Charlottesville Words

<![CDATA[Roving reporter Marijean reports:

Charlottesville Blog of the Week on CBS-19

Tonight on WCAV CBS-19, I’ll be talking about Elizabeth McCullough’s C’ville Words blog. You can tune in and watch it live, using that box in your living room, or watch it streaming online around 6:30pm Eastern.

THIS JUST IN: according to staff at the Newsplex, we should have a video clip to post after the fact so, yes, Virginia (and Missouri, Illinois, Florida, Ohio, Massachusetts, Michigan and London, England, YOU, TOO will be able to get your MjTV). How nice, to be able to watch on your own time.

Of course it is now too late to watch it live, but I'll post the clip here if CBS puts it on their site. Meanwhile, catch up on past Blogs of the Week. Many many thanks to Marijean for picking me!]]>

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• Richard Eoin Nash - The Blog: Amazonfail: A straight white male publisher on glitches and ham-fisted errors
  "Amazon breached that social contract. The breach was no less problematic if it wasn’t entirely intentional.... Because in a world where whiteness and straightness are “norms” and males benefit from our patriarchial history, it is always the GLBTQ books, the queer books, the non-normative books that get caught in the glitches, the ham-fisted errors."

  I agree: Behind the "ham-fisted" coding mistake there were other mistakes of arrogance and prejudice.

• Vroman's Display: 'Books Amazon Doesn't Want You to Read'
  From Shelf Awareness:

  "We have put up our display of 'Books Amazon Doesn't Want You to Read.'"--@Vromans tweet in reaction to Amazon's de-ranking of LGBTQ books (Shelf Awareness, April 13, 2009). In a subsequent bookstore blog post titled, "Amazonfail & The Cost of Freedom," Vroman's observed that "independent publisher sales rep John Mesjak put it best when he tweeted this statement: 'I haven't read all of #amazonfail, so I am likely repeating, but my takeaway: this S#!T happens with monoculture gatekeepers. Go IndieBound!'"

  Some folks know how to work that Internet.

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• 'Gay writing' falls foul of Amazon sales ranking system | Technology | guardian.co.uk
  Best summary of the ongoing glitch-a-thon I've seen so far:

  "Although the move does not mean the affected books are no longer on sale, it does block them from being able to access some of the site's most powerful areas – potentially affecting sales as a result. Without sales ranks, books cannot appear on many of the site's popular charts or suggestion pages, for example.

  "The move has left authors, publishers and readers angry, but also highlights the extent to which Amazon has become one of the most powerful forces in the publishing industry – with the power to make or break a book."

• How books got their titles: 43. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
  What does Tristram Shandy have to do with The Man from La Mancha? Find out here.
• Nine Words You Might Think Came from Science but Which Are Really from Science Fiction

  : OUPblog

  Via The Morning News
• Making Light: Amazon's very bad day
  Patrick Nielsen Hayden has the best guess I've seen so far at how Amazon's de-ranking disaster might have gone down:

  "My own guess would be that it has nothing to do with homophobia and everything to do with the fragility of large organizations..."

  Read on to see how easily this sort of massive mistake can happen.

• #Amazonfail and the politics of anti-corporate cyber-activism | Net Effect
  'I can't reasonably explain what good Amazon expected to gain by removing sales ranking data from all LGBT books that it sells. All it did was to fuel a Twitter-swarm that is now ripping Amazon apart (not surprisingly, using a shared Twitter tag of "#amazonfail"). Even though LGBT books are not singled out by the company's policy and are included as part of the "adult" category, I thought that a company like Amazon - weren't they supposed be the powerhouse of tags and labels, the emperor in the kingdom of the miscellany, the master of the new digital disorder?- would know the value of tags as emotional symbols and wouldn't stupidly insist on a policy, which, to say the least, is misguided and belongs to the pre-digital world.'
• The True Monster of Florence | The Wrap
  Chilling account by Douglas Preston, co-author of THE MONSTER OF FLORENCE, of how journalist Mario Spezi remains under attack by Italian legal authorities.
• Amazonfail: A Call to Boycott Amazon : Edward Champion’s Reluctant Habits
  "It’s been called #amazonfail on Twitter, but it represents the greatest insult to consumers and the most severe commercial threat to free expression that we’re likely to see in some time. Amazon has decided to remove certain books that they deem “adult” from their ranking system. But the “adult” definitions include such books as D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Amazon link) (screenshot), Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Carolina (Amazon link) (screenshot), Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain (Amazon link) (screenshot), John Cleland’s Fanny Hill (Amazon link) (screenshot), and numerous other titles. Books that, in some cases, have fought decades to gain literary respectability have become second-class overnight because of Amazon’s draconian deranking policy. "
• Mark R. Probst - Amazon Follies
  'On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: “Transgressions” by Erastes and “False Colors” by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book “The Filly.” There was buzz, What’s going on? Does Amazon have some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books? Is it just a major glitch in the system?'

  Short answer -- it's not a glitch. Read the rest at Mark Probst's LiveJournal.

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<![CDATA[

• 50 Totally Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory - Psdtuts+
  50 Totally Free Lessons in Graphic Design Theory

  --Picked this up via Twitter.

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<![CDATA[Where better to relive the 2009 Festival of the Book than on BookTV?

VABook! on BookTV: April 11-12

This weekend, C-SPAN2's BookTV will feature hours of programs and interviews with authors from the 2009 Virginia Festival of the Book. Tune in for the afternoon or evening, from midday to midnight, to catch dozens of the programs you may have missed.

The Saturday, April 11 (Noon-Midnight) content is listed here.

The Sunday, April 12 (1PM-1AM) content is listed here.

Be part of the audience of millions who will soon be able to see Virginia Festival of the Book programming.

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• Still Life with Book Maven: The Curious Case of the Flippant Release Letter, Part Two
  "A few weeks ago, I attended the annual National Book Critics Circle Annual Meeting and Awards, and I was astonished how little many print-based critics knew about blogs and social media and how hostile many of them were to the idea that book coverage, book reviews, and publishing news could be covered properly in any medium other than a newspaper column or a magazine page."

  All the hostility coming out of NBCC toward lit blogs over the past couple of years was my first clue.

• Chicks Dig Poetry
  Check out her April 7 post on the do's and don'ts of author websites.

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