At Book Expo in 2011, I learned several surprizing facts: recent BISG stats revealed that indie bookstores are faring better than large chains in the US; literary fiction is making a come-back, while adult non-fiction struggles. And, refugees from Darfur who live in camps in Eastern Chad wish for books. This last revelation didn't come from BISG, but from a gracious, petite woman I met at another seminar. Afterwards, we found ourselves heading to the cafeteria for one of the Javitz Center's over-priced sandwiches, speaking about the organization that she and her son founded, The Book Wish Foundation. Their mission is to build libraries in Chad's 12 refugees camps.

"I've never thought of refugees wanting books," I told her. "I imagine that their lives would revolve around food and medicine." But I've never been to such a camp, and Lorraine has. She told me that, for many refugees, books represent education and the means to a better life, as well as an opportunity to heal and grow, to imagine, to be entertained. It then occured to me that my own childhood was filled with stories and books, and my life would have been unthinkably different without them. I suspect the same is true for anyone reading this blog.

I immediately offered to send books to the camps. Lorraine thanked me, but told me that such shipments are typically intercepted by the government in these African states. Books must be accessible from within the country's borders.

In order to help Book Wish raise funds to build libraries, the Penguin Young Readers Group just published an anthology of short stories and poems by renowned, bestselling writers. What You Wish For: A Book for Darfur weaves stories and poems with photographs from the camps, blending many dreams and wishes into one rich volume.

On Monday evening, October 17, Books of Wonder in New York will host a signing at which seven of these authors will read. This event is free and open to the public. Come by if you can and if not, check out this incredible book whenever possible. Buy it as a gift that keeps giving, as each purchase benefits the literacy and education of Darfuris. The stories, by writers like Joyce Carol Oates, Meg Cabot, and Ann M. Martin, and the poems, drawings and photographs keep giving, too.

Not About Madonna: My Little Pre-Icon Roommate and Other Memoirs by Whit Hill makes good on the title’s promise. The beautifully written memoir made me laugh and cry. It held my interest and made me think twice — or more. And, along the way, Whit presented a more real, likeable and vulnerable aspect of Madonna than we tend to see in media.

Back "in the day" Whit — or Anne, as I knew her — was one of the ‘perfect’ girls in 4^th and 5^th grade: she was upbeat, mature, resilient (“not in math,” she now claims) while I was the “artist” and jester. Our P.S. 59 class reconnected on Facebook decades later. I had no idea that a wonderful and unique book was going to come of it. Please check it out and let us know your response, on this blog or on our Facebook page for Not About Madonna. I promise it will be time well spent.

“Maybe we’ll merge with (smarter–than-human intelligences) to become super-intelligent cyborgs, using computers to extend our intellectual abilities the same way that cars and planes extend our physical abilities...”

—   Lev Grossman, 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal, Time Magazine (Feb. 21, 2011)

“Who would have imagined that the computer … could fly a plane and guide a missile before it could ride a bike? … As computers have mastered rarified domains once thought to be uniquely human, they simultaneously have failed to master the ground-floor basics of the human experience: spatial orientation, object recognition, natural language, adaptive goal-setting…”

—   Brian Christian, Mind vs. Machine, The Atlantic Monthly (March 2011)

“With all due respect, Hare, you’re a sent. Not my doctor, or my wife, or my mommy!”                        — Jake Anderson, Harold the House

In the last months, magazines like Time and The Atlantic Monthly have featured cover stories about artificial intelligence.

These articles explore a turning point in human history in which A I figures even more prominently that it does already — a turning point that many contend we are quickly approaching. What might such a time portend, what are its implications? Will the “human era” end, as Lev Grossman ponders, or might humanity assert itself yet more compellingly, as Brian Christian suggests?

Author Jake Anderson envisions a future when A I lords over our homes and private desires. I was not only gob-smacked by this astonishing (and plausible) tale, but I felt Harold the House should be illustrated and presented as a serialized graphic novel. And I knew just the person to bring it to life: Angela Bocage, friend of my youth and underground comic artist extraordinaire. 

The next step is for you, gentle reader, to weigh in. Please use this blog to post any comments about the world that you see unfolding in this hot bot drama. Would you be as "chummy" with Harold as our hero Mark? How many years in the future do you think this story is set?

"Publishers provide a huge resource to authors who don't know who reads their books," said Mr. Godin in an interview. "What the Internet has done for me, and a lot of others, is enable me to know my readers." — Seth Godin, "Author to Bypass Publisher for Fans," Wall Street Journal, August 24, 2010

In  a recent Wall Street Journal article Seth Godin was quoted, proclaiming his intentions to forego publication with Penguin and sell his forthcoming books directly to his follower base.

For anyone who has either published or tried to get a manuscript published, Godin’s indomitable spirit strikes a raw nerve. Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, author of this article, writes: “One of (Godin’s) many concerns about the current publishing market is that the process often takes 12 months or more to get a new title into the hands of his readers.”

Indeed, this concern pertains especially to time-sensitive material.

Another concern is the conceits of literary agents and acquisition editors.

J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, for example — an outstanding bestseller — was initially rejected by 12 publishers. Meanwhile, numerous books that are less popular are returned to warehouses by the hundreds and eventually destroyed.

This thick-headedness on the part of publishing decision-makers inspired writers before Seth Godin, like Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, Rudyard Kipling, Anais Nin, Benjamin Franklin, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Leo Tolstoi and other literary giants to publish their own works … in times when self-publishing was far more costly and difficult than it is today.

Yet another concern is an author’s ROI. Seth Godin probably would command a substantial advance from his publisher. But Godin must perceive greater earning opportunities from the self-publishing and self-marketing that he now plans.

Will other top-selling and midlist authors follow his lead? Few of them probably have Godin’s interest and expertise in marketing. So I would guess that some might, while most will prefer to remain with their publishing houses.

Perhaps the greatest loss to corporate publishing will be fresh voices — of every age group — who are weary of the wasted time and skewed, derisive opinions exacted by inept literary agents and publishers. It wouldn’t surprise me if the most talented and passionate writers wiped those obstacles from their paths and carried on in Godin’s footsteps

“… nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom.”

            —James Baldwin

And nothing is more imponderable, once we sense it, than eternity.

As a child learning about the universe, I gripped my mother’s arm and said, “Forever never stops!”

Our lives are finite, but life is infinite.

A popular way to resolve this tension is to create false “end times,” when the world as we know it will “come to an end” — and “forever” will stop. The latest of these fads is 2012, but other “ends of the world” have included 30 C.E., 1000, 1843, 1844, 1914, 1919 and 2000.

Since these promises of apocalypse have yet to be fulfilled (and I personally wouldn’t hold my breath) the next best way to “kill eternity” is through fad and fashion: “THIS style,” people declare, “Is over.”

Modernism is “over; “ even post-modernism is “over.”

Yet, people pay huge sums of money to acquire art of the modernist era, and students continue to read and love modernist literature.

When Apple introduced its first model in the mid 1980s, the artsy hoi polloi cried: “Painting is dead!”

Yet everyone I know either owns an original painting or a poster reproduction of one.

In the early 2000s the music industry arguably transformed. But still, my teenage nephews love the Beatles as I did.

The latest death cry has come from our own industry, publishing.

A pretentious ex of mine declared: “Soon every book will be an executable file!”

Two weeks later, I attended Book Expo and saw miles of paper books displayed.

Last week, best-selling author Seth Godin wrote in The Wall Street Journal about his plans to produce and market books directly for his readers. And yesterday, the New York Times weighed in on the presumed battle between ebooks and paper books.

To me, such avowals don’t foretell the end of paper books and traditional publishing so much as the introduction of choice and simultaneity.

Perhaps my prognosis is less dramatic than “Book Publishing Apocalypse Now.”

In the blog posts that follow I will explore the more subtle and perhaps likely implications of these changes in our industry.

The name and reputation of Henry Luce, born 112 years ago, has shrunk from the heyday of his media empire (TIME, LIFE and FORTUNE magazines) in the forties and fifties. Today, the circulation of TIME has declined, and LIFE has ceased publication.

But growing up in Detroit in the forties, before TV and the Internet affected the availability of news stories, I remember depending on TIME and LIFE to tell me what was happening in the big world.  For a young college student eager to keep up with the news, Luce’s magazines were required reading, an assignment I looked forward to completing each week. I wasn’t the only one hooked on LIFE. Based on polling data of Americans, George Gallup reported that the biggest break a movie could get was a two-page layout of still photographs in LIFE. Publicity of this kind was more useful than a page-one story in all newspapers published in the United States.

Living in Detroit was like living in a remote province, away from important news being made in Washington and London, far from theater openings on Broadway and new books being published in New York.  To me Henry R. Luce was a “macher,” a big shot charting the future goals of America.  For example, the “American Century” referenced in the subtitle of Brinkley’s new Luce biography was the title of an essay Luce wrote in the February 7, 1941 issue of LIFE. This messianic view of Americans civilization harkened back to the missionary work of his father, a Presbyterian minister laboring in China, where Luce was born, to spread the word of Christianity.  According to son Henry, “It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmists called a little lower than the angels.”  

Henry Luce was also a figure of envy, having married the beautiful, beguiling, Claire Booth, author of the successful Broadway show and movie, THE WOMEN, elected to the U. S. Congress and later appointed ambassador to Italy.  Subsequent biographies of Claire Booth Luce show that this second marriage was one of Henry’s ventures that turned sour.  

I don’t plan to read Brinkley’s biography any more than I plan to read a biography of other American journalists such as Horace Greeley, Joseph Pulitzer or William Randolph Hearst. The Australian Rupert Murdoch? Well, that sounds like a tempting read.