Paper Tigers and Look-Alikes

A few headlines stood out this week as food for discussion here at the JPLBB.

First of all, Barnes and Noble unveiled its new entry into the e-book market, hoping to draw some market share from Amazon’s Kindle. Despite the excitement of its new features (free readers for pc, mac, iphone and blackberry), this article in the New York Times illustrates how this new product will likely fizzle due to “beta” level development.

Are you a fan of Melissa Bank’s, The Girls’ Guide to Huntin and Fishing?  If so, have you found yourself duped into a sub-par, ‘chick-lit’ read due to the curse of the ‘look-alike’ cover featuring rubber boots?  Entertainment Weekly columnist Thom Geier, explores the phenomenon of the look alike book cover with clever examples and a call for stop to this reckless act of marketing.   Read the article, here.

How to Buy a Love of Reading

How to Buy a Love of Reading by Tanya Egan Gibson explores the idea that reading isn’t for everyone, especially not for Carley Wells who sees words as enemies and says of books,  “I’ve Never met one I like”.  So if she’s not into reading whose crazy idea is it to try and buy her love?  Her parents’ idea, that’s who.  They’re determined to commission an author to write a book that even Carley Wells can love.  And Carley’s into it too, if only to help distract her best friend, Hunter Cay from his blurry world of booze, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Vicodin.  Despite her resistance, Carley soon finds herself swept up into the fictional world being written for her and life will never be the same again.   Check out the interactive website and award winning book trailer too.

Checkout: A life at the tills

Be careful what you say at the checkout stand next time you’re in the grocery store, who knows how Anna Sam’s memoir about her life as a cashier will inspire the masses.  Check out the story on NPR.  Get the book, Checkout: A life on the tills by Anna Sam, here.

Salinger says

“A ripoff, pure and simple” referring to Swedish author, J.D. California’s (psuedonym) novel, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye. For those of you out there who are as eager as I am for some new work by the reclusive J.D Salinger, it doesn’t seem likely we’ll see anything for some time, unless the lawsuit against J.D. California’s novel is part of some elaborate scam as suggested by Ron Rosenbaum,

“(Wouldn’t it be a brilliant jest on us all, for example, if Salinger himself had actually written the Holden Caulfield sequel 60 years later, hired this (apparently) Swedish guy to impersonate the pseudonymous author, then sued himself to insure no one would guess the real author? It reminds me of radio talker John Calvin Batchelor’s brilliant stunt: a mock-scholarly speculative essay published in the mid-’70s considering whether Salinger was Thomas Pynchon, who would then have been not a recluse but a pseudonym.)

Media coverage of Salinger’s lawsuit spread quickly and Stephen Colbert went so far as to “Raise High the Rage Beams” by demanding Salinger be a guest on the show to chat about what he’s been up to for the past 50 years, bananafish and more.

Listen to the NPR op-ed: Save Salinger Archives from Salinger which features a 17 minute, intriguing conversation from Talk of the Nation.

While your on a kick you can read some, Dead Caufields