference.

The modern detective’s appeal often has more to do with his or her flaws than any particular virtue or integrity.

Intellectually, we can all see that won’t wash. There have to be rules and officers have to be accountable to them. But anti-corruption officers like the ones portrayed in Line of Duty have to embody that principle in a working culture defined by an us-and-them mentality. Having broken the informal rules of group loyalty, they have little choice but to revel in unpopularity, sacrificing the respect of their colleagues for the sake of Chesterton’s ‘most dark and daring of conspiracies’ – doing the right thing.

That two-way tension between rule-bound behaviour and moral righteousness is dramatically rich, even if it has more to do with character than plot. Superheroes are not bound by rules, after all. And even mere mortals sometimes think of ourselves as special cases. One major influence on That Existential Leap was Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The protagonist Raskolnikov decides he is an ‘extraordinary person’ and therefore has a kind of special licence to rise above the law and conventional morality, and even commit murder in pursuance of his own greatness.

This idea appeals to my own first, criminal, protagonist. But my second, the detective, is less concerned about people rising above the law than about the law imploding from within. After a particularly sinister child murder, he is put in charge of a new unit to solve ‘occult crimes’, and soon begins to worry he has been put on a crusade that has nothing to do with criminal justice or morality. What happens, not when individuals refuse to subject themselves to the law, but when the law stops treating individuals as responsible subjects?

The cosmic conservatives DCI Alexander contends with are not just burglars and footpads, but well-meaning senior colleagues who are more interested in keeping the plot moving along than in anyone’s moral character. There is a good deal of morbid psychology, then, but I like to think some of the romance of man, too.

Perhaps Chesterton was right. Detective stories do present us with a romantic rebellion against lawlessness. But that rebellion is more complicated than who killed the chauffeur. The rebel leaders are flawed, there are fifth columnists, and the rebellion never finally succeeds or fails. That’s why crime fiction continues to beguile, even when it loses the plot.

Copyright Years

The Great American Novel enters the public domain on January 1, 2019—quite literally. Not the concept, but the book by William Carlos Williams. It will be joined by hundreds of thousands of other books, musical scores, and films first published in the United States during 1923. It’s the first time since 1998 for a mass shift to the public domain of material protected under copyright. It’s also the beginning of a new annual tradition: For several decades from 2019 onward, each New Year’s Day will unleash a full year’s worth of works published 95 years earlier.

This coming January, Charlie Chaplin’s film The Pilgrim and Cecil B. DeMille’s The 10 Commandments will slip the shackles of ownership, allowing any individual or company to release them freely, mash them up with other work, or sell them with no restriction. This will be true also for some compositions by Bela Bartok, Aldous Huxley’s Antic Hay, Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis, Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Pigeons, e.e. cummings’s Tulips and Chimneys, Noël Coward’s London Calling! musical, Edith Wharton’s A Son at the Front, many stories by P.G. Wodehouse, and hosts upon hosts of forgotten works, according to research by the Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Throughout the 20th century, changes in copyright law led to longer periods of protection for works that had been created decades earlier, which altered a pattern of relatively brief copyright protection that dates back to the founding of the nation. This came from two separate impetuses. First, the United States had long stood alone in defining copyright as a fixed period of time instead of using an author’s life plus a certain number of years following it, which most of the world had agreed to in 1886. Second, the ever-increasing value of intellectual property could be exploited with a longer term.

But extending American copyright law and bringing it into international harmony meant applying “patches” retroactively to work already created and published. And that led, in turn, to lengthy delays in copyright expiring on works that now date back almost a century.

Only so much that’s created has room to persist in memory, culture, and scholarship. Some works may have been forgotten because they were simply terrible or perishable. But it’s also the case that a lack of access to these works in digital form limits whether they get considered at all. In recent years, Google, libraries, the Internet Archive, and other institutions have posted millions of works in the public domain from 1922 and earlier. With lightning-fast ease, their entire contents are now as contemporary as news articles, and may show up intermingled in search results. More recent work, however, remains locked up. The distant past is more accessible than 10 or 50 years ago.

The details of copyright law get complicated fast, but they date back to the original grant in the Constitution that gives Congress the right to bestow exclusive rights to a creator for “limited times.” In the first copyright act in 1790, that was 14 years, with the option to apply for an automatically granted 14-year renewal. By 1909, both terms had grown to 28 years. In 1976, the law was radically changed to harmonize with the Berne Convention, an international agreement originally signed in 1886. This switched expiration to an author’s life plus 50 years. In 1998, an act named for Sonny Bono, recently deceased and a defender of Hollywood’s expansive rights, bumped that to 70 years.

The Sonny Bono Act was widely seen as a way to keep Disney’s Steamboat Willie from slipping into the public domain, which would allow that first appearance of Mickey Mouse in 1928 from being freely copied and distributed. By tweaking the law, Mickey got another 20-year reprieve. When that expires, Steamboat Willie can be given away, sold, remixed, turned pornographic, or anything else. (Mickey himself doesn’t lose protection as such, but his graphical appearance, his dialog, and any specific behavior in Steamboat Willie—his character traits—become likewise freely available. This was decided in a case involving Sherlock Holmes in 2014.)

The reason that New Year’s Day 2019 has special significance arises from the 1976 changes in copyright law’s retroactive extensions. First, the 1976 law extended the 56-year period (28 plus an equal renewal) to 75 years. That meant work through 1922 was protected until 1998. Then, in 1998, the Sonny Bono Act also fixed a period of 95 years for anything placed under copyright from 1923 to 1977, after which the measure isn’t fixed, but based on when an author perishes. Hence the long gap from 1998 until now, and why the drought’s about to end.

Of course, it’s never easy. If you published something between 1923 and 1963 and wanted to renew copyright, the law required registration with the U.S. Copyright Office at any point in the first 28 years of copyright, followed at the 28-year mark with the renewal request. Without both a registration and a renewal, anything between 1923 and 1963 is already in the public domain. Many books, songs, and other printed media were never renewed by the author or publisher due to lack of sales or interest, an author’s death, or a publisher’s shutting down or bankruptcy. One estimate from 2011 suggests about 90 percent of works published in the 1920s haven’t been renewed. That number shifts to 60 percent or so for works from the 1940s. But there are murky issues about ownership and other factors for as many as 30 percent of books from 1923 to 1963. It’s impossible to determine copyright status easily for them. It’s easier to prove a renewal was issued than not, making it difficult for those who want to make use of material without any risk of challenge. Jennifer Jenkins, the director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, says, “Even if works from 1923 technically entered the public domain earlier because of nonrenewal, next year will be different, because then we’ll know for sure that these works are in the public domain without tedious research.”

Jenkins’s group was unable, for instance, to find definitive proof that The Great American Novel wasn’t renewed, but that doesn’t mean there’s not an undigitized record in a file in Washington, D.C. While courts can be petitioned to find works affirmatively in the public domain, as ultimately happened following a knotted dispute over “Happy Birthday to You,” most of the time the issue only comes up when an alleged rights holder takes legal action to assert that copyright still holds. As a result, it’s more likely a publisher would wait to reissue The Great American Novel in 2019 than worry about Williams’s current copyright holders objecting in 2018.

There’s one more bit of wiggle, too: Libraries were granted special dispensation in the 1998 copyright revision over work in its last 20 years of its copyright so long as the work isn’t being commercially exploited, such as a publisher or author having a book in print or a musician actively selling or licensing digital sheet music. But hundreds of thousands of published works from 1923 to 1941 can be posted legally by libraries today, moving forward a year every year. (The Internet Archive assembles these works from partners at its ironic Sonny Bono Memorial Collection site.)

It’s possible this could all change again as corporate copyright holders start to get itchy about expirations. However, the United States is now in harmony with most of the rest of the world, and no legislative action is underway this year to make any waves that would affect the 2019 rollover.

A Google spokesperson confirmed that Google Books stands ready. Its software is already set up so that on January 1 of each year, the material from 95 years that’s currently digitized but only available for searching suddenly switches to full text. We’ll soon find out more about what 1923 was really like. And in 2024, we might all ring in the new year whistling Steamboat Willie’s song.

Bookshelf Credibility

Imagine that you are a member of the expert class — the kind of person invited to pontificate on television news programs. Under normal circumstances, your expertise might be signaled to the public by a gaudy photograph of skyscrapers superimposed behind your head. But now the formalities of the broadcast studio are a distant memory, and the only tools to convey that you truly belong on television are the objects within your own home. There’s only one move: You talk in front of a bookcase.

As the broadcast industry shelters in place, the bookcase has become the background of choice for television hosts, executives, politicians and anyone else keen on applying a patina of authority to their amateurish video feeds. In March, when the coronavirus put the handshaking and baby-kissing mode of presidential campaigning on pause, Joe Biden conspicuously retreated from public view for several long days as his team scrambled to project an air of competence from within Biden’s basement. When he finally re-emerged, it was in front of a carefully curated wall-length bookshelf punctuated with patriotic memorabilia like a worn leather football and a triangle-folded American flag.

In April, an anonymous Twitter account, Bookcase Credibility, emerged to keep an eye on the trend and quickly accumulated more than 30,000 followers. Its tagline is “What you say is not as important as the bookcase behind you,” and it offers arch commentary on the rapidly solidifying tropes of the genre as well as genuine respect for a well-executed specimen. YouTube CEO Susan Wojicki appears before “a standard credibility wallpaper presentation in the unthreatening homely style.” The migrants’ rights activist Minnie Rahman’s Encyclopaedia Britannica collection “is a lazy hand wafted at convention.” And the British politician Liam Fox’s “bold grab at credibility is somewhat undermined by the hardback copy of The Da Vinci Code.”

Liam Fox (DFDS) has gone big and poses in front of a bookcase in his avi. The bold grab at credibility is somewhat undermined by the hardback copy of The Da Vinci Code. That, political biographies and a book about crime suggest politics, knavery and bullshit.

The aesthetics of credibility often go overlooked. The look of cerebral authority is highly specific — in this country, credibility looks like a white man in a dark suit — but it is also blandly inflexible. It gains strength from its constancy over time. It is a superficial choice for people who pretend to reject superficial choices. But now the pandemic has unlocked a whole new canvas for signifying respectability, and for judging it: home décor.

Grading the video conference backgrounds of public figures has become a pandemic parlor game. For a certain class of people, the home must function not only as a pandemic hunkering nest but also be optimized for presentation to the outside world. The Twitter account Room Rater assesses lighting, angles, tidiness and accessorizing and then assigns a score out of 10. (David Frum could use a “plant to soften the space”: 7.) A carefully appointed background wall can delight (as when John Oliver appeared on the “Wendy Williams Show” in front of a painting of Wendy Williams) or it can distract (as when Jamie Dornan filmed himself from the bathroom in an attempt to make his enviable celebrity domicile appear “normal”).

The bookcase offers both a visually pleasing surface and a gesture at intellectual depth. Of all the quarantine judgments being offered right now, this one feels harmless enough. One gets the sense that for the bookcase-background type, being judged by their home libraries is a secret dream finally realized. Spectators hunt their shelves for clues as if examining a puzzle in a highbrow version of Highlights for Children: They have discovered that Pete Buttigieg owns Thomas Piketty’s “Capital,” Paul Rudd has “Jude the Obscure,” and the Broadway actress Melissa Errico displays a volume called “Irish Erotic Art.”

But often the titles of the books themselves are not legible through the screen; all that can be ascertained is the overall vibe. The presence of gilded, leather bound volumes can overwhelm the expert’s own expertise, recalling the props in an ad for a personal injury lawyer; a library so extensive that it requires a “Beauty and the Beast” style ladder inspires grudging respect.

Treating a book as a purely aesthetic object is often seen as an affront to intellectual credibility. In recent years, the bookcase aesthetic has been heavily influenced by the design sensibilities of Instagram, in which books are often arranged not by author or subject but by color and height, in undulating rainbow waves that resist functionality. Services arose to supply literary ornamentation, selling visually pleasing books by the meter. At the height of the pretty bookcase trend, some decorators even suggested displaying books spine-in, flouting the intellectual claim of the library completely in favor of a soothing neutral expanse. When the lifestyle influencer Lauren Conrad filmed a tutorial video in which she slashed into books and put their hollowed-out husks on display, she sparked such outrage that she deleted all evidence of her deed.

The credibility bookcase, with its towering, idiosyncratic array of worn volumes, is itself an affectation. The expert could choose to speak in front of his art prints or his television or his blank white walls, but he chooses to be framed by his books. It is the most insidious of aesthetic trends: one that masquerades as pure intellectual exercise.

It is remarkable how quickly the bookcase has become obligatory, how easily it has been integrated into the brittle aesthetic rules of authority. The appearance of the credibility bookcase suggests that the levers of expertise and professionalism are operating normally, even though they are very much not. There is a hint of tender vulnerability embedded in these authoritative displays. At a time when even our appointed experts rarely know what’s really going on, the veneer of respectability is always at risk of tumbling down. Last week, the ABC correspondent Will Reeve appeared on “Good Morning America” in front of a highly credible bookcase featuring an antique-style clock and a shimmering golden urn. He was not wearing any pants.

Other Resources

• Books About Books
• Anecdotes About Books
• Quotations About Books