1. First, for Tricia, Daphne Kalotay revisits Rebecca.

Though I was in my early teens, already I could tell from the big, swirly letters on cover that this was “popular” fiction, not “literature.”  Indeed, I couldn’t stop turning the pages.  And yet the prose was attentive and measured.  Not only was the physical setting (a mansion by the sea) lushly depicted, but the psychological landscape, too, was achingly precise; I still recall the young protagonist’s yearning for her husband’s love—her longing for intimacy and affirmation, and her acute attention to what his every word or action might indicate about his feelings.  As much as the story is a gothic mystery, it is also realistic portrayal of the way that relationships sag under the weight of unspoken truths.  And this is just one of the reasons du Maurier deserves to be viewed—as she herself long desired—as a “serious” writer of talent and depth.

I never considered Rebecca “popular” fiction. I didn’t even think there were people who thought that. I didn’t know to think there were people who thought that.

I lumped Rebecca in with Jane Eyre (which I love) and Wuthering Heights (which I hate.) They are Gothic romances that became popular because of the violence and romance but stayed popular because of their quality.

Kalotay’s thoughts are a nice addendum to Picoult and Weiner’s opinions on popular versus literary fiction, and our own dual review of Rebecca.

2. Apparently, Google Books has hit some snags. Who knew that compiling a database of every book ever produced could be so complicated?

3. John Forgetta, the creator of The Meaning of Lila, gave us a nice shout-out after we mentioned him in a previous post.

It makes me sad that Forgetta’s comic strip, which is based in Cleveland, doesn’t get more local love. I guess newspapers only have one slot for local talent and it goes to Tom Batiuk. (Not that we have anything against Batiuk. We don’t.)

4. Finally, McSweeney’s presents As I Sat Writing, the autobiography of William Faulkner.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

Four things, and for a change of pace, I’ll try to be concise.

Airen — the blogger and author who Helene Hegemann remixed — has replied to Hegemann’s assertions that she did not plagiarize him.

There was really no need for her to copy me. But she borrowed entire passages of dialogue. I feel like my copyright has been infringed.

Hegemann’s publisher could probably throw money at Airen to make this issue go away. Even if it does, I hope this worthwhile question is not forgotten. When does influence become plagiarism?

As a sidenote, in Airen’s interview, he said he quit writing when he gave up the drug-club-sex scene because he ran out of material. This begs another question. How much of good writing is dependent on its subject matter? We talk about language here a lot, but we don’t talk about the value of topic.

Thing two: New short story contest from NPR. The only rules are it must be shorter than three minutes when read aloud, and the story must be based on this photograph of an open newspaper on a cafe table. The winner gets to read their story on NPR and receives an autographed Alan Cheuse book.

Thing three: Google looks like it is willing to compromise with its eBook store. If Google settles, then the publishers seem to have won the e-book war. Here’s hoping they can make a profit.

Final thing: Maud Newton writes about how some authors are so good, they paralyze her.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

It’s Monday, and I could talk about the Amazon-Macmillan melee for the third or fourth time. (The buy buttons are back, by the way.)

I could talk about the Justice Department’s critique of the proposed Google Orphanarium for Abandoned Books. (The revised agreement is better, they said, but still “suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement.” In other words, it’s still a monopoly on orphaned books.)

I could discuss Dani Shapiro’s essay on how the mentality in writing has changed. Instead of expecting suffering and rejection, young writers anticipate blockbusters and insta-success. But what could I add? Shapiro already explains the dangers of the blockbuster mentality for both young and established authors.

Her best line addresses students in writing school: If they were enrolled in medical school, in all likelihood they would wind up doctors. If in law school, better than even odds, they’d become lawyers. But writing school guarantees them little other than debt.

Apparently, braille is dying. Only 10 percent of blind children in the United States learn it. Instead, they rely on audiobooks. That’s something I could write about, right?

I mean, listening and reading are two different things. They are two different ways of learning... and, that’s pretty much all covered in the link.

How about I talk about the saltometer, instead? The saltometer is how one bookstore owner measures where readers do most of their browsing. After a snowy day, customers track snow and salt into the bookstore, and the owner follow the prints to see where people spend most of their time.

It’s anecdotal and imprecise, but it measures something different than, say, sales.

For example, I often browse in the philosophy/religion or language sections; but I rarely buy. I’ve probably paged through a half-dozen books about Edgar Cayce but didn’t purchase any of them. I can almost talk myself into buying a Tagalog/English dictionary, but common sense sets in somewhere between the language section and the cash register. These are browse/no-buy books.

Contrarily, I don’t spend a lot of time browsing for certain authors. If I see a book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Neil Gaiman or Mark Twain that I don’t own, I buy it — even if I have no intention of reading it in the immediate future. I don’t read the back cover or sample a few pages. I classify them as buy/no-browse. (Yes, that approach has burned me a few times, but I’m a volume consumer.)

So, Tricia, I know you’re a browser. Where would your saltometer lead?

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

First, to Tricia, I suggest A Christmas Memory by Truman Capote.

It has all of the ingredients that make for an overwrought holiday mess — poor child; sweet, but simple adult; beloved family pet; terrifying strangers who reveal their sentimental side — but Capote doesn’t overplay his hand.

It’s cute. I don’t mean that in a condescending way.

Also, I do like A Christmas Carol. Charles Dickens usually dropped a wealthy benefactor into his plot, so his adorable orphan could have happy ending. I call it the “ducats ex machina.” (Yeah, not clever. Latin puns are not my forte.) For A Christmas Carol, Dickens takes a different tact. He writes from the perspective of the wealthy benefactor instead of the adorable orphan, except we don’t realize he’s the wealthy benefactor until the end.

I was absent most of last week, but not idle. I spent my free minutes following the escalating e-book war. Random House declared retroactive e-rights over all of its books. (That ain’t gonna work.) MobyLives said the Federal Trade Commission should investigate Amazon for its price-slashing tactics. And, for those who don’t spend their free time perusing book blogs, Dr. Syntax gave us a summary of the e-war up to this point, including Covey’s defection from Simon & Schuster to Amazon.

And though it’s not e-book related, a French court convicted Google of copyright violation for its book search program. This is the first international conviction against Google, to my knowledge. I expect it will not be the last.

Merry Christmas. It’s about to get interesting.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

I owe you guys a real post. Unfortunately, you’re getting a series of links.

Link one: Gregory Maguire has released a free novel.

The idea behind The Next Queen of Heaven and its publisher, Concord Free Press, is to release books for free and encourage those who receive them to give a charitable donation “to a local charity, someone who needs it or a stranger on the street.”

That’s a nice notion. By giving the reader something for free, it encourages them to be charitable, as well.

Unfortunately, I predict this backfiring. Only 2,500 copies of Queen have been published. Maguire’s too popular an author for these not to end up on eBay with exorbitant price tags (especially with Christmas coming.)

That doesn’t make Maguire of Concord Free Press’s gesture any less thoughtful. It just means some people can’t understand the spirit of charity.

Link two: Authors from China are joining the “Google must be stopped” club.

Authors from China are saying Google scanned their books without permission. Google is saying the small portions of text that can be read online amount to fair use.

This begs the question how does “fair use,” a phrase from national law, apply to international activity. The story from the New York Times does not answer that question. It only says that some authors have their rights protected by international treaties.

Link three: Omnivoracious, Amazon’s book blog, has released its Top 100 list for the year.

Final link: Gore Vidal weighs in on Roman Polanski.

Q: So what’s your take on Polanski, this many years later?

Polanski’s answer: I really don’t give a (expletive deleted, but can be guessed easily). Look, am I going to sit and weep every time a young hooker feels as though she’s been taken advantage of?

Gore Vidal then attributes Polanski’s trouble to anti-Semitism. Of course, the problem is that Polanski’s Jewish — not that he pleaded guilty to having sex with a 13-year-old girl. (Polanski said it was consensual. The victim did not. Whether or not it was is legally immaterial, if I understand correctly, because the age of consent in California is 16.)

Where’s Norman Mailer when you need him?

Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Due to my self-imposed moratorium, I refuse to link to any stories about the announced prequel to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Apparently, it is a prequel using Jane Austen’s characters but none of her writing, which is a shame, because the best parts of the original Zombies all came from the source material.

I present to you the Espresso Book Machine: the latest gadget that readers will love/loathe.

It’s the book-equivalent of those DVD-producing kiosks that are supposed to replace video rental stores. The EBM can print, bind and trim a 300-page book in four minutes.

The EBM was created by On Demand Books and can create any of the 2,000,000 books in the ODB library. Apparently, it’s being sent to libraries and bookstores. (I haven’t seen one in action yet.)

Upon learning of the EBM, I thought of two immediate uses for it. One, this thing is perfect for out-of-print books. Remember Google’s plan to collect orphan books? The EBM would make hard-to-access info even easier to read. Some people would rather not peruse 300-page technical manuals on a computer monitor. The EBM offers a way to turn these texts into books.

Naturally, Google and ODB are three steps ahead of me and have already formed a partnership.

Secondly, schools could benefit from the EBM, as well. High schools need to replenish their supplies of Jane Eyre and The Odyssey after age deteriorates them. The EBM would allow them to print their own copies. Granted, EBMs are too expensive (they cost about $100,000) to be cost-effective now; but this may be an option in a decade.

Schools could use EBMs specifically because many of the books read in English class are public domain, so no one will need to wrangle with a publisher for rights.

Meanwhile, on an unrelated subject:

BBC News asks if we are due for a wave of book piracy. The question is will bootlegging affect publishing as much as the music industry.

I used to think it wouldn’t, but I’m reconsidering that stance.

My initial thought was this: It’s easy to bootleg and disseminate a song. It takes about 30 minutes. However, a bootlegger would need days to scan in all the pages of a book.

Because of the workload required in literary publishing, the only books that would be heavily bootlegged are best sellers. That creates a big difference between book and music piracy. An experienced music pirate can find the unreleased demo tapes of an obscure garage band in about two or three minutes.

The same pirate would not be able to find books as easily.

I decided to test my theory by searching for illegal downloads of specific e-books. It took me 45 seconds to find How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life. It took about two minutes to find The Life of Pi. I was not able to find The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. (I can’t confirm that any of these files were valid, because I didn’t download them. They might have been fraudulently labeled, but I doubt it.)

I guess I underestimated the tenacity of pirates.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com

P.S. Speaking of the “ODB Library,” the Rza has released his second book, The Tao of Wu. I haven’t read it yet but highly recommend it to anyone who owes me a birthday gift.

What do Google and Charles Dickens have in common?

They’re both poised to make a fortune off of orphans.

Google has spent the last few years scanning the pages of millions of orphan books. Out-of-print, unclaimed by copyright holders — orphan books drift into obscurity with no one to claim ownership. (Often, the copyright holders died or went out of business.)

Google took more than 7 million of these unwanted urchins and compiled them in an enormous digital library.

Of course, Google didn’t just do this out of sense of altruism or posterity. They plan to charge for access to these orphans.

As often happens in this country (but apparently not in Sweden), somebody sued. The Author’s Guild and The Association of American Publishers filed a class-action lawsuit in 2005. Google settled to the tune of $45 million.

The settlement is pretty complex, but what bothers most of its critics is it essentially gives Google lone access to these orphan books. So if you want to hunt down an obscure piece of literature or scholarship, you’ll have to pay Google.

Consequently, the Justice Department announced earlier this month that it would be investigating the Google Book Search settlement to see if it violates antitrust law. Feds will formally present their findings on September 9, and a federal judge is scheduled to hear the case October 7.

On one hand, it would be wonderful if millions of difficult-to-find books were available on Google. On the other, theoretically nothing could stop Google from jacking up the prices for availability.

The Google Book Search plan definitely has merit, but it’s hard to view their control over orphan books as anything besides a monopoly.

-Jason Lea, JLea@News-Herald.com