Watch worldwide book sales, live

  By Carolyn Kellogg

The Book Depository is a British-based online bookseller that ships to countries around the world, for free. To bring that point home, it has built a map that shows who bought what, where, just now. The window of the map moves to reach the most recent purchase, zooming back and forth from Germany to Singapore to the United States to Australia to Norway. In each location, the title pops up. It’s hypnotic. That’s partly because it’s a simple, elegant interface. But it’s also because it shows what books other people are purchasing, and that’s inherently interesting to people who like books.

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Could the Internet Save Book Reviews?

AP Images

Even as print publications are getting rid of reviewers, websites and podcasts offer new ways of approaching literature.

By Sarah Fay

In his 1946 essay “Confessions of a Book Reviewer,” George Orwell outlined the changes he’d make to the standard, 600-word format of the book review. He wrote that the best practice “would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews—1,000 words is a bare minimum—to the few that seem to matter.” He then suggested notices “of a line or two” for the majority of titles less worthy of mention. Although Orwell considered book reviewing “an exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job” and once likened it to “pouring his immortal spirit down the drain, half a pint at a time,” he’s often evoked as the patron saint of book reviewers. Orwell reviewed over 100 books in 1940 alone and “Confessions of a Book Reviewer” is a testament to the problems he saw in journalistic literary criticism, including the fact that reviewing involved “praising trash” and “constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feelings whatever.”. His idea to review only the best books didn’t spark a revolution in 1946 and probably won’t start one any time soon, but the essay points to the fact that book reviews haven’t changed very much in the past 65 years—until now.

The digital age has transformed the physical act of reading and will alter journalistic literary criticism as well. According to a Pew Research study published in 2010, over half of all Americans obtain news and information—including book reviews—on digital platforms: online editions of newspapers like the New York Times, email, Twitter, RSS feeds, etc. (The number is even higher among people with post-graduate degrees and those who are in their 20s and 30s.) The full effect of these changes will have on book reviews isn’t clear, but they’re already shifting in ways that would both please and alarm Orwell.

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Twitter feeds you need: top tweeters reveal their three favourite follows

  In just six years, Twitter has become the life-support system for those seeking news, humour, wisdom or a shot of esoteric web weirdness. Here, introduced by Lauren Laverne, 50 top tweeters reveal their three favourite follows. Plus, five experts on the Twitter accounts that define their fields.

   ByLauren Laverne

The internet is like a talking bear: undoubtedly miraculous but best approached with caution. This has never been truer than in the case of the time-thief Twitter. In the six years since its inception, the site that lets us socialise in teaspoons has delighted, inspired, disgusted and distracted (to distraction) its 140 million users, often in the space of half an hour; and changed the world forever.

One thing everyone agrees on is that nobody agrees on the point of Twitter. It is derided as trivial (the name “Twitter” was chosen because it meant “a short burst of inconsequential information”) as frequently as it is hailed as the engine that drove the Arab Spring. It’s both a voyeuristic window into the gilded idiocy of celebrity and a spotlight on suffering that would otherwise go unrecorded. Twitter’s fuel is extreme emotion – jealousy, rage, mawkish sentimentality and LOLZ. As such, it’s a digital Molotov cocktail, constantly waiting for a spark. Just ask Samantha Brick, Ricky Gervais and Cat Bin Lady.

Thanks to Twitter, television – George Orwell’s “cyclopean eye” – has become a compound one, a multi-screen myriad of information streams. Like many others, I traced the path of last summer’s riots sitting in front of the rolling news with my laptop on my knee, following Guardian journalist Paul Lewis’s tweets from the ground, DMing friends trapped in their houses and thinking “#PrayForRain”. But whereas Orwell’s viewers were pinned like a butterfly under television’s unblinking glare, Twitter has restored a beneficial distance between us and it. If Twitter is a virtual living room, the TV has been put back into it. Viewing is a group activity again, which certainly brightens up Question Time.

Graham Linehan once posted: “Celebrities who don’t follow anyone! You have in your possession a magic mirror, and you’re just using it as a mirror!” which made me laugh, then made me think: maybe Twitter’s status as an enchanted looking glass isn’t limited to famouses. The mirror told the wicked queen the truth, even when it was unpalatable. Our online personalities may be an exaggeration of ourselves, but perhaps “In Ternet Veritas”? Regardless, Twitter demonstrates the ugly reality of problems like racism, as illustrated by the recent case of “Muamba tweeter” Liam Stacey. Hopefully the outrage that followed his remarks shows attitudes are moving in the right direction.

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Vote for the Independent Book Blogger Awards

By Jason Boog

Voting is now open for the Independent Book Blogger Awards, a contest sponsored by Association of American Publishers members and Goodreads.

Four bloggers will win a trip to BookExpo America (BEA) along with “free airfare and hotel accommodations and a pass to the three-day global gathering.” You can search the list of reader nominated blogs by name or by category.

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The novel saved by a police forensic team

Photo: Alamy

When Trish Vickers lost her sight, she decided to make use of her vivid imagination by painstakingly writing a book in longhand.

But after hours of hard work and careful thought, she was left devastated when she was told that 26 pages were blank because her pen had run out of ink.

The 59-year-old mother feared that the manuscript was lost but the generosity of her local police force meant that it was gradually recovered using forensic technology.

Miss Vickers said she was “gobsmacked” when Dorset police officers agreed to help by sacrificing their lunch hours over five months to study the indents made by her pen.

“I could remember the gist of what I had written but there was no way I could have written exactly the same way again,” she said. “I am so grateful. It was really nice of them and I want to thank them for helping me out.”

Miss Vickers, from Charmouth, near Lyme Regis, lost her sight seven years ago through diabetes and turned to her imagination for solace.

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The Journo Blues: A Song Inspired By Arianna Huffington

By Jake Adelstein

The big lie that journalists and most young Americans are told today is that working for free will eventually net them a job. The unpaid intern has become a wonderful source of exploitable labor.  With people so desperate to get their foot in the door, many people are willing to work their ass off in the hope that someday they will actually get paid for their labor.  Recently, a federal  judge has dismissed that class action lawsuit filed last Spring by a group of unpaid bloggers suing the Huffington Post for pay, falling on the side of the Huffington Post. Of course, the class action suit was unlikely to succeed because the bloggers had all agreed to forfeit pay for “exposure.”

This business model of using unpaid journos and ripping off stories from the mainstream press will probably work for a few more years, until there are no paid journalists left to do the actual reporting. It’s partially a myth that bloggers are parasites on the mainstream media, and blogs do handle stories the mainstream media shuns,  but if you look closely at the Huffington Post, a large amount of their material is still repackaging original reporting from the old established press. Citizen journalism is laudatory but investigative journalism is time consuming and expensive, and if no one pays for it–it will wither and die.

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Mad Men: the most literary show on TV

Mad Men: Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), Don (Jon Hamm) and Joan (Christina Hendricks) return Photo: BBC / AMC / LIONSGATE

James Walton welcomes the return of Mad Men – a television drama with all the ingredients of the Great American Novel.

An excruciating 17 months after the end of series four, Mad Men will return to our screens this month, to plunge us once again into the irresistibly glamorous world of advertising in Sixties New York. It’s time to brace ourselves for the usual avalanche of paeans to the programme’s immaculate sense of period. The boozing! The smoking! The clothes! Joan’s bottom! Yet, while all these things are worthy of note, there’s one aspect of the show that seems to have been overlooked: Mad Men is one of the most literary television shows of recent times.

For a start, its style is markedly less cinematic than the other big American series of the current golden age. The settings are mostly interiors and the dialogue is deliberately theatrical — as creator Matthew Weiner has said, elevated rather than natural and without any of the overlapping speech used to denote realism in shows like the West Wing. More importantly, within those celebrated Sixties trappings, this is a series that’s always concerned with, and sometimes explicitly refers to, several recurring and often timeless themes in American literature.

Take the town where the main character Don Draper lived in the first three series. Of all New York suburbs in which a mysterious but unfailingly charismatic advertising executive could have tucked away his family, the one chosen by Weiner was Ossining: from 1961 until his death in 1982, the home of John Cheever. Dubbed “the Chekhov of the suburbs” or, more extravagantly, “the Ovid of Ossining”, Cheever was, even before Updike, the first American writer to establish the now-familiar literary picture of suburban frustration, status anxiety and marriages cracking under the strain of their own unrealistic expectations. In a 2009 article on Cheever, The New York Times listed the main themes of his work as “secrecy, doubleness, sorrow, the comforts of sex, the perils of alcohol, the suddenness and fleetingness of joy” — which, as a 17-word summary of Don Draper’s life, is pretty hard to beat.

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Programmer writes algorithm to find Waldo

The end result of one programmer’s attempt to solve a “Where’s Waldo?”

 Beloved puzzle game has been solved with code

 

By Braden Goyette

It was a challenge no true computer geek could ignore: Find Waldo, not with your eyes, but with code.

A crafty programmer answered the call, developing an algorithm to spot the iconic globetrotting children’s book character in any illustrated crowd.

A user who goes by the moniker Heike created the “Where’s Waldo” detector after seeing this challenge posted on the popular programming message board, Stackoverflow.com.

The goal? Find Waldo using Mathematica, a software that can analyze images.

Drawings in the Waldo books, first published in 1987, typically camouflage the character — wearing his hallmark red-and-white-striped sweater — in bustling crowd scenes.

Heike’s algorithm narrows down the places Waldo could be hiding by searching for the colors of his signature shirt.

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Mike Stilkey’s Awesome Book Art Arrives in Hong Kong

  By Katie Hosmer

Mike Stilkey is at it again! Recently, high-end retail boutique Joyce asked the L.A.-based artist to do an installation for the opening of their flagship store in Hong Kong. What a spectacular way to showcase a selection of his whimsical characters who bring new life to giant stacks of old books! Rather than creating just one large-scale piece, Stilkey decided to create a handful of mid-sized pieces that were displayed throughout the store.

The artist chooses this unique canvas for painting because he said, “There is something weighty and sacred about a book. I really like the idea of taking these discarded books that were once so important to someone and upcycling them into a piece of art instead of seeing them pulped or destroyed.

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Style Police: Eschew These Words!

It’s a tough job, but somebody’s gotta do it. Strike that! That phrase is a cliche, and it’s one of the many language devices that New York Times style cop, Philip Corbett, would flag.

Corbett is actually the New York Times associate managing editor of standards (and enforcer of the paper’s style guide). In his blog, After Deadline, Corbett writes about words and phrases that are overused, but often end up in the paper.

Corbett pays special attention to what he calls “journalese.” These are expressions you’re only likely to find in the news, but would never say.

Some examples include: “in the wake of,” “probe,” “spark,” “push back” and “kerfuffle” (one of Robin Young’s personal favorites).

The Times can also track words that people don’t know through its website. Whenever someone double-clicks a word, the definition will pop up. Corbett reviews that data to create an annual list of 50 fancy words.

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