Bird’s-Eye: Can you identify the opening first lines of 20 famous books from the past? Can you beat your editor’s score of 14/20? ☺ In the future we will read ebooks on a Kindle, or an iPad, or in paperback, or not at all. The New Yorker tells us where it’s all going. And in the present two heavyweight authors land counterpunches: JK Rowling to those who want to cut social assistance (There she goes again, promoting the gay socialist wizarding agenda!) and Margaret Atwood responding to those who think she should decline her 450k prize “from” an Israeli University. Comments, anyone?
* First Lines Quiz The Guardian
* The iPad, the Kindle, and the future of books The New Yorker
For the time being, Apple’s entrance into the book market has given publishers a reprieve. A close associate of Bezos said, “Amazon was thinking of direct publishing—until the Apple thing happened. For now, it was enough of a threat that Amazon was forced to negotiate with publishers.”
Most publishers mistrust Amazon and think it is unnecessarily secretive. It won’t tell them details about customer habits, or the number of Kindles sold, or what it costs to make a Kindle. It won’t even disclose the percentage of revenues its book sales represent, saying only that “media”—movies, music, and books—accounted for fifty-two per cent of sales in 2009.
Publishers say that the negotiations with Apple were less contentious. There were arguments over the price of e-books, with publishers wanting the top price set at seventeen dollars and Apple insisting on fifteen. “Once Apple had determined that they were going to accept the agency model,” a publisher said, “they were very tough: Take it or leave it.” But the Apple people “had a much more agreeable feel than Amazon did. They said they would share some consumer data about buying e-books. We have no such data from Amazon.”
“The 2010 election campaign, more than any other, has underscored the continuing gulf between Tory values and my own. It is not only that the renewed marginalisation of the single, the divorced and the widowed brings back very bad memories. … I chose to remain a domiciled taxpayer for a couple of reasons. …I am indebted to the British welfare state; the very one that Mr Cameron would like to replace with charity handouts. When my life hit rock bottom, that safety net, threadbare though it had become under John Major’s Government, was there to break the fall. I cannot help feeling, therefore, that it would have been contemptible to scarper for the West Indies at the first sniff of a seven-figure royalty cheque. This, if you like, is my notion of patriotism. “
* Atwood on the Dan David Prize
“Since I accepted the Dan David Prize and it has been announced, I have received several letters from different groups asking me to reverse my acceptance and boycott this event…. PEN International, an organization of which I am a Vice President, is in favour of continuing dialogue that crosses borders of all kinds. www.internationalpen.org.uk “International PEN, the world’s oldest human rights organization and the oldest international literary organization. International PEN was founded in 1921 to dispel national, ethnic, and racial hatreds and to promote understanding among all countries.” (See U.S. PEN’s recent New York Tariq Ramadan Cooper Union event, for which they were attacked by extremists from all sides.) Moderates who want to promote dialogue always get hammered twice as much, as they get stones thrown at them from several directions at once.”
