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The Book Calendar 2009
Website that introduces a new book everyday.
http://www.thebookcalendar.com

I think every library blogger should resolve in 2009 to publish a book. With POD publishing like lulu and createspace, it's "mostly" free and incredibly easy.

Edit your blog and republish in print.

And buying (I used createspace) copies of my book was really cheap, so I was able to give all my friends copies (that's 3 copies for my 3 friends, not counting cats!).

Maybe if enough bloggers become publishers, we can create a whole genre of blog publishing,... or not. But get off your lazy ass and do it. Or sit on your busy ass and do it, whatever gets it done.

Now if Stephen would only add my story that I recorded for him to one of his podcasts, you can hear about how/why I did it (which is basically what I just wrote here).

Books: 5 Worst of 2008: EW critics rank ''The Gargoyle,'' ''Chasing Harry Winston,'' and ''Bright Shiny Morning'' among the year's worst

It wouldn't be the first time the Bible was censored.

But it is probably the first time that the Bible has been published serially, in a sort of magazine format, with somewhat sexually explicit pictures. Then there was the homoerotica...

Yeah, it should surprise no one that this didn't work out too well in the "land of the free."

More from The Local.se.

The publisher of a disputed Holocaust memoir has canceled the book, adding the name Herman Rosenblat to an increasingly long list of literary fakers and ending with a heartbreaking crash his story — embraced by Oprah Winfrey among others — of meeting his future wife at a concentration camp.

"I wanted to bring happiness to people," Rosenblat said in a statement issued Saturday through his agent, Andrea Hurst. "I brought hope to a lot of people. My motivation was to make good in this world."

Rosenblat's "Angel at the Fence" had been scheduled to come out in February, but Berkley Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), withdrew the memoir following allegations by scholars, friends and family members that his tale was untrue.

Full article here.

Article in the New York Times:

Book publishers and booksellers are full of foreboding — even more than usual for an industry that’s been anticipating its demise since the advent of television. The holiday season that just ended is likely to have been one of the worst in decades. Publishers have been cutting back and laying off. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt announced that it wouldn’t be acquiring any new manuscripts, a move akin to a butcher shop proclaiming it had stopped ordering fresh meat.

Bookstores, both new and secondhand, are faltering as well. Olsson’s, the leading independent chain in Washington, went bankrupt and shut down in September. Robin’s, which says it is the oldest bookstore in Philadelphia, will close next month. The once-mighty Borders chain is on the rocks. Powell’s, the huge store in Portland, Ore., said sales were so weak it was encouraging its staff to take unpaid sabbaticals.

Full article here.

The idea that the internet is transforming our buying habits was first popularised in an article written by Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of the technology magazine Wired, in October 2004. The article, titled "The long tail", became a blog, a best-selling book and a marketing mantra. In other words, says Page, the extra choice available online is of little economic worth to the retailer. "Scarcity in conventional retailers might be a constraint," he says. "But it could also be a discipline, representing an economically optimal inventory."

Could book lovers finally be willing to switch from paper to pixels? Some could...but others, to quote the Times, "maintain an almost fetishistic devotion to the physical book".

According to the New York Times "the ebook is starting to take hold". Many Kindle buyers appear to be outside the usual gadget-hound demographic. Almost as many women as men are buying it, Mr. Hildick-Smith, president of the Codex group said, and the device is most popular among 55- to 64-year-olds. Codex is a book market research company.

Nobody knows how much consumer habits will shift. But the technology may have more appeal for particular kinds of people, like those who are the heaviest readers.

Perhaps the most overlooked boost to e-books this year — and a challenge to some of the standard thinking about them — came from Apple’s do-it-all gadget, the iPhone. Several e-book-reading programs have been created for the device, and at least two of them, Stanza from LexCycle and the eReader from Fictionwise, have been downloaded more than 600,000 times. Another company, Scroll Motion, announced this week that it would begin selling e-books for the iPhone from major publishers like Simon & Schuster, Random House and Penguin.

All of these companies say they are now tailoring their software for other kinds of smartphones, including BlackBerrys.

From the Library of Congress:

President-elect Barack Obama on Jan. 20, 2009, will take the oath of office on a Bible from the Library of Congress’ collections that is steeped in history — the same Bible upon which Abraham Lincoln swore March 4, 1861, to uphold the Constitution.

More

Pictures from the Presidential Inauguration Committee

Five years ago, young Muslims across the United States began reading and passing along a blurry, photocopied novel called “The Taqwacores,” about imaginary punk rock Muslims in Buffalo.

“This book helped me create my identity,” said Naina Syed, 14, a high school freshman in Coventry, Conn.

A Muslim born in Pakistan, Naina said she spent hours on the phone listening to her older sister read the novel to her. “When I finally read the book for myself,” she said, “it was an amazing experience.”

The novel is “The Catcher in the Rye” for young Muslims, said Carl W. Ernst, a professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Springing from the imagination of Michael Muhammad Knight, it inspired disaffected young Muslims in the United States to form real Muslim punk bands and build their own subculture.

Full article here.