Chicago Tribune: Does a book’s popularity guarantee its movie’s success?

”The film version of ‘Eat Pray Love’ took in $24 million its opening weekend — a tally AdAge calls ‘satisfactory’ — but it was bested by ‘The Expendables,’ the over-the-hill tough-guy action movie. In the weeks since, the book ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ has stayed in the top three — respectable but not stunning. Meanwhile, the paperback of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’ is back at the top of our nonfiction bestseller list.”

NY Times: Print or Pixels? Publishers Strive to Advance Both.

”Auriane and Sebastien de Halleux are at sharp odds over ‘The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,’ but not about the plot. The problem is that she prefers the book version, while he reads it on his iPad. And in this literary dispute, the couple says, it’s ne’er the twain shall meet.”

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Will the Book Survive Generation Text?

”I don’t mean the already overwrought debate over the crisis of the book as codex — the daily New York Times announcement that electronic readers stand primed to eliminate paper books. [snip] The issue isn’t the decline in book sales, though it, too, remains an element of the big picture. I am talking about the growing feeling among humanities professors — intuitive and anecdotal, shared over lunch like an embarrassing tale about a colleague — that for too many of today’s undergraduates, reading a whole book, from A to Z, feels like a marathon unfairly imposed on a jogger.” This sadly makes me think of graphic design, where ‘negative space’ is as important as ‘positive space’.  And the risk of losing context.

Workman Publishing: Leonardo’s Notebooks.

Want.

The Atlantic: What Ernest Hemingway, Toni Morrison, and R. Crumb Have in Common.

”What made these interviews radical was their method.  In the first place, the method is slow. [snip] In the second place, the interviews are collaborative.” Interesting.

Discover Magazine: When the ancients were wise.

“The Renaissance had been an efflorescence of learning, but it had been retarded in its progress in some ways because of the reverence for ancient precedents. This is most evident in medicine and physics, where Galen and Aristotle led scientists astray.  There are some domains where the ancients still hold sway today. Religion is one.”

The New Yorker, The Book Bench: I Buy it for the Bovary.

”I am not very interested in Playboy, but I am interested in the female form. That is, in one female — Lydia Davis — operating in top form in her new translation of ‘Madame Bovary,’ an excerpt from which is included in the September issue.”

Skepsi: Bad Behaviour in Medieval and Early Modern Europe.

Pffft. Via wood s lot.

Wall Street Journal: Get Ready for Ads in Books.

I was afraid of this. Bleah.

Discover: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids - and What We Can Do About It.

”Higher education should be open to every young person, and this is an option we can well afford.  We confess to being born-again Jeffersonians: we believe everyone has a mind, the capacity to use it, and is entitled to encouragement.” Congruent with my beliefs.

Spiegel.DE: Famous Chestnut: Anne Frank’s Tree Topples in High Wind.

”From my favorite spot on the floor I can look up at the blue sky and the bare chestnut tree, on whose branches little raindrops shine, appearing like silver, and at the seagulls and other birds as they glide on the wind.”

NY Times: Students Find $100 Textbooks Cost $50, Purchased Overseas.

”Just like prescription drugs, textbooks cost far less overseas than they do in the United States. The publishing industry defends its pricing policies, saying that foreign sales would be impossible if book prices were not pegged to local market conditions.” I wonder if college students couldn’t work in some international travel, with the cost saved. Go pick up the books themselves, in other words.

Inside Higher Ed: Rice University Press, Abandoning an Experiment.

”The demise of the project led to immediate speculation about whether the Rice experience suggested difficulties for the economic model or if other factors may have been decisive. Several experts suggested that the crucial factor may be size.” My concern about turning to digital is that proper professional editing will be short-shrifted in the drive to lower costs.

Washington Post Video: Raging bull injures 40 spectators.

I take it this was Ferdinand’s angry brother [If you don’t know Ferdinand, here].

Slate, Book Review Jack London’s many sides emerge in James L. Haley’s Wolf.

”At one point, London says socialism’s strength is that it ‘transcends race prejudice’ — but then that prejudice returns, just as vicious as before. When he visits Hawaii, he is in awe of its native culture, but then demands the United States conquer it just the same.” Color me shocked ... I didn’t realize this about the man.  The very first book I ever ‘got into’ as a child, the one that took me from passive reading to involved, connected reading was ”White Fang”.  Funnily enough, I never bothered to read “Call of the Wild”, the more popular of his books. Every time I cracked it, it never seemed as interesting as the former.

BIT-101: Kindle and iPad Displays: Up close and personal.

Kindle performs well here. Yet I’m more attracted to the iPad display, given the two. Strange. I’ve only seen a Gen 1 Kindle; I’ll have to kick the tires on one of the newer ones.

Salon: Iran was not Jimmy Carter’s fault.

”If we want to blame someone for this “mad regime” why not Dwight Eisenhower, who was president in 1953 when a U.S-British backed coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh?” Read ’Rooftops of Tehran‘, by Mahbod Seraji, for the counterpoint to any pro-Shah sentiments, and see what the Iranian people actually believed. A work of fiction, but congruent with what I know through friends and acquaintances.

Slate: Why e-readers like the Amazon Kindle will soon cost less than $100.

Yes, we’ve known for a while that the ‘inkjet printer sales model’ would be best for e-books. $12.99 for an e-book? Ouch.

NPR: A Dark View Of Dostoevsky On The Moscow Subway.

”The Dostoevskaya station — which opened this summer in memory of Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky — met a fair share of opposition when psychologists expressed concern that dark murals of the violent scenes from Dostoevsky’s books could put riders in gloomy moods — or, worse, even encourage suicidal impulses.” Doesn’t look so bad from the photos.  A bit monochromatic, perhaps.

The Neglected Books Page: The Art of Slow Reading, from The Guardian.

“Sticking to material that can be read quickly and lightly leaves merely proves the saying that a little learning is a dangerous thing.  [snip] Relying exclusively on skimming as one’s way of acquiring knowledge is the intellectual equivalent of eating baby food — which is, essentially, pre-chewed food. Real men chew their own food and real readers roll up their sleeves and dig in.”

NY Times: Plagiarism Is Not a Big Moral Deal.

”Whether there is something called originality or not, the two scholars who began their concluding chapter by reproducing two of my pages are professionally culpable. They took something from me without asking and without acknowledgment, and they profited — if only in the currency of academic reputation — from work that I had done and signed.”

Book Beast: The Novella is Making a Comeback.

”It’s fashionable to lament the status of the novella: unjustly neglected, the ugly duckling of the literary world, etc. Actually the novella seems in pretty healthy shape to me.”

Slate: Digital publishing levels the playing field for small publishers.

”Reports that the Wylie Agency—among others—is launching an online imprint, that Amazon’s e-book sales outpaced print sales, and that its digital sales will surpass paperback ones in the next nine to 12 months underscore a new reality: the age of the publisher-turned-digital-curator.” I’m predicting printed books eventually having the same downward arc as photographic film ... and it makes me extremely sad to say that.

Guardian.UK: National Portrait Gallery shines light on forgotten artist Thomas Lawrence.

Linked because this young lady’s portrait graces my copy of “Pride and Prejudice”. It’s a face I’ve come to love, over the years.

Guardian.UK: The chick-lit debate: light doesn’t have to mean stupid.

”… why insist that chick-lit reflect the issues facing its readership when no other genre is measured by the same yardstick? It isn’t expected of science fiction, crime, mystery, historical fiction, or even most literary fiction.”