Finally, the Kindle may have found its market: but perhaps not quite what Amazon expected - it may just be the the new must-have accessory for pornophiles. That is, if a recent thread on FriendFeed is anything to go by... and yes folks, Litopia After Dark merits an explicit tag this week – you have been warned!
Raising our sights for a moment, Peter is convinced that, in a blinding flash of revelation, he has seen the future of the digital publishing business - and it's Google, not Amazon, who look like being the clear winners.
"When we look back", he says, "we may well decide that this was the week when the world changed for readers, writers and indeed the entire the publishing industry." It all hinges on the a settlement that has been reached between Google and authors and book publishers regarding Google’s massive book scanning and indexing project.
"The implications of the Google settlement are truly vast", Peter believes. "Let’s imagine that Google soon start to sell an e-reader –just as they’ve recently produced a phone. With the new Google E-reader, you can have the text of just about every book ever written - the majority of them, being out of opyright, will be 100% free.
That's an offer that is impossible to refuse! And on the back of it, they will be able to sell frontlist books, too. I really believe the promise of "all the world’s books in the palm of your hand" will be a game changer for the entire industry."
The panel discuss the massive implications of this development.
A new book by Geoff Nicholson mourns The Lost Art of Walking – and since part of Nicholson’s walking talks place in Los Angeles, we can assume it is not just a lost art, but also a pretty dangerous one, too. So, should writers walk – or stay in their rooms, famously like Marcel Proust?
A piece in this week’s Daily Telegraph by Tibor Fischer reviews Schulz and Peanuts: A biography by David Michaelis. Michaelis’s books reveals much about the man himself: the man behind the iconic cartoon strip had devotees that included Timothy Leary and the Grateful Dead, but also as Fischer points out, “grunts in Vietnam went into battle with Snoopy emblazoned on their fuselages or helmets. Schulz's prodigious cartoon beagle was almost called Sniffy, before he remembered his dying mother's suggestion that their next dog should be called Snoopy (a Norwegian term of endearment). We chat about the appeal of the puppy… what made Snoopy so popular?
Also, Daniel W. Drezner writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education review this week about the alleged disappearance of the intellectual as a public figure. The pessimism about public intellectuals is reflected in attitudes about how the rise of the internet in general, and blogs in particular, affects intellectual output. Alan Wolfe claims that "the way we argue now has been shaped by cable news and Weblogs. No emotion can be too angry and no exaggeration too incredible." The panel give their views on whether the role of intellectual is dead? We also ask whether intellectuals are actually necessary any more?
Finally, there’s something particularly evil and enduring about book burning – the very phrase conjures up nightmarish visions of Nazis and bonfires. People just don’t seem to get as excited about, say, the Great Firewall of China, which arguably has had a far more chilling effect on free speech than ever the Third Reich managed to have. In the current New English Review, Theodore Dalyrmple writes: “Books have an almost sacred quality: it is necessary only to imagine someone ripping the pages out of a cheap and trashy airport novel one by one to prove to oneself that this is so. If we saw someone doing it, we should be shudder, and think him a barbarian, no matter the nature of the book. The horror aroused by book burnings is independent of the quality of the books actually burnt.” So, what is going to happen when books are read electronically? Will the smell of burning plastic still conjure the same emotions?
And if all that wasn’t enough, we play all the games you love to listen to… Pitch the Nasty Agent, Toad Suck, Arkansas, Reverse Shuffle Six Card Strip Pokerette and Litopia’s Cry for Help (this week we get a letter from a rather strange contributor!).
To discuss all this and more is our erudite and entertaining panel… Dave Bartram, Donna Ballman and Richard Howse. Joining them is our very special guest Dr Susan O’Doherty, writer, clinical psychologist and the author of Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman’s Guide to Unblocking Creativity. Her popular advice column for writers, “The Doctor Is In”, appears every Friday on MJ Rose’s publishing blog, Buzz, Balls, & Hype. The Ustream chatroom was a bit congested this week, but do join us there next week, and be part of the Litopia phenomenon!
