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LongPen in The Scotsman:

WHEN Margaret Atwood first had the idea of a machine that could allow a writer to sign personalised copies of her books at a distance, many people thought she was just having a dig at the gruelling schedule publishers tend to set for their touring authors.

Not so. Her invention, LongPen, produced by Unotchit (”you no touch it”), a company she set up last year, has already passed the prototype stage and will, she reveals, be ready for a full demonstration at the London Book Fair (5-7 March 2006).

“You can’t be in five countries at once and someone’s always feeling left out,” she explains. “This might help. I could sign in one country, there’d be a video feed to another country, and the machine would produce my signature and any requested message there.

Atwood is - patently - a genius and should be seen at all costs when Mr Byng’s Myths masterclass rolls into Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum on Monday. And get a copy of her new book, The Penelopeiad - signed, if possible, in the old-fashioned way - while you still can. (See feature, page 6.)

GHOSTLY CONTACTS

Margaret Atwood is something of a sore point with me, as she writes novels (THE HANDMAIDEN’S TALE) that are by any reasonable definition science fiction, but are not shelved that way. Why do some “literary” authors who write inferior science fiction get a free pass into the “mainstream”? It’s a mystery.

Now Atwood has invented a gizmo. Not just any gizmo, but a long cylindrical rocket-shaped gizmo that provides authors with the ultra-cool and highly science-fictional capability of telepresence.

How much longer can she hide out in the literary fiction ghetto? Let’s start shelving Margaret Atwood where she belongs!

Uncategorized science fiction, What's New for Book-Lovers, YA

This is a nice find. I love blurbs.

Writers’ Representatives, LLC: The Greatest Blurb of All Time:

The Greatest Blurb of All Time
By R.W. Emerson

Concord, Massachusetts, 21 July, 1855

DEAR SIR—I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of “Leaves of Grass.” I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat & mean. I give you joy of your free & brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It has the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging.

I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real & available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, & have felt much like striking my tasks, & visiting New York to pay you my respects.

R. W. Emerson

Uncategorized What's New for Book-Lovers

Publishers Marketplace: Recent Deals reports:

Christine Kole MacLean’s PULLING OUT, an edgy coming-of-age story about a high school senior from a fundamentalist Christian home, who gets swept off her feet by a college professor, to Andrew Karre at Flux, in a nice deal

That “swept off her feet” is pretty strange coming in between “high school senior from a fundamentalist Christian home” and “college professor.” Explain to me how this isn’t a novel about something close to statutory rape? The age difference and power imbalance are compounded by the perception that the young woman has a sheltered background.

Uncategorized What's New for Book-Lovers

Independent Online Edition > Business News:

Harry Potter and the half-baked print run: 2.5 million books unsold in the US

Now, Scholastic’s chairman, Richard Robinson, whose father Robbie founded the firm in 1920, admits bookshops have been left with 2.5 million unsold copies….

…However, unlike franchises such as The Lord of the Rings, where the film sparked a boom in sales of Tolkien, the opposite appears to be the case for Harry Potter. It seems Potter films mostly attract those who have already read the book.

Last year, when Warner Brothers released the film Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, reaping $761m (£428m) at the box office, a mere 60,000 copies of the book were sold.
… far from guaranteeing high profitability, Scholastic’s performance since the first Potter in 1998 has been woeful, even though it has netted $600m in revenue from the franchise.

Over the past three years, Scholastic’s share price has halved, losing 10 per cent this month, and operating margins have dropped from 9 per cent to 6.4 per cent. …

Wow, that’s embarrassing for Scholastic.

Returns are the Avada Kevadra of the book business.

Uncategorized Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

For sale: Britain’s underground city - Sunday Times - Times Online:

WELCOME to Cold War City (population: 4). It covers 240 acres and has 60 miles of roads and its own railway station. It even includes a pub called the Rose and Crown.

The most underpopulated town in Britain is being put on the market. But there will be no estate agent’s blurb extolling the marvellous views of the town for sale: true, it has a Wiltshire address, but it is 120ft underground.

The subterranean complex that was built in the 1950s to house the Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan’s cabinet and 4,000 civil servants in the event of a Soviet nuclear attack is being thrown open to commercial use. Just four maintenance men are left.

Property developers looking for the ultimate place to get away from it all need not apply. The site has a notional value of �5m but there is a catch. It is available only as part of a private finance initiative that involves investing in the military base on the surface above.

And what is today’s plan B?

Uncategorized Proliferated

Death on strike in Nobel laureate Saramago’s novel - Yahoo! News:

“All my books without exception deal with the improbable and the impossible,” the Portuguese writer said at the novel’s launch in Sao Paulo, Brazil, on Thursday night.

The story depicts Death as a woman who goes on strike because she is fed up with being hated by people.

Chaos follows. Hospitals fill up, people keep growing old without dying, and the pension system overloads. Soon the church campaigns for Death to return.

“In the end we discover the only condition for living is to die,” said Saramago, who will turn 83 next month.

“It is an extremely funny book. The reader will smile many times and even chuckle,” he said.

A couple of thoughts.

1. It is ominous when the 82-year-old author says his book is extremely funny. Laff-a-minute, I’ll bet …

2. This author is writing fantasy and science fiction in Portugese, and he’s got a Nobel Prize. Terry Pratchett is writing about the same material in English. I’m sure Saramago is good, but I’m also sure he’s not as good as Pratchett. Why isn’t Pratchett getting the Nobel Prize?

Update: Grumpy Old Bookman calls Pratchett “the best living UK novelist.”

Uncategorized google, science fiction, What's New for Book-Lovers, Writing, YA