Prognosticating e-books in the new year

It's a mad venture, looking into the future of e-books. Which is why we here at Jacket Copy are letting Sarah Rotman Epps and James McQuivey from Forrester Research carry the ball. They've blogged their 10 predictions for e-books and e-readers at paidContent.org.

Perhaps their most audacious prediction is that e-book sales will top $500 million in 2010. It's audacious because e-book sales from January through September of this year were just over $109 million, according to the Assn. of American Publishers. The researchers say that since this number omits education, libraries and other markets, the sales are actually higher. And that the sales the association does track will also continue to climb.

The two have heartening words for Nook executives at Barnes & Noble; they say the bookseller's challenger to the Kindle and Sony Reader will increase market share in 2010. This is a pretty safe prediction -- pre-orders have sold out the Nook until January, so if there will be a year of the Nook, it certainly won't be 2009.

Several predictions -- about increasing use of non e-readers to read books, and app-ification of e-readers so they can take on more diverse functions -- all point to the same interesting question. A book used to be something simple: pages between covers. But now, it can be almost any collection of words and/or pictures in sequence that's been published, electronically or otherwise. What exactly will define a book at the end of 2010? At the end of 2050?

We're not much for predicting the future here. But maybe you are.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photos: left, the Kindle DX. Credit: Amazon.com. Right: the Nook. Credit Barnes & Noble

A painful narrative that still connects

Students at a continuation high school in Southern California connect to Jimmy Santiago Baca's 2001 memoir "A Place to Stand," their teacher Jean Gillis writes at La Bloga. Because her teenage students aren't reading at grade level -- they might be reading at anywhere from a second- to fifth-grade level instead -- she reads the book aloud.

The students read along with me, and we build up our stamina so that we can concentrate on the story for up to 30 minutes a class period. My students may not have experienced that childhood luxury of being read to..... But it is the potency of the narrative that hooks them. How many times have they told me that they have never read a whole book until this one? It's so important to me that they read, that they feel invited to that table of readers and not hang back in the shadows of the excluded.

Baca, who was abandoned as a child in Arizona, didn't learn to read until he was imprisoned for dealing drugs. An almost complete autodidact, literacy became his lifeline. Does some of this idea reach the students who read his book? From our 2001 review by Michael Harris:

Lying in his cell, remembering a brief period in his childhood when he lived with his grandparents in a traditional New Mexico farming village, Baca discovered that he had things he desperately wanted to write about, and he taught himself to read and write, with minimal help from inmates and outside correspondents. His first note to one of the latter in 1975 is painfully illiterate, but less than two years later he was reading poets Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda and writing powerful, sophisticated poems of his own....

Pain must be expressed or it kills the self and others -- that's the message Baca distills from his life's story.

It's easy to forget that not everyone feels, as Gillis writes, "invited to the table of readers." But Baca's struggle drew them there. He has won awards for poetry and nonfiction, and earlier this fall published a novel about the sons of two farm workers, "A Glass of Water."

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Ripping off the covers with Harlequin in Vegas

There's something happening in Vegas right now that we can talk about -- the art exhibit of Harlequin Romance covers on exhibit at Paris Las Vegas. The Times wrote about  'The Heart of a Woman: Harlequin Cover Art 1949-2009" this weekend:

Visitors walk through a doorway next to one of Paris' signature advertising photos: a couple lustily embracing on an elevator, the man reaching for the "stop" button. It could be mistaken for a Harlequin cover.

Inside a small room is a chronology of representations of desire.

The earliest covers draw from film noir and are rife with -- in hindsight -- unintentional comedy.

"Virgin With Butterflies" (1949) shows a brunet in thigh-high stockings encircled by five male heads sprouting butterfly wings. "Men Cast a Net for Her," the cover promises....

There is a kind of goodness -- if sometimes awful goodness -- in Harlequin covers like those in the exhibit.

But romance readers know that other covers are just plain awful. Take these worst-of examples from the Cover Cafe's annual contest. "This cover is enough to make me nostalgic for the bodice-ripping clinches of old," wrote a judge of "Take Two," the second-place 2006 winner. "At least they didn't look quite so weird and porn-y.”

The Cover Cafe, which is devoted to romance novels, also awards a series of best-ofs every year. Maybe some of those -- with titles like "The Boundless Deep," "Abandon" and "The Russian Concubine" -- will make it into a retro-book-cover exhibit of the future.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Paris Las Vegas

Louis Armstrong: the life of a master, inside and out

In Sunday's paper, we look inside the new Louis Armstrong bio "Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong." Author Terry Teachout was the first to chronicle Armstrong's life with full access to the 600-plus tapes the musician recorded. The tape recorder was meant to be for music, but eventually Armstrong left it on all the time, recording "dinner parties, getting high in the dressing room after a gig, trying to get his wife into bed," Teachout says.

A musician getting high might come as little surprise -- but Louis Armstrong? Teachout's bio shows that the sweet avuncular character who sang "It's a Wonderful World" had a little more edge.

"Most people, I suspect, don't know that he smoked marijuana every day," Teachout says, although he acknowledges that a jazz musician using drugs wouldn't really astonish anyone. "But people who know about Armstrong in the general way that most of us know about Armstrong, I think they're going to be surprised."

"He was even more effective on television than he was in the films. In the films, he played these stereotypical Uncle Tom-like roles, because that was what you got to play if you were black in the 1930s and 1940s," Teachout says. "On television, he played himself performing as a musician, and he was one of the most frequently seen people on TV throughout the 1950s and 1960s. . . . He had the personality, and he was able to make use of media that brought that personality into the homes of ordinary people."

In the clip below from the 1960s, that personality is in evidence as he joins Johnny Cash on his variety show; the two of them sing a 1930 Jimmy Rodgers song.

See Armstrong play jazz after the jump.

CIA secrets revealed -- like magic

The Cold War made for strange partners -- including the CIA and a well-known magician named John Mulholland. In 1953, Mulholland was hired by the C.I.A. to adapt his craft for its agents. The documents he produced, long thought destroyed, were discovered in 2007 by two C.I.A. historians, who have recently published "The Official C.I.A. Manual of Trickery and Deception."

What could a magician teach spies? Much sleight of hand, apparently, that could be used for dosing drinks, passing pills and exchanging messages. And then there were the covert signals, including some that could be sent by tying your shoelaces in special patterns. The Boston Globe has illustrated some of the tricks in this marvelous slideshow.

In an accompanying piece at the Globe, Tom Scocca writes:

In the superpower struggle for power and influence around the world, the CIA was secretly funding and engineering everything from literary journals to coups and armed rebellions. It was total warfare, but with creeping breadth in place of nuclear intensity. Both the ideas and techniques of secret war pervaded the culture -- the corrosive belief in hidden conspiracy and the nifty thrill of spycraft itself, the codes and disguises and miniature cameras....

Today Mulholland’s account of real-world stagecraft amounts to an etiquette manual for a lost moment of history.

That moment is lost, as he says, because many of the methods used depended on the context of the tricks. In those days, men could be counted on to wear suit jackets, which had predictable internal and external pockets. Enough people smoked so that a matchbook could be used as a prop without attracting attention. If there might be contemporary cognates for these -- jeans, say, or Blackberries -- the social context back then was different as well. Performing a trick depends upon expected behavior, and how men and women interact has changed since 1953 -- in a few ways, at least.

If the tricks in this book no longer apply, exactly, they do illuminate a mysterious interlude in our country's past: When a guy who'd made his living pulling a rabbit out of a hat showed C.I.A. agents how to do their jobs.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Publishing from the grave, Michael Crichton style

If you're an author, be careful what you leave lying around. In the event of your death, anything might make it to print. For Vladimir Nabokov, it was a pile of index cards, now published as "The Original of Laura" -- it's so faithful to the original that part of the book are reproductions of the index cards themselves, which can be punched loose and stacked.

There is no such artifact to accompany the posthumous novel from Michael Crichton, "Pirate Latitudes." The completed manuscript was found by an assistant on a computer after the author died last year from throat cancer. 

A buccaneer saga set in the Caribbean in the 17th century, "Pirate Latitudes" is closer to Crichton's historical romances -- "The Great Train Robbery" (1975) and "Eaters of the Dead" (1976) -- than his better-known work like "Jurassic Park," "The Andromeda Strain" and "Congo." Reviewer Tim Rutten writes:

If you're on an airplane for a flight of several hours and not in a particularly demanding mood, "Pirate Latitudes" would be a reasonably agreeable companion. The setting is the crown colony of Port Royal in Jamaica. Hunter, our dashing privateer, is an American -- coincidentally a Harvard man -- born in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. When asked by an attractive woman whether he's a Puritan, he replies, "Only by birth." You get the picture. Meanwhile, a treasure ship has arrived in the heavily fortified Spanish port of Matanceros, and Hunter is asked to capture it.

The plot unfolds, with a sassy pirate wench who bares her breasts to distract her enemies during swordfights and more. But swashbuckling isn't the point.

"Crichton had a remarkable career on its own terms and, somehow, respect ought to be paid," Rutten writes. "The point here is really a question: Are a writer's heirs really entitled to strip-mine his papers for every conceivable nugget of value?"

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Michael Crichton on the set of the 1978 film "Coma." Credit: MGM

How far will our memoir fascination go?

Decades ago, real life became the stuff of novels -- everyone knew "The Bell Jar" was taken from Sylvia Plath's own experience, but nobody wanted to call it a memoir. Flash forward to James Frey and reverse it -- he couldn't sell "A Million Little Pieces" as a novel, but it got snapped up as a memoir (novelistic liberties notwithstanding).

"Memoir" by Ben Yagoda is an "incisive exploration" of memoir, its history and its popularity in our reality-TV era, according to our reviewer. In its review, Salon writes:

Truly provocative is Yagoda's assertion that the rise of memoir shows how "authorship has been democratized"; everyone has a story to tell and who better to tell it than the one who lived it? We put less faith in expertise and objectivity, and more in what's spoken "straight from the heart."

Today in the Daily Beast, Yagoda elaborates on this idea. "Any intelligent, self-aware person with an interesting story can write a decent and readable memoir," he writes. But where do those three things intersect? Can a really, really interesting story make up for a lack of self-awareness? Can someone smart and self-aware write a good book about a relatively boring life? Would anyone want to read it?

Perhaps the biggest question is where the publishing industry fits in. It's perhaps too easy for publishers to say yes to celebrity memoirs, and hard to get them to amount to something anyone would want to read. Take this excerpt from "Still Standing," the memoir from Miss USA contestant Carrie Prejean about her big moment at the pageant:

I knew if I told the truth, I would lose all that I was competing for: the crown, the luxury apartment in New York City, the large salary -- everything that went with the Miss USA title.... Suddenly, it hit me that the long months of planning, dieting, exercising, and practicing were on the verge of paying off. If I won, I would become Miss USA, headed for the 58th Miss Universe Pageant in Nassau, Bahamas.

The prose is hardly electric. Whether or not the form has hit its peak, he writes, "it is becoming evident that the bottom of the barrel is being scraped." And he never even got to these guys.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Carrie Prejean at the Miss Universe pageant. Credit: Eric Jamison / Associated Press

Alice, Beatrix and Harry: Valuable children's literature collection up for auction

A valuable collection of children's literature, including Alice's own copy of "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There," a first edition of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and Beatrix Potter's personal copy of "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" will be presented for auction Dec. 16.

It is the collection of NFL player Pat McInally, a Harvard grad who was a punter and receiver for the Cincinnati Bengals from 1976 to 1985. After completing his turn as a professional football player, he started a successful line of football action figures.

The auction, held by Southern California auctioneer Profiles in History, includes an original drawing by John Tenniel of the Gryphon from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" (pictured). Two copies of "Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There," the Alice sequel, are for sale: One has a pair of original pencil drawings by Tenniel and is estimated to sell for $40,000 to $60,000; the other, expected to sell for at least twice as much, is signed by Alice Liddell, who as a young girl inspired Lewis Carroll to write "Alice."

Other first-edition children's books for auction include "Stuart Little" signed by E.B. White; "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien; "Watership Down" by Richard Adams; and "Mother Goose in Prose," L. Frank Baum's first book, in which Dorothy makes her debut. A copy of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is accompanied by a letter about Narnia written and signed by C.S. Lewis. There are also limited editions of "Winnie the Pooh," "The House at Pooh Corner" and "Now We Are Six," all inscribed by author A.A. Milne and illustrator Ernest H. Shepard, as well as a limited edition of the first four Harry Potter books inscribed by J.K. Rowling.

There are a few bookish collectibles for adults too, including a first edition of "The Time Machine" signed by H.G. Wells. James Bond fans should be happy: In addition to a first edition of "Goldfinger" signed by Ian Fleming to William Plomer, to whom the book is dedicated, there are first editions of "Thunderball," "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and "For Your Eyes Only."

Although bids will be accepted by the old-school methods of mail, fax and in person, online auctioneers icollector and LiveAuctioneers also will be taking bids. 

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Original John Tenniel drawing of the Gryphon from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland." Credit: Profiles in History

Pop-up books in the news

The man behind the modern pop-up book, Waldo "Wally" Hunt, has died. Hunt, a Los Angeles advertising executive, sold his company and traveled to New York, where he became disenchanted. He was charmed by a pop-up book imported from Czechoslovakia. "I knew I'd found the magic key," he told the L.A. Times in 2002. "No one was doing pop-ups in this country." Hunt's first pop-up company was so successful that Hallmark purchased it. Then Hunt returned west and started another company -- making pop-up books, of course.

"He was such an important publisher of pop-up books who really advanced them technically. The pop-up designers who worked for him were amazing creative engineers," Cynthia Burlingham, director of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum, told the L.A. Times.

Hunt was also a collector; many of the 300 works in a 2002 exhibit "Pop Up! 500 Years of Movable Books" at the Los Angeles Central Library were from his collection. He passed away at 88 on Nov. 6.

Meanwhile, the website Hilobrow, which has just undergone a snazzy design upgrade, celebrates pop-up books as underutilized subjects of book trailers. The site has posted a series of examples -- including some that are mediocre and lousy -- that includes a few real charmers. One winner -- for "ABC3D," a design favorite of 2008 -- is after the jump.

Who's confused by Palin parody?

When we wrote that OR Books, publishers of the Sarah Palin parody "Going Rouge," might be hoping to confuse buyers looking for "Going Rogue" with their evil-twin cover and typo-switcheroo title, we didn't imagine that the media would be caught up in their ruse.

Today the New York Post reports that several media have mixed up the two books. USA Today posted an image of the cover of "Going Rouge" to accompany its review of "Going Rogue" on the Oval, correcting it later with the note, "Erratum: An earlier posting featured the photo of a different Sarah Palin book. The Oval regrets the error." Fox News also displayed the cover image of "Going Rouge" while discussing Palin's actual memoir. And CNN reported that Obama administration officials were sharing copies of "Going Rouge," when the book that had actual changed hands was the official "Going Rogue."

To try to counter the confusion, someone -- possibly publisher HarperCollins -- has been purchasing Google ads that point to "Going Rogue: An American Life" when people search for "Going Rouge," just in case they're not looking for the satire but have mistyped the title. This, indie publisher OR Books told Page Six, "seems very unsporting."

But maybe it's just the media that have been confused by the doppleganger books. Palin fans have been able to find her memoir without a problem at Amazon (even if they can't get it signed), where it remains atop the Amazon bestseller list.

-- Carolyn Kellogg