The Written Nerd

* The Guardian notes various methods of organizing your bookshelves . (The ALP and I tend toward the author's own methodology, "according to where I can jam them.") (via Bookninja , who always leads me to the cool Guardian articles) * Literature In the Internet Age category, #1: I'd normally be skeptical of a trailer for a short story -- but the story is by Jim Shepard, the publisher is the very intriguing new multi-format literary journal Electric Literature , and the video itself is somewhat breathtaking. Watch. * Literature in the Internet Age category, #2: our Brooklyn visionary of the literary future, Richard Nash, writes in Publishers Weekly about Cursor , the new print/digital, publisher/community hybrid creature he's working on creating. I'm still wrapping my head around it, but it seems to come down to the fact that writers are readers and vice versa, and thus offering tools for refining and publishing one's writing while also selling the wr...

One of my oft-lamented pet peeves is the recurrence of media stories about books and independent bookstores that tell the same old story: indie bookstores are a dying breed, reading is the victim of new technologies, etc. So I must give credit where credit is due to two pieces of journalism today that present a more nuanced picture of the world of books and bookstores. Via Publishers Weekly, here's an LA Times piece on the uncertain future of the fabulous and venerable Hollywood bookstore Book Soup, after the too-young, too-soon death of its founder Glen Goldman. Even with this somber starting point, the LAT piece offers the most balanced and realistic picture of the actual business of bookstores that I've read in a national newspaper. Here's a sample: In recent decades, independent bookstores have become endangered, closing as chain stores move into their neighborhoods and market share is gobbled up by online booksellers such as Amazon .com. Some, like Dutton's Br...

Clearly, it's time to read Lev Grossman's article in Time about the future of books. I expect to agree, argue, and quibble in various measures. In the meantime, GalleyCat has a good summary and analysis of the piece , especially as it pertains to us snobby NYers. In the meantime, Bookninja pointed me to an indie bookstore story from Britain that sounds like something out of a Frank Capra movie. An MP from Lancashire discovered that his beloved, homey local indie bookstore is closing because of economic pressure. So he storms into Parliament and tells everyone it's high time the government started supporting locally owned small businesses. And for good measure, he tells publishers they'd better be careful about relying too much on chains and online sellers, because "it's in their own interests to have a large number of outlets." Since when did a politician get so passionate, practical, and well-informed? Truly it is a new day in politics. Perhaps...

Review of an imaginary book As I was delaying getting out of bed this morning, I had one of those weird morning dreams. I was reading a YA comic book about a boy and a girl who were left in the woods for dead. They somehow returned to civilization with a mutant superpower: if you got too near them you sickened and died. But it worked very slowly, so for most people it just manifested as a faint nausea. Then the boy and the girl became rockstars (apparently inducing nausea added to their mystique), and played a kick-ass show in which one of them played a Smashing Pumpkins song and the other simultaneously played some hip hop anthem, producing a harmonious chaos. As the kids were both either black or Latino, it was in a weird way a positive depiction of teens of color, influenced perhaps by Ivan Velez' Dead High Yearbook , and maybe by the animated comic (the ALP says "We used to just call it 'cheap animation'") in the extras of the Hellboy 2 DVD I watched last...

Note: At last weekend's meeting of the board of NAIBA (the regional booksellers's assocation of which I am an executive board member), secretary Eileen Dengler "comissioned" a piece for the upcoming NAIBA newsletter. This is something I've had on my mind lately, so it was a great motivation to write out my thoughts, and Eileen graciously agreed to let me cross-post it here. Your comments are most welcome. Bookstores in Bad Times At this particular moment, it’s a challenge to be an idealist and an optimist: two labels I’ve embraced as I’ve found my calling as an independent bookseller. Newspaper headlines, daily sales totals, and our own tightening belts tell us that things are tough, and getting tougher. As we head into the holiday season, where most of us make 40% of our yearly sales, it can seem logical to throw up our hands and wait for the apocalypse. But booksellers are tough, and relish a challenge. And somehow I keep finding reasons to be optimistic. For ...

I have yet to read the really important Washington Post article everyone is blogging about. But I always find time for Overheard In New York (it's on my Google desktop). OINY, which also inspired a book, posts the irresistably funny, gross, weird, and unbelievable things people hear other people saying in New York. Wednesday the site gathers lots of short quotes together around a theme, with often exponentially hilarious results. Today, people are talking about books . If you are a book person, try not to bang your head against the wall after reading these. After all, if you overheard people talking intelligently about books (and there are plenty of those in New York too), it wouldn't be funny enough for Wednesday One-Liners.

Listening to NPR this morning I had a little jolt: they were talking about the intersection of the internet and books, but not from a book industry point of view. As part of an ongoing series on the effects the internet has had on the culture of China, this piece highlights the growth of Chinese online publishing : chapters selling for a few cents each. It's not political writing, but mysteries and romance that are breaking out of the traditional, party-run publishing mold. And it's mostly young writers, as you'd expect. The kicker? All those kids publishing online really just want to get into print. There is some good news for people who like actual books made of paper. Fu and most other Chinese writers still want to see their books in print. Happily for them, publishers increasingly look to the Internet to find the most popular books. City of Books, Shanghai's largest book store, takes up six stories, and more and more, books that first showed up on the Internet ...

Read through for some random interesting links, or scroll to the end for a special invitation for NYC booksellers... * The L.A. Times has a cool article on the future of physical/electronic books , from the perspective of some rare books librarians, with some ideas after my own heart: "Our library is very heavily used," said director Judith Nadler. "The digital and the print-based will continue to coexist. We don't want the electronic instead of the book. We want the electronic and the book." * The New York Observer has taken on the ambitious task of picking the Brooklyn Literary 100 : the most important figures in the Brooklyn literary community, including authors, publishers, editors, etc. (What I like about the map is that it also points out the bookish places in Brooklyn, including bookstores and coffee shops). It's obviously a tad arbitrary, but not enough so for New York Magazine , which has taken the Observer 's list and edited it down to the ...