Google’s bought eBook Technologies.

(No, not patents related to digital text. There’s actually a company called eBook Technologies. Guess they couldn’t brainstorm their way out of that genericism.)

Details on TechCrunch, among others: just follow the link.

What’ll they do with it? Lord only knows.

Tagging along with Kathryn’s musings on what makes a reader a reader, this morning I found the results of Central Connecticut State University’s annual study on reading in the country’s 75 largest cities. There’s some interesting data there, especially if you dive in and look at their different categories.

Washington, DC, turned out in the top spot this year, unseating Seattle, which had won or shared the top spot for four out of five years. Portland also ranked in the top ten, so I’d say having both northwest cities that qualify for the list sitting that high is a good sign.

But what really intrigues me is not the list itself, but the categories, and I found a number of surprising things, such as while Washington, DC, is the overall most literate cities, it ranks just 17th on the list in number of bookstores per 10k people.
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Death match between a tribble and Snooki's hair. Who wins? I promise we'll get to this.

Every time I read a post about the kindle (or other e-readers) I get one of three things:

1. “I think e-readers are bad and the death of the book is nigh because most people are ignorant slobs who will steal books and woe is me!”

2. “The Sony kindlepadnook is the bestest thing evers and everyone who doesn’t have one is stupid welcome to the STONE AGE!!!”

3. “I decided that I would make an intellectual effort to compare the experience of digital text to that of physical books for the sake of a logical comparison, though I want to disclaim any support of horrifically large and abusive companies such as Amazon, et al.”

Kyle Minor recently posted a review of his kindle experience on HTMLGIANT, and it certainly falls into the third category. Judging by the posts and literary work of Kyle’s that I’ve read, he seems to be a very bright character. But I’m worried by things like this: “Am I distrustful of million-tentacled corporate monsters like Amazon? Very.” Not because I’m a corporate whore, but because it points the finger in the wrong direction.

Yes, large corporations are scary, because they have lots of power and little accountability, and that frees them to act like sociopaths whose sole focus is on the self. Sure. Understood. But isn’t there something larger at play here? Corporations don’t start out as gigantic evil monsters. They can only have real influence and power over the marketplace if consumers allow it. If few people bought items from Amazon, then Amazon would not sell millions of different products for low prices. They would only be able to sell items that were being purchased. But because they’ve established an effective business model, they’ve grown and expanded their influence because consumers keep coming back. Ultimately, we’re all to blame, right? People who spend money? So saying, as Kyle does, that there’s very little he can really do about such a company, is the easy way out.

But it’s also the easy way out to say that it’s consumers’ fault and we all need to fix things if we want them to be better.
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This weekend I wrote a post about something that happened when I was nine. That was the year that I decided the red-headed girl with the ponytail was too normal to be my friend, the year I first held a hearing aid in my hands, the year the school counselor sprinted down the hallways chasing a half-naked kid and slamming him into the lockers at the end of the hall. Also, I changed my name for the first time.

But Tom Ashbrook, as he so often does, changed my morning routine. Tom hosts On Point, and is the greatest interruptor I’ve ever heard. But more important, his shows cover an incredibly wide range of topics, and he handles them all with respect. This morning the topic was recession-era letters to Santa Claus, and they broke my goddamned heart.

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Last week my phone died. Remember when you could buy a phone without a camera, keyboard, and pasta maker attached to it? It was one of those. Call me old-fashioned, I guess. Heck, the memory card in the phone pre-dated the Cingular-AT&T merger.

So I got a shiny new phone with a camera and too-small buttons and the only phone numbers I had were my wife’s and parents’. The rest of the numbers I used all the time—friends, other family, the dentist’s office—were all lost to me, and I had to embarrassingly ask each person for their phone number. Which is a strange thing to have to ask someone who you just called the day before. Because even though I used them all the time, I had no idea what they were.

At first this made me happy. I don’t like talking on the phone anyway, and if I lost my address book, I’d have an excuse when people asked me why I didn’t call them.

It only took me a couple of days to get all the numbers back. Email and facebook and asking around (digitally, mind you, not in person) made it happen. And I wondered, what if I didn’t have email to ask what their number was? What if there wasn’t facebook (which I use mostly as a glorified address book)? What if I couldn’t call someone who called someone who had someone’s number in their cell phone?

What if this was 1994?
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“How many editors will Random House assign to my novel?”
“Minus Thirteen.”

Thank you, Suvudu, via io9.

Satire is underrated. Also hard to do. And often misunderstood. So, who’s the great satirist now?

The trouble with satire is that half the people aren’t smart enough to get it (Huck Finn, anyone?), a quarter of the people will get it and be pissed off, and a quarter of the people will get it and chuckle and nod and not do anything about it.

Has satire moved away from its real purpose–to shame people into changing–and erred on the side of humor instead? Is it because humor is easier? Safer? Politically less volatile? Is Stephen Colbert really just a clown? A very good comedian?

Isn’t there a line between satire and parody? Isn’t one more complex and intelligent than the other?

Is The Onion as close as we have to genuine satire? It would have been very easy for them to go down the comedic road of cheap laughs and never look back, but for the most part haven’t they done a pretty swell job, even if it is getting old?

Can you do satire on a daily basis? What isn’t proper fodder for such treatment?

Jonathan Swift, sure. Chaucer. What about Garry Trudeau? And by extension South Park? And then Jonathan Coulton and John Hodgman? Everyone named John?

Must it be more than one’s tongue embedded in cheek?

Should Animal Farm be classified as satire? 1984? Is satire easier to do in science fiction? Is it even technically possible? Can you satirize something that doesn’t actually exist yet? Or is the human condition what’s always really being satirized, regardless of the setting? Is that too simple?

Who is taking the easy way out? Who isn’t? Who is the real live eminent satirist of our time?

It’s not Tom Wolfe, is it? Tell me it’s not Tom Wolfe. No offense to his work. But the white suit.

And why are there no women mentioned in this post? Mary Roach could be the greatest satirist of our time if she wanted to.

Because I spent the weekend writing instead of writing blog posts, this is all you get: Read up on the Underground Literary Alliance. How I never heard of them, I don’t know. Still too new to it to judge entirely one way or another, but their website is about twelve years out of date. Which is weird because they’ve only been around for ten.

I’ll be doing a write-up on the ULA for next week. A sample from their manifesto: “literature is the product of upper class writers so jaded, inherently sick, emotionally barren, and spiritually dead that they thrive on anti-truth and esoteric parlor jokes.”

Is it even possible for that to be true?

More where that came from.

Today I wrote a rejection letter that contained these lines: “Although it seems that vampires are everywhere, there’s more to a successful book than the race & attributes of its characters. While genre-specific readerships are huge, they are also inundated with opportunities for reading, and a book must stand out in some way if it’s to take hold of the market.”

This was my way of saying, “Please, stop making me cry.”

Maybe you’re tired of hearing people complain about how many vampire manuscripts there are. You know why people complain about that sort of thing? Because it’s true.

When I specifically ask you to send me three chapters of your manuscript, don’t send the whole goddamn thing.

Would I ask you if you wanted a latte, then dump a gallon of hot milk on your head?