Monday: Literary Links Round Up

Bookish bits and bobs and other odds and sods I have read today, some are from the tail end of last week as I was playing in London town in So ho ho and the Groucho rather than at my desk.

Linkage:


Jonathan Franzen: Screen idol
Novelist Jonathan Franzen, in conversation at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, explains his problem with e-books and reveals that he is writing a TV adaptation of his acclaimed work 'The Corrections': 'Books are a bad business model.'



Ebook sales are being driven by downmarket genre fiction Publishers face secrecy over sales and an absence of industry-wide data to help them plot strategy
Self-published author society prepares to launch
A non-profit body representing the interests of self-published authors will launch this spring.Author and former literary agent Orna Ross is readying the The Alliance of Independent Authors for launch internationally, with its website set to go live within weeks. She said: "We will be speaking up on behalf of independent authors, and making links with booksellers, wholesalers, agents and legacy publishers, so people have an idea of what our creative needs are. It requires a change of attitude both in writers and in other players. In the past, the author was a resource to be mined, but indie authorship is about meeting the publisher as a partner."
Kate Mosse,  Hari Kunzru and the Guardian's literary editor Claire Armitstead are to take part in a conference programme billing itself as the first UK digital conference aimed directly at writers.

Five Best Books: Boundary-Pushing Women Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer John Matteson on memorable portraits of Katharine Hepburn, Emily Brontë, newspaper publisher Katharine Graham, photographer Dorothea Lange and the Federalist-era women's rights advocate Judith Sargent Murray.
Comic book ban highlights Vietnam's censorship struggle ; youth find ways to circumvent control 
The Death of the Cyberflâneur THE other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 — published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today — caught my eye. Celebrating the rise of the "cyberflâneur," it painted a bright digital future, brimming with playfulness, intrigue and serendipity, that awaited this mysterious online type. This vision of tomorrow seemed all but inevitable at a time when "what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur."
When will big publishers speak out about Amazon? Barnes & Noble's dramatic statement on Tuesday that, no matter what, it wouldn't, under any circumstances, including beards, sell books published by Amazon, ever, come hell or high water — eh, except for, well, ebooks on its website — has certainly been the talk of the industry the last few days, and continues to draw interesting observations …
Bookshop Spotlight #1: Ripping Yarns Bookshop 'A blog post about Ripping Yarns bookshop, an antiquarian bookshop in North London. I've worked here for two and a half years, and it's where I started writing 'Weird Things Customers Say in Bookshops' properly.'
Books added to the list to read:
The Library Book - Alan BennettWeird Things Customers Say in Bookshops - Jen Campbell