November 25, 2005

Andrew Wylie is a big wheel.

The Times Online guest contributors Opinionb:

Both Amazon and Google are involved in the search for new models. Many alternatives are being considered. As things stand in this rapidly shifting landscape, it’s contemplated that you will be able to access and buy pages of a book from Amazon; or buy a book for $25, and acquire a digital copy of that book for an additional sum. Then you will be able to start reading a book at home, in your living room; continue reading it on a handheld device as you travel to work; and finish reading the book in bed at night.

From Google, you might rent a book retailing for $25 at a price of only $2.50 per day. The book would sit on Google’s server, and your access would be shut down 24 hours after payment. Or, as Random House has recently suggested, you could buy part or all of a book at 5 cents per page — 1 cent to the website retailer, and 4 cents split between publisher and author — from Amazon or Google.

But it’s hard to kill old habits: when publishers initially thought about cookbooks in the digital realm, they felt that individual pages should be acquired at perhaps five times the price of the very best non-fiction, fiction or poetry. After all, one recipe can feed an army, whereas “To be or not to be” can only engender alienation.

Can one extrapolate from that model, and assume that relatively unfamiliar words or passages will be judged correspondingly less valuable, and deserving to be sold at a lower price than more familiar passages? We’re at a decisive point in the development of our industry,

The Australian: Not so desperate housewives [November 26, 2005]:

KATH & Kim’s “almost feature”, Da Kath & Kim Code, picks up where the third series left off. In that series, which has just been repeated on the ABC, we learned Kath was reading the “Incy Wincy abridged version” of Dan Brown’s blockbuster The Da Vinci Code. As the telemovie opens, Kath and her husband Kel, a metrosexual and purveyor of fine meats, have just returned from a Da Vinci Code tour overseas. Kath’s interest in another man sparks a marital crisis, while Brett and Kim have serious “iss-yews” after he gets a promotion and she becomes Fountain Lakes’s power trophy wife.

washingtonpost.com - Live Online: “The death toll in Darfur is climbing. While nearly 30,000 Sudanese have died on account of Sudan’s destructive government, the United Nations has been loathe to intervene. Many are demanding reasons for the nonintervention.

Daniel Wolf, a Washington lawyer and president of the George Wolf Operating Foundation, has just returned from a fact-finding mission in Sudan with Refugees International. He will be live online at 2 ET on Thursday, August 5, to explain why action in Sudan is critical.”

Read this great interview where my old friend Dan Wolf explains Darfur. He does a better job than most of the WaPo correspondents usually do at remaining civil and to the point in response to idiotic on-line questioners.

This has to be considered a top story for book-lovers.

Vladimir Nabokov’s last novel will never be read! .:. NewKerala - India’s Top Online Newspaper:

Washington : Normally, an author writes a book and then finds a publisher to publish it, but renowned Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov had expressed wish that his last novel, ‘The Original Of Laura’, be destoryed on his death in 1977.

To fulfill Nabokov’s last wish, the unpublished novel, which is said to be about “a real Laura and a non-real Laura”, is now set to be consigned to flames, without scholars or members of the public getting a chance to read it.

The writer had asked his wife Vera to destory the manuscript for the novel, but she couldn’t bring herself to carry out his wishes and left the decision to their son Dmitri when she died in 1991. After Dmitri considered placing the manuscript in the trust of an establishment, which would allow limited access for scholars, he wrote an email to New York Observer columnist Ron Rosenbaum telling of his plans to destroy the book before his own death.

“If what he says in his email holds true, it’s for the flames,” Contactmusic quoted Rosenbaum as saying.