Bookninja

The best advice I’ve seen on this whole thing is to act like you have the virus even if you don’t. So stay in and isolate yourself from others for a few weeks until the system can cope with the cases already out there. So, here’s an extra long Today In How Corona Virus is Nailing the Book Industry Coffin Shut post to keep you busy at home (is there really anything else to talk about anyway?):

• Diary of an Italian editor;
• The poor, coffee-and-bookless people of France (let’s hope this virus doesn’t affect the French worlds of wine, cigarettes, and withering looks;
• World of books braces for future (thankfully, this is what the world of books has been dealing with for nearly 20 years — a scary future it neither understands, nor is prepared for);
• Delivery by skateboard: small bookstores trying anything to keep head above water;
• To wit: super-dedicated Hunter Street Books owner in Peterborough will hand deliver your books (sending my address, Michelle… I hear flights are cheap right now…);
• Dennis Johnson of Melville House is also trying to do some good for small bookstores;
• The first lines of classic works rewritten for pandemic;
• Quill collates cancelled events;
• I am critically too old to know of or remember Animorphs, but apparently you millennial types gobbled them like cookies back in the 90s… well, they’re all free at Scholastic (purveyor of fine plastic garbage, CDs, and dumbed down movie tie-in shit for kids via their formerly glorious catalogs);
• How kidlit authors are stepping up during the crisis;
• And yet, Canadian Children’s Book Week tour is cancelled;
• The Americans have some strong feelings on canceled vs cancelled;
• Celebrities are here to save the day by reading to your kids over the social medias;
• Canadian Heritage says its here to help orgs that are losing out because of covid-19;
• Canada Council has some advice as well;

UPDATE: This weekend, we received 700+ web orders at https://t.co/ihLmVudBJ6. We normally get 5-10 a day. Needless to say, your support helps keep us going. We are processing these as fast as we can. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

— Literati Bookstore (@LiteratiBkstore) March 16, 2020

This BookNet article asks: Should poets be on Instagram? I think the question should be more like, “Should Instragram poets be counted as part of poetry sales?” Maybe they should get their own category so our parents will stop asking us why we make no money when “that pretty girl who draws the flowers online” is a millionaire.

But then I asked myself,
Who are you
to say these things?
Who are you?
and my self replied,
You have always known.
So I was like,
That’s a cop out, Self,
but my self just shrugged.

In 2014, Instapoets accounted for just over 12% of all poetry sales. By 2016, half of all poetry sales were for books by poets with strong Instagram followings. Instapoets’ domination peaked in 2017, when their titles accounted for just over 80% of all poetry sales.

In 2018, Instapoets accounted for just under 1% of all poetry ISBNs with sales, but made up 70% of all units sold. Pretty compelling!

While it looks like Instapoets’ domination may have peaked in 2017, it’s hard to say what could happen in the future.

Depends on whose future we decide to go with. Mine is particularly grim.

Not sure why we’re even talking about this stuff anymore… Oh, right, “keeping the flame of civilization lit so its light might survive the coming darkness”… THAT old thing. (My 2003 book of apocalyptic poems, The Hunter, doesn’t seem so far fetched now, does it, Buying Public?)

• On making ballet out of ancient lit;
• For those of you interested in treating this crisis like a reading vacation and are just looking for something easy: USA Today recommends some books to take the edge off (I find USA Today is a great resource for people who don’t want to, or can’t, think critically);
• Followup: Entertainment Weekly is also brainless, and maybe we need that rn;
• Ooops… Bible museum displaying fake Dead Sea scroll fragments;
• Lionel Gelber Prize awarded;
• Oooh! Ken Liu SF stories coming to TV;
• Prix Voltaire shortlist;
• Better late than never? Blooming as a reader later in life;

It’s Monday and the proverbial shit has hit its associated fan, and we’re getting a full dose of realistic dystopia. Turns out it’s less about tricked out wasteland hot rods competing for fuel (and even less so about watching sad-but-pretty Ryan Gosling navigate his own desire for humanity) and more about people walking around with crusty butts because no toilet paper. Guys, do us all a favour and just listen to the experts. Follow the advice of people who went to school to learn about this shit. You don’t know jack, except what they tell you. So take their word as gospel. This situation is why we invented experts. When the great poetry crisis of 2030 strikes, it’ll be me you listen to. Until then, it’s them.

Updates below:

• Book business disrupted (buy some books online from small sellers, or call and order);
• Canada Reads postponed? Time to crack open each other’s heads and feast on the goo inside? (Whatever will CBC Books post about five times a day now? Books news?);
• Libraries are dropping like flies (NYC, Toronto, St. John’s… Oh, wait… WE STILL DON’T HAVE A FRIGGING DOWNTOWN LIBRARY);
• Even iconic indy Powell’s is closing;
• Both the NYT and the Washington Post are taking down the paywall on their coronavirus coverage (the WSJ also did the same, but I figure it’s mostly conservative types screaming and lists of investor suicides);

How to repair a binding.

This is a interesting piece on how a little scrap hoarding by someone back when (and I do mean scraps), has led to a “national library” from the ruins of whatever created your self-declared, still-unrecognized country in the first place. (Post only to highlight the library building, not to state anything political around it — this is still a place where homosexuality is illegal, etc.)

At the time, Somaliland was mostly trying to forget. For three years, it had been bombed into submission in a brutal civil war waged by Somalia’s government in Mogadishu. Up to 90% of its capital, Hargeisa, was destroyed. It had recently declared its independence, trying to build something new from the rubble. 

But one day, Mr. Jama thought, Somaliland might want to remember.

Three decades later, the papers he gathered in 1991 have become the foundation of the library and informal national archive he is building here in Hargeisa. Like Somaliland itself, the project is a radically DIY institution, built from the bottom up with little outside help. And also like the self-declared republic, which is not recognized by a single other nation, its very existence is an act of defiance. 

“This country is poor. Most of its budget must go to the basic needs of its citizens, I understand that,” says Mr. Jama in the melodic, Italian-inflected English he perfected during his years as a mathematics professor in Pisa. “But when you remove arts and culture from the equation of a society, you remove the thing that makes humans humane. I wanted to make sure that never happened here.” 

• Report: digital readers are more likely to be writers than paper readers;
• I both pity and envy all the writers who have been working on, or are about to release pandemic novels;
• Academy of American Arts and Letters literature award winners;
• NBCC awards given out without glitz;
• BC and Yukon book prizes announce shortlists (go Ivan! go Sonnet!);
• Reflections on Jack Kerouac, noted Gap model, on his 98th birthday;
• More on Amazon being flooded with self-published coronavirus books (if this pandemic doesn’t teach the world some critical thinking skills, I don’t really know what will);
• A book on presidential books (Bush’s presidential book will be a (right lovable, these days) pop up, and Trump’s will be a sticky VHS tape of him getting peed on);

As pieces of information, you could copy a book as many times as you wanted, or in the case of libraries, loan it out that many times. This article labels publishers as “greedy” for limiting the number of times an e-book can be checked out at the library, but I’ll bet there’s more to it than that. I understand the point that libraries could preserve books forever, but there’s all sorts of stuff wrapped up for authors too in what constitutes “in print” vs not. My hope is that some publishing types might comment with opinions here.

But why can only one person borrow one copy of an ebook at a time? Why are the waits so damn interminable? Well, it might not surprise you at all to learn that ebook lending is controversial in certain circles: circles of people who like to make money selling ebooks. Publishers impose rules on libraries that limit how many people can check out an ebook, and for how long a library can even offer that ebook on its shelves, because free, easily available ebooks could potentially damage their bottom lines. Libraries are handcuffed by two-year ebook licenses that cost way more than you and I pay to own an ebook outright forever.

Ebooks could theoretically circulate throughout public library systems forever, preserving books that could otherwise disappear when they go out of print—after all, ebooks can’t get damaged or lost. And multiple library-goers could technically check out one ebook simultaneously if publishers allowed. But the Big Five have contracts in place that limit ebook availability with high prices—much higher than regular folks pay per ebook—and short-term licenses. The publishers don’t walk in and demand librarians hand over the ebooks or pay up, but they do just…disappear.

This is a question I struggle with every day. And not just about once-acceptable, now-problematic texts/books. People, too. At what point do you just give up and let them go. Given my somewhat strident views on things, the answer for me is largely: right away. Because as this article points out, it’s mostly not worth it. But there are a few things and people I cling to, out of love more than loyalty, that I am having a hard time with. I try to use them as negative examples, or a sort of critical thinking whetstone, to shape and sharpen my own mind and heart by looking at them with eyes wide open.

We have the privilege of living in a time where thousands of new books release every single day. It’s easier than it ever has been to gain access to good stories, the kind that don’t promote harmful stereotypes or condone or promote racism. There’s really no reason to cling to books that promote awful things – and there never was.

The classification of a harmful book though, that’s what kept tripping me up. What makes a book harmful? Does a throwaway sentence or the treatment of a minor character count? Is it anything that makes you uncomfortable when you read it? Or is there a need to read books that make you uncomfortable in order to understand those who are different from you?

• Terry Pratchett tribute by his agent (who was also his first publisher);
• Dirty laundry on the line — books about the book industry;
• That time the Dutch turned Hitler into a bug and stepped on him;
• There are worse places to be a poet than Canada… In fact, most other places are worse — Turkish poet in prison for 25 years for a crime he didn’t commit;
• Winners of the CBC writing challenge for teens — watch for these names!;