DC Comics goes digital

DC Comics is expanding the reach of its digital comics by selling its monthly titles through iTunes, Amazon and Barnes & Noble.


The decision appears to be the first time a comics publisher has made all its titles — not just graphic novels or collected editions — available for sale on iPads, Kindles and Nooks.

The industry has embraced tablets, with most selling their titles through Comixology and other online storefronts on the same day that print copies are sold in comic shops.

Hank Kanalz, DC Entertainment’s senior vice-president for digital, says it is not leaving Comixology. Instead, DC hopes to capture new readers for its monthly titles who already buy most of their media through their tablets.

from: National Post

Santa Cruz library board delays suspension policy changes

by: J.M. Brown

SANTA CRUZ -- The library board agreed Monday to push two controversial issues to its Dec. 5 meeting to get legal advice on a patron suspension policy and replacing a citizen board member.

The proposed patron policy changes allow for staff to suspend someone for up to a year after a series of warnings.

Current rules allow only for a 30-day suspension, after which the next step was to seek a temporary restraining order. Staff now would be able to suspend a patron up to six months or a year after a fourth violation of conduct rules, and there are ways to appeal.

The changes also ban using the library for sleeping. Landers said the rule is not meant to punish those who doze off while reading, but rather those who come to sleep for long periods of time. The new rules also empower staff to remove unattended items, such as backpacks.

The rules also clarify provisions for animals -- dogs or miniature horses -- that provide emotional support to patrons. The proposed rules would require staff to ask what kind of service or support the animal provides.

Santa Cruz County Supervisor Ellen Pirie objected to the rule, saying the question could violate personal privacy by forcing a patron to disclose a disability.

"I agree you need to ask, 'Is this a service animal?' It's the next step that I'm not sure is wise," Pirie said.

Landers said identifying the purpose the animal services reduces the city's liability if the animal injures someone else.

The library also updated the language used on a flier staff can hand to someone who has a strong odor, a piece of paper that on one side urges the person to leave and on the other provides information about free shower and laundry facilities at the Homeless Services Center. The new language tells the person their odor 'is a violation of our rules of conduct," a point Landers said interferes with others' use of the library.

Landers estimates staff hands out a flier once or twice a week at the downtown branch.

Landers said there has been a major improvement in the atmosphere around the branch since the city hired private security guards to patrol the library and City Hall. People have often congregated outside, sleeping, smoking or being loud. There have been problems inside too, including a man staff caught disrobing in the stacks months ago.

Monday, the board also debated the process for replacing citizen Leigh Poitinger, who has represented Santa Cruz. Pirie objected to specifying that a seat be named specifically for the city, saying the library's bylaws only state that the board's three citizen seats be geographically diverse.

The board decided to table the matter to get a ruling from the city attorney about a motion passed in 2005 that some believe required city residency for one of the seats.

from: Mercury News

Canada and Australia launch women's literary prizes

As the search continues for a Women's fiction prize sponsor, two Commonwealth nations have gone ahead and started their own
by: Alison Flood

As the prize formerly known as the Orange continues its hunt for a headline sponsor, it's interesting to see that Canada and Australia have both just launched women-only literary prizes.


The Stella prize, in Australia, is named after Stella Miles Franklin, the esteemed novelist whose bequest founded the country's most prestigious literary award, the Miles Franklin, which came under memorable attack last year for being a "sausage fest". No female author had made the shortlist for the second time in three years, and just 13 out of the award's 50 winners had been women.

That changed this year when Anna Funder took the prize, but a group of women in the arts have founded the Stella award nonetheless, to "raise the profile of women's writing" with a prize pot of A$50,000 for the best work of fiction or non-fiction by a woman.

In Canada, meanwhile, trade magazine Quill & Quire reports that the Rosalind prize is being set up. It's just for fiction, and it comes about due to the disparity in numbers discovered by the organisation Canadian Women in the Literary Arts: although looking at submissions for the Governor General's Literary Awards, "women and men published books in near equal numbers in 2011 with 513 books published by men and 523 books published by women", far fewer books by women were reviewed in the press (you can see the details here).

"I thought things were fine and equal here in Canada. I didn't realise the disparity until looking at the hard numbers," publisher Janice Zawerbny told Quill & Quire. "It was really disheartening. Why is this happening in this day and age? It became the impetus or the rallying cry, sitting in the auditorium."

The establishment of the Rosalind prize follows the discontinuation, in 2008, of Canada's Marian Engel award for female writers. There's an intriguing piece in the Globe and Mail by Leah McLaren about this.

"In Canada, women writers have been playing with the big boys for some time now," she writes. "This is why, in 2008, when I was on the authors' committee of the Writers' Trust of Canada, we discontinued the Marian Engel award (for a woman writer in mid-career) and created the Engel/Findley award to honour a body of work by any established Canadian writer, male or female. Assessing the literary landscape, the committee decided that a gendered prize was no longer needed – and we were right. It was a wise choice, and one that reflected the progress (if not outright dominance) of female Canadian writers on a level playing-field."

Clearly, not everyone in Canada agrees that there's a level playing-field these days. But as we in the UK discuss whether or not we still need the Women's prize for fiction – Hilary Mantel, after all, is fresh from her second Booker win – it's intriguing to note that other countries are starting their own versions.

from: Guardian

Starbucks Builds a Library-Themed Pop-Up Store in Tokyo

In Tokyo, the design firm nendo created the Starbucks Espresso Journey pop-up store to help the coffee chain promote its espresso drinks–a coffee shop that looks like a library.

The library shelves featured nine books, each book sharing information about a different espresso drink. Patrons are encouraged to browse this coffee library until they find the drink they would like to order. Here’s more from the designers:

At the counter, visitors can trade the book for an actual espresso drink, but retain the book cover which tells them about the drink they have chosen, to use as a book cover, as they like. The reverse side of the book cover has been punched into a tall or short size tumbler insert, which can be used in a Starbucks Create Your Own Tumbler. The ‘library’ invites visitors to choose an espresso drink as they would a book, and verse themselves in espresso drinks as though quietly entering into a fictional world. Books and coffee are both important parts of everyday life, so we created a link between favorite books and favorite coffees. (Link via Book Patrol)

What do you think of this unusual project?

from: MediaBistro

Secret reading in Sudan

The banning of books by the Sudanese authorities has inspired a new reading culture in Khartoum

by: Reem Abbas

Journalists hold signs protesting about the closure of the Al-Tayyar newspaper in July in Sudan, 'a surveillance state where freedoms and civil liberties and now creativity are shackled'. Photograph: Ashraf Shazly/AFP/Getty Images

When Fathi al-Daw, a Sudanese journalist and writer, published a book about the state security apparatus and how it has operated over the past few years, the security apparatus quickly confiscated copies from bookstores in Khartoum, turning it into a much sought-after book, with a badly photocopied version selling at $10.


After al-Daw's book, travellers who arrived in Khartoum with books found themselves put through a much more rigorous airport security. Many reported confiscations of books, especially travellers coming from Cairo, where a large number of Sudanese authors are published.

A few weeks ago, a very early work of politics by al-Daw was confiscated from the luggage of a university professor who refused to leave the airport until the confiscated books were returned to him. He organised a sit-in and encouraged his students to join him, which they did. The security apparatus feared that the students would turn the sit-in into a highly organised protest.

Abdelaziz Baraka Sakin, a well-known Sudanese novelist, caused ructions earlier this month when his books were three days late arriving at Khartoum's book fair. Sakin threatened to begin a hunger strike before the books were brought over from Cairo to the book fair.

His books only lasted a few hours at the book fair before the security officers confiscated all copies saying that they had to read them before they could go into circulation. Then, they said, they would return them.

In total 15 books were confiscated from the book fair, causing many young readers and intellectuals to boycott visiting the book fair.

In a matter of minutes, social media broke the news of these latest confiscations and a whole crowd of youngsters started asking where they could get their hands on the confiscated books as an act of defiance against a surveillance state where freedoms and civil liberties and now creativity are shackled.

Trading secret books is somewhat similar to organising a protest in Sudan. Code words are used, the planning takes places only through trusted sources, and personal security becomes important.

A young woman keeps Sakin's books, which are now officially banned, in boxes in the back of her car. She tells me that the "marijuana" is selling fast.

In Sudan they used to say that Cairo writes, Beirut prints and Khartoum reads, but in recent years, the reading circle has shrunk to politicians and the creative community. Now, with the growth of a politically aware younger generation, the ongoing censorship campaign is endowing books with their long-lost status all over again.

On social media, the blogs of writers have been tweeted, retweeted and shared, and novels written by Sakin and other banned authors have been circulated as pdf files by one of the largest Sudanese online lists.

Meanwhile, it's not too bad that security officers will get the chance to read the banned books. Who knows – they might find their personal stories between those covers which Sakin dedicates to "a class with slaughtered hopes and dreams".

• This article first appeared in Open Democracy's Arab Awakening section

from: Guardian

Will a twit fic lit fest get followers?

Next month, Twitter will host its first online storytelling festival. John Walsh explains how the medium is already shaking up fiction

by: John Walsh

Readers who complain that novels are too bloated and baggy these days will welcome the news of the first Twitter Fiction Festival next month. It won't take place in a field in Hay-on-Wye or the town hall in Cheltenham; it'll occur online, under the hashtag #twitterfiction. And it has so few rules, the organisers are asking contributors to make them up.

"We're looking," say the organisers, "for new, creative, exciting ideas that will push the bounds of how we tell stories on Twitter. Tell us how you are going to explore content formats that already exist on Twitter… or how you'll create a new one."

Much of Twitter operates as a linkage service, urging a tweeter's followers to read an attached article or view an attached video of a kitten in a catsuit. Many tweets are smart remarks – and Gertrude Stein famously told Ernest Hemingway: "Remarks, Hemingway, aren't literature." Twitterfiction uses the tiny compass of a tweet – 140 characters – as a creative or critical tool. We've seen many examples already.

Twitterature (Penguin, 2009) by Alexandere Aciman and Emmet Rensin, re-told great works of fiction through multiple tweets that cut through the, you know, verbiage to the meat of the plot, whether it's Oedipus Rex ("PARTY IN THEBES! Nobody cares I killed that old dude, plus this woman is all over me. Total MILF") or Anna Karenina ("Alright, twenty rubles says I can toss my bag in the air, run across the tracks and catch it before the train arriv..."). The hilarity soon fades.

A chap with the Twitter handle of @biblesummary offers a condensed version of the Bible, one tweet per chapter, one chapter per day. It's ingenious, because the terse précis suits the Old Testament ("The serpent deceived the woman; she and Adam ate from the tree. The earth became cursed, and God sent Adam and Eve out of the garden.")

On Bloomsday (16 June) last year, a group of Joyce fans chopped the 20th century's greatest novel into tweets, each "representing" eight pages of Ulysses, a doomed and fatuous exercise about which the loquacious author would have expressed contempt.

In last week's Guardian, certain writers including Ian Rankin and Jilly Cooper were asked to write a story in under 140 characters. The results were patchy, more like jokes than bonsai tales (David Lodge's was: "Your money or your life!" "I'm sorry, my dear, but you know it would kill me to lose my money," said the partially deaf miser to his wife.) But they pointed the way to a genuine innovation: using Twitter to tell a story in real time.

The best exponent so far is Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer-winning author of A Visit From the Goon Squad. In May she tweeted "Black Box" (a series of dispatches from an undercover agent in the future) on the New Yorker's Twitter feed, at one tweet a minute, for an hour, and did the same for 10 nights until the 8,500-word story was finished. It offered a thoroughly conventional experience of reading literature in instalments (see Charles Dickens,) provided you could stand the jerky rhythm; and the Pinteresque, pause-heavy dialogue. You've got until 28 November to set the Twittersphere alight. #goodluck

from: Independent

Santa's pipe put out in new edition of children's classic

Fresh version of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas sparks censorship row

by: Alison Flood

Santa smoking ... a traditional image of Father Christmas. Photograph: Alamy/Beryl Peters Collection

A new version of Clement C Moore's classic festive poem A Vist from St Nicholas, better known by its first line, 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, has removed all mentions of Santa Claus's pipe in a bid to limit children's exposure to images of smoking.


Canadian publisher Pamela McColl released her edition of the 1823 poem, which is attributed to Moore, last month, drawing widespread criticism from anti-censorship groups. Her version cuts two lines from the poem - the description of St Nicholas which runs "The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, / And the smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath" - as well as redrawing the illustration to remove the pipe and smoke from around the character.

McColl, who published the book through her own company, Grafton and Scratch, is an anti-smoking campaigner, and believes children's books which feature smoking should include parental warnings. She did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian, but writes on her website that the cuts she has made to the Moore poem do not constitute censorship.

"I have edited out a few words and lines that reference Santa smoking and removed the cover illustration of his pipe. The omission of these few words do not change the material intent of the author nor do they infringe on the reader's understanding or enjoyment of this historically-rich story, but by removing these words we may save lives and avoid influencing new smokers," she says. "I think these edits outweigh other considerations. If this text is to survive another 200 years it needs to modernise and reflect today's realities. I want children to celebrate the spirit of giving and to reflect proudly on the holiday traditions that shape their childhood, and the best way to honour Santa and this story is to make him smoke-free."

The description for the book on Amazon states that "as the direct link between the exposure to the depiction of characters smoking and youth initiation to nicotine has been well established, we were compelled to make these recommended changes".

But the American Library Association disagreed, saying that the changes made represent "an act of censorship that denies the audience access to the author's authentic voice". Deborah Caldwell-Stone, deputy director of the ALA's office for intellectual freedom, said that "such censorship misrepresents the artist's original work and relies wholly on the idea that children are incapable of critical thinking or that a parent's guidance and training are meaningless".

She suggested that "a far better path would be providing tools for parents who want to raise the issue with their children rather than suppressing Clement Moore's speech. One person's beliefs, no matter how well-meaning, should not be used to deny youth and families the ability to read Clement Moore's original poem for their own enjoyment."

At the National Coalition Against Censorship, director of programmes Svetlana Mintcheva said that "putting children in an insulation bubble, hoping to protect them from anything their parents may deem harmful, is not only impossible, it is unproductive".

"In this world where all kinds of images barrage us in the street, on the internet and through mass media, energies should be directed at helping children navigate among messages and look at them critically rather than hoping for a magic solution by taking away Santa's pipe," she said.

McColl has not addressed the issue of Santa's obesity in her "special 21st-century edition". Moore writes that "He had a broad face and a little round belly / That shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly", and these lines remain in the poem.

"He doesn't eat in the story. That's not my issue," she told the LA Times. "That's Jamie Oliver and other people's issue."

from: Guardian