James Risen

“The Obama administration is seeking to compel a writer to testify about his confidential sources for a 2006 book about the Central Intelligence Agency, a rare step that was authorized by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr.,” according to a report by Charlie Savage in the New York Times, a report that has its share of irony: The writer in question is James Risen, and the book is his State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration, in which he uncovered the fact that the Bush administration had been conducting a warrantless surveillance program on US citizens; Risen, a Times reporter himself, published the book because the Times at first refused to run his reports.

However according to Savage, Risen has been subpoenaed “to provide documents and to testify May 4 before a grand jury in Alexandria, Va., about his sources for a chapter … [that] … largely focuses on problems with a covert C.I.A. effort to disrupt alleged Iranian nuclear weapons research.”

Risen referred questions to his attorney, who would only say, “He intends to honor his commitment of confidentiality to his source or sources. We intend to fight this subpoena.”

Risen won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the case when the Times eventually ran his report.

A GalleyCat item by Jason Boog points us to a beta page at Amazon that shows the most popular passages being highlighted by readers of Kindle editions.

As Amazon explains at the page, “The Amazon Kindle, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPad each provide a very simple mechanism for adding highlights…. We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights.”

Why does Amazon do this? To “help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people.”

So what is the most popular passage highlighted by Kindle readers? It’s the following not-quite-a-full-sentence from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which was highlighted by 1698 people so far: “… three things–autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward–are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”

The next eleven places on the list are for passages from either William P. Young’s The Shack, or Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. No other book enters the list until number 12, when Mitch Albom’s bon mots from Have a Little Faith start getting highlighted.

So what do we learn from this? Well, that lightweight bestsellers are getting more closely read, perhaps, than you thought. And despite its refusal to release sales information, we now know that Amazon has sold at least 1698 Kindles.

And, oh yeah: Big Brother is watching you.

Jake Grovum of Stateline.org takes a comprehensive look at the “Amazon tax” situation in this thoughtful essay. As Grovum notes, the bottom line is that despite the fact that “shopping online can be a handy way to avoid paying sales tax on books, CDs and electronics,” online shoppers are nonetheless “still supposed to pay tax on these purchases.” And given the economic crisis, more and more states “desperate for revenue” are struggling to find ways to get people to live up to that obligation. The states also say it’s a question of fairness: “Main Street retailers have to collect sales taxes, and leaving the Internet as a tax-free shopping zone puts them at a disadvantage.”

But the effort has “ignited a tax war with the huge online retailer that is the primary target” of such efforts: Amazon.com. The company has fought back vociferously:

In February, Colorado passed a law requiring Amazon.com and other Internet retailers to mail notices to customers reminding them of their tax liabilities. Amazon responded by shutting down its affiliate program in Colorado, effectively closing thousands of small businesses that were marketing Amazon’s products over the Web.

Then, last week, Amazon sued North Carolina after the state’s department of revenue asked the company to turn over the names and addresses of its North Carolina customers - information the state would need if it were to try to collect unpaid taxes.

Amazon also shut down its affiliates in Rhode Island after a sales tax measure was passed there, and Amazon is suing the New York State for forcing it to collect sales taxes there, Grovum says there are “as many as 15 more cash-strapped states weighing whether to pass Amazon taxes of their own….” Meanwhile other big online retailers — such as Target and Barnes & Noble — have agreed to collect sales taxes, and Amazon is becoming more and more solitary even as it becomes more and more vehement in its fight.

But even as Amazon finds itself fighting more and more states, “the issue points to a larger flaw in the country’s tax system — one that’s still based on agriculture and manufacturing rather than services,”  says Grovum. Or, as one analyst tells him, “This is an issue that has to be dealt with. Basically, to avoid running a 20th-century tax system in a 21st-century economy.”

Decorate! Here’s the thing about real books. If you don’t like one, you don’t just throw it away (or, in digital speak, delete it). You make do. It can be a door-stopper, a gift to a friend you don’t particularly like, or its pages can be ripped out for kindling or packing material.  Paper mache anyone?  Hell, we’ve even glued a bunch together, stacked ‘em high and built a cute side table. A book is reusable and recyclable, plain and simple.  So here is yet another fun idea to reuse the book you just can’t stand to keep on your shelves.  And no,  you can NOT use an e-book for this project.  Do not try.  It will not get results.

A report at the BusinessInsider details how “Amazon has very successfully transitioned away from being a site for just buying books, movies, or music.” In fact, “In its last quarter, Amazon’s sales from other goods, like electronics, was greater than its sales from media like books and music.”

How much greater? “For the first quarter in 2010, Amazon’s media sales totaled $3.51 billion, while sales from electronics and other merchandise totaled $3.7 billion.”

According to the report, it’s a good development, away from troublesome products like books: “Now that Amazon is selling TVs, shoes, and other hard items that can’t be pirated on the web, Amazon is better positioned for the future.”

Mary Higgins Clarke (Is that young Mary in the background? Or Carol?)

Do we really need to write about this? No!!! But it’s just so freaky, especially with that picture, that we will: USA Today reports here this breaking news, “The mother-daughter duo of Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark has three spots in the Top 100 on USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list.”

Now don’t get excited. They are not numbers one, two, and three. Mary is at #6 for her new release, The Shadow of Your Smile and at #10 for the paperback release of Just Take My Heart. Carol is at #80 for Wrecked.

Need we say more, Carol? Just look at your title. You can beat her, but you’ve got to get your titling down—something with hearts, smiles, me, you—no sturm und drang, please.

Cory Doctorow

Apple iPad infatuation? Corey Doctorow isn’t having any of it. In a rip-snorting commentary for Publishers Weekly, he says

Here’s what most mainstream press reports so far haven’t told you. The iPad uses a DRM system called “code-signing” to limit which apps it can run. If the code that you load on your device isn’t “signed,” that is, approved by Apple, the iPad will not run it. If the idea of adding this DRM to the iPad is to protect the copyrights of the software authors, we can already declare the system an abject failure—independent developers cracked the system within 24 hours after the first iPad shipped, a very poor showing even in the technically absurd realm of DRM ….

But DRM isn’t just a system for restricting copies. DRM enjoys an extraordinary legal privilege previously unseen in copyright law: the simple act of breaking DRM is illegal, even if you’re not violating anyone’s copyright. In other words, if you jailbreak your iPad for the purpose of running a perfectly legal app from someone other than Apple, you’re still breaking the law. Even if you’ve never pirated a single app, nor violated a single copyright, if you’re found guilty of removing an “effective means of access control,” Apple can sue you into a smoking hole. That means that no one can truly compete with Apple to offer better iStores, or apps, with better terms that are more publisher- and reader-friendly ….

Think about what that kind of control means for the future of your e-books. Does the company that makes your toaster get to tell you whose bread you can buy? Your dishwasher can wash anyone’s dishes, not just the ones sold by its manufacturer (who, by the way, takes a 30% cut along the way). What’s more, you can invent cool new things to do with your dishwasher. For example, you can cook salmon in it without needing permission from the manufacturer (check out the Surreal Gourmet for how). And you can even sell your dishwasher salmon recipe without violating some obscure law that lets dishwasher manufacturers dictate how you can use your machine.

Doctorow goes on with a line of brilliant analogies (and one that’s mis- or under-informed — the collapse of AMS didn’t really show “what can happen when a single distributor locks up too much of the business;” after all, another company, a hedge fund called Perseus, took over AMS’ publishing holdings such as PGW and more, and now owns 80% of indie publishing distribution, dwarfing AMS).

But even more intriguing is his belief that

There’s an easy way to change this, of course. Just tell Apple it can’t license your copyrights—that is, your books—unless the company gives you the freedom to give your readers the freedom to take their products with them to any vendor’s system. You’d never put up with these lockdown shenanigans from a hardcopy retailer or distributor, and you shouldn’t take it from Apple, either, and that goes for Amazon and the Kindle, too.

This is exactly what I’ve done. I won’t sell my e-books in any store that locks my users into a vendor’s platform….

I’m planning to be in the publishing business for a good half-century or more. And though I am not exactly sure how the e-publishing book business will mature … I am keenly aware that locking my readers to a specific device today, whether the iPad or the Kindle, could very well mean a dramatic loss of control for my business tomorrow.

Heather Reisman

Despite rumors that have been circulating to the contrary — see the earlier MobyLives report — Heather Reisman, owner of Indigo Books & Music, Canada’s biggest book retailer, says she has no intention of selling the business.

Reisman made the statement during an interview with the Financial Post, during an exchange about the impact of Amazon.com being allowed to open a distribution center in Canada despite having no Canadian ownership:

Now that Amazon will be allowed to have its own distribution centre here, do you believe Ottawa should ease foreign ownership legislation in a way that would allow you to enter into international partnerships?

A: Amazon had a full-on distribution centre here before, but it was run by Canada Post. The change is they are going to run it themselves. In my opinion, once the government [in 2002] allowed Amazon to operate 100% as a major bookseller in Canada with no Canadian ownership, they were de facto saying that they believe in this day and age that you do not have to be Canadian to own a book-retailing company [in Canada].

Q: Do you intend to take that issue up with Industry Canada? How is it that Kobo can have international partners with a substantial stake?

A: I don’t have any reason to take it up because I am not looking at selling the Indigo business. Our Kobo business is a global business. But I think the government realizes that you cannot put legislation on a digital business - what are you going to do? You just can’t.

There is a certain irony nonetheless to the Amazon deal for Reisman — as her interviewer, Hollie Shaw, observes, years ago Reisman was tapped to head up the Borders chain when it started a Canadian division … “but was thwarted in the mid-1990s by Industry Canada’s restrictions on foreign ownership of booksellers.”

There’s further irony in the fact that Reisman has now partnered with Borders on the Kobo, the company’s ereader device — which, by the way, is looking like big business indeed for Indigo, set to offer “a book catalogue in 180 languages, and offers more than two million e-books for sale and an additional 1.8 million titles available for free download.” As to how it will compete with huge players such as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad, Reisman points to a very persuasive price point: $149.99, less than half the price of the nearest competitor, the Kindle.

Now you can take your library with you, without an e-reader! According to this post on the Inhabitat site, “If you’re not quite ready to donate excess texts or replace them with electronic versions, David Garcia Studio offers an innovative solution: Archive II, a circular bookshelf propelled by walking that is currently on exhibition at Denmark’s University of Roskilde Main Library.

According to Garcia, “The average reader can read about 240 words per minute. A 300 page book normally takes 9 hours to read, non-stop. If you read while you walk, you can read a book in about 43 kilometers. If you read and walk, watch out for traffic.” Always good advice.

The infamous 5-sided book.

You wouldn’t know it by looking at this five-sided, seemingly children’s-oriented, picture book, but it may hold the key to your early retirement. The book, The Clock Without a Face by Eli Horowitz, Mac Barnett, and Scott Teplin, from McSweeney’s, is a mystery-cum-interactive nationwide scavenger hunt. If that’s too confusing, here’s a brief synopsis from the McSweeney’s Store:

We’ve buried 12 emerald-studded numbers—each handmade and one of a kind—in 12 holes across the United States. These treasures will belong to whoever digs them up first. The question: Where to dig?

The call comes in from the shadowy Ternky Tower: 13 robberies, one on each floor, all the way up to the penthouse, where obnoxious importer Bevel Ternky has been relieved of the legendary Emerald Chroniker, his priceless, ancient clock. Readers must conduct their own investigations, scouring detailed illustrations for hidden clues and knotty puzzles. All the answers can be found within these 13 floors: whodunit and how…and where they are now.

So is this real or a literary hoax? The book’s main site encourages readers to post pictures of the jeweled numbers (created by New York based jewelry designer Anna Sheffield) once they’re recovered, and even suggests the best tool for the job at Ace hardware. Also, this is the first FAQ on the central site:

Is there really buried treasure?
Yes.

So, all indications are that authors Horowitz, Barnett, and Teplin intend this to be the real literary-emerald-scavenger-hunt deal. Additionally, the first review, at School Library Journal, sums it up quite well: “Enter the world’s weirdest book.”

As an aside, savvy Eggers readers may remember that a similar (though more rudimentary) treasure map/scavenger hunt ploy was described in his second novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity!, but that probably won’t help you solve this puzzle, unfortunately. So how will we know when the puzzle, or part of the puzzle, is solved and one of the clock face’s jeweled numbers is found? It could be when the book’s Amazon page gets its first 5-star rating.