News: Institute d'Egypt, Indie Bookstores and The 99¢ Question

Sinus acting up, and out of fresh saline for irrigation. I had something written and stuff to write as well, but ah, what the heck... Rudolph's red nose might also be a symptom of a sinus problem.

• Caught between between protesters and Egypt's military, the Institute d'Egypt, the research centre set up by Napoleon Bonaparte when the French invaded in the late 18th century, caught fire when both sides clashed. Among the treasured writings housed in the Institute was the handwritten 24-volume Description de l'Egypte, which includes two decades' worth of notes by over 150 French scholars and scientists on Egypt's monuments and its history. Like the Institute, over 190,000 books, journals and writings - some of which were 200 years old - were damaged by the fire, possibly beyond repair.
• News of another death in the literary world were nearly swamped by tributes to the late Christopher Hitchens. So George Whitman's Shakespeare and Company is not the same storied bookstore frequented by Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. Whitman's S&Co, was originally called Le Mistral and is about half a century old. The place is now being managed by his daughter Sylvia, and as seen the likes of Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs.
  
  Speaking of bookstores and old gentlemen: Thank you, Leong Siok Hui, The Star for bringing The Penang Bookshelf to our attention. She also put together a profile of the owner.
• Previously, there was speculation about how Jane Austen died - was she murdered? The same is now being asked of Robert Ludlum, author of the Bourne Identity. Is there something ... undignified or mundane about natural causes, etc that some sensational cause of death needs to be applied to authors of note?
• Will book promos go Bollywood? After completing his book, the first in the Shiva Trilogy, Amish Tripathi made a film trailer as part of the book's marketing. It's not a unique case; there are some video trailers on a web site for a series of alternate history novels depicting Elizabeth I of England as a descendant of a Druidic vampire-killing priestess. My review of the first book has yet to be published.
• Frustrated at having her books pirated, Spanish novelist Lucía Etxebarria has threatened to quit writing. While we can perhaps sympathise with the Basque author, blogger The Digital Reader thinks she should be taking steps to reduce the pirating of her works - like, maybe, introduce cheaper, more accessible e-editions of her books? - instead of merely throwing hissy-fits.
  
  The head-desk inducing irony, according to the blogger, was that Etxebarria did not want to publish e-book versions "because that is easy to pirate. It would have been like throwing it straight to the lions." ...Then again, it's not as if every writer is like Paulo Coelho and can give away free books.
• Elsewhere, people are wondering if 99 cents is too cheap for an e-book. How does one come up with a win-win-win-win pricing scheme for authors, publishers, retailers and readers? One reason why it would be better to price an e-book above 99 cents:
  
  

  The difference in royalty earnings between a self-published book at 99 cents through [Kindle Direct Publishing] and a $2.99 book through [ditto] is roughly $1.66 per book. ... At $1.66 per book, authors need to sell only 24,100 books, or 2008 per month to earn $40,000 per year, not a stellar salary by any means, but enough to make writing more than just a passion. Remember, most indie authors are not selling 2000 copies of their books per month - they’re lucky to sell 50.

  
  It's only a matter of time before 99 cents would cease being a fair price for e-books.
• Teachers in the US are publishing their own textbooks "for niche courses ... for which a suitable book doesn't exist; to self-publish supplementary material for a class; or because sudden curriculum changes can put widely used textbooks out of date", thanks to self-publishing firms. In light of the reported disintegration of the US school system, this bit of news is heartening.
• Write a book, get it published, what could possibly go wrong? Peter Bromhead finds out. Make sure this doesn't happen to you.
• Steven Piersanti, President of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, presents a cheat sheet-style piece about his ten awful truths about book publishing and a list of strategies for responding to them.
• Will the 21st century see the death of books? Nay, says the Guardian. "Far from killing off the book, the digital age is proving a boon to innovative publishers and authors, many of whom are using new technology to breathe life back into old ideas." Profiled are three such innovations: online subscription publishing site Unbound, hybrid books and Boxfiction, "the TV show you read"... what, reading TV?
• Another case for the existence of the physical book: signed, annotated secondhand books as collectibles of historical value.
• Writer and editor Robert McCrum lists fifty things he learnt about the literary life and outlines a new map for the changing landscape that is the world of books.

Me, Bookstore Snob? ...Yes

This came about several days late, mainly because I was wondering if I could word the whole thing better. I'm still wondering about it now. Why send this to TMI? Well, thought I'd give it a shot.

I've included a couple of other links related to the story that I forgot about in the text below. The Internet reacted a lot faster than I thought to the Slate article.

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Happy to be a bookstore snob
first published in The Malaysian Insider, 20 December 2011


"Independent bookstores are expensive, inefficient and don't deserve to be saved."

This snappy headline and the Slate article it was associated with nearly made a bookstore manager cry.

Jen Campbell, who runs the Ripping Yarns bookstore in the UK, is planning a series of bookstore-related articles in response to said piece by Slate's resident tech geek Farhad Manjoo.

What might have got Manjoo's goat was a New York Times article by Richard Russo (a little daisy chain going on here, methinks) that pivots the pro-indie bookstore/anti-Amazon argument on the notion that indies are bastions of literary culture, something which Amazon does nothing to promote.

Though he has criticised some of Amazon's allegedly egregious business practices, Manjoo argues that the company has done more for the literary culture than, perhaps, indie bookstores, which he considers "...the least efficient, least user-friendly, and most mistakenly mythologised local establishments you can find."

And he adds that although Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is "an easy guy to hate... if you're a novelist - not to mention a reader, a book publisher, or anyone else who cares about a vibrant book industry - you should thank him for crushing that precious indie on the corner."

It's quite an interesting piece, and Manjoo makes some cogent points. He's also right about other aspects of bookstore snobbery. Bookstore browsing or haunting, in my case, is a meditative experience, a source of comfort (or an escape) in bad times. Surrounded by shelves and shelves of books, I feel calm. Some days, being in a bookshop makes me want to write.

But his overall argument for Amazon as a better driver of literary culture reminds me of a news report back home that equates a high-income/knowledge country as one that publishes 27,000 books a year.

"Buy more books," they said. We are, judging from the crowds at a warehouse sale I attended months back. But books are meant to be read; how many of those bought books would be read in a month? Two months? And are these the kind of books that really work the gears in your head or merely cranium stuffing? 

Literary culture is more than just the book. It's the people (authors, editors, publishers, book designers, readers and critics) and the institutions (schools, universities, libraries, archives and yes, bookstores). It's the history; the book as we know it has been around for ages. To touch a physical book is to hold the tangible results of centuries of literary evolution, and the hard work of the people and institutions that put it together.

Even as the publishing industry moves towards digitisation, the inevitable loss of some of that will be painful to many. The death of George Whitman, for one, prompts one to ask: what will become of his storied bookstore by the Seine?

A piece of tech or a shiny on-screen user interface doesn't elicit that kind of emotion. Nor does the history of Apple or Steve Jobs gives one that fuzzy warm feeling. (No, I'm sure that buzz's just static electricity.)

Yes, you can still buy physical books from Amazon, maybe with discounts, if you're feeling all tactile and stuff about history and the romance of the book.

But the whole online thing feels cold to me.

The 24/7 convenience is great for long distances and hard-to-get books, but we already spend so much time online for other things, and we don't need another reason to stay wired and indoors.

Bookstores in general are hard to run. Indie bookshops, even more so. Which is why the people who run them are exceptional, especially when they're familiar with their products, the industry and the communities they serve. Some of them are out there, still soldiering on - which might explain why Manjoo's apparent dickishness has strummed more than a few nerves.

Slate readers would note that Manjoo writes this way at times, so the article doesn't necessarily reflect his character.

The extinction of the bookstore would just mean one less excuse to leave the house. However, it would also mean an end to one of the connections between the people who make books and those who read them - which are already fraying.

Education systems are deteriorating in some parts of the world, even as our collective attention spans crave faster, smaller bursts of entertainment. The business model of the big bookstore and the rise of the mega-selling superstar authors are partly to blame for the disconnect. Pushing big names out big stores in huge numbers does not necessarily indicate a growing reading culture - just more people buying books.

I'm aware that I'm arguing this from a mainly emotional angle. Perhaps with good reason. The need to express ourselves and the hunger for knowledge stems from passion. I don't go nuts at all the books I see on the shelves, but there's a certain connection I can make with it that I can't with a piece of tech.

Odd, considering my long IT background. But maybe not - it would explain the discomfort of the eight years I've been in IT.

Are indie bookstore lovers hopeless touchy-feely romantic about their weathered brick-and-mortar hangouts? Likely; in my case, "Hell, yes."

The digital transformation in the way we read and write books is unavoidable, but what is the publishing industry without the passion to write, package, archive and read through all that material? What could we publish or market without the urge to think, discover, dream, discuss and argue - and write or type it all down?

I believe it's the same kind of flame that burned in the bosoms of Jobs, Gates, et al - one can only be kindled by human interaction, conversation and sharing of ideas.

Technology like the Internet has certainly helped in bringing minds together and made sharing easier. But to say that online bookstores are better and more efficient at nurturing literary culture, well... wouldn't that be mistaking the medium for the message?

News: Hitchens, Manjoo and More Bad Books

Great Gutenberg, lots of news this week. Perhaps the biggest one is the passing of Christopher Hitchens, the combative, well-known atheist writer and journalist.

Expect these to become popular in the coming days

His last book, Mortality, will be out next year.

Some of his greatest Slate pieces can be found here. He even took time to comment on the Allah issue. I think that was the first time I got acquainted with his writings. Also:

• Virginia Tech was shaken up days ago by another shooting, where a policeman was killed. The institution achieved infamy as the site of one of the biggest campus shootings in 2007. But there was, according to author Matthew Pearl in his book The Professor's Assassin, another shooting incident that happened there - in 1840. Does this make Virginia Tech the most shot-up campus ever in the US?
• Slate tech writer Farhad Manjoo further stirs a teacup storm by suggesting that Amazon does more for literary culture than independent bookstores. I'd drafted a take on it, but such was the overwhelming response to that, I'm having second thoughts. Jen Campbell of the Ripping Yarns bookshop in the UK intends to respond with a series of bookstore-related blog posts. The Christian Science Monitor has one article about it.
• The reported flagging of Lee Kuan Yew: Hard Truths to Keep Singapore Going as haram by JAKIM generated quite a bit of buzz, with several voices weighing in. Among the latest was Dina Zaman's "Oh! Woe to the book lover" in The Star. No word yet from the Home Ministry yet on the status of that book, or the others that JAKIM flagged for banning. I'm hoping we won't have to wait for nine months.
• On a somewhat related note: Due to a misspelling, a book called Singapore Sucks! will be reviewed. The application for an import permit for the "series of satirical short stories, poems and essays about life in Singapore" listed the book as Singapore S. The editor was surprised by the decision to review the book because copies of it have been selling in Singapore for months before that.
• After much see-sawing, the controversial novel Interlok was reportedly withdrawn from the school syllabus. Perkasa is apparently crying foul, implying that it's a ploy to gain Indian votes for the rumoured upcoming general elections.
• Our government is prepared to allocate funds to writers to boost book industry, which is great. Utusan Publications and Distributors Sdn Bhd executive director Dr Ahmad Hairi Abu Bakar also said, "To achieve developed nation status by 2020, the nation needs to publish 27,000 titles annually compared to 18,000-20,000 titles presently." Okay, but how many of those books will actually be read? And how many of those books will actually help create a learning society?
• Amazon's best-selling books for 2011. The Mill River Recluse by Darcie Chan and The Abbey by Chris Culver made the list based solely on Kindle sales and were independently published using Kindle Direct Publishing.
• "How we do not kill each other": Author and former Gawker editor Emily Gould and Ruth Curry interview each other about their indie e-book business.
• Another chapter on the e-book price war between publishers and retailers.
• The New Statesman asks: Do books "prime people for terrorism"?
• Reader's Digest cuts 150 positions.

MPH Quill Issue 32, Oct-Dec 2011 - At Last

Frankly, this should be called the MPH Quill December issue. But at least it's - oh dear printing press gods, finally! - out. Flipped through the pages of a copy yesterday morning.

MPH Quill Issue 32, Oct-Dec 2011 cover (left) and part of
the contents pages

The cover stories are all about e-books and digital publishing, in conjunction with the official launch of MPH's e-publishing arm, MPH Digital. Oon Yeoh talks about the growth potential of e-books, while MPH Senior Manager of Business Development Rodney Toh answers some questions on e-publishing.

Eric Forbes interviews Marco Robinson (Know When to Close the Deal and Suddenly Grow Rich! (2011)) and Samantha Bruce-Benjamin (The Art of Devotion (2010)). Also featured are authors Neel Mukherjee (A Life Apart (2010)), June Hutton (Underground (2009)) and Lauren Kate (the Fallen series).

Author interviews by Eric Forbes: Marco Robinson (left) and
Samantha Bruce-Benjamin

Quill also speaks to Mohd Khair Ngadiron, the managing director/CEO of the Malaysian National Institute of Translation (Institut Terjemahan Negara Malaysia or ITNM) and Japri Bujang Masli, acting CEO of state library and depository Pustaka Negeri Sarawak (Pustaka).

Amir Muhammad reveals the inspirations behind the catchy book covers from his new imprint Fixi. We would've loved to include the latest release Zombijaya (2011) and the upcoming Tabu and Kelabu, but we were in a rush to close the issue.

Covers and authors of pulp fiction titles by Fixi

Also: Lee Su Kim shares how she put together her book Kebaya Tales: Of Matriarchs, Maidens, Mistresses and Matchmakers. Janet Tay heads for the hills to escape her writer's block, but even so, distractions abound.

Alexandra Wong tries her hand at copywriting and realises that "selling out" isn't so bad, after all. Ellen Whyte takes readers to the Spanish city of Valladolid, the place author Cervantes (Don Quixote) and poet and playwright Jose Zorilla settled in.

Alexandra Wong's corporate writing article (left) and
Ellen Whyte's Valladolid travel piece

Quite a lot of stuff, plus some book news and more.

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Quill is a magazine on books and the reading life in Malaysia.

Since 2003, Quill has been recommending the best and upcoming titles in bookstores. The magazine supports Malaysian and international authors, providing exclusive interviews and events coverage. For aspiring writers, there are articles on developing the writing craft by established authors. Find reviews of noteworthy fiction and non-fiction, as well as travel, food and lifestyle pieces.

Quill is free for members of MPH's Readers' Circle. It can also be purchased at newsstands nationwide.

"Mofo" Is Not A Spanish Word

I love the title of this book. It's the perfect send-off line for hated politicians everywhere. Mine's a long list, but at the top of my head are several, including one James Richard Perry.

In 6 August, the governor of Texas led a 30,000-strong prayer rally at a Houston stadium - one of the strongest signals of his intent to join the race to be the Republican Party's presidential candidate.

Anticipating that, New York Times best-selling author James C Moore proposed a book that maybe suggests why it would be a bad idea to put him in the Oval Office. Publisher Henry Holt took it on, but after the manuscript was completed, Perry's polling numbers slumped as it became clear that he's not quite what the party had in mind as a credible adversary to Obama.

The gaffes might have something to do with that.

In a debate, he couldn't remember one of the government departments he wanted to axe as part of spending cuts (Department of Energy). He forgot that the legal voting age in the US was 18, not 21. In an interview, he couldn't recall the name of a US Supreme Court judge. He mistakenly called a bankrupt energy company a "country". And the list goes on.

Anyway, Henry Holt cancelled the book. But Moore and co-author Jason Stanford decided to publish the book on the Amazon Kindle. The "engaging, imminently readable book," said Mary Pauline Lowry in the Huffington Post, "has moved several times into the Top 10 political titles on Amazon, providing another heartening example of the way e-books and the Internet are helping authors to regain agency over their work."

In Adios, Mofo: Why Rick Perry Will Make America Miss George W. Bush, Moore and Stanford chart the rise of this dude from Paint Creek, West Texas to a Republican presidential nominee:

...Who preached abstinence to school kids. And ended up with the most teen births in the country. Opposed gay marriage so vehemently he accidentally turned Texas into the gay marriage capital for post-op transsexuals. Pushed to privatize state highways and created corruption so huge it could be seen from space. Literally.

The air in Rick Perry’s Texas is polluted to the point that some schools have to cancel football practice because it is dangerous to breathe. His state budget is such a mess that his cuts threaten the jobs of 100,000 teachers. Perry campaigns as a “proud American in love with his country.” But he threatened to have Texas secede. Texas is offering America another conservative, so godly, so ineffably manly that not only does he jog with a laser-sighted semi-automatic handgun, but he asked to be on the front page of the paper just to make it abundantly clear that he was most definitely not gay.

...Moore ... teams up with Stanford ... to tell you the unintentionally hilarious stories about how Rick Perry is so bad at governing that it's been said he couldn't lead a silent prayer.

Sold? I am. But here's an excerpt from the book, if you're curious. It describes the scene at that prayer rally.

Even without the book, Perry's uninspiring performances during the debates and press coverage on the man just screams, "Don't vote for this guy!" And he's probably not the worst among the GOP's current line-up of presidential nominees.

Some of us outside the US watching the GOP electoral circus would maybe chortle and delight in this sign of an imminent implosion of, no thanks to Iraq and Afghanistan, an unpopular superpower. But we should all be worried.

While there's no guarantee that Obama will be any better than this lot in his second term, there's the more palpable fear that the next Republican in the White House will, in a way, usher a return to the bad old days of "if you're not with us, you're against us".

The GOP primaries are, at least, being viewed with alarm in Germany, as indicated by a scathing Der Spiegel article. Harper's Magazine contributing editor Scott Horton translated some of the more salient paragraphs, and sums it up for all of us:

"At a time of mounting crisis, when much of the world is looking to the United States for leadership and initiative, the celebration of sleaze and ignorance that has marked the Republican primary is damaging the reputation of the nation as a whole. Even those who despise the G.O.P. should be concerned about the depths to which the party has sunk."


The phrase "Adios, Mofo" became an online sensation after Perry used it in a mocking sign-off to Ted Oberg, a television reporter for ABC. The e-book was released on Amazon Kindle in the US sometime last month.

News: Amazon, Freebie Freezes and Clumsy Prose

• Amazon being accused of more and more predatory tactics. Is it time to Occupy Amazon?
• Publisher William Morrow attaches provisos to review copies of books given to book bloggers. "Message is essentially: if you don't review enough of the books we send you, in the timeframe we want you to, you're out," tweets Rebecca Schinsky, a.k.a. @bookladysblog. The beginning of the end of book blogger freebies?
• Another digital self-publishing success story: Lawyer Darcie Chan's e-published novel The Mill River Recluse. On a related note, the e-reader wave draws closer.
• A group of people that's keeping the physical book alive: book designers.
• Another poet quits the TS Eliot Prize shortlist over sponsorship by hedge fund firm Aurum.
• What should be quite obvious: Why Amazon consumer book reviews cannot be trusted. Not saying that bona fide book reviews are 100 per cent all that...
• David Guterson's modern take on Oedipus wins Literary Review's Bad Sex Award for 2011, beating the likes of Haruki Murakami (1Q84), Lee Child (The Affair) and Stephen King (11/22/63).

Saving JFK

"Hot book!" they said, so I chiselled the review out of my glacial writer's block. But my speed record for reviewing David Sedaris's Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk - two days after reading - is still unbroken. And likely to remain that way.

I was initially worried that I wouldn't be able to appreciate the book due to my shallow understanding of Stephen King's body of work. The last - and only other - book of his I'd read was Pet Sematary, a terrifying tale of Indian graveyards and demon-possessed zombie pets (and people). In contrast, 11/22/63 is a different sort of animal, and it even ends... happily.

A little disappointed that no coupon was attached with it. RM87.90 is a bit steep, even if it's Stephen King.

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Saving JFK

Stephen King's tale of time travel explores the possibilities in — and perils of — changing the past 'for the better'

first published in The Star, 09 December 2011


A rule of thumb I follow regarding books: If the author's name is bigger than the title, caveat emptor.

When the author is Stephen King, however, perhaps there is some justification. Even more so when the title is the word-less 11/22/63. That's Nov 22, 1963, the day John Fitzgerald Kennedy was shot. And yes, there is reason to be wary of this book – but only because it might get hold of you and never let go. The first time I opened it, I almost skipped lunch.

The much-anticipated novel about a time-travelling English teacher who inherits a dying man's quest to stop the assassination of the 35th US President pretty much lives up to the hype that has surrounded it since the publishing world first got an inkling about it.

Jake Epping is, in his own words, not a crying man. But an essay by one of his adult students, janitor Harry Dunning, manages to make him weep. It's not (just) the atrocious grammar and spelling. It was a horrific account of how, as a child, Dunning survived his father's drunken, murderous rampage that claimed the rest of his family.

Then he meets Al Templeton, the owner of a diner that has a portal to an exact time and date back in time: 11.58am, Sept 9, 1958. Who cares how the portal came to be, as long as Templeton gets to buy cheap, good-tasting, chemical- and hormone-free beef from the good old days. A sceptical Epping goes through the portal, and falls in love with the root beer he buys at a store – no preservatives, Templeton guesses. We never know if it's A&W's.

Of course there's a catch. On his shopping trips back in time, Templeton had toyed with the idea of changing American history by saving JFK. But Templeton gets cancer before he can do anything, and he's not sure when his time will be up, so he appoints Epping as the heir to his mission. But when Epping has second thoughts after his attempt to fix Dunning's future backfires, Templeton commits suicide. With the weight of a dead man's last wishes on his shoulders, our sentimental English teacher takes a seemingly permanent step into the past.

King is said to have done heaps of research for this book. Through the words of Epping, now George Amberson back in 1958, we experience the life of an ordinary American in the golden post WWII era. Much of the book really is about how Epping/Amberson adapts to and lives in the past, which he does perhaps a little too well. We look into his head, see through his eyes, hear with his ears.

The book tries to help us experience those days. Store signs, newspaper headlines and billboards are announced in capital letters and different fonts. Phonetic spelling of some words in the dialogue goad us to read them aloud. Go on, say "beer” the Maine way: "beeyah”. It's fun ... for the first two times. Yes, I heard about the Easter eggs, too. However, I could only spot references to The Shawshank Redemption and It in the pages; fans of King will undoubtedly find more.

It's quite some time to 1963, so Epping/Amberson passes the time by teaching at a school in Texas. And getting involved with its pretty, popular librarian, Sadie Dunhill. But it's only a matter of time before someone discovers the truth about him.

This is quite a good read despite the heavy American flavour, the long drawn-out build-up to the confrontation with JFK's assassin, and the shocking consequences that follow, not to mention the multi-font all-caps assault on the eyes. The boring and incredible parts where Epping/Amberson stalks Lee Harvey Oswald and the explanation of time travel physics barely register on the disbelief suspension scale. It's Stephen King, after all.

Wish I could say you can't put it down, but if you're reading the hardcover version, you'll have to or you might develop a cramp bearing the weight of this 840-page tome in your arms. Looks like King threw just about everything he'd researched into this book.

Hints at a yearning for a rose-tinted past echo throughout King's almost fairy tale-like depiction of the US half a century ago, calling to mind the Camelot myth spun around JFK not long after his death. Perhaps the question, "what if Kennedy survived?” is a yearning for a return to those days, when a charismatic young senator took the White House against all odds and, later, as president, faced up to a belligerent world power an ocean away under the shadow of a mushroom cloud – and won a desperate gamble.

Not only does today's US hardly resemble that storied Arthurian realm, its people might also be wistful about a return to Camelot. King's 11/22/63 gives us a tantalising peek at such a possibility, but also cautions us that it is perhaps better to let the past be and work on the now – and towards the future.

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11/22/63

Stephen King
Scribner (2011)
849 pages (Hardcover)
Fiction
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2728-2