So if you haven’t heard of Kindle, it’s the e-Book reader/marketplace that Amazon.com has set up. Right now they’re focusing on Kindle 2, the newfangled revamped version, which includes a text-to-speech function… As in, you turn the feature on, and you’ll hear your computer reading the book to you in a scary robot voice.

…Hm. You know, I’ve got nothing against books on tape, and I’ve got nothing against Doctor Stephen Hawkings, but I’m not sure I’m so hot on the idea of books on tape as read by Doctor Stephen Hawkings… Unless the book in question happens to be Hawking’s own A Brief History Of Time .

After some complaints, Amazon has decided that they’re going to offer authors and publishers the right to decide whether or not to allow for the text-to-speech function on their particular book, so that “rightsholders can decide on a title-by-title basis whether they want text-to-speech enabled or disabled for a particular title”.

The complaints were that this would somehow violate audio rights over the book… but let me tell you, nobody’s sitting around going “Why would I spring for the audio book as read by Sir Anthony Hopkins? I’ve got a scary computer voice shouting the story at my ears in a booming monotone, and for free!”

If you really want to hear STORY-BOT 9000 read Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road into your eardrums, you can always download a separate text-to-speech program and copy and paste a chapter at a time.

If you ask me, the whole story is kind of silly. It’s silly to think someone wants a book read to them by their computer, and it’s silly that anyone would care if this or that reader actually DOES want to do just that.

Incidentally, the complaints came not from authors, but from the “Author’s Guild”. The Authors Guild is basically a group of legal experts who charge you membership dues to look at publishing contracts for you, so… all this fuss reminds me of a good lawyer joke, what’s the difference between a “shame” and “a crying shame”?

First of all, Hugh Jackman was a lot of fun, and for once, the awards went not to the fanciest flicks with the biggest budgets, but to actually entertaining films, like the action/drama/musical thriller Slumdog Millionaire.

The result? Long time critics finally caved, and long time supporters called it the best Oscar ceremony in decades.

…Except for writer Salman Rushdie.

In particular, Rushdie really didn’t like Slumdog Millionaire, and recently went on record calling the film trite, false, superficial, and a number of other things not fit for publishing on this esteemed blog.

“The adaptation (of the original novel, Slumdog Millionaire) has a plot spun out of candyfloss and cheap tricks, the sort of thing that newspapers call ‘touching’ and ‘human’, but which merely spray paint a melodramatic sheen on deeply ingrained colonial prejudice.”

Ouch!

Well… respected author and thinker or no, Rushdie is also famous for being a bit of a grouch. Slumdog is certainly based on a crazy plot device, the whole Indian Who Wants to be a Millionaire? thing, and, as Rushdie says, it’s “more fantasy and fairy tale than contemporary fiction” but it’s really a very fun flick, and a difficult movie to be cynical about, what with its energetic camera work, upbeat international pop music, and, yes, dance numbers that seem to occur for no reason whatsoever.

Salman Rushdie does have some good points, but it’s kind of ironic that he actually seems to be guilty of the same thing that the Oscar ceremony detractors typically Academy of doing: Taking movies a little too seriously.

…Yes, he passed away several years ago, but you know, V.C. Andrews passed on over a decade ago and has still been releasing about one book a year since.

The book was actually written by his ex-wife, Tessa Dick. Tessa took to putting the story together herself. She started with notebooks left behind by the author as well as her own knowledge of the story gathered from the couple’s three year marriage, and wrote the majority of The Owl in Daylight herself in as close a style to Dick’s as she could replicate.

It should be noted that there will be a movie coming out this year entitled The Owl in Daylight, but don’t think you’re going to be able to fool anyone into thinking you’re a big PKD Reader by just watching the movie like with Total Recall, Blade Runner, and Minority Report. The film with the same title is actually intended to be a biopic with Giammati playing Philp K. Dick.

Tessa actually worries that the film might reduce Philip K. Dick’s complex personality into something of a tragicomic anti-hero, whether this fear proves justified remains to be seen, of course. It’s probably fair to say that Hollywood hasn’t exactly been kind to Dick. As entertaining as the above mentioned films have been, they really do reduce the author’s sometimes convoluted but always fun high concepts into little more than a platform for endless shoot outs and chase scenes.

The plot of the actual novel revolves around a brilliant computer expert who builds an artificial intelligence console in order to run a vast amusement park, only to wind up being trapped inside his own invention, and I bet you all the change in my pocket that the inevitable movie adaptation will climax with the hero duking it out with some baddie atop a neon-lit Ferris Wheel!

Now, if the reviews for this book wind up being largely positive, my advice for Tessa Dick is to capitalize on her ability to mimic famous writers and see if she can get a good job ghostwriting for famous clients!

What?!

I know I just wrote that, but I’m still wrapping my head around the notion!

The story combines text, image and sound to create a tale told largely through surreal daydream sequences. I kind of like that. Such a crazy concept, you have to expect a crazy story to go along with it.

On the one hand, I’m intrigued by the goofy gimmicks people come up with to tell their stories, but there’s also that doubt that’s always going to be there; are they really trying to do something new and exciting to enliven the art of storytelling, or is this just a cute way to sell a few copies of a dull story?

It’s kind of like 3D movies. Try watching one without the red and blue glasses, and you’re usually left with a bland tale of boring characters doing tedious things for no good reason, except there’s always a bunch of stuff flying at the camera lens.

Anyways, you have to maintain a relaxed, steady rhythm to your breathing if you hope to finish the story. I suppose the real gauge of how good this book really is would be… is it easy to read? Because if it is, then that means it’s not really as… breathtaking… as we usually like stories to be. I like reading the kind of books that can speed up your heart rate and have you taking short, gasping breaths as you turn the page to see what happens next, so if The Breathing Wall winds up being any good, it’ll be something of a challenge to get through.

“Dean Koontz… sometimes he’s just awful.”

“James Patterson is a terrible writer but he’s very, very successful.”

“Stephanie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”

On the one hand, you’ve got to appreciate his honesty in expressing his own uncensored opinion for what it is, and on the other hand, you have to laugh at his audacity.

Perhaps he’s just reached an age where he no longer cares whose feathers he ruffles and is willing to give straight talk even on writers like Dean Koontz, a friend and sometimes-co-author of King’s.

It’s generally part of an author’s publicity training to never go too hard on his or her peers, so really, it’s kind of refreshing to see King giving the interviewer a little more than the same old sound bytes about signing tours and “where he gets all his ideas”.

And to be fair, King tends to be just as quick to dole his criticisms out on himself, as well. He recently wrote a top ten list of his favourite movies of 2008 for Entertainment Weekly, prefacing the list with a confession of his own terrible taste in film, and when he published Blaze last year, he opened the book with a warning to the reader that this wasn’t one of his best, and that you may want to read the first chapter in the bookstore before wasting any money on it.

Now, if you really want to hear Stephen King go off on a few bad writers (including himself, at times), his memoirs/how to book On Writing comes highly recommended. If you read enough autobiographies, you get used to reading between the lines and wondering if the author is really being completely honest with the reader. In King’s case, On Writing is as fierce and merciless a portrait as anyone could paint of the man.

Love’em or hate’em, there’s no denying that they must have some interesting stories to tell, so even their fiercest critics are likely to gobble up Steven Tyler’s upcoming autobiography. That’s the thing about eighties rock, you don’t have to like the music, but you can’t help but admire anyone who managed to survive the decade!

Of course, Steven Tyler’s bio will not be penned by himself, but by ghost writer David Dalton. Dalton has previously written books on James Dean, and Jim Morrison, and has written numerous articles about Marianne Faithfull, The Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan... is it just me, or does this Dalton fellow seem attracted to stories of excess?

There will be a draft of the book due in June, but we’ll probably have to wait and see when the finished product is actually released. The HarperCollins imprint Ecco bid a cool two million on the rights to the book last year, though, so we can be sure they’ll be in a hurry to hit the shelves as soon as possible. Plus, Steven Tyler has always been incredibly open when sharing stories of his past. If you watch some interviews, he’s half bragging and half apologizing for his party days, so we shouldn’t expect him to pull a Bobby Brown and back out at the last second. With the publisher and the author both eager to get the book out there, a summer release date wouldn’t be surprising.

So while this sort of thing may draw plenty of criticism, you have to admit it’s a smart move on the part of all those involved: Britney Spears is currently holding “auditions”, more or less, to find a publisher for her tell-all bio.

This is actually fairly common practice. A star who knows his or her bio is going to rake in somewhere in the area of “all the money in the world”, can afford to have representatives from different publishing houses fly in to meet them, and each one tries to one-up the other with what they can offer the star for the exclusive rights to their book.

This kind of thing is very easy to criticise as lowest-common-denominator pandering, but let’s look at the facts. First of all, book sales have been declining and declining and declining in recent years. Second of all, a book “by” and about Britney Spears is going to fly off the shelves in the blink of an eye. From a business perspective, the exclusive rights to something from Spears could do a publisher a lot of good.

The funny thing is, there’s no book in plans or anything, Spears has proposed nothing. What’s more, that’s the way these deals usually work. Simply put, it’s something of a contractual promise; “If you ever want to do a book, come to us first”. If the lucky publisher who lands the contract knows what they’re doing, though, they’ll reserve the right to hire a ghost writer on their own and publish something with or without Brit’s participation.

If you look at the big picture, it’s hard to focus on the usual criticisms this sort of news evokes. Look, you’re going to have an entertaining book to flip through, and the publisher is going to earn a ton of money to put towards publishing new novels. Is it kind of crass and incredibly commercialistic? You bet it is. But you don’t have to read it, and it will put a pump a lot of money into an industry that is struggling to stay afloat.

Then I remembered the episode of The Simpsons wherein John Updike had ghost written a book for Krusty the Clown, entitled Your Shoe’s too Big to Kickbox God, so there you go, I can make this relevant to the subject at hand!

I think it goes to show how respected you really are in the literary community when The Simpsons can get a few laughs out of the mere idea that you would ghost write a twenty page book as a money making scam for a washed up TV clown. It’s not so much the book that’s funny, but the idea that it would be written by somebody as high profile and as successful as John Updike.

I won’t say who, but sometimes I read about this or that author getting all kinds of kudos in the literary world and I just think “Really?” Maybe one of the most disappointing experiences for a reader is hearing all this great talk about a certain book or writer, and when you finally get around to checking it out, you just have to wonder what all the fuss was about. John Updike, on the other hand, is one of those authors who deserves every word of praise he’s received.

What might be most impressive about Updike is the simple fact that he remained highly prolific throughout his entire career. Since his debut in the late fifties, he’s put something out almost every single year, and in fact, even earlier this year, 2009, he released a collection of short stories. So many writers put out a popular book or two and retire to the Bahamas, it was comforting to know that Updike always had something new to share with us.

If you haven’t yet, pick up a copy of The Centaur or The Witches of Eastwick, if nothing else, you’ll at least find yourself with a good page-turner.

You know, of all the usual targets for the gossip hounds and paparazzi, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are probably at the top of the list, as well as the hardest to get any dirt on. They’ve always been a very private couple, and most of what we see in the celebrity gossip magazines has amounted to little more than speculation on the part of the writer, or through-the-grapevine rumours credited to “unnamed and not always reliable sources”.

So with that in mind, this is slightly more exciting for celeb gossip junkies than your usual tell all book. Apparently, Mickey Brett, former bodyguard to Angelina Jolie is hoping to make a few bucks and maybe earn himself some notoriety with a no holds barred expose on one of the hottest couples in showbiz.

I hope this pans out for him, because he’s probably not getting another celebrity bodyguard gig anytime soon, and in times like these I don’t like to see anyone out of a job!

If you don’t think this book is going to sell by the boatload, you’re crazy. I can guarantee that every gossip lover in the world is going to have a copy, and so will a number of their fans who have never even touched a gossip rag. Heck, I might even take a peek myself, if only to see how someone so close to the family as to have been nicknamed “Uncle Mickey” by little Maddox got jilted and now wants to spill the beans for all the world to see.

If you consider that he’s hiring ghostwriter Robin McGibbon for the actual scribing of the book and is himself not likely to take up a job as a novelist after this, well, let’s just hope he invests his earnings wisely, because there’s not much work in Hollywood when you’re a bodyguard who sells his client’s secrets, and you didn’t write the tell-all book yourself.

Of course, who am I kidding? I’d bet the farm that this book will set Mickey Brett up for life on the first week sales alone. Note to self: If I ever work for someone famous (apart from as a ghostwriter that is of course), do not sign a confidentiality agreement!