External Monologue

In a stunning demonstration of the selling power of so-called "piracy", the Akashic Books children's title "Go the F*ck to Sleep" is now said to be up to 275,000 copies in print. Left unanswered, though, is this burning question: who should read it?

Here's the new JMascis album. He's been making my first foray into Drupal since I finished my class easier to handle. I'm playing around with getting a working editor and image handler working in Drupal 6, and I've mostly gotten it. The documentation on this stuff is beyond horrible, but with so many Drupal sites around, I figure it's good to know how to do this stuff. 

At a taping of the Martha Stewart Show today, the swag bag included two books, a very clever little shredder for chives, and a Sony Reader Pocket Edition. Which one was I excited to get? It was fun to watch the chive-knife in action during the wok segment, but I really wanted to play with the e-reader. And what exactly was I doing at Martha Stewart, anyway?

With Google eBooks (née Google Editions) barely a week old, I asked booksellers using the Google/Indie Commerce solution for their first impressions. A survey (still up here, if you want to chime in: http://goo.gl/V2I49) was emailed to booksellers, and a tweet about it made the rounds. I wanted to know how booksellers were promoting the service, how customers were reacting to it and what devices customers are using. The results are in, and it’s been interesting to see how booksellers wrestle a new reason to drive traffic to their websites.

As many of you have heard, I am leaving Parson Weems Publisher Services at the end of this year. First and foremost, I want to say that I will terribly miss all of the booksellers I work with and have worked with over the past 13 years. The territory that I once navigated with an astonishing pile of maps and notes has devolved in to a well worn trail that I navigate by muscle memory while visiting old friends. I will miss making those trips and seeing your smiling faces each season. But I am leaving to return to something I abandoned long ago: computer science.

I went to Book Camp last Saturday. I’ve been turning over jokes about it in my head (“this one time at book camp”, etc) but none of them are very satisfying. The event itself, though, was supremely satisfying. I had dinner with my soon-to-be-former colleagues at Parson Weems the next night, and Chris Kerr seemed surprised when I announced that I learned a LOT. I suppose this is due in part to my typical conference mode, which has always been to skip any and all sessions and spend time chatting up publishers on the trade floor.

Mac/Adam Cage just sent me a healthy stack of galleys for Mark Dunn’s new novel, Under the Harrow. I was lucky enough to be able to read this in manuscript (on my Sony Reader) a few months ago, and I’ve been enjoying selling it all summer.

Because I needed to get through a short flight (NYC to Chicago) and a long one (Chicago to Seattle), I finished most of an issue of the New Yorker for the first time in I don't know how long. I skipped the reviews, as usual, but I read the rest of it in order. I took particular pleasure in skipping Adam Gopnik's review of something or other, and I seriously loved the poems. I noticed that they were thematically linked, and I can't possibly allow that this may have happened accidentally. The first was about Men at Work, and the second about Sting. Two 80s acts!