PowellsBooks.Blog

The challenge of making my case in these five short blogs is magnified for me because I am both a slow talker and thinker. I tend to work toward my thoughts in an 'organic' manner. That's probably why I chose the form of the novel for expression. I am not easily seduced by sound bites.

The first line of my novel Hound was hidden until my editor pointed out the old newspaper adage that I was burying my lead. Yet it was that first line that had spawned the whole book and had always been the nucleus of the way I was going to approach my larger subject.

Books are, after all, the way I make my living.

It is a matter of our age that most of us refuse to deal with unpleasantness until we are forced to. There are so many alternatives. Buy a new one. Eat out. Watch TV. Download it... A significant number of my fellow citizens live their lives between a pair of headphones. It's damn hard to hear the screaming that way.

We have thrown off ...

And then we have the op-ed by Sergey Brin, a co-founder of Google, in the October 9th New York Times, which praised and defended the concept of Google Books — essentially the planned digital access to all the world's literature. I recommend anyone interested in the subject of books, copyrights, and the integrity of text to read it.

I read his comments with horror and began immediately to write an essay on the subject for my own website. Sadly, I would wager that, at the very least, nine out of ten people who read Mr. Brin's editorial will think that his efforts are for the good and offer a whole new future for the written word.

A few weeks ago, I stood in a grassy field where I had been picking apples while a major book illustrator paged through his portfolio of dozens of successfully published covers and hundreds of projects. His portfolio was in his hand on a device made by Apple. He also had the text of the books he had illustrated there as well, and numerous reference works he had made use of.

How could I ...

In the October 17th issue of the Wall Street Journal there was a provocative piece concerning the new Kindle 2, by Stephen Marche who often writes for Esquire. In essence he accepts the revolutionary potential of the Kindle and proposes a new word, the "transbook," to describe the device and its cousins. I find the more humorous intonations of an "Omnium Gatherum" to be appropriate. I suspect his optimism and suggest he has his historical facts out of order and incomplete.

Mr. Marche happily describes the moment in history when the "Kindle" of another age was introduced: the codex. This wonderful device replaced the scroll — a single roll of paper — with what was essentially a bound volume of scrolls and was in fact the first true book, bringing to an end the tattered isolation of specific hand-written texts. This was revolutionary, indeed. What he fails to mention is that this was the very device which was used by authority to do away with the anarchy of the individual scroll, which might be produced by just any apostate who could write, and created the opportunity

...

It was in a letter of 1897, about his cousin James Ross Clemens, that Mark Twain famously noted that "the report of my death was an exaggeration." He...

Because I write this from Indianapolis, where I have been attending this year's Bouchercon (the world crime and mystery fiction convention), I will begin with a bit of argument I usually save for later in my general thesis concerning the death of the book. Sadly, most of the people attending looked like me — old and white... Okay, older, but still white. And though I know many younger readers of the mystery genre, they are the minority, and they are still white. Sitting in the audience and looking over the gray hair toward the podium where many fine authors were expounding on wonderful aspects of a genre which has been special to me since I was a teenager aspiring to be a writer myself, I could not help but be aware of the mortality of so many of these folks so devoted to their field they are willing to spend hundreds of dollars during a recession just to attend a gathering of fellow mystery lovers in this fine city with at least one great eating establishment (the Rock Bottom Brewpub. I recommend the hickory ...