Sarah Warsop in The Huffington Post

I would not be a good husband if I didn't take a moment to note Sarah Warsop's presence, gracing an article in The Huffington Post.

She rocks!

Wylie and the Odyssey

You won't wander far on the web today without knowing there's a new publishing house / imprint / book label in town - Odyssey Editions, a cooperative venture between Amazon.com and the Wylie Agency.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Amazon.com now has exclusive rights to sell the e-book versions of some of the best-known titles from top literary authors Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, John Updike and more. In an announcement late Wednesday -- shortly after midnight Thursday, East Coast time -- the online retailer revealed that a deal with the powerful Wylie Agency will give Amazon.com the exclusive e-book rights for two years to books such as "Lolita." The e-books will only be available through the Kindle store.

The initial Odyssey Editions booklist? Voila:

“London Fields” by Martin Amis
“The Adventures of Augie March” by Saul Bellow
“Ficciones” (Spanish Edition) by Jorge Luis Borges
“Junky” by William Burroughs
“The Stories of John Cheever” by John Cheever
“Invisible Man” by Ralph Ellison
“Love Medicine” by Louise Erdrich
“The Naked and the Dead” by Norman Mailer
“Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov
“The Enigma of Arrival” by V.S. Naipaul
“The White Castle” by Orhan Pamuk
“Portnoy’s Complaint” by Philip Roth
“Midnight’s Children” by Salman Rushdie
“The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” by Oliver Sacks
“Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by Hunter S. Thompson
“Rabbit, Run” by John Updike
“Rabbit Redux” by John Updike
“Rabbit Is Rich” by John Updike
“Rabbit at Rest” by John Updike
“Brideshead Revisited” by Evelyn Waugh

And here is what is so very clever about this move - every undergraduate student in the English-speaking world (should they read more than one English Lit course) will buy all of these books.

Probably on a Kindle. (Here's what's not clever: they might just download an illegal PDF and read it on an iPad.)

Odyssey Editions will be many things, but they will also be apublisher of text books for the English Lit academic market.

A very smooth move.

Wags guess-timate a 25% market share for ebooks in 10 years. That's as conservative as a Baptist at a Bob Jones bake sale.

Social Marketing Compass

Social Marketing Compass, via Hugh Garry

Let me add, as an aside (and not speaking about either of the linkees), that I value phrases like "Value Proposition" and "Core Values" as much I like the word "allows" when speaking of a software "product".

I can explain to you what they mean, but I am certain they communicate nothing in common usage. They're on a level with brackets and odd capitalizations in postModern(ist)-speak, and only manage to communicate this: "I speak the Shibboleth."

I see a long post about language coming soon....

David Foster Wallace on quiet concentration / Kevin Slavin on putting it in the mix

"The faster things go, the more we feed that part of ourselves .... We don't feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet."

David Foster Wallace speaks here, as part of a longer interview, on American attitudes toward literature (I disagree - the issue is education, not geography), and our growing inability to sit quietly and encounter works of culture, undistracted.





As a fan of Wallace's, and as a man who enjoys a bit of doing nothing, I understand his point. We are changing, and part of that change is that we don't quietly contemplate a single work of art as we once did. We browse while watching television. We chat while reading a magazine. We prefer to listen to audio commentary while contemplating a painting.

The last time went to Cannes, I spoke with an older American producer about ebooks, and shared my desire to create rich media experiences for readers. He was outraged. "The last thing I want messed with is my time alone with a book."

But let me suggest this - if we like to tweet and facebook while we watch television, shouldn't this be seen as a new way of enjoying media? Starling see it that way.

And if, like me, you find that while reading on the iPad, you open Maps to look up a location, or Wikipedia to read background, or Google to understand context, shouldn't we see this as something new - a more committed engagement with literature - rather than something bad?

I'm all for sitting quietly doing nothing. But perhaps, as authors and producers, we should consider our new audience, and invent new ways to serve their engagement with our work.

Kevin Slavin on Starling:

Failure, Features and Fable

Games Industry publishes an insightful interview with Microsoft's Peter Molyneux.

For a man representing a corporate behemoth, Molyneux is incredibly introspective about his practice, as much in this interview as in others we've encountered. Of particular interest are his thoughts concerning why Pixar manages to avoid the Uncanny Valley, what it means to add features just for the sake of adding them, why less blades make a better razor, and how great ideas are hindrances in the face of poor delivery.

Molyneux also takes time to reflect on the future of iPhone gaming. He predicts a future of seven-figure budgets and high barriers-to-entry for iPhone developers. This vision speaks volumes concerning the presence of big brands in the iPhone space. We'd love to see an interview with Molyneaux that tackles the future of casual gaming on the device, as well as the role of indies in relation to AAA developers on the iPhone. His is a brain we'd like to see into.

An excellent interview and write-up by Managing Editor, Phil Elliot.

Would you rather own books or words in a cloud?

 http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/

Thanks to Ros Lawler over at Random House, we found this link to an article in The Olympian.

Best quote: "[T]he neurological phenomenon of reading is centered in a location of the brain that appears to have no preference for media, other than black words against a white background." From Stanislas Dehaene.