Link-Mad Monday: ELNO Winter 2006, Awards, Complaints, and the Pervasiveness of Powell's

Quick little link-madness for today.

* The next Emerging Leaders Night Out has been announced! We'll be getting together on November 29, to celebrate the Small Press Book Fair on December 2 and 3. And thanks to the good offices of marketing wizard Steve Colca, Emerging Leaders NYC now has its own website. It's little more than a blog at this point, but it's a start, and hopefully it will be another resource for connecting with each other. Check it out, tell us what you think, and RSVP for the ELNO!

* As I was making my Christmas wish list on Powells.com (yes, Mom, there are still books I don't have), I finally discovered the Powell's blog. And duh, it's great! Several of my links today are courtesy of the alert and witty folks at Powells, and there's more where these came from. Is there anything those Portland indies can't do?

* The National Book Award winners are announced this Wednesday -- oh, the suspense! (If Richard Powers doesn't win, I'm going to be very disgruntled.) A commenter on this blog a couple of weeks ago mentioned the flap about Gene Yang's graphic novel American Born Chinese being nominated for the Young Adult award, so here's some links on that: the Wired article lamenting the choice (along with a lot of comments taking issue with the writer's opinion), and Gene Yang's response to Wired on the blog of his publisher, First Second Books. I had the pleasure of hosting the publisher of First Second, Mark Siegal, at an event with cartoonist Joann Sfar last week, and Mark mentioned the complaints about the nomination (the first ever for a graphic novel) with a kind of rueful satisfaction. Sometimes criticism is the sincerest form of acknowledgement.

* I'm working on freelance projects, volunteer projects, reading projects, blogging projects, and holiday projects. But I'd better get my tuchas in gear on my bookstore project, or someone else will do it first. (Thanks Bookslut, Powell's, and The Onion for the hilariously close-to-home link). One major obstacle is the fact that my ancient laptop isn't up to handling the spreadsheets I need to create a workable budget, so I'm in the market for a new computer -- I'm thinking Apple since there's a store nearby my house and I love their customer service, but it's all new to me and I wonder if I'd be paying for cuteness and creative options when all I really need is Microsoft Office and a bigger hard drive. Any thoughts from book people and/or business people on PC vs. Mac in our particular industry? And how's a poor bookseller like me to afford it all?

Sorry for ending on a complaint -- must be the gloomy, sloppy weather. I'll be back on Wednesday with some book reviews and in a better mood, I promise. Happy reading!

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