The XX Factor: What women really think.

Better Late Than Never

A couple of days ago the New York Times' sports section reported on the fascinating saga of Dorothy Jane Mills, who, for several decades beginning around 1950, assisted her husband, the historian Harold Seymour, in writing a three-volume scholarly history of baseball. More than assisted: She co-wrote it, but received little recognition at the time and, it would seem, precious little thanks from her husband ... (Read the rest of this post here.)

Rating Books?

KJ: I want to second your point about the problem with creating “rating systems” for teen and preteen books. I was never a fan of TV ratings (though recent episodes of Gossip Girl may have led me to reverse my position!), but I’m really not a fan of book rating. As you astutely point out, reading graphic language is not the same thing as seeing graphic footage. For one thing, books are far more subjective a medium ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Kids' Books Should Not Be Rated

A post from DoubleX contributor KJ Dell'Antonia:

By way of the NYT's book blog comes this question from January magazine: Should kids' books be rated? Novelist Tony Buchsbaum was reading a review copy of a new YA novel, Will Dutton, Will Dutton, containing this riveting IM exchange:

boundbydad: thrust your fierce quivering manpole at me, stud

grayscale: your dastardly appendage engorges me with hellfire ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

"Choose Your Own Adventure" for the Urban Parent

A post from DoubleX contributor KJ Dell'Antonia:

The Tablet's Marjorie Ingalls has created a brilliant parody of the Choose Your Own Adventure books that I grew up on: Planet of the Helicopter Parents. The art and the dead-on language sucked me right back to sixth grade, and I couldn't resist clicking my way through to find every ending. I'm proud to say that despite choosing to serve Dunkin Munchkins for snack, I still got anointed as "the best parent ever."

Scholastic Brings Back "The Babysitters Club"

A New Year's gift from Scholastic! The publisher is bringing back The Babysitters Club, the series about a gang of entrepreneurial young girls that more or less taught me how to read. Scholastic is re-issuing the first two books in the 213-title series—you read that right: 213—as well as a prequel. (Outdated references to things like perms and cassette players have been tweaked for the new millennium.)

I, for one, was shocked to learn that all the books are out of print. 'Tis a travesty that demands rectification ... (Read the rest of this article in DoubleX.)

Nora Roberts, Cool Chick

Nora Roberts has written 182 novels. Last year alone she sold 8 million copies of her new romance titles, 5.5 million books off her backlist, and 4.5 million copies of her mystery books. Her work has been on the New York Times bestseller list for more than 700 weeks, but she’s been reviewed in its pages only once. This week Lauren Collins at The New Yorker throws Roberts a highbrow lifeline in the form of a charming, funny profile that fully convinced me 1) I should read a Nora Roberts book and 2) I really want to hang out with Nora Roberts.

Pulp Fictions, Amish Style

Twilight Touches Off Great Filipino Book Blockade

Texas School Board Stands Up to Science

Over at Seed, Josh Rosenau describes his organization's long, failed attempt to get the Texas School Board to adopt evolution-friendly standards for the state's textbooks. Much as I'd like to, I cannot get exercised over this issue; my own public, and later parochial, elementary education was full of so much misinformation (America will run out of landfills by the year 1990! Marijuana kills! New York City is the capital of New York!) that... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Meet My Book Publisher, Google

Yesterday something important happened in the world of books: A federal judge ordered an extension of the deadline for authors to choose to participate in the Google book search settlement. The deadline had been May 5; now it's September 4. This is important, because the settlement is very peculiar, and more attention ought to be paid to what is going on. It presents a lot complicated questions that merit more debate. By settling, Google essentially transformed a relatively small lawsuit brought by the Author's Guild into a class-action style settlement that applies to all books. (Or so I understand from this piece.)

The part that is cause for concern has to do with so-called "orphaned books," or books that are out-of-print and whose copyright holders can't be located. In the fine print of the settlement, Google has in effect set up what some feel will be a monopoly on these books (you can read more at this New York Times blog) claiming it has the rights to scan them and put them online. This is one thing: Many writers would want their books to be widely available once they are, say, dead, and can't benefit from royalties. But Google isn't necessarily merely planning to make books more available. The company would establish something called the "Books Rights Registry," initially funded by it, which will, as I understand it, handle request for reprints, and be the recipient of monies derived from sales. All of this may end up being on the plus side for authors, but what is troubling is how far the range of the settlement was expanded, and with very little public knowledge. As Pamela Samuelson, a copyright scholar at Berkeley, put it last Friday:

In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement—more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.

The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry’s future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is.

Will Google Monopolize Books Someday?

Not long ago, I became obsessed with a book of poems by Thomas James, called Letters to a Stranger. The poems were brilliant and uncanny, magical and beguiling. They were also out-of-print. I read them in a kind of samizdat xerox passed around by the poet Lucie Brock-Broido. They did not exist in book form, as I recall, because no one could find James' relatives in order to get permission to publish the poems. Just last year, these poems were finally published, and an underground classic became available in print.

I mention this because James's book is a type of "orphaned" book that Google is claiming it would one day have had the right to publish, had James's relatives never been found. At least, that's what this post over at BoingBoing says. The back story is this: As you may remember, many writers were happy when the Author's Guild and Google finally reached a settlement over Google Book Search, which authors had claimed infringed upon their rights. (See here for more.) But as the BoingBoing post notes, the settlement has a funny loophole: It apparently allows for Google to take over rights of books whose authors have died, disappeared, or can't be found. As I understand it, in the past the rights to some of these books would have returned to the public domain; now they will go to...Google. The brilliant Lewis Hyde is protesting here. 

Meghan McCain Gets a Six-Figure Book Deal

Carolyn Maloney Does Fine on Colbert (And Why, Again, Do I Care?)

Was Carolyn Maloney not adorable on Colbert last night? She has a new book out, Rumors of our Progress Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, about how little the wage gap has narrowed over the years—and what is the glass ceiling made of, Plexiglas? But Maloney did break one barrier last night, becoming the first member of Congress I've seen on that show who actually seemed to get the joke, understand the deal, and have ever heard of the program prior to appearing on it. So the laugh was not on her when she kept right on pitching Obama while Stephen pretended to use a breast pump that sounded more like a buzz saw—supposedly to show how right employers are to fire lactating women for distracting their co-workers. And when he asked for guidance on the proper way to compliment a subordinate on her great breasts, Maloney didn't fume like all those unfortunates who'd come on before her, whose passive-aggressive aides seemed to have forgotten to brief them. Nor did she play along to her own detriment, like that ninny Robert Wexler, who Colbert got to say that of course he loves cocaine and prostitutes. She was funny, but without making an ass of herself. And I guess it's a sign of how far we still have to go that I actually found myself feeling relieved.

Emily, your post on relating to Michelle Obama because you both grew up grooving on the Brady Bunch seems like exactly the sort of response that Bill Bishop (also hawking a book, The Big Sort) was talking about on Jon Stewart last night when he said we don't actually vote on issues any more. Instead, having organized our whole lives around sticking to our own kind, politically speaking, we tend to go for the candidate who most reminds us of ... us. "We vote lifestyles,'' he said, in response to campaigns designed to hold a mirror in front of the voter and say pssst, "Vote for you!'' Not that you're going to base your vote on the Marcia Brady connection or anything. (And thank goodness, because Michelle was really more of a Jan.) Even after all that has been written on the role emotion plays in our electoral decisions, there's still more to this than we'd like to admit. But enough of this, or authors are going to be calling my house at all hours trying to get me to stay up late more often.

The Color of Hopelessness

Guess I’m a rube, too, Hanna. When David started the e-mail thread at Slate calling BS on Seltzer’s “memoir,” I had the sneaking suspicion that folks were quick to denounce the book’s veracity out of the notion that a white girl couldn’t possibly be raised in a black foster family or have experienced the stuff that Margaret Seltzer said she had. No doubt David and others saw fakery in aspects of the story aside from her skin color. I, too, thought she was playing up the lingo and lifestyle for effect—the gangster recuperating from a gunshot wound on her couch was a bit much, and the pit-bull tattoo, well. Still, that didn’t prove that the writer hadn’t spent her adolescence in South Central running drugs for thugs. Assuming that a white girl wouldn’t be placed in an inner-city neighborhood with a black foster family is folly. My black aunt took in plenty of white kids, from toddlers to teens, during many years as a foster mother. There's a thorny presumptuousness behind the mind-set of how could a white kid possibly get stuck in such a hopeless life! In reality, a white girl could be placed in a housing project in Compton or a trailer park in Riverside. She could wind up slinging crack or meth. Both scenarios are feasible, even if they don’t apply to Margaret, and hopelessness knows no skin color.

Workplace Dynamics