It’s the Memorial Day holiday here in the U.S., and we’re trying to make it memorable by reading and not responding to outside stimulus …. Back tomorrow ….

Mian Mian

“A Chinese novelist’s lawsuit against Google over its online library is going ahead in court after settlement talks failed,” reports Joe McDonald in an Associated Press wire story. “Mian Mian — known for lurid tales of sex, drugs and nightlife — filed suit in October after her latest book, ‘Acid House,’ was scanned into the library. Google says it removed the work following Mian Mian’s complaint but the author is suing for damages of 61,000 yuan ($9,000) and a public apology.”

Mian’s lawyer says “Compensation is negotiable but Mian Mian really is demanding an apology.”

Google refused to comment. Meanwhile, “the China Written Works Copyright Society, is calling on Google to negotiate compensation for Chinese authors. The group says it has found more than 80,000 works by Chinese authors scanned into the library.”

Barnes & Nobel's ebookstore, as seen on the Nook E-Reader

An astute observation from Wall Street Journal book reporter Geoffrey A. Fowler:

As books go digital, much of the focus has been on which gadgets offer the best approximation of old-fashioned paper and ink on a screen. But there’s another choice that’s just as important for readers to weigh before they make the leap to e-books: which e-bookstore to frequent.

Reading devices like the iPad, Kindle and Nook will come and go, but you’ll likely want your e-book collection to stick around. Yet unlike music, commercial e-books from the leading online stores come with restrictions that complicate your ability to move your collection from one device to the next. It’s as if old-fashioned books were designed to fit on one particular style of bookshelves. What happens when you remodel?

In a detailed report, he blames publishers and retailers for creating the problem — publishers because they “demanded that e-bookstores embed digital rights management software in most best sellers to keep them from being stolen and swapped, free, online,” and retailers (such as Amazon.com, Apple, Barnes & Noble, and Sony) who “want you to buy their own gadgets and to continue buying e-books from their stores” and so fix things so your books work only on their device.

There are some providers, though, while still falling “short of putting readers fully in charge of their own digital-book collections,” have nonetheless “begun to unveil their own solutions for moving your e-books around.” Still, problems remain: Amazon, for example, has created apps so you can read ebooks purchased from them on the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, PC, Mac and, soon even on devices running Google’s Android software — but “Amazon buyers should know that they’re likely stuck using the retailer’s software forever.”

And while Sony’s ebookstore, and Borders’ Kobo store, as well as a future version of Google’s, offer better (although complicated) alternatives, “For now,” says Fowler, “the e-bookstore choice comes down to which compromises readers are willing to accept. … readers intent on building an e-library may want to either invest in an ePub-based collection, or hold off until the industry figures out a better solution.”

The Moby Award in its natural habitat.

The chatter continues about the First Annual Moby Awards for Best & Worst Book Trailer in this post in the Boston Globe, this feature on the PBS Newhour, and this article in the New York Press. And, for those of you who couldn’t attend the ceremony, or couldn’t see much because of the crowd—here is a glimpse of the mighty Moby Award itself, caught in situ. According to Dennis Johnson, instigator of the whole Moby fracas, the award is solid gold and the wrong species of whale. But next year, it will be the right species and gold-plate!

Isaac Asimov: Lap dance aficionado, says Bookslut

It’s an old dilemma for the upright reader: “I just found out that one of my favorite sci-fi writers is a raging homophobe. Should I prevent my son from reading the jerk’s books?”

Or, as Brendan I. Koerner observes in this commentary for Wired, “Denied the works of jerks, what would we read? Certainly not famed eugenicist H. G. Wells. Or the misogynistic Robert Heinlein or the druggy deadbeat Philip K. Dick. How about Harlan Ellison’s famous… er… prickliness? (Or so we hear! Please, Harlan, don’t sue us—you deserved story credit on Terminator. Really.)”

The solution comes from Bookslut’s Michael Schaub:

“Buy the author’s books used or borrow them,” suggests Michael Schaub, managing editor of Bookslut, an online magazine dedicated to the written word. Then donate the money you saved to a gay rights cause. Or just blow it all on liquor and lap dances, as we’re pretty sure Isaac Asimov would have done.

Apparently, these things can be more than just e-readers ….

(via Jason at GalleyCat)

The family of Foxconn suicide Ma Xiangqian gather outside the Foxconn factory to mourn and protest

When yet another of its employees committed suicide Tuesday at its Shenzhen plant (aka the “hell factory” — see yesterday’s MobyLives report), the Foxconn Technology company — a producer of Apple iPads — swung into emergency response mode Wednesday. According to a New York Times report by David Barboza, company chair Terry Gou, “one of the richest men in Asia,” has issued an apology and more:

Sensing a public relations fiasco and facing questions from Foxconn suppliers, Mr. Gou traveled here Wednesday from Taiwan on what company executives said was an emergency trip. As part of a hastily assembled, carefully orchestrated news conference and tour led by Mr. Gou, Foxconn executives defended their labor practices, even as they vowed to do everything possible to prevent more young people from taking their own lives.

The company also presented a panel of mental health professionals to discuss the likely causes of suicide in China generally. At least one of the panelists placed the blame on social issues in the country beyond Foxconn’s control.

And perhaps in a sign of desperation, the company said it had even begun putting safety nets up on factory buildings to deter suicide attempts.

The effort, sadly, was apparently not enough: “Hours after the news conference, another Foxconn employee fell to his death from one of the complex’s buildings,” reports the Times.

Meanwhile, Apple and other companies having their products made there — including Dell and Hewlett-Packard — “say they, too, are now investigating conditions at Foxconn,” according to the report. None of those companies, however, seemed to have revealed any details to the Times about those “investigations.”

Soon after receiving a Kindle DX ... (University of Washington student Franzi) Roesner began to miss thumbing through the pages of a printed textbook for the answer to a homework question."

“If Amazon hoped for honest feedback when it started testing the Kindle DX on college campuses last fall, it certainly got its wish: Students pulled no punches telling the Seattle Internet giant what they thought of its $489 e-reader,” reports Amy Martinez in a Seattle Times report. “If Amazon hoped the Kindle DX would become the next iPhone or iPod on campuses, it failed its first test.”

As Martinez details, responses were almost uniformly negative across the board:

At the University of Virginia, as many as 80 percent of MBA students who participated in Amazon’s pilot program said they would not recommend the Kindle DX as a classroom study aid (though more than 90 percent liked it for pleasure reading).

At Princeton University and Portland-based Reed College, a small liberal-arts institution, students praised the Kindle for its long battery life, paper savings and portability. They then complained they couldn’t scribble notes in the margins, easily highlight passages or fully appreciate color charts and graphics.

One University of Washington student put it succinctly: “You don’t read textbooks in the same linear way as a novel. You have to flip back and forth between pages, and the Kindle is too slow for that. Also, the bookmarking function is buggy.”

Be there or be square: today Open Letter Books and Melville House are hosting a launch party for Alejandro Zambra’s new release, Private Lives of Trees, at the Melville House bookstore. Zambra is also the author of Bonsai, part of the Melville House Contemporary Art of the Novella series. Zambra has been called “the herald of a new wave of Chilean fiction” (by The Nation’s Marcela Valdez) and his work as won high praise: the Chilean paper Las Últimas Noticias called Bonsai “One of the greatest literary events of recent years.” It was also Chile’s Novel of the year in 2008. Below, an excerpt from the book — go ahead, flip the pages ….

Lord Byron: If only he'd shared his editor with Ashley Dupre

It’s a miracle that Keats’s letters to Fanny Brawne survived to be published.

And painful to be reminded of what we will never read: Galileo’s letters to his daughter, destroyed by the good sisters of her convent; the autobiography of Sir Richard Francis Burton, condemned by Isabel, his Christian wife; Byron’s memoirs, burned by his own publisher, the immortally despised John Murray.

Among the literary reasons to be thankful to be alive in the 21st century (as opposed to, for instance, the medical reasons) is the announced publication of Mark Twain’s suppressed autobiography. Twain stipulated that the work, which promises to confide what he called “the privacies of his life,” remain unpublished for one hundred years after his death (April 21, 1910).  It is promised by his publisher, The University of California Press, to be “uncensored.”

The first of three volumes will be published this November.

But the benighted armies of the censor are out to deprive us of another sort of memoir, if Ashley Dupre is to be believed. In an exclusive interview with Hollie McKay from FOXNews.com (a network whose work in this area is unimpeachable), Dupre says that political pressure has blocked the publication of her “tell-all” about her mostly paid relationship with former New York Governor Elliot Spitzer. The revelation, two years ago, that the governor was conducting an extra-marital affair with Miss Dupre, then working as a prostitute, purportedly shocked adult New Yorkers, led to Mr. Spitzer’s resignation and short-lived disgrace, and inspired at least one unpopular limerick:

There once was a guv’nor Spitzer,
As A.G. a champeen kibitzer.
He always butt in
on the other guy’s sin –
turns out, he’s a regular shpritzer.

In what was very likely an unconsidered choice of words Dupre said, “I’ve had three really huge publishers and they’ve all pulled out.”

Miss Dupre, who, as a Huffington post report notes, appears on the cover of May’s Playboy magazine, is undaunted. “I’m not giving up,” she says, “I’m going to keep going with it.”

One would like to think that publication of Miss Dupre’s revelations might serve an educational purpose but, as Byron remarked, “the reading or non-reading a book – will never keep down a single petticoat.”