Oyster Book Service shutters but the future of books is looking good

When Oyster first started a few years back, it seemed like a potentially interesting model to get people reading and, more importantly, to bring buzz back to the books and publishing world.

Sadly, it wasn't meant to be. Oyster announced that it was closing up shop. Modeled on Netflix, the aim was to get people to sign up to a subscription service whereby each month a book would be e-delivered to various e-readers so you'd have a certain amount of time to read the book before it would disappear and another would re-appear.

I looked into it. It seemed complicated to arrange and I couldn't deal with it. Another issue is that I read on so many different kinds of devices and platforms that it didn't seem suitable for me (I literary read on my phone, iPad, notebook and, of course, mainly paper books).

Still. It's always a drag when someone trying to create a new idea falls flat.

That said, I think fears that have hovered over the book world for many years now, if not overstated, are starting to feel passe. After all, according to several people in the know that I've talked to, digital book sales account for only around 14% of sales in literary fiction and that number has not increased in a number of years.

So ereaders taking over the book world, those fears, have long been considered overblown. (This is for literary fiction, remember: genre fiction does have a higher rate of e-readers though even then it's not more than half of book sales and, again, doesn't seem to be increasing).

The publishing world still moves along: there are hits and there are misses. There are runaway successes that surprise and there are huge bombs. I'm much more optimistic than I was just a few years ago.

Make no mistake: it's not easy: writers rarely can make money off their art. I dislike the concentration of what gets buzzed about (the same 10 books for weeks at a time). But there's an entire industry of Canadian literature that is thriving with our own literary stars and classics. That's a great thing. Not only that, but we have to remember that artists rarely can make much money off their art: singers, dancers, painters, media artists, often have to take full-time jobs to make their art. Few make it big and very few can afford to quit and just live off what they produce.

E-reading on the beach: not a good idea

Publishers are surviving (some barely, it's true). Book culture seems alive and well. There are hundreds of literary journals, blogs, websites that explore book culture and translated fiction has even managed to eek out a small place at many of these places (and successes like Knausgaard and Ferrante show that there is an appetite for translated hits).

And a new bookstore opening around the corner seems like a positive sign, too (one bookstore doesn't prove anything but they do tell me that things are going very well over there).

All of this to say that Oyster shutting its doors is sad but it's also a sign that book lovers don't want gimmicks or revolutionary models to encourage them to read. They just want good books...and as long as publishers can deliver on that, publishing and book culture will continue to thrive.

Canada refuses invitation to be country of honour at prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair

This story has been making the rounds on social media for the past 12 hours and it's a bit shocking.

Apparently, the Canadian government refused the invitation by the largest book fair in the world, citing budget problems. There is generally a cost associated with this honor, but it translates into book deals for authors, publishers, rights agencies, translators and bookstores, and the roughly five to six million dollars it would have cost is minimal.

There's a link to the story here but for some reason, only the Francophone media, Radio-Canada specifically, is reporting on this so far. The link's in French.

Obviously, I don't know all the ins and outs and there could be some other angle or some other information the journalist wasn't privy to, but if this is true, it's really depressing and frustrating. There aren't enough ways to describe how important this kind of honour would have meant for Canada and the Canadian publishing industry in particular. Instead of Canada, the fair then turned their sites on France who them become the country of honour. They ended up spending more than the amount required and are now reaping the benefits.

Canada to Frankfurt: "Naaaaah, we'll pass..."

For the uninitiated, these fairs are terribly important because everyone from the industry is there making deals: publishers meet writers who talk to translators and book chains and libraries and rights agencies and distributors, all with the idea of facilitating book deals all over the world. If your book's been translated and published in Turkish, in Chinese, in French, in Spanish, chances are the deal happened (or the contact was made) in Frankfurt. It's the biggest and most prestigious book fair in the world (by far) and attracts 275,000 visitors and 9,000 journalists.

So the thought that the Canadian government said no for a measly $6,000,000 is appalling, especially when one considers the fact that after years of essentially being one of the main drivers in creating an identity for Canadian literature inside Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts (funded by the Federal government) has for a couple of years started spending (a small amount of) money trying to promote Canadian literature outside Canada, to put Canada on the map internationally in terms of our artists, writers, musicians, dancers, etc.

I'm sure Canada Council had little to no involvement in the above decision since they have a specific mandate and the Frankfurt Book Fair would have fallen outside it, but it just goes to show how one branch of government can often be undoing what the other hand is trying to accomplish.

New publishing house for Muslim books based in Ottawa, Murakami on stage, Brazilian brothers' new graphic novel, Luis Alberto Urrea, Storylines at the Guggenheim: Cultural Digest for August 11

• Three sisters in Ottawa have opened a small publishing house to feature works by and about Muslim women and about the Muslim world broadly.
• Luis Alberto Urrea (Blue Met 2014) talks about his latest book, a poetry collection entitled "The Tijuana Book of the Dead."
• Haruki Murakami's book Kafka on the Shore has been made into a stage production that was performed at Lincoln Center in New York in July.
• Anticipation is building for the brotherly duo, Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá, two of the comics world's biggest names, and their latest book, Two Brothers, which comes out later this fall. Their 2011 book, Daytripper, was one of the best graphic novels/serials I've ever read.
• The Paris Review looks at the connection between writers and the visual arts after a Guggenheim exhibition on the same theme, called Storylines.

Murakami on-stage

National Forum on the Literary Arts

So this weekend I've been holed up in a basement conference room near McGill University, attending the National Forum on the Literary Arts which Canada Council for the Arts is putting on.

What an incredibly rich gathering of literary professionals from all over the country: poets, writers, festival organizers, publishers, booksellers, storytellers, librarians, publicity agents, probably over 200 people. We've all come together to discuss the future of the literary arts in Canada and what a conversation it's been.

One thing I have to say that I have really appreciated about the forum is the intentional variety that's been a core part of how it's been organized. I've been in rooms with only writers or only festival organizers and so often individual groups involved in the literary arts have specific sets of problems. But talking to different kinds of stakeholders in the literary world makes us all aware of the entire eco-system.

Yesterday we heard from Richard Nash of Byliner.com who was snowed-in so stuck at Laguardia but still beamed in to give us his funny, thoughtful and provocative take on the last 1000 years of literary history (in 50 minutes). I didn't agree with everything he said but he certainly got the audience talking.

The best moments, though, of these conferences, are the moments in between sessions: sharing a coffee in a corner with one of the country's best literary magazine promoters, being irritated at an off-hand comment by a major Canadian publisher, seeing old friends I've known for years and shaking hands with people I've never met but sent 500 emails to, traipsing through a blizzard with three major west-coast Festival directors, a writer, and a poet, and discussing writers to avoid (yes, we share notes, writers so behave yourselves!), writers who are a gem to work with, companies, themes, problems, personalities, venues, etc., etc.

We're very lucky in Canada that we have the Canada Council who does so much to promote the arts but then also takes the time to listen to its artists. Working in the arts isn't easy and though it has its perks, is not something someone does unless they love it. And the fact that the government of Canada is willing to invest in supporting and promoting its arts is one of the most amazing things about living here.

This said, mind you, from someone who only became a Canadian citizen less than a month ago...

50 Shades of Insanity: the Publishing World in Freefall

All these changes in the publishing world are something worth watching closely. A merger between Random House and Penguin will really shake up publishing in many ways, even in Canada, where they are the two biggest US-based publishers with whom Canadians work.

I have to admit that it makes me somewhat nervous. And for more than one reason. Remember many years ago when people were complaining about Barnes & Noble and Borders having some huge over-concentrated chunk of the US book-distribution market? At the time, the worry was that there was too much intellectual information in the hands of two organizations and without a "deal" from one of these book stores, a small publisher or even writer had no chance at survival. Distribution is key, as many people began to understand. That problem is still ever-present but the other problematic issue which arose from that much concentration was that when Borders went belly up, the concentration became even more acute (now we have B&N and Amazon and even less chance for small publishers...).

I've said it before, but I hate the fact that there are "super" or "mega" hits which affect 5 or 10 authors at any one time, but hundreds of thousands of authors just scrape by (or, in fact, don't scrape by) and this is one extension of having so much of the publishing world and book distribution world done by so few. (Having travelled so much lately, I've been shocked to see versions of Fifty Shades being read by young women -- always young women -- and translated into French, German, Dutch, Spanish and even Swedish! I just want to take these young women and shake them, "Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?") Why are, as it seems at certain key moments, all the world's women in the West reading the same book? It's depressing.

And don't even get me started about men and what they (don't) read. And don't even suggest that it's "the market" that decides because it's not a free and open system where people (i.e., authors) can play fairly.

Why not spread all the money being spent on that silly book to 100 books and authors instead of all concentrated onto one author and one publisher, particularly when that book will be utterly forgotten in 20 years (it's already widely available in bargain bins and every used bookstore owner I know turns copies away because they are swimming in them). Hell, it will be utterly forgotten in 10 years (except, most likely, as a minor note in how it made S&M something mainstream for a brief period of time). Give a hundred writers a decent chance to make a living instead of making one author and one publisher obscenely rich.

I know, people don't think about it that way when they want to read the book and see what the hype is all about. But pfffffft.

Then there is the possible demise of D&M, one of the best presses in Canada. This point is truly depressing. One of the best things about Canada is its vibrant publishing scene in terms of diversity, regionalism, and genre but in a very limited Canadian context. More and more, Canada takes its cue from the US in terms of "the market" and there is less government support for publishers (and more competition). Is there too much being published in Canada? Probably. But without government support, we wouldn't have big Canadian hits (Johanna Skibsrud, Esi Edugyan, Kim Thuy, Will Ferguson, etc., etc.) and our market would come to resemble more and more the big behemoth to our south (that certainly publishes too much without government support and still manages to produce so little diversity).

That's not to say that the Canadian publishing world couldn't use a dose of something because there are often I find too many of the same kinds of novels being produced, rarely is anything innovative in terms of form (I'm talking about novels here), and though there are some excellent smaller publishing houses in Canada, where is our New Directions or Open Letter or Dalkey or Melville House or Archipelago?

I guess what I am building to is that the government restriction that Canadian presses focus primarily on Canadian books means that the work being done is less diverse than it might be otherwise. The small US presses get little to no government funding and because of that can publish writers from all over the world and do beautiful translations of writers in Latin America, Europe, and Asia. To me as a reader, diversity is always a good thing. We need less of the modern urban novel about life in a contemporary Canadian city and more of other voices: more Edem Awumeys and Esi Edugyans and Anna Porters and Kim Thuys and Josip Novakoviches and Goran Simics.

But to circle back: what all this means to Canada, I fear, is more of the same. More publishers unwilling to take risks, more necessity to seek out "a hit." Literary prizes seem to be help to some extent though even that seems to produce a certain "kind of" writer (a different topic for another day) and favour certain "kinds of" novels. If D&M can pull out of this difficult period, it's all the better for Canadian writing...

Expozine: The Best of Small Presses

I am such a huge fan of Expozine and this year's edition only underscored my affection. Located in a church basement off St-Laurent and St-Joseph, the exposition brings together some of the most innovative and creative writers, publishers, book producers and printers in the Montreal area. And that's why I like it: not all the writing is stellar (but some of it is excellent) but the artistry involved is on the whole super impressive.

From bigger presses like Invisible Publishing (everything's relative, mind you: this press isn't actually big though one should see some of the presses Expozine includes), to established magazines like Maisonneuve along with newcomers like New Escapologist, to tiny presses that do innovative work like B&D, who does an awesome series called The Life and Times of Butch Dykes, to calendars, t-shirts, tote bags, all done by people who do it simply because they love it.

May it continue to grow and prosper (all while keeping its bohemian and sub-culturey vibe, of course).