Anil writes the blog post I wanted to write[1] about Kindle.[2]

[1] But didn't get to it today; how the hell did he?
[2] NB: this post is filed under "Books" and not "Business" or "Software."

Kottke (and Buzzfeed! and the New York Times!) on virtual book tours, which would have been the more appropriate option for the guy hawking his September 11 historical fiction / conspiracy theory tome at McCarran Interational Airport in Las Vegas last week. He was walking up to people and handing out these glossy bookmarks that must have cost him a buck a pop, the poor guy.

Dave Itzkoff reviews Spook Country:

What initially unites these seemingly unrelated narratives is a theme familiar to Gibson’s work: the novice initiated into an alternative reality he or she never knew existed. But in each of these strands, Gibson is also playing on the word "spook," not just in the slang sense of a spy, but also in the more traditional sense of a ghost — of figures who pass through the world unnoticed and unrecognized, and who are about to find out how empowering anonymity can be.

What William Gibson is doing with Spook Country and Pattern Recognition before it feels like what DeLillo was doing with The Names and his other books around that time (pre Libra): presenting the world that's invisible to us but we sense exists alongside ours.

OMG, do you think they disclose the interestingness algorithm?

From the Gawker media site that everyone loves to love, news that Courtney Thorne-Smith  has a new book, titled Outside In.  The only thing you need to know is this delicious adjective from Emily Gould:  "unghostwritten."

Robert Olen Butler's (now open) email re. his wife leaving him for Ted Turner really could have used an editor.  An editor that would have consigned the entire thing to the "never to be spoken of again, much less sent" folder.

I was able to help her a great deal. She says I saved her life. But de facto therapy as the initial foundation of a marriage eventually sucks the life out of a relationship. And it is very common for a woman to be drawn to men who remind them of their childhood abusers. Ted is such a man, though fortunately, he is far from being abusive. From all that I can tell, he is kind to her, loyal, considerate, and devoted to his family, and perhaps, therefore, he can redeem some things for her.

Wow wow wow.  Train wreck in Tallahassee, details at 11.

I saw Andrew Keen and David Weinberger go at it at Supernova, and it was highly entertaining.  The Journal has the full text of a "reply all" debate between the authors of The Cult of the Amateur and Everything is Miscellaneous, respectively.  Here's Weinberger...

Andrew, the mud you throw obscures the issues you raise. Porn sites, silly posts, monkeys, cockroaches, toilet seats. This rhetoric isn't helpful. In fact, in your attempt to be controversial, you're playing into the hands of political and economic forces that would like the Internet to be nothing more than an extension of the mass media. If your book succeeds on the best-seller lists, but contributes to the Web becoming as safe, narrow, controlled and professional as the mainstream media, I believe you would be almost as unhappy as I would. It's a shame because we need to be taking seriously the issues you raise. But to talk about them, we need to get past the notion that the Web is all dreck all the time and that it is nothing but a great "seducer" of taste.

OMG, book editors in England fail to identify anonymously submitted sample chapters and book summaries as being lifted from Jane Austen. 

"I was staggered. Here is one of the greatest writers that has lived, with her oeuvre securely fixed in the English canon and yet only one recipient recognised them as Austen's work."

This guy had a book he had actually written rejected out of hand, so he knew that over-the-transom work will rarely get read by publishers or agents.  So I'm filing this one under "cheap trick."

Michiko Kakutani on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows:

True to its roots, [the book] ends not with modernist, “Soprano”-esque equivocation, but with good old-fashioned closure: a big-screen, heart-racing, bone-chilling confrontation and an epilogue that clearly lays out people’s fates.

Can you imagine if Rowling had actually done a "modernist, Soprano-esque" ending?  She'd be run out of town by a ten million-strong angry mob of ten year olds screaming "WHAT DO WE WANT? CLOSURE! WHEN DO WE WANT IT? NOW!"

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(un)filtered is a product of michael sippey. there are older things at sippey.typepad.com/filtered, with archives back to 2003, and even older things at stating the obvious.