BOOK WEEK IN ISRAEL, WITH MARGARET ATWOOD

A special edition of Haaretz, to mark Israel's book week.

Margaret Atwood contributed a beautifully written, deeply emotional article to the newspaper Haaretz.

It is called THE SHADOW OVER ISRAEL, and is introduced by a heartfelt poem, The Moment.

Recently, she then says, I was in Israel.  The Israelis I met could not have been more welcoming.  I saw many impressive accomplishments and creative projects, and talked with many different people.  The sun was shining, the waves waving, the flowers were in bloom. Tourists jogged along the beach at Tel Aviv as if everything was normal.

But, there was the Shadow.  Why was everything trembling a little, like a mirage?  Was it like that moment before a tsunami when the birds fly to the treetops and the animals head for the hills because they can feel it coming?

"Every morning I wake up in fear," someone told me. '"hat's just self-pity, to excuse what's happening," said someone else.  Of course, fear and self-pity can both be real.  But by "what's happening," they meant the Shadow.

I'd been told ahead of time that Israelis would try to cover up the Shadow, but instead they talked about it non-stop.  Two minutes into any conversation, the Shadow would appear.  It's not called the Shadow, it's called "the situation." It haunts everything ...

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SECRET DOCUMENTS TO GO ONLINE

Millions of secret messages stored at the World War II code-breaking centre, Bletchley Park, are to be made available online.

Simon Greenish, CEO of the Bletchley Park Trust, said the plan was for the centre's entire archive to be digitised.  A time-consuming project, the first stage alone is expected to take three years. 

It could have been started five years ago, but the Trust has lacked the funding.   Now, electronics company Hewlett-Packard has donated a number of scanners to the centre in Milton Keynes so volunteers can begin the ground-breaking task.
During World War Two, Bletchley Park was home to more than 10,000 men and women who decoded encrypted German messages. Many of the records at the once-secret centre have not been touched for years.

The centre believes there is a good chance that once the papers are scanned and deciphered, previously untold stories will be revealed.

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2:22 PM | 0 comments

THE BATTLE OF THE BUTTONS

Those of you who buy from the online bookstore amazon -- which I guess includes you all -- have probably scarcely noticed the "Add to Cart" or "Add to Basket"  buttons.  All online stores feature that crucial graphic where you click your mouse when you have made up your mind to buy the selected item.  It's easy, and it's automatic.  But what do you do when the button is mysteriously missing?

Obviously, you can't buy the item.  It is like being in a real store where all the salespeople have vanished.  The book (or whatever) is out of reach and unobtainable.

One would think that this would defeat the purpose of having an online store, but according to a fascinating timeline on an Authors Guild sponsored site, WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com, amazon stores have been using the buy buttons as a weapon in a war to dominate publishers and maximize profits.  Back in 2008, after an altercation with Bloomsbury press, amazon.uk whipped the buy buttons off the Bloomsbury book pages, including, incredibly, those featuring JK Rowling.  Little was publicly said, but there must have been a behind the scenes flurry, because after some kind of sorting out of issues, the buttons quietly returned.

Amazon must have been pleased with the sneaky ploy, because within months they had done it again -- to no less than Hachette Livre UK, one of the world's largest publishers.  Authors Guild quotes CEO Tim Hely Hutchinson, who wrote to their authors, "Amazon seems each year to go from one publisher to another making increasing demands in order to achieve richer terms at our expense and sometimes at yours."  Many Hachette books are still minus those vital buttons, as the standoff continues.

Those demands widened to the print-on-demand trade.  In that same year, 2008, Amazon informed a slather of print-on-demand publishers that if their books were not printed by amazon-owned BookSurge, the buy buttons would disappear.  Author Solutions was one outfit to be blacked out  They succumbed, and the buttons returned.  Another firm, Booklocker, did not cave in so easily, filing an ultimately successful anti-trust suit instead.  (Amazon paid $300,000 but admitted no wrongdoing.)

This hurts authors, publishers, and the book trade generally.  You, the reader, can help -- by simply moving on to another online store, if you find that the buy button is missing.

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4:02 PM | 0 comments

FIRST EDITION COLLECTION TO BE SOLD

Well, it seems it is Christmas Carol remembrance moment.  According to the BBC, a first edition of the story, complete with an inscription by the author, Charles Dickens, forms part of a magnificent collection of first editions that is going under the hammer.

Other features of the collection are first editions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.  There is a collection of TS Eliot poems, also with a personal inscription (to none other than Virginia Woolf), a copy of Wilkie Collins's Moonstone in its original cloth, and Samuel Beckett's Murphy in its original DJ.  Charles Darwin, Geoffrey Chaucer and John Milton are other highlights.

Sotheby's English literature specialist, Peter Selley, confides that he felt "rather punch drunk" when he scanned the brilliant array.  "There is not just one highlight -- there is one highlight after another.  It is the finest collection I am ever likely to see in my lifetime."

Obviously, it is an eclectic array.  It does seem a pity, however, that it is going to be broken up.

Offered in a series of lots, the collection is expected to fetch as much as fifteen million pounds.

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3:20 PM | 0 comments

A CHRISTMAS CAROL

June is here, and down in New Zealand, where a wintry blast of rain has predominated for the last eleven days, it feels like a mid-year Christmas -- which makes finding a New York Times discussion of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol feel particularly apt.

Apparently, there is only one surviving version of the manuscript of the classic, held now at the Morgan Library and Museum in Manhattan.  As you can see, it is a bewildering chaos of alterations, corrections, and after-thoughts.  One wonders how it ever metamorphosed into a printed book.

Dickens wrote it because he needed the money, but was not rewarded particularly well.  The print run was 6,000, all with hand-tinted illustrations -- a disastrously expensive decision.  The project was a financial fiasco.  Even a man with the feverishly fertile imagination of Dickens himself could not picture the future of film, pantomime, and drama that lay in the future of this messy little masterpiece.

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1:30 AM | 0 comments

A SKYPE IDEA

According to the latest bulletin of the Authors Guild, the computer phone SKYPE is the gadget du jour for publicizing books.  Needing just a computer, an internet phone, a webcam (which is probably standard on your reasonably new laptop) and a SKYPE account, the mostly free service is widely used by families to keep in touch.  It is also very useful for phone conferences, adding that invaluable element of visual communication.

Publishers have suddenly discovered that they like it as a promotion tool, because it is a lot cheaper than sending authors on tour.  The authors themselves find it is a little strange to invite the world into their living rooms to talk about their books. On the other hand, Andrew Clements (Extra Credit) finds it is an easy way to make contact with the public, yet keep plenty of time for writing, while Brian O'Dea (High) says that it means an author can keep control of the promotion of his or her book.

It sounds very promising as a way to avoid all those wasteful hours on the road, though there is something about face-to-face with current and potential readers that considerably enlivens the writing life.  And how does one promote an author-reader SKYPE session?  It would be interesting to find out. 

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4:08 PM | 0 comments

RACING THE ALPHABET

Crime and mystery writer Sue Grafton started off the alphabet with A is for Alibi in 1982, and since then has worked her way up to U, with ever-increasing popularity.   The print run for the first -- "A" -- book, which introduced hard-boiled heroine Kinsey Millhone, was just 7,500.  The first run for the latest, U is for Undertow, was in the hundreds of thousands, and it is currently number two on the amazon.com crime and mystery bestseller list.

Obviously, everyone is wondering what the author is going to do after "Z" has been written, published, and become that very predictable bestseller.  According to People magazine, Sue Grafton's plan is for "a very long nap--and then I will party."

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