A study by a company that helps track pirated digital books estimates that there were 9 million illegal downloads of copyrighted books in the final months of last year. Attributor, which works for publishers including Hachette Book Group and John Wiley & Sons, scanned 25 Web sites that offer readers downloadable content, looking for 913 titles across categories ranging from business and investing to fiction.
In some ways the online world has reinforced the joy of books. The best reading is not useful reading; it is useless. The Kindle is the first thing to annex technology for this uselessness: the joy of a comic novel, the journey of a historical biography, the diversion of a short story. Trust me: this took me by surprise. It will probably do the same to you.
With a masterful hand, Victor Hugo, a noble lover and a great student of architecture, traces her fall in Notre-Dame.
The prophecy of Frollo, that "the book will kill the edifice," I remember was to me as a boy one of the grandest sad things of the world.
After seeking the origin and tracing the growth of architecture in superb fashion, showing how in the Middle Ages all the intellectual forces of the people converged to one point - architecture - he shows how, in the life of that time, whoever was born poet became an architect. All other arts simply obeyed and placed themselves under the discipline of architecture. They were the workmen of the great work. The architect, the poet, the master summed up in his person the sculpture that carved his façades, painting which illuminated his walls and windows, music which set his bells to pealing and breathed into his organs - there was nothing which was not forced in order to make something of itself in that time, to come and frame itself in the edifice.
Then Warhol had a brain wave. Get every writer subject to mention which scent they wore - this would appeal to the perfume houses. I don't know if Bob bought the idea but I think it's an excellent one. Perhaps Roger Alton of the Indy and other editors might like to think about it - I have often wondered whether VS Naipaul wears a cologne and would love to know whether Doris Lessing likes a squirt of Caron's Poivre - a lively blend of red and black pepper, cloves and other spices. The bottle comes in a limited-edition Baccarat crystal.
The value of books sold on the high street fell 12.7pc in the week to December 6 against the same period a year earlier. That compared to a 6.9pc decline in the UK market as a whole, according to figures from Nielsen, the research company.
For any reader left feeling they didn't do enough shopping before Christmas, help is at hand from Nintendo, which is preparing to launch a library of 100 classic books for its handheld games console on Boxing Day.
...Paris city hall, alarmed that the garish knick-knacks are damaging Paris's "cultural landscape", has launched a battle to protect the literary soul of the banks of the Seine. Bouquinistes have been invited to crisis talks at the city hall in an attempt to promote more intellectual merchandise. But some warn that if they cannot adapt to the changing market they will "die of hunger".
The trade is strictly regulated. Each bouquiniste is allowed four boxes painted dark green: three must contain books, the fourth can sell items such as prints, collectors' postcards, stamps and souvenirs.
"On or about December, 1910," Virginia Woolf once wrote, "the world changed." Sometime during the early aughts of this century, it changed again. The Internet leveled our cultural landscape. There was an epistemological free-for-all, a paradigm shift. The pyramid of media hierarchy flipped - top down became bottom up - and people-powered content started to change the way we think.
Books require a different sort of communion with one's subject than the Internet. They foster a different sort of memory - more tactile, more participatory. I know more or less where, folio-wise, Eliot gets nasty about the Jews in his infamous 1933 lecture series "After Strange Gods," but I always have to read around a bit to find the exact quote, and the time spent softens the bite of his anti-Semitism because the hateful remarks were made amid smart ones. For literary works, books are still, and most likely always will be, indispensable.
For all its convenience, Google's snippet-view of information flattens knowledge, erasing context. Sometimes truth lies not in the needle but in the haystack.
That's part of a very messed up serious of re-defining that the net has been bringing us. "Privacy" means preference settings in a central database that's regularly mined for views of the private. "Friend" means a database entry that control various database access features. It also means a "point" in a scoring game. "Reputation" means database entries where people rate you from 1-5 or similar. "Collaboration" means enriching a corporate entity, along with other customers, by contributing free labor. "Freedom" means your right and duty to do so. "Production" means using investment to gather up "collaborators" and sell their accounts to Google or Microsoft.
I guess it's just natural that "knowledge" should be re-defined as "that which can be obtained from Google nearly instantaneously."
Isn't this a potential privacy nightmare for libraries? Will Google compile personally identifiable information (via a login to Google Docs or some other service) of terminal users? Will Google collect search and usage data from these library terminals to "improve" searches? Will such data be open for study by the publishers? Scholars? How long will Google retain such data, if it compiles it at all?
The service invites comparison to the iTunes revolution, and was hailed by the internet search giant, the American Association of Publishers, and the Authors' Guild as a key moment in the evolution of electronic publishing.
Google's co-founder, Sergey Brin, called the $125m deal a "great leap". Paul Aiken, executive director of the guild, called it "the biggest book deal in US publishing history". Once approved by a federal court in Manhattan, the deal will offer access to a library of millions of titles.
