Wednesday Links: 8-19-09

Some news about books and ebooks from around the web. Side note: after next week I won’t be doing this feature anymore. I’ll be planning for (and going on) a trip to Africa that will last a few months (more about that as it nears). I might be handing Wednesday Links off to other C4 writers; at the least, I’ll pick it back up in December. On to the news.

• Sony recently announced a digital reader service for the PSP, which will evidently be centered around comics for the near future.. Here’s a trailer for “Digital Comics,” featuring precious little actual comics-reading. Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve read a comic book, but don’t they sometimes have page-sized panels? Seems like that would be impossible on the PSP. But the implications are good for ebooks.

• Alain de Botton, who went atomic over a mediocre review of his last book, will spend a week in Heathrow Airport, as the “writer-in-residence.” He’ll interview airport-goers and type up a short book during the week, and his writing will appear in real time on a screen behind him. Uhhhhhh, weird. (via)

• Even more Google Books news. The French National Library struck a deal with Google Books. Here’s the Wall Street Journal‘s take on the Google Books settlement. The National Writers Union opposes the settlement.

• Werner Herzog is awesome. That’s a given. In honor of the new collection of the diaries he wrote during Fitzcarraldo, Vanity Fair imagines the diaries he’d write during his current shoot, for something called Bad Lieutenant. If you don’t know the story of the famously fated filming of Fitzcarraldo, there’s an excellent documentary about it called Burden of Dreams. Or you can watch the best bit on YouTube. It’s pretty awesome.

• On the other hand, I’m not a fan of A.S. Byatt. I found Possession excruciating.That said, Byatt’s making news by “attacking” writers who base characters on real people (the original interview is here). Truman Capote famously based a lot of his material on real people. Sure, he died friendless and alone, but I’ll take a Capote book over a Byatt book eleven times out of ten. In the interview, Byatt also says that she knows of a person who committed suicide because they were put into a novel, which I frankly don’t believe. That’s like saying somebody suffered a psychotic break because the girl at the coffee shop didn’t smile at them: there would be other, more serious factors in such a case. Here’s Bookninja’s take, and Conversational Reading’s. Byatt’s not getting much love on this one.

• Quick takes: Author Scoop has a list of ten great movies about writers; here’s a quick interview with Daniel Handler (Lemony Snicket, although his adult books, especially Adverbs, are also quite good), regarding his selecting the music for the Believer‘s music issue; Cory Doctorow makes the case for authors giving out free ebooks; E-Reads has an interesting piece about the similarities between the publishing and movie industries; here’s the first look at Dave Eggers’s novelization of Where the Wild Things Are (we need that why?);

• Random of the week: I was going to link to “Imagining the Tenth Dimension,” a mind-bending video about the seven dimensions after the three you’re familiar with. But it got Boing Boinged the other day, so here’s a bonus: condescending conservative nimrod Patricia Heaton flailing and floundering (for 8 minutes) on Millionaire in response to an easy math question. Hurry, though, YouTube’s already taken down a few incarnations of the video.