Book Publishers and a Changing Landscape

Posted by Jack on 01.06.2009 at 2:50 pm

Over on the New York Times Books section the pillory of publishing houses continues as ritzy lunches and lavish corporate outings are scrutinized.  This is no outsiders barrage though. Unlike the one we’ve seen in automobiles and finance groups, this is primarily the internal struggle of an industry trying to grapple with its own unsustainable excesses.  

As the article points out:

Read more…

1 Comment » | Tagged Book & Author News, james patterson, new york times, on my soapbox, the book industry

Pronouns and Amateur Efforts

Posted by Jack on 09.02.2008 at 1:33 pm

Sometime this summer I saw an article about the inherent egotism of the “i” in so many products (how over saturated is this world going to get, honestly?) such as the iPod, iHome, etc… The article stipulated that this focus on the “I” was causing a further sense of me vs. the world and less community focused feelings.  One particular reader argued that “YouTube” and the double entedre “Wii” were counters to her claim, but fundamentally the story remained the same.  (I can’t figure out where I saw this artile either, anyone?)

I’m not going to weigh in on the societal effects created by product names, it’s not what I’m good at.  What I am good at, however, is finding books for you to check out if this kind of thing interests you.

It’s a little bit of a heady book at times, and don’t let it’s small stature fool you, it’s a bear, but “I and Thou” is also a fantastic philosophical look into the way our own language and understanding of it changes our feeling or tinges it.  Martin Buber navigates claustrophically narrow nuances of language and blows them into vast expanses of thought.  Whether it’s the difference between saying “I’m sorry” where you just free yourself or asking someone “forgive me” and putting the power to them to free you, this book endeavors to show that sometimes the Thesaurus is not more factual that a bad English translation.

Currently we have none in stock but we do have this excellent analysis:

Have your say » | Tagged Book Reviews, book reviews, martin buber, new york times, philosophy

On Language: Emoticons

Posted by Jack on 08.27.2008 at 10:14 am

I was recently flipping through the back issues of the New York Times magazine that I had not yet gotten to and saw one of my favorite columns, On Language, tackling a most interesting topic for a CBO: Emoticons.  You won’t see emoticons here at the Better World Blog, but in a world where the average American child types far more than they write and emoticons and “AIM speak” dominate, it can be a challenge to think of how literacy and education will change with these dominating forms of communication.  How many of you have fallen in and said “brb” “lol” or just included a simple ” ” in an email or used “u” instead of “you” in a moment of brevity inspired weakness?

In any event, the article is sharp and can be found here but the point of most note is the end:

Those concerned about the compression of our sped-up language are directed to “Linguistic Ruin? LOL! Instant Messaging and Teen Language,” by Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis, an article in the spring 2008 quarterly “American Speech” (dukeupress.edu). My choice for most influential and seminal language book of the year is “Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World,” by Naomi S. Baron, professor of linguistics at American University in D.C. (Oxford University Press, $30). She’s a scholar who can write in real time with real words.

1 Comment » | Tagged Book Reviews, emoticons, literacy, new york times, on language

Relevant New York Times Article on Social Entrepreneurs

Posted by David on 05.21.2008 at 7:22 am

Make sure to read the March 21st article in the New York Times written by David Brooks, entitled “Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders”.  This is an excellent article on Social Entrepreneurship and there are many points from the article that connect directly with what we have built here at Better World Books.

Have your say » | Tagged Dispatches from the Green House, Uncategorized, david murphy, new york times, social entrepreneurship

Bonfire of the Vanities at NYT Reading Room

Posted by admin on 04.04.2008 at 10:21 am

Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full

Hey readers, I was just checking out the New York Times when I saw that their feature “Reading Room” was tackling Tom Wolfe’s great-text-cum-awful-movie, Bonfire of the Vanities.  “Reading Room” is an excellent discussion about a text.  In this case it begins with an hour long podcast with Wolfe, discussing everything from journalism to his thesis to his works and then moves forward with some really fascinating discussion about race and the book as a period piece (which I would say, and they would agree, that it is most certainly not).

Anyway, here’s the beginning and here’s the rest (N.B. like any blog, start at the bottom to sift through the lot).

Have your say » | Tagged Book Reviews, bonfire of the vanities, book reviews, new york times, thomas wolfe

New York Times: It’s Not You, It’s Your Books

Posted by admin on 04.02.2008 at 11:02 am

I came across a pretty interesting article by Rachel Donadio in the New York Times this Sunday. Check out a bit of it:

Some years ago, I was awakened early one morning by a phone call from a friend. She had just broken up with a boyfriend she still loved and was desperate to justify her decision. “Can you believe it!” she shouted into the phone. “He hadn’t even heard of Pushkin!”

We’ve all been there. Or some of us have. Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast. At least since Dante’s Paolo and Francesca fell in love over tales of Lancelot, literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility.

Reading this, (despite the overt and somewhat heavy handed Pushkin reference that flies in the face of Donadio’s later quip a la Burroghs about the guy holding Beckett’s “Proust”) I was intrigued. We’ve all had relationships that went one way or the other and education and taste in books (and movies) has definitely been an issue in the early stages. I remember a girl I dated who was rather offended when I referred to Grisham as “beach worthy kitsch” and another who could never understand my lack of appreciation of the perfection of Austen’s complete works.

Fundamentally though, it’s the boring, hipster-esque snarkiness that creeps into the article that begins to take over any agreement, mocking men’s reading as middlebrow should they briefly embrace Ayn Rand, John Irving or Virginia Woolf (heaven forbid we read something with feminist tones that is actually well written!  Stupid guys…).

The two quotes that really do it for me are “…Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”  The next time a girl is telling me about a life changing experience or a book she likes I’ll make sure to act like a total jerk, talking about how painfully quotidian her experiences are.  Geez.  If you can’t talk to me about the latest installation at MoMa (which is way overrated, I liked ______ better when people didn’t know his work as well) then you may as well embrace gender as social construct and pay your own bill and leave.

Then Donadio paints an altogether different picture, of someone not bored to tears, but actually amused by the banal baseness of a would be beau: “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.”  I will give Donadio this, can’t you just see this woman sitting across the table from a guy tittering about the clunky language of someone undertaking the task of 400+ pages of philosophic bildungsroman written in her non-native tongue?  Clearly Rand should’ve taken cues from Solzhenitisyn’s “First Circle!”

Donadio notes “Naming a favorite book or author can be fraught. Go too low, and you risk looking dumb. Go too high, and you risk looking like a bore — or a phony.”  Trouble is, in this article she can’t navigate her own advice, at once sounding disingenuous and flippantly certain.  I like the concept of the article but trying to wade through all the Big Apple affectations of over-education is as rewarding as wading through the garbage in the East River (people wonder why I couldn’t swim until I was 12 even though I grew up in the Bronx…)

Luckily I remembered it was a fluff piece just in time… “If that person slept with the novelist in question, that would probably be a deal breaker — more than, ‘I don’t like Don DeLillo, therefore we’re not dating anymore.”

(that would be a deal breaker…)

Have your say » | Tagged Uncategorized, books, dating, humor, new york times, snarkiness

Better World Books In the New York Times

Posted by admin on 07.03.2007 at 9:03 am

Last week Better World Books received a visit from the New York Times. The reporter wrote an interesting piece on different ways to part with beloved used books.

Here’s an excerpt: “…Better World Books offers a different option. Started by some freshly minted Notre Dame graduates in 2002, it collects used books and textbooks from about 1,000 campuses and 700 libraries nationwide.

As an individual, you can donate if you pay for shipping yourself; but you can buy anything off its Web site and shipping is free anywhere in the country.” Click here to read the full article…

One of the pictures taken on our warehouse floor – the photographer even bought a book for his book club!

Have your say » | Tagged Dispatches from the Green House, betterworld.com, new york times, press