Travels of Thelonious (Fog Mound)
This is a beautiful graphic novel written by Susan Schade and illustrated by Jon Buller for readers 9 – 12 years old. It’s about a post-apocalyptic world in which humans are gone and only exist in legends and in the artifacts of their once-great civilizations. After being swept away by a flood, Thelonious finds himself in a city filled with criminal animals. As he tries to find his way home again he discovers clues about what happened to all the humans.
Well… it better not jam. That’s my two cents. But really this is a neat idea. A book printer. It lets a user download, print, and bind a real book in just a few minutes. The New York Public Library has one. I’m not sure if one is expected to return the books it prints, but if they think it’s a good machine, it probably is. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt has one. This is the kind of machine that makes online book printing services like Lulu.com really start making sense. Of course, the shops and libraries must keep themselves supplied with the right paper and cover materials. But it is quite obvious that the days of publishers shipping cartons of books to bookstores all over the world in such bulk are very numbered. Pretty soon there will be a book printer in many homes. That’s assuming that everyone doesn’t switch to ebooks. But with companies like Amazon building portable cash registers instead of real ebook devices, that will not happen for a long time.
I was very interested in a post about Henry David Thoreau at BoingBoing this weekend. I got into one of those wonderfully dignified arguments in the comments with other Thoreau lovers and haters. But one of the commenters posted a link to this fascinating podcast episode in which a Thomas Jefferson fan and expert named Clay Jenkinson discusses Thoreau’s masterwork and its connection to the thinking of Jefferson. It’s a great listen and has me all excited about Walden again. In fact, I think I’m going to do a full reading the book right here. Perhaps I’ll start it this week. We’ll see. But I certainly think it needs to be read with all the punkish attitude and brilliant observation that I see in the book. If you want to read Walden, you sort of have to become Henry David Thoreau for a while. Not an easy task.
Meanwhile, you really should listen to this marvelous show about Walden.
Here’s an excellent CBS Sunday Morning report about French book collectors in Paris. I love the piles of books in the apartments. The skinny book finder guy is a very amusing character. He reminds me of the character Johnny Depp played in the Roman Polanski movie, The Ninth Gate. That character is a shady and extremely skilled book finder who goes after rare books for wealthy collectors. The movie is fascinating for all its investigation of ancient texts and satanic illustrations. One of the collectors in the video mentions how when a collector finds a book they like, then they must also acquire every other edition that they can find. I totally understand this, having gone through something similar with various editions of Don Quixote. That’s a really good book to collect because there are so many beautiful editions of it that include the work of great illustrators. Not to mention the fact that Don Quixote himself is a maniacal book lover.
In what appears to be one of the worst cases of literary censorship in modern United States history, Amazon.com has listed a wide range of books as what the company calls ‘adult material.’ It would appear that they have included any title that contains any material related in any way to homosexuality. By being placed on this ‘adult material list’, the books were essentially stripped away from any search results and made very difficult to find by browsing.
The following is from Amazon:
In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.
Candlelight Stories thinks that this represents one of the single most moronic statements ever delivered to the public by a prominent book seller.
The company has announced that this was due to a ‘technical glitch’ but there are very few bloggers who seem to believe that explanation. It would seem that plenty of ‘adult material’ was left available and that this effort was focused largely on non-heterosexual material. This is a terrible thing for a major bookseller to do. It’s a form of book banning. It reeks of ultra-conservative fear of ideas or differing lifestyles. Amazon says it was engaged in an initiative to protect its wide customer base by listing certain books as ‘adult material’ so that they would not appear at the top of search results and possibly offend someone. The complaints of someone who is offended by a book for adults showing up in a list of search results should not be listened to for even a moment. It is a very short step from this kind of censorship to a book burning. This is truly indicative of the danger in primarily relying upon a single online source for books.
It would be advisable to immediately move away from Amazon as a source for books. This kind of behavior, though given a flimsy explanation by the company, tends to indicate a general direction or pattern of behavior in a company. Candlelight Stories is looking into fully disengaging from our relationship with Amazon and will not be offering their products through our site. This blog stands fully opposed to discrimination, censorship or book banning of any kind whatsoever.
Once again, we cannot over-emphasize the importance of moving away from Amazon for book purchases. This is a very serious problem and the company’s explanation is insultingly false.
Here are links to several of the best book sellers on the internet:
In what amounts to a shocking display of callous disregard for handicapped readers, The Authors Guild threatened to sue Amazon.com over its text-to-audio feature built into the Kindle 2.0 ebook reader. It then negotiated with Amazon to allow authors to disable the feature for their books.
Apparently, the Guild and its member authors (who really need to have their names listed in public) have decided that the Kindle feature violates some mysterious copyright related to audio book rights. So the logic they use seems to suggest that if I worked in my garage to invent an optical reader that would read my own books aloud to me as I passed it over the pages, I would be somehow violating an author’s copyright. This is absurd.
The Reading Rights Coalition organized a protest in New York City a couple days ago to urge authors to allow everyone access to ebooks.
Read this amazing double-talk response to the protests from the Guild in which it pretends to have concern for handicapped readers. They keep insisting that a device that reads a book out loud is an audio book. No, dear Authors Guild, it is not. It is a device that reads books out loud. Like I do when I read to my wife. What if a very life-like robot walked around reading a book to itself out loud. Would that be an ‘audio book?’ Publishing companies are free to produce their own audio books and sell them and make contracts for them. But they cannot tell people not to build machines that read. Forget it.
The Authors Guild is mounting an attack on handicapped readers all over the world and should be made to look like the dinosaur it really is. Which authors are a part of this assault on the blind? Candlelight Stories wants the list. We’ll happily publish it. We’ll call the list, ‘Authors Who Don’t Want Blind People to Read.’
