"This doesn't look like a hard-working part of an economy humming along: it's nothing less than epic capitalist onanism."

"affordable homes" and other gems.

Reports from UNESCO Monza, with a notable cameo.

In which a prediction nearly comes true.

"Last month's London Book Fair focused on Russia, she added, while China was the guest of honour at the 2009 Frankfurt Book Fair and is due to be the "Market Focus" for next year's London Book Fair. "All of these countries are oppressive regimes." Yes. This. Boycott's aren't the answer, but neither is avoiding the problem. (See posts on Dubai passim)

On literacy and digital fiction (McCrum's come a long way).

Betteridge's Law applies. In fact it applies so hard it might be worth killing for.

Conflates the issues of ebook pricing and ebook availability, but otherwise a very good article on what is happening to publishers in the age of Amazon. But nobody comes out of it very well.

It's pretty hard to decide whether to bother even arguing against this, or just throw up one's hands, but Cory has a go.

Full of good moments

"The internet has altered our lives in ways television never did or could, but mainstream literary novelists – by which I mean writers who specialise in realistic, character-based narratives – have mostly shied away from writing about this, perhaps hoping that, like TV, it could be safely ignored. They've ceded the field to authors of speculative fiction, such as William Gibson and Cory Doctorow, whose hacker and brand-ninja characters exist primarily to explain or propound ideas about bleeding-edge technology, or thriller writers who concoct ingenious but outlandish tales about the potential nightmares lurking in same." Oh hai NR.

Thanks the lovely @tobybarnes for mentioning /Romance.../ in his excellent Grauniad 2010 review:

Old friend of Booktwo and Bookkake, Tom McCarthy, has just been nominated for the Booker. Here he is on technology in literature.

Some good stuff here, and kind mentions of both Enhanced Editions and Artists' eBooks. (Hat tip to Niven)

by Phil Gyford. Look at that progress bar. Just look at it.

A good, old article turned up by Google. Although the "disappear" in the final para upsets me a little.

One of the secret pleasures of the literary life.

It looks as though there will be no events marking the 100th anniversary of Algernon Swinburne's death on Friday - not on the Isle of Wight where he grew up and was buried, nor in Putney, south London, where the alcoholic author spent 30 years in a kind of permanent rehab after a breakdown, looked after by his friend Theodore Watts-Dunton (sketch artists, the late-Victorian equivalent of the paparazzi, would dash off drawings of the ageing bad-boy poet as he drank his daily pint in a Wimbledon pub). There is no Swinburne Society to organise such parties.

His name is Alfred Chester and, while I'm in confessional mode, I might as well admit that I was attracted to him through ambulance-chasing as much as the hope that he might be a good writer.

"The Guardian has four principles, permanence, addressibility, discoverability (mutliple routes to the content) and openness." Excellent.

A fun, silly story: but I do think it's A Good Thing that submitting writers have a clearer idea that they'll be judged, not just read.

30,000 Sony Readers sold. Hello, 2009. (And Nicholas Clee: they are reading on it, they're just not reading the official and overpriced ebooks that are being counted.)

"A series looking at different aspects of guardian.co.uk's rebuild and redesign project, which ran from October 2005 to September 2008." Get in.

I've often been turned off the Guardian's blogs by the intense and frequently plain nasty commenters. Good to know there's intelligent comment and real community there.

Some love from the Grauniad, which is very gratifying.

JK comes out against age banding. I have to agree - telling kids what age to read stuff, cramps their style - but there may be other and better ways to gauge 'reading age' and encourage reading.

"I have a compulsive urge to use that background to build baroque laboratory mazes for my protagonists to explore, rather than being content to examine them in their native habitat."

Locative story-telling on the M6, which a short round-up of similar endeavours.

Good hash over one of my favourite issues. BORED of Amis, Rushdie, McEwan et al. Plus nice puff for Granta ;)

How do journalists still get away with reprinting corporate press releases? This is an embeddable version of Amazon's Search inside, it's not new, and it's certainly not Last.fm. Oh, and Sebastian? 'Widget' was coined in 1924. Look it up.

"Should published mean “in a paper format”? A chance to meet and speak with 21st century publishers of short fiction and find out where they stand in relation to the paper/online divide."

Lots of excellent stuff on location-aware data.

French professor invents machine to write books and feed them to Amazon. Literary spam is here.

Lee Rourke reports on two guys attempting to buck the trend.

Great article from Charles Arthur about the nature of the internet, the wrong attitudes to it, and the right one: change or die.

Just a bit sad - people can only be reading more because of the internet. They may be reading differently, but the profusion of lit-related content puts the lie to this. Did I say that already.

"The web provides you with a way to keep in daily, even hourly contact with the more committed part of your readership, but it's done using an entirely new language and playing to a different set of habits." [Via Russell Davies]

Roy Greenslade writes in The Guardian about his decision to quite the NUJ, and how it's largely technology-driven.

Bookmarked to mark when it's removed from my RSS. The Guardian/Observer have great Arts coverage, but unlike much else on GU, the book blog is too full of twaddle to make it worthwhile.

There's a good argument in here: that publishers are (or at least should be) asserting their role as taste-makers to offset the long tail effect...

I really don't like the idea of reading a book on a digital device. But that's not going to stop them being forced on us.

The Guardian's Vic Keegan taking lit into SL

Dear God in Heaven, Jesus Wept, &c.

Another reason to go to the library