The UK Booksellers Association has written a letter, calling the Google settlement a “monopoly” and telling British and Irish publishers to be as uncooperative as they can, and to “claim your titles and turn off all Display Uses pending a clearer vision of how the market for digital works will develop.”

BA head Tim Godfray complains that because anyone in the world will be able to download the books covered in the agreement, it will impact more than just the American signatories of the agreement — Google, the Association of American Publishers and the Authors’ Guild. However, because the BA has no standing in an American court, they can’t participate in the vetting of the settlement. “So,” he writes, “here we have a case of three organisations in the US making decisions that will affect not only booksellers in the US, but in the UK and other parts of the world. It is difficult not to take the view that Google are being handed a monoploy and competitors will be placed at a considerable disadvantage.”

He also noted that if British publisher don’t oppose the deal now, “In the longer term it will also be a question of ‘In the US today, in the UK tomorrow’, as Google is likely to try and introduce a similar agreement in Europe.”

Supposedly leaked photo of the Apple Media Pad, complete with side view -- according to Slashgear. But see the reader comment below.

Kindle owners may soon “end up wishing they had waited on their purchase,” says David Coursey. Why? He says rumors are growing about “a ready-to-release” Apple device that would do much, much more tha allow you to read a book — although it could do that, too.

In a report for PC World, Coursey says the device may be a “supersized iPod touch” and is “Described as having a larger touch-screen than the Kindle’s 6-inch display, while being physically smaller than the Amazon device, Apple’s baby has been dubbed a ‘mediapad.’”

But that’s not all: “The larger screen would be a more pleasant way to view movies or the Internet than an iPod or iPhone and the device could have decent speakers, too. By using a touch screen, Apple could save space necessary for Kindle’s keyboard, resulting in a smaller device.”

In short, says Coursey, “An Apple mediapad would doubtless do everything an iPod touch does, only larger. And it could do everything a Kindle does, too, only in color.”

And he’s not the only one saying this — reports abound (here’s one now!) that Apple is even going to team up with phone service providers on the new device, particularly Verizon.

In the past, I have kvetched when downsizing newspapers have justified shrinking book sections by saying “They don’t draw the ads they used to.” Pshaw, said I. They never generated that many ads. In the past, I have proclaimed, they never played up the appearance of a writer the way they do now. Who knew what they looked like or gave a damn?, I carped. In the past, I have confidently noted, promotional text was much more straightforward and honest — none of this biff-bang-pow stuff you have to write now.

Er, I might have been wrong on a couple of those claims, as this New York Times slideshow of old newspaper ads for books seems to indicate. While it’s still unethical to say ads from an industry should determine how much coverage you give the news from that industry, well, there’s no denying there are a lot of ads here. And it seems the way the author looks did matter — every one includes an author photo, and prominently at that. The write-ups are amazing, too — although it’s somehow comforting to note the simple amount of text they include, which is to say, a lot.

However, lest you think that text was particularly more articulate, there’s ample evidence of the hard-sell tenor reminiscent of a used-car salesman that now permeates the biz — such as the use of a Jacqueline Susann blurb for a Rex Reed book, back when Reed was still a higly respected representative of the heady New Journalism: “Whether you read in the nude or in a bikini, Rex Reed’s Do You Sleep In The Nude is perfect for bed or the beach.”

Hmm. I prefer the one for a Tom Wolfe book that says: “Tom Wolfe is a goddamn joy.”

So are these ads.

You know the legend: Lots of great writers have come out of the MFA program at the University of Iowa’s Writers Workshop, including Flannery O’Connor, Raymond Carver, John Edgar Wideman, Kurt Vonnegut and both Dennises — some would say Denises — Johnson. At least one notable grad, though, is still pretty rankled about her time there, many years later:

In 2003, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix topped the bestseller lists in Germany — in its English-language edition. Several more Potter titles have repeated the feat since then, and currently, Stephanie Meyer’s “Twilight” series is up there, too.

What the? “People’s ability and willingness to read English-language novels is growing,” says Thomas Wilking, editor-in-chief of buchreport, Germany’s version of Publishers Weekly. According to a report at Deutsche Welle – a German news site that’s written in, er, English — the phenomenon is driven by women, and people trying to develop English-language skills, which are “essential to career success in Europe.”

But the article also cites another, fascinating reason: “some German readers also choose the original version when the topic has a strong connection to the language.”

When everyone went home last night, it looked like today’s big story was going to be the one that was breaking in mid-day: That a federal judge in New York had postponed the deadline for authors and publishers to opt out of the controversial settlement between Google, the Association of American Publishers, and the Authors Guild to digitize books after being petitioned by a group of authors and heirs that included the representatives of the estate of John Steinbeck, Philip K. Dick, and others. As this Wall Street Journal report by Jessica E. Vascellaro details, “Judge Denny Chin of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York Tuesday agreed to move back by four months the deadline for authors to opt out of that settlemen,” from May 5 to September 4, 2009, “and also pushed back a hearing over the settlement, which is still subject to court approval, to Oct. 7, 2009.”

But then last night the bombshell hit: The US Justice Department has opened an antitrust investigation into the deal. As a New York Times story by Miguel Helft reports, “Lawyers for the Justice Department have been in conversations in recent weeks with various groups opposed to the settlement, including the Internet Archive and Consumer Watchdog. More recently, Justice Department lawyers notified the parties to the settlement, including Google, and representatives for the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, that they were looking into various antitrust issues related to the far-reaching agreement.”

The probe seems to be focussed on the fact that, as a Reuters wire story reports, the settlement “would allow Google — and only Google — to digitize so-called orphan works” and sell access to them. Orphan works are books that are out of print, but still in copyright. (Reuters is not correct when it indicates that it is unclear who owns copyrights in this situation — often, ownership is clear, as we here at Melville House can attest about several books we’ve brought back into print that are available now through Google Books.)

“There are legitimate antitrust issues related to Google’s ability to solely commercialize this content,” commented Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive. IA also digitizes books, and Brantley “said his organization had ‘multiple conversations’ with the Justice Department about the Google plan,” according to Reuters.

Brantley says he hopes the aforementioned Judge Denny Chin will throw out the settlement. “We would like the court to say: ‘This is fine theoretically, but these orphan books, they don’t have anyone to speak for them, so let’s take them out of the agreement,’” he says.

Which is, in fact, what Brantley and IA asked the judge to do earlier this week — and which the judge refused to do, as per this MobyLives story from just yesterday.

Meanwhile, as the Times report notes, this investigation “will not be the first time that Google has found itself in the sights of federal regulators. Last year, Google abandoned a prominent advertising partnership with Yahoo after the department threatened to go to court to block the deal.”

Morning Mobylivers! For once, this post is not written under bleak London skies but in the steaming heat of Kibaha, a small town on the Tanzanian coast. Although this may just seem like an opportunity to gloat (yay me!) I thought you might be interested in the local literary scene…

An inflight magazine is usually an exercise in futility, designed to numb passengers’ brains to minimise requests and complaints to the flight attendants. Not so with Kenya Airways. Msafiri, their offering, is the most interesting and varied example of this type of literature I have read. In place of the spurious “in depth” city studies and breathless mall reports offered by the likes of Easyjet and American Airlines, the articles ranged from the inevitable homage to Obama (well, he is half Kenyan) through the preparations for the 2010 South African World Cup, and the effects they are having on the population, to a short essay on the likely impact of the global economic crisis on Africans.

The closest it gets to celeb spotting is a very short piece on the “New Face of Africa”, Kate Mewson. I also learned about solar cookers - did you know that Africa receives 51% of all the concentrated sunlight that reaches Earth? And do you know how odd it feels to say that I learned something on a plane? — and three emerging Kenyan artists and sculptors. The photography throughout was quirky and beautiful. Best of all, there was a short story by Henrietta Rose Innes. “Poison” won the 2008-09 Caine Prize for African Writing. It’s the tale of the aftermath of a chemical explosion in Cape Town. Amid the falling debris, one woman resists the exodus, standing alone in the middle of a highway littered with deserted cars. How the writer manages to make it lyrical, I have no idea, but she does and it’s wonderful. You can read the entire issue yourself here.

Msafiri raises the stakes, not just among the airlines but in the magazine world as a whole. East Africans clearly care about their publications - the wide variety of newspapers puts Britain to shame, and that’s just the English ones!

The one and only

As our intrepid author Ben Greenman begins his book tour for Please Step Back, Time Out New York chimes in with a profile noting that the novel started as something altogether different: “as a biography of the soul-funk legend Sly Stone,” with Greenman “logging countless hours poring over microfilm and old TV interview clips at public libraries in order to capture the life of this enigmatic musician who spoke in riddles and lived the quintessential flame-in, flame-out life of sex, drugs and rock & roll superstardom.”

It didn’t work, though. “I didn’t like the restrictions of the biography format,” Greenman says. He says it curtailed him from being able to examine what really interested him about certain musicians of the era: “a lot of the people this is loosely based on peaked, then vanished in odd ways, falling prey to addiction or to ego or to money problems or to bad management. I was thinking about how that happens — how someone can make great work for quite a long time and then the light switch just gets snapped off.”

In the end, “while history informs Please, and many real-life figures (Allen Ginsberg, Mick Jagger) pop up in the narrative, Greenman decided to take a fictional route, making frontman and protagonist Rock Foxx a composite character: Sly Stone with a pinch of Curtis Mayfield,” says the report. In fact, the piece includes an mp3 playlist of pop songs from the era that feature in the book so you could see what serious musicians of the time were up against. In the Year 2525, anyone?

Gail Hareven

Back in January an article entitled ‘New Yorker Fiction by the Numbers: The Many Stories by the Few’ reported on a certain Frank Kovarik’s six years of number crunching, and revealed some interesting facts about the breadth and depth of the esteemed magazine’s fiction selections:

• Just nine writers account for 73 (or 23%) of the 312 stories to appear over the last six years. Just 18 writers account for 118 (or 38%) of the stories.
• Of the 312 stories in the New Yorker from 2003 through 2008, 119 or 38.1% were penned by women.
• Americans make up the bulk of the contributors. 157 of the stories, or 50% (down from 52% after 2007), are American (and this leaves off several writers who could be conceivably classified as both American and a native of another country).

The article also listed the ‘superstar’ set—the writers who have appeared in the New Yorker at least five times over the last six years: Alice Munro (12); William Trevor (10); T. Coraghessan Boyle, Tessa Hadley (8); Louise Erdrich, John Updike, Roddy Doyle, Haruki Murakami (7); Thomas McGuane (6); Antonya Nelson, Tobias Wolff, George Saunders, Charles D’Ambrosio, Jonathan Lethem, Edward P. Jones, Jonathan Lethem, Roberto Bolaño, Lara Vapnyar (5).

But with the latest issue of the magazine comes a redemption of sorts: the short story, The Slows by Gail Hareven is (gasp) written by an Israeli woman, and (gasp) translated from the original Hebrew and (gasp) comes from a writer whose work was little know here until Melville House introduced her to a US audience with the publication in English of her novel, The Confessions of Noa Weber.

Bravo Deborah Treisman and, um, bravo Melville House for being quicker off the mark.

das Jessa Crispin

One of the original — and by most counts still the most popular — book blogs, Bookslut, is moving to Berlin. Or at least, founder and editor-in-chief Jessa Crispin is.

It’s not the first time Crispin has uprooted — soon after she started Bookslut in Austin, Texas, she moved it to Chicago, where it quickly grew to include a magazine of fiction and poetry and reviews and interviews. Meanwhile, Crispin just as quickly became the literary doyenne of the town, running the city’s most popular reading series and being the media go-to for local literary stories. It even proved a platform for a larger audience, as Crisipin has become a popular commentator for national media such as NPR and The Smart Set.

So what happened?

“I think that maybe I treat cities like relationships, and one day I just wake up and realize it’s over,” she explains in a blog post. “I’ll tell myself that I’m crazy, that maybe I’m not trying hard enough, after all, people I love very much are here. But no, it’s over, and I started looking around for somewhere to move.”

Crispin says not to worry: not only will the site continue on as it is, with her assistant Caroline Eick as the new managing editor — she’ll even continue the Chicago reading series. But as for the beloved blog, it will be run by some substitutes — such as her old Bookslut sidekick Michael Schaub — until she gets settled in Berlin.