Remo and Chiun face dire and seemingly insuperable challenges in a host of Warren Murphy Destroyer thrillers just put into play by E-Reads. In #51, Shock Value, a haberdashery clerk suddenly leaves his home in Ohio, flies to Italy, and kills a Red terrorist. Everyone figures the guy’s just coming apart at the seams – until it happens again . . . and again . . .

A pattern’s emerging, and the international powers are getting hot under the collar. Remo and Chiun are investigating before the U.S. is caught with its pants down. But then Harold W. Smith vanishes, along with the best brains in the world, and all at once CURE’s less than a memory . . .

Remo and Chiun follow the thread of evidence to a tropical island and a man with a message – a man with trouble up his sleeve. And, they find it’s just a matter of time before he takes the entire world to the cleaner’s . . .

Also newly added are Fool’s Gold, Time Trial, and Last Drop, and more are to come.

For a complete list of Warren Murphy titles carried by E-Reads, click here.

Karl Lagerfeld has developed a new fragrance – the smell of book.

Simulating the aroma he inhales in his 300,000-title personal library, he will capture and sell it in an actual book hollowed out to contain a flacon of “Paper Passion.”

Lagerfeld is by no means the first to try to emulate the smell of books.  Here’s a piece we ran in November 2009 called “Aerosol Makes Your Nook Smell Like Crunchy Bacon.”

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A while back we wrote up a book lover who said she was reluctant to buy a Kindle “unless Amazon comes out with a special ‘book scented’ Kindle.” (See If They Can Make the Kindle Smell Like a Book, Maybe She’ll Buy One). It was all kind of a joke, but an enterprising manufacturer took it seriously enough to produce a line of aromatics simulating book scents. The aromas include New Book Smell and Classic Musty. The product is trademarked as Smell of Books™ and here’s how their website describes it:

Does your Kindle leave you feeling like there’s something missing from your reading experience?
Have you been avoiding e-books because they just don’t smell right?
If you’ve been hesitant to jump on the e-book bandwagon, you’re not alone. Book lovers everywhere have resisted digital books because they still don’t compare to the experience of reading a good old fashioned paper book.
But all of that is changing thanks to Smell of Books™, a revolutionary new aerosol e-book enhancer.
Now you can finally enjoy reading e-books without giving up the smell you love so much. With Smell of Books™ you can have the best of both worlds, the convenience of an e-book and the smell of your favorite paper book.
Smell of Books™ is compatible with a wide range of e-reading devices and e-book formats and is 100% DRM-compatible. Whether you read your e-books on a Kindle or an iPhone using Stanza, Smell of Books™ will bring back that real book smell you miss so much.

Among the five smells offered is “Crunchy Bacon”. This is a welcome novelty for noses jaded by such natural book fragrances as grass, leather, printer’s ink, and decaying paper. Hopefully, the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France will invest heavily in shpritzing their collections with Crunchy Bacon. Some other but lesser known aromas associated with books are baked lamb shank, General Cho’s Chicken, and asparagus vinaigrette.

On a more scientific note, Henry Fountain of the New York Times reports on research to quantify old-book odors to help librarians preserve books more effectively. Fountain describes how conservators “analyzed the volatiles produced by 72 samples of old paper of different types and in varying condition from the 19th and 20th centuries, using liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry. They found that some compounds were reliable markers for paper with certain characteristics — high concentrations of lignin or rosin, for example, which make paper degrade relatively quickly.”

There was apparently no manifestation of crunchy bacon in the spectrum analyzed by the scientists, but it is well known that subatomic bacon particles are even more elusive to detect spectrometrically than the Higgs boson, and the Large Hadron Collider at CERN may be required to capture one.

Read Digging Into the Science of That Old-Book Smell. And here’s the article about Lagerfeld: Karl Lagerfeld to create fragrance that smells of books

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

How far can you thrust your tongue into your cheek without it punching through your flesh? You’ll find out when you read The Future of Books by James Warner on the Mcsweeneys.net website. Warner projects the evolution of books decade by decade until 2080, when we learn what dolphins will be reading.

Here’s a preview from 2030.

RC

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2030: All Books Will Be Crowdsourced and Cloud-Based

Novelists will start out designing their characters in the form of sets of vinyl figurines. If these generate enough buzz, fans will produce the actual novel collaboratively as a wiki. As you read it, thermal cameras will measure your physiological signals, including flickers in eye movement, facial muscle contractions, and heart rate, to determine where you want the story to go next—it will be expected to read itself to you, explain itself, and unobtrusively weave your incoming text messages into the dialogue. You will also be able to fine-tune details of how the characters are digitally rendered, fire at them, and (when imperative) indulge in cybersex with them. If a novelist is posthumously discovered, his or her vinyl figurines may wind up as collector’s items.

RC

We’ve heard of popup stores for Halloween costumes. We’ve heard of them for Christmas ornaments.  But we’ve never heard of one for books. And we’ve certainly never heard of one devoted to a single book.

But there’s a first time for everything, and credit for that distinction goes to Andrew Kessler, who “booked” a New York City storefront and, with a lot of help from his friends, opened a shop dedicated to sale of just one title – his own.  It’s called Martian Summer, and if you happen to be in the vicinity of 547 Hudson Street in lower Manhattan, drop in and support your local bookstore and its unique merchandise.

Jason Boog of Galley Cat reported Kessler’s “Monobooklist” store and you can read in detail here how he used up his ration of favors to enlist help.

In case the popup store has popped down by the time you read this, here’s a link to the print and Kindle editions on Amazon.  And you won’t want to miss the video (below) of Kessler infectiously describing what it’s like to do Martian science from a distance of millions of miles – “Like hitting the Nerd Lottery!”

Does Kessler advise other authors to follow in his footsteps? “I’d be very nervous to tell others to spend their hard-earned money on art projects (although I secretly want them to).” Thanks, sir, but, knowing the cost of Manhattan real estate, we’ll pass on that one.

Richard Curtis

Jonathan Tasini has lent his name to another class action lawsuit, and if the last one is any guide, this one will be bitter and protracted and expensive. It may also be successful. New York Times Co. v. Tasini was waged on behalf of freelance authors and made its way up to the US Supreme Court where the authors’ rights were upheld.

This one is on behalf of bloggers, specifically those who posted on Huffington Post.

“HuffPo,” as it is nicknamed, is one of the most successful media sites of the last decade. Its value was concretely recognized when AOL acquired it recently for $315 million.  But the deal soon provoked criticism because the site’s success has been built on the sweat of unpaid bloggers.

Granted that when they originally wrote for HuffPo the bloggers seemed okay with trading a paycheck for a byline. But when they heard about all that money being shelled out for the value that they had added free of charge, they began to grumble.  Those grumbles are now embedded in the claim filed by Tasini representing more than 9,000 bloggers.  They feel that $105 million out of the AOL money – precisely one third of it – should go to them.

We had observed the same thing when we posted Hey, Anybody Can Sell a Company for $315 Mil if They Don’t Pay Their Help

Tasini, whose fearless crusading spirit hearkens back to the days of two-fisted labor organizers, minced no words on the website dedicated to the lawsuit, comparing Huffington to “every Robber Baron CEO” who thinks that “they and only they” should profit while “peons struggle to survive”

Richard Chirgwin, writing in The Register, says “The complaint claims that the HuffPo lured contributors with the promise of exposure, but unjustly gained from them by keeping the income accrued for itself. (This is, of course, an old trick in the publishing game: any hopeful journalist will have been, at some time or other, offered the chance to ‘get exposure’ if they would let publishers use their articles for free, usually on a ‘trial basis’. This means ‘as soon as you ask us to pay you, we’ll stop running your articles’.)” See Writers sue Huffington Post for back pay

Tasini knows all those tricks, having documented them in the celebrated lawsuit that  bears his name.  That suit was born in the dawn of the digital era when magazines and newspaper republished in various digital formats pieces that had appeared in print written by freelance writers. With the Supreme Court’s affirmation he won the case, reaping some $10 million for writers (and $4 million for lawyers!)

Richard Curtis

Booksellers usually divide the year into three seasons: spring, fall and Holiday. But you may not know about a fourth one, and maybe it’s just as well, because you’re going to get good and depressed when we tell you about Returns Season.

Returns Season “comes near the tail-end of the fiscal year, when we can delay the inevitable no longer and have to send back books which we’d been holding on to as long as possible for sentimental reasons; books which ‘should’ sell,” blogs Charlotte Ashley, who we gather is a bookseller.

The shipping of books back to publishers for credit towards  new purchases represents the triumph of market reality over hope. “After all,” writes Ashley, “our job isn’t to snobbishly insist readers should be reading one thing or another, it’s to provide them with a good choice of things they might be interested in. So why, after years of failing to sell some of these books, do we keep ordering them? Optimism, I suppose.”

So? What kinds of books will be consigned to ignominy?

Young Adult Literature Not Featuring the Occult (“good, insightful plain fiction aimed at young adults? Forget it. Not that that stops us from filling the shelves with Glen Huser, Polly Horvath, Alan Cumyn, Tim Wynn-Jones and Paul Yee. We just have to send them all away again at the end of every year.”)

Chinese Literature (“Oh man, China. Its day in the literary limelight has not yet arrived. Gao Xingjian won the Nobel prize in 2000, the first Chinese writer to do so, but I defy you to name offhand a single book of his.”)

Post-Soviet Russian Novels (“I think I’d be safe in saying that post-soviet Russian novels are being completely ignored by Western media, critics and readers.”)

NYRB [New York Review of Books] Classics (“We do tend to order absolutely everything they publish because their books are so damn good, so when it comes time to return and we’re sending back most of them, it looks particularly bad.”)

If it’s any consolation to retailers, they should remember that those books are going back to publishers, who will now have to refund money they had hoped they would be able to keep. Who can forget publisher Alfred A. Knopf’s rueful comment about returns: “Gone today, here tomorrow.”

Misery loves company. So, to honor the fallen during Returns Season, let your local booksellers know your heart goes out to them.

The Sadness of Books We Can’t Sell

Richard Curtis

Working in the accounting department of a large soap manufacturer isn’t exactly where Casey O’Reilly saw her life as going. She had always pictured something more glamorous, more exciting. But, she never pictured something so exciting as time travel.

A freak lightning strike near Sante Fe somehow sends Casey back to the year 1878. Thrown into vibrant yet unfamiliar past, Casey finds herself lost and alone. That is, until a mysterious man named Luke arrives, claiming to be a time traveler himself. He wants to guide Casey on her journey, even arranging for her to be the guest of an aristocratic Hispanic family. Will Casey be able to handle the shock of traveling back in time? Will she finally take control of her life and realize that love is staring her right in the face?

In Heaven On Earth, Constance O’Day-Flannery, the original “Queen of Time Travel Romance,” shows readers that true love can lead us toward our destinies… even if those destinies are lifetimes apart.

The United States Marine Corps is a legendary fighting force. Literally thousands of books and movies have glorified its history. But now a Marine veteran has written a novel that opens up the curtain and provides a look deep inside the modern Corps: the good, the bad, and the sometimes just plain embarrassing.

In William Christie’s The Blood We Shed Lieutenant Mike Galway takes command of his first platoon and it is not at all what he bargained for. What he anticipated was the challenge of training a unit of disciplined Marine infantrymen to go to war. Instead he finds himself responsible for a group of unruly American teenagers, for whom he has to become a combination of surrogate father, psychologist, high school principal, marriage counselor, financial advisor, conflict mediator, and drug and alcohol therapist. The results are frequently hilarious, always frustrating, and sometimes heartbreakingly tragic.

While Galway learns the secrets of leadership he and his men are overtaken by the events of September 11, 2001, and the time for playing war is over. Now at the place where Marines always expect to be, the tip of the spear, the men of Echo company deploy aboard ship and race towards the Middle East. There they find themselves fighting the first battle of a war that continues to this day, in a place none of them could expect.

William Christie
After serving with distinction in the Marine Corps, William Christie poured everything he’d learned into gritty, fast-paced violent novels of men in war, and E-Reads is happy to deliver them to you.

If you enjoy The Blood We Shed you’ll find more Christie military fiction on his author page.

It looks as if the business we described a while back, a way to autograph e-books, is going to get off the ground.  The system developed by two enterpreneurs, “Autography”, will be on display at Book Expo America this spring, according to the New York Times. Here is our original article.

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When we broached the idea of replacing physical book conferences with virtual ones (See A Book Conference You Can Attend in Your Bathrobe), a number of readers observed that there was one big problem: how do you autograph virtual books?

A team of enterprising businessmen, T. J. Waters and Robert Barrett, know how, and they’ve launched a service for publishers and authors called Autography.

Waters’ entrepreneurial tale is a fascinating one “I wrote an ebook entitled Prior To The Snap as a companion guide to my Wiley-published business book Hyperformance.” he explained in a recent email to me. “The eBook became wildly popular with troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Next thing I knew I was invited to join a USO tour going overseas. I asked a grad school friend (and high end IT geek) about developing a method to autograph the ebook like I would a hard cover book. The rest, as they say, is history, though still very much in the making.”

We visited his website (www.autography.us.com) and though the service is still, as Waters says, “in the making,” in theory at least he seems to have thought of every question that might be raised by author, publisher or customer. For example:

• “Our vision is live streaming video over the Internet coupled with autographed eBooks. We can even let the author create a scheduled of which cities he’ll be ‘visiting’ during his ‘tour’. We are now having our software upgraded so that readers can export the signature page (with a thumbnail of the book’s cover) out to their social media (Facebook, etc) to further promote the book/author to their friends.”
• “Personalization can take place at the time of purchase or any time afterwards, including after secondary (used) sales.”
• “Authors can give away signed sample chapters to introduce themselves to new readers who later purchase the full volume at their convenience. The now full copy ebook retains the author’s salutation (replacing the sample chapters) without the need for Digital Rights Management (DRM) software.”

Waters points out that “Autography’s patent-pending technology doesn’t just cover eBooks. We’re redefinining the digital media experience for a wide range of entertainment. Digital comic books, movie and music cover art, video games, and athlete or celebrity promotional cards are quickly and easily personalized for consumers.”

For further information contact the company’s representative Bob Diforio at bob@d4eo.com

With Autography the road to Virtual has taken another big step. Look for more and more applications in the coming years.

Richard Curtis

The darker it gets for Borders, the more mordant its employees’ humor. As evidenced by this display.

RC

(Photo: ludachrist, seen on Tumblr)