• Clay Shirky and Cory Doctorow, two smart guys whose books I like, have offered some thoughts on the future of bookselling.  I had planned a lengthy response to these articles, but to be honest, I don’t see the point.  I will summarize both by saying that they have great ideas for new stores.  If I were opening a bookstore today, I’d take a hard look at whether a non-profit model made sense, as Shirky suggests.  I’d also focus on the areas where the net can’t compete — making a great browsing experience, carrying as many limited edition, object d’arte that I could, having a kick-ass coffee shop/wine bar, etc.  But to take a store that’s already in existence and move to those kind of models is extremely difficult.  Ask the folks at Shaman Drum how easy it is to switch to a non-profit model after years of operating as a for-profit business.  In the end, discussions like this are important, as they’re bound to inspire some innovation, but they need to be fully grounded in reality to be useful.

• The Millions has begun its Year in Reading series for 2009.   As I said last year, The Millions does this year-end business better than everyone else because the focus is on reading — the best book you read in 2009 — rather than publishing.  Jonathan Lethem, Julie Klam, Mark Sarvas and others have already been posted.  Mine is forthcoming, so stay tuned for that.

• The New York Times 10 Best of 2009 is out.  Topping the fiction list, alongside books by heavyweights Lorrie Moore and Jonathan Lethem, is Both Ways is the Only Way I Want It, by Maile Meloy.

• Finally, those in Los Angeles will want to check out Interviewing the Audience with Zach Helm, running this weekend at Bootleg Theatre.  “Interviewing The Audience is an opportunity to expand the perception of theater and narrative with a simple, human approach. Specifically, members of each evening’s audience will be asked to sit with Mr. Helm and allow themselves to be interviewed without any pre-conception or structure. The result is a series of stories so personal, so real, so emotionally deep, so strange that they often surpass our expectations more than any typical piece. Mr. Helm saw the late Spaulding Gray perform the piece in Chicago and became immediately enamored with it. After a 5 night successful run in 2007, Teatro de Facto & Bootleg are bringing it back for a 2 Night Limited Engagement.“  The show is this Friday and Saturday night.  Tickets are $15 online and $20 at the door.

I’m in a creative writing class, and when we discuss each other’s work there’s always the issue of technology.  Doesn’t this character have a cell phone, we ask.   They’d be able to trace the credit card sales! we say.  Technology has caused fiction writers a lot of grief.  In the old days — the early 90s, say — a character could pretty much disappear from sight.  Messages were lost, people raced against time.  Now, they have a device that connects them to the world in their pocket at all times.  Anybody writing a thriller or mystery has had to reckon with that for a few years now, but literary fiction seems content to ignore the times, or at least the technology of them.  Doctorow’s book, while maybe not strictly literary fiction, is the first novel I’ve read that even mentions Twitter.  Only a handful that I’ve read mention blogs.  And yet these things, along with Facebook and the rest of the net, are parts of our daily lives.  Shouldn’t our fiction represent that?  Why doesn’t it?

The most obvious reason is timeliness.  It takes a few years to write a novel, so the fiction coming out now is actually a few years old, in terms of when it was conceived.  Twitter and Facebook have only just broken into the common consciousness.  Blogs are a bit older, but they have slightly higher profile in fiction than the new “social media.”  In two or three years, don’t be surprised to find characters tweeting and facebooking all over the place.

Another reason, and one I find somewhat less defensible, is that of dating the material.  Novelists — some novelists, at least — are weary of referencing too many specific pop culture items because it can date the book to a specific time and place.  To be sure, it’s important to guard against too many references, as it’s difficult (maybe impossible) to know what will survive.  God knows I felt like a fool for writing that book about the Beanie Baby-crazed gangsta rapper who maintained a geocities site about the Clinton-Lewinski scandal.  That book is going nowhere.  But seriously, though, some pop culture references are fine (Look at Ulysses, one of the greatest books ever written.  It’s loaded with all kinds of arcane references to turn of the century Irish pop culture and politics).  The way I see it, Twitter and Blogs and social media are a part of how we communicate, so writing a book where none of the characters ever use them is pretty strange.

What do you think?  Will we see more characters using social media and the web?

• Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky.  This book examines the ways people use technology and what that means for the future of various industries, including publishing.  Shirky describes it as “a book about organizing without organizations.”  He’s kind of a doom-and-gloomer about the future of the printed word (on paper, that is), but he’s very persuasive.  The New York Times blog Paper Cuts posted this morning about a panel Shirky will be participating in at SXSW.  See also:  herecomeseverybody.org.
• The Cult of the Amateur, by Andrew Keen.  For an even more pessimistic take on how “Web 2.0″ (this term is almost certainly quote-worthy, as it seems nearly meaningless now) is “destroying our economy, our culture, and our values.”  Personally, I’m skeptical of anyone who claims that something is destroying our culture or our values.  To paraphrase a Hanns Johst, when I hear the phrase “destroying our culture,” that’s when I reach for my mouse.  Keen points out that newspapers are losing revenue and continue to give away their content online for free.  The logical conclusion to this – that newspapers will cease to be – is something that has recently come up on David Carr’s blog at the New York Times with a hardy agreement from local pundit Larry Wilson and  a rebuttal coming from Daniel Gilmore at Boing Boing (be sure to read the very intelligent and very even-handed comments, too).  If newspapers don’t exist, how will journalists be paid to report the news?  These are the slippery slopes Keen describes in the book.  You can read more of his work at his blog, The Great Seduction.
• On the subject of e-books and electronic publishing, one of the most interesting posts written about it is “The Future of Reading:  A Play in Six Acts.” There are now 250 comments on the post, which are also well worth your time.
• Free Culture and Remix, by Lawrence Lessig.  Nobody writes about copyright better than Lessig, a professor of law at Stanford and a columnist for Wired.  Free Culture looks at “the cold war between media companies and new technology,” while Remix offers a future where creative people can prosper without restricting access to their work.  Further reading at Lessig.org.
• Cory Doctorow.  This post started with him, so it seems fitting to end it with him as well.  Be sure to read his posts on Boing Boing, which frequently address copyright and other issues dealing with the junction of creativity and technology.  Further reading:  craphound.com.  And this will be the last post about Doctorow for awhile, I promise.

Of course, this list is wildly incomplete.  If you’ve got anything else we should be reading, please leave a comment.