Last Gasp - GOODNIGHT MOON (WITH ZOMBIES)

Enjoy this brief video and feel free to pass along. Happy Halloween from your pals at New Street. Play safe, children.

What Happens When Classic Literary Characters Go Digital?

Laura Miller, Salon.com: "The ill-fated matchmaking and meddling of Jane Austen's Emma Woodhouse, for example, was seamlessly updated to include cellphones in the 1995 movie 'Clueless.' Of course, an Emma transposed to 2010 would have a field day with Facebook, nudging acquaintances to friend each other and forming little groups like 'People Who Have Heard Quite Enough in Praise of Jane Fairfax,' to the dismay of Mr. Knightley. Can anyone doubt that if Holden Caulfield were around today he'd have a blog? He practically invented the blog, five decades before the things existed! As for James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus: He'd have a Tumblr. Would it necessarily detract from 'Moby-Dick' if Ahab implanted a GPS chip in the white whale, and couldn't Iago have spread doubt and suspicion even more insidiously as an anonymous Internet commenter? Scarlett O'Hara could have bypassed that loveless marriage to Frank Kennedy and financed the restoration of Tara by using the project as the premise for a reality TV show. That would be just like her -- and the dress made out of old curtains would still play."

Goodnight Moon (with Zombies)

Happy (early) Halloween from New Street Communications, LLC. Please feel free to forward.

Another Damned, Thick, Square Book

"Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh, Mr. Gibbon?" - the Duke of Gloucester to Edward Gibbon, whose magnum opus, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes over the course of 12 years (1776-1788). I've got all six volumes on my Kindle - no longer thick and no longer square, though perhaps still damned.

David Pogue/Kindle - The Video!

Here we go. Very funny.

Sorry, Customer: No E-Books Allowed in This Establishment

Bravo, Nick Bilton. My favorite line from his piece in today's NY Times Bits Blog: "I wonder if people went through the same thing in the mid-1400s as they sat in coffee shops with their pesky paper books? I can imagine a coffee shop owner demanding that a patron remove his book from an establishment that only allowed spoken communication."

Well, you know, it's just all the noise those damn Kindles and Nooks make, and the noxious smoke that comes out of them all the time. Your fellow customers find these things annoying. As well, please remember that your servers need a healthy workplace ...

Gotta love it.

Apple iBooks Censorship ... and David Carnoy

Very entertaining, even though I don't think the censorship issue is funny at all. Nevertheless, David Carnoy shows wit in enjoying himself at Apple's expense.

Ten Commandments for Publishers

This from Mike Shatzkin and Joe Esposito:

1. Thou shalt regard thy former competitor as thy future collaborator.

2. Thou shalt let no intermediary stop you from knowing your customer, nor stop your customer from knowing you.

3. Thou shalt publish no book intended for an audience outside your spheres of direct influence.

4. Thou shalt read Dr. Faustus in all its editions–Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and Google–and know that Mephistopheles always appears first as a helpmate.

5. Thou shalt not forsake thine own brand.

6. Thou shalt create new brands and master the power and importance of brands.

7. Thou shalt respect and value thy communities with the same devotion thou hath always given to copyrights.

8. Thou shalt recognize that metadata is everywhere and associating it meaningfully is thy job.

9. Thou shalt not fail to test a new marketing channel in order to protect an old one.

10. Thou shalt deliver thy content in every imaginable form that thy customers request or might require.

Garrison Keillor and the End of Old Media

Garrison Keillor, speaking to a hoard of old media publishers and authors at the annual Authors Guild benefit last month, said: "I'm an older writer, so I have nostalgia about these occasions and always imagine that this might be the last one." Garrison likened the evening to a "1951 meeting of CBS Radio affiliates" or a "1982 convention of typewriter repairmen." Boo-rah.