Sometimes I think I’ve woken up on a different planet, the Bizarro World of the old Superman comics, a place that looks somewhat like ours, but all the angles are sharper, values are inverted, and all the people are below average intelligence.

For example, my immediate response to the notion that Amazon will give you some payola for tweeting about a product and including a link that someone uses to buy that product, is “this stinks.” It’s dishonorable to tell someone “I just read a great book” and get paid for it under the table – even if you actually thought it was a great book. Paid tweets should have a notice: Advertisement - the way newspapers used to label those ads that were deliberately formatted to look like news stories about cures for baldness or a breakthrough on back pain treatment. It was a way to draw a line between unbiased information and promotional ad copy.

But no – I’m just out of step. The whole purpose of human interaction is to market yourself or to market goods for others. Relationships are for marketing. The self is for sale.

In so much of Web-based self-fashioning and communication there seems to be no line drawn between “this is what I think” and “this is what I want you to think for my own personal gain.” Why don’t people feel a little bit queasy when they’re disguising a sales pitch as an honest opinion – or when earning money for what may seem an honestly held position? Oh – because there is no line anymore. Our attention – our selves – are just product to be bought and sold. That’s how we know what we and our opinions are worth.

By happenstance, I’m writing this on National Bookstore Day – a grassroots effort to support local independent booksellers. Selling your opinions on Twitter is yet another way to destroy local commerce and all the great things that independent booksellers contribute to book culture. Do you really want to do that? If so, let me introduce you to my friend, Dr. Faust. He can tell you what your soul is worth. Maybe you’re selling yourself cheap. (No pun intended.)

I’m reminded of the character played by Patrick McGoohan in The Prisoner making his impassioned statement about selfhood: “I am not a number. I am a human being!” For the 21st century, here’s a new motto : I am not a brand. I am a human being!

image courtesy of Pink Ponk.

It’s always amazing how language is used to make dreadful legislation sound good. No, this time I’m not talking about the PATRIOT Act, even though it makes me grind my teeth that opponents of crappy and unconstitutional legislation are unpatriotic. No, I’m thinking of John McCain’s “Internet Freedom Act.” You know, the one that makes sure corporations are free to decide who gets to use the Internet.

This little video does a pretty good job of saying why that’s not good for business, not to mention for people in general.

Oh, and by the way – McCain has received over $800,000 from telecom companies. You think that kind of support comes free?

September is a month of full moons, totally lunatic with classes starting up and a million things to do at work. (I’m department chair these days, am teaching a first term seminar, and I agreed to also serve for a year as the director of our faculty development program. Shoot me now.) I’ve had a couple of conferences to attend in the past month and always feel behind on the weekly column I’ve been writing for Library Journal’s Academic Newswire. So posting here and on my Scandinavian Crime Fiction blog has fallen by the wayside. But I want to share this . . .

I just got the cover art for my next book – and I love it. Minotaur asks for ideas, and I made up a web page with some images that seemed to fit. And they picked right up on it! This shot is one of Chicago’s many spooky and intriguing underpasses. And I’m happy it isn’t a picture of the Loop which is what almost appears on the covers of books set in Chicago (and is so not the Chicago I write about). I’m also highly tickled because it’s based on a CC-licensed photo I discovered on Flickr, not on the usual stock photography that appears (again and again) on book jackets. At the end of Open Access Week, this just feels so right.

The title, by the way, was inspired by a Leonard Cohen song, Anthem. There are a couple of lines that I particularly like that I used to introduce the book. I can’t quote them here because they are owned by Sony Music, and I had to pay a lot of money for the right to quote them. (This is sometimes jokingly referred to as “seeking permission” – as in “I just sought permission for a new Jaguar, and man it’s fun to drive. Too bad I had to remortgage my house.”) What really burned me was that not one penny went to Leonard Cohen. I wish he got at least some of it.

I’ve just started reading William Patry’s new book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars, and as you can see, it’s getting me all stirred up.

As I was away for a few days, meeting a large number of grasshoppers, prairie dogs, and buffalo in the South Dakota Badlands, I had to wait for the thrilling conclusion to Green Apple Book’s Smackdown! between books and the Kindle. Clearly, the guys got a little excited and began to take the brand name seriously. First – round eight: the staff picks shelf goes up against Kindle availability. Even Nobel Prize winners are not Kindled.

Round nine: a book dropped on the ground comes out of the accident unscathed. A dropped Kindle leads to a major catastrophe (wherein the imagination decides to head for the high ground and bring fire trucks and airplanes)

And finally, round ten: in which Lemony Snicket, when asked to sign a Kindle, encounters an unforunate event that seems to have been scripted by a major Hollywood committee.

All in all, good clean and completely over-the-top fun. Thanks, Green Apple!

My favorite so far in the book v. Kindle battle of the giants. Green Apple books is having fun making an entirely one-sided and shamelessly partisan argument for books. This round gets the “cutest smackdown ever” award.

The Green Apple Mega-death-smackdown-super-ironic-silly-athon continues as the handselling capabilities of a good bookseller (or, as it’s known in librariana, Reader’s Advisory)  is compared to keyword searching. Okay, so maybe the contest was a little rigged. Still, there’s a real point to be made here: when you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, a curated collection of  hand-picked books (and someone who knows them) has an advantage over a bunch of stuff with a search engine. Not that too many bookstores or libraries will likely have close to hand that particular book . . .

The fifth round of the Green Apple smackdown between books and Kindle is . . . well, it’s kind of a guy thing. Actually, the whole series is kind of a guy thing, as the sports motif might well indicate. Still fun.

In round four of the Green Apple Smackdown, the pleasant feeling of drifting asleep while reading . . . turns dangerous. Warning, contains graphic violence and ghoulish Bezozian laughter.

Admittedly, I know a lot of 500+ page books that are more risky than a Kindle to read in bed, being capable of significant blunt-force trauma. (Has reading Infinite Jest in bed led to vists to the ER? Sadly, CDC reports have not addressed this issue.)

As for these videos – they do but jest. Poison in jest. No offense i’ the world.

Round three: sharing is a little harder with a Kindle when your friend walks off with all of your Kindle books, not to mention the gadget itself. (Of course, this might actually be against the TOS – at least, that’s what libraries have heard from Amazon.)

The comments at Green Apple’s blog are taking the whole project very seriously – “you forgot about this” or “you aren’t fairly representing both sides.” Er, this isn’t a real competition. Go elsewhere for thoughtful, probing, even-handed reviews. This is all in fun – and if you think it’s a level playing field, the best joke in this episode is that the paper-and-ink book that brings tears to the loaner’s eyes is Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses. On the Kindle, the best book ever – Bridges of Madison County.

No, we’re not going for dispassionate analysis here. Thank goodness.

There has been more than enough said about the Kindle, which has been good for getting buzz if nothing else. I’ve had my own reservations about Amazon’s extraordinary vertical integration of businesses that give them a major stake in everything from self-publishing to audio to used books to book discussions online. But this series of videos is just goofy good fun. An independent bookseller, Green Apple Books in San Francisco, has started a video smackdown, pitting the book against the Kindle. Here are the first rounds.

Selling your books so you can support your book habit:

Buying a book, in which the TOS (that in reality nobody reads) offers some surprises:

Story time. Nuff said.

No doubt a Kindle-lover could make equally funny videos about the superiority of the Kindle for those who want a book NOW and/or have panic attacks when stuck on a plane with fewer than four or five books. But for amateur YouTube fun, these are pretty sweet. I’ll post more as the smackdown continues.