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Alexander Solzhenitsyn became a household word when I was in high school. I read The Gulag Archipelago, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich and The First Circle. I did not read The First Circle until last year. Solzhenitsyn was an impressive writer.

My local paper, The Daily Gazette in Schenectady, New York, wrote a great editorial on Solzhenitsyn today, all the more impressive because I can’t ever remember the paper devoting an editorial to an author.

The death of the famed Russian author and Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn Sunday won’t receive the kind of attention it would have had it happened at the height of the Cold War, but it certainly is worth noting. There was a 19th century concept in Russian literature called “the superfluous man,” a man born to wealth and privilege who gambles, engages in duels, chases women, and suffers from boredom. Solzhenitsyn was the antithesis of that; he was a deeply moral man of great courage and integrity.

Today it is hard to understand just how revered writers were by the people of the old Russia and Soviet Union — and how feared they were by their leaders, whether tsarist or communist. Most people who could read loved literature and poetry, and there was a long history of writers, from Dostoevsky to Gorky to Pasternak, running afoul of the authorities, living in fear of death, prison or exile.

Read the entire editorial.

Here is an article that I wrote for the Sunday Gazette on the dangers of reading in public.

There were six of us waiting outside Hometown Healthcare on State Street in Schenectady. It was a Saturday morning, July 5, and none of us wanted to be there, but teeth and other body parts have a way of causing pain on holidays as well as ordinary days.

We were a cross-section of the Mohawk Valley — male and female, young and old, black and white, from Schenectady, Amsterdam and Fonda. What struck me as unusual, however, was that four out of the six of us were reading books while waiting for the clinic doors to open.

Seeing one person read in public is unusual, at least in my experience.

When Eleanor Burns, a literacy volunteer and professor at Fulton-Montgomery County Community College, was alive, you never saw her in public without a book, but she was unique. Sometimes I still see a person reading in a doctor’s office, but generally it’s a magazine not a book, and the ever-increasing number of televisions in waiting rooms is killing that. To see four people reading books in public at the same time, however, is worth taking note of.

Read the entire article.

The New York Times national edition on July 23rd carried a two and a half inch news brief on the declining health of the book section in the Sunday LA Times. It appeared in the “Arts, Briefly” columns of the Arts Section. According to their short piece the Sunday stand-alone book review section is going to be folded into the paper. As of Thursday the 24th the LA Times itself still wasn’t saying anything officially but confirmed an announcement was expected in a few days.

On the 27th they made it official announcing in their opinion section under the lead “Moving our Pages”:

Read the entire story.

SEATTLE & VICTORIA, British Columbia–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Aug. 1, 2008–Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), today announced that, subject to closing conditions, it has reached an agreement to acquire AbeBooks. AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books, with over 110 million primarily used, rare and out-of-print books listed for sale by thousands of independent booksellers from around the world.

“As a leader in rare and hard-to-find books, AbeBooks brings added breadth and expanded selection to our customers worldwide,” said Russell Grandinetti, vice president of books for Amazon.com. “AbeBooks provides a wide range of services to both sellers and customers, and we look forward to working with them to further grow their business. We’re excited to present all of our customers with the widest selection of books available any place on Earth.”

“This deal brings together book sellers and book lovers from around the world, and offers both types of customers a great experience,” said Hannes Blum, chief executive officer of AbeBooks. “We are very excited to be joining the Amazon family.”

The acquisition is subject to customary closing conditions, including regulatory approvals, and is expected to close before the end of the fourth quarter of 2008.

AbeBooks will continue to function as a stand-alone operation based in Victoria, British Columbia. AbeBooks will maintain all of its websites, including its Canadian website with Canada-specific content, such as reviews of Canadian-authored books and interviews of Canadian writers.

About AbeBooks

AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books, with over 110 million primarily used, rare and out-of-print books listed for sale by thousands of independent booksellers from around the world. AbeBooks has millions of customers who purchase tens of thousands of books a day from its global websites (Abebooks.com, Abebooks.ca, Abebooks.co.uk, Abebooks.de, Abebooks.fr, Abebooks.it and Iberlibro.com). A true internet success story, AbeBooks.com has been selling books online since 1996, and is a private company based in Victoria, BC, Canada, with affiliates in Germany and the United States. Internet Retailer magazine ranked AbeBooks at No. 73 among North American online retailers in June 2008.

About Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), a Fortune 500 company based in Seattle, opened on the World Wide Web in July 1995 and today offers Earth’s Biggest Selection. Amazon.com, Inc., seeks to be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices. Amazon.com and other sellers offer millions of unique new, refurbished and used items in categories such as books, movies, music & games, digital downloads, electronics & computers, home & garden, toys, kids & baby, grocery, apparel, shoes & jewelry, health & beauty, sports & outdoors, and tools, auto & industrial.

Amazon Web Services provides Amazon’s developer customers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon’s own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable virtually any type of business. Examples of the services offered by Amazon Web Services are Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon Flexible Payments Service (Amazon FPS), and Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Amazon and its affiliates operate websites, including www.amazon.com, www.amazon.co.uk, www.amazon.de, www.amazon.co.jp, www.amazon.fr, www.amazon.ca, and the Joyo Amazon websites at www.joyo.cn and www.amazon.cn.

As used herein, “Amazon.com,” “we,” “our” and similar terms include Amazon.com, Inc., and its subsidiaries, unless the context indicates otherwise.

Amazon Forward-Looking Statements

This announcement contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. Actual results may differ significantly from management’s expectations. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that include, among others, risks related to competition, management of growth, new products, services and technologies, potential fluctuations in operating results, international expansion, outcomes of legal proceedings and claims, fulfillment center optimization, seasonality, commercial agreements, acquisitions and strategic transactions, foreign exchange rates, system interruption, significant amount of indebtedness, inventory, government regulation and taxation, payments and fraud. More information about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com’s financial results is included in Amazon.com’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2007, and subsequent filings.

CONTACT:
Amazon.com
Media Hotline,
206-266-7180

SOURCE: Amazon.com, Inc.

DENVER — A man accused of checking out hundreds of books and DVDs from libraries around the Denver area and then trying to sell them has been sentenced to 10 years in prison.

Denver prosecutors say 34-year-old Thomas Pilaar also was ordered Tuesday to pay $53,549 in restitution.

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Before considering cheap books, consider free books. After all free is better than cheap. If you need a classic or a work that is now in the public domain, you can download more than 100,000 free ebooks at www.gutenberg.org and its partner sites. While gutenberg.org is my favorite, you should also check out getfreebooks.com and manybooks.net. While an ebook will never measure up to a real book in my mind, ebooks do have some advantages. They don’t take up a lot of space, and the search function is especially useful in locating a particular passage.

Read the entire article.

Take the 82 minute DVD (why 82 minutes instead of 60 minutes?) containing excerpts from Mike Wallace’s best interviews out of its pocket in the back of the book, pop it in your DVD player and drop the book in the nearest garbage can.

Edith Wharton was a greater writer. I have read Ethan Frome several times and consider it one of the best short novels ever written. I also enjoyed reading The House of Mirth. Now Edith Wharton’s house, The Mount, in Lenox, Massachusetts is in danger of closing. Click here to help keep The Mount from closing to the public.

If novelist Robert Coover had his way, all book shops would close their books and doors forever. Coover’s vision of books is one in which they will be written, distributed and read by a computer or some other electronic reading device; a future without printed books. Coover, who is also the founder of the Electronic Literature Association, is not alone in his vision of the future. He is joined by other writers and cyberpunks who claim we are on the verge of a publishing and reading revolution greater than that brought about by the Gutenberg press. Whether in the New York Times Book Review or at writers’ conventions, Coover’s message is the same: “The book is dead.” But to paraphrase an even greater novelist than Coover, “The news of the book’s death has been greatly exaggerated.”

Read the entire article.