If the internet is killing books, the blog to book deal is an ironic reward for blogosphere fame, writes Sarah Hromack in the July/August issue of The Brooklyn Rail:

How strangely anachronistic is it (and yet, extraordinarily telling) that those who participate in perhaps the most monumental democratic exercise ever—and who do so daily, often for a living—would seek to tame the great, unbridled, immaterial beast that is the Internet with some high-gloss stock and two binding boards? How thoroughly odd it is that one would attempt to translate the particular digital reading experience of the Tumblr blog, or Twitter feed, or Facebook update into an analog one.

Source: The Brooklyn Rail 

If you love an old fashioned grammarian throw down, we've got a good one for you. This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of William Strunk and E.B. White's The Elements of Style and  Geoffrey K. Pullum isnt celebrating.  In a delightfully vitriolic essay for The Chronicle Review, Pullum complains that the tiny guide "does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it."

Brutal. Then, in the very next breath, this: "The authors won't be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead." You get the distinct sense that Pullum would have been glad to see the book buried with the men who made it. "Both authors were grammatical incompetents," he writes. "Strunk had very little analytical understanding of syntax, White even less. Certainly White was a fine writer, but he was not qualified as a grammarian."

Pullum isn't pissed about the style advice, which he calls "mostly harmless"—all of his punches are aimed squarely at the grammar rules and the grammar itself: 

"Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs," they insist. (The motivation of this mysterious decree remains unclear to me.)

And then, in the very next sentence, comes a negative passive clause containing three adjectives: "The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place."

That's actually not just three strikes, it's four, because in addition to contravening "positive form" and "active voice" and "nouns and verbs," it has a relative clause ("that can pull") removed from what it belongs with (the adjective), which violates another edict: "Keep related words together."

"Keep related words together" is further explained in these terms: "The subject of a sentence and the principal verb should not, as a rule, be separated by a phrase or clause that can be transferred to the beginning." That is a negative passive, containing an adjective, with the subject separated from the principal verb by a phrase ("as a rule") that could easily have been transferred to the beginning. Another quadruple violation.

A 50th anniversary is a big deal, and Geoffrey K. Pullum knows how to party.

Source: The Chronicle Review 

Ten million billion ants, 60,000 papers on the genetics of the common fruit fly, the weaponozation of at least 18 arthropod-borne diseases, and one skinned frog. In the books section of The Guardian, science writer PD Smith offers a titillating roundup of bizarre facts from the history of animal and insect experimentation—and leaves you with a reading list.

Image by  Hamed Saber , licensed under  Creative Commons . 

At Crumpled Press, a young, independent bookmaking outfit based in Brooklyn, each book is a tactile treasure—custom cut, bone folded, and hand sewn. In a profile for University of Chicago Magazine, Melissa F. Pheterson writes of how the press’s four editors collaborate with each author “to create a book’s artisinal feel...to savor the printed-page aesthetic in an era of digitized technology.”

For each edition, the press hosts binding parties in McIntyre’s loft, with about a dozen crafty friends paid in snacks and conversation. “It’s like quilting,” says founding editor Jordan McIntyre. “It’s a homespun model that people miss.”

Since 2005, Crumpled Press has used this homespun model to publish ten titles, and the business is flourishing, with consumers drawn in by the books’ homemade beauty. While sales were in the low double digits for their first four publications, recent titles like Anthony Grafton’s Codex in Crisis (2008), a treatise on the digitization of books, and Derek McGee’s When I Wished I Was Here: Dispateches from Fallujah (2007) have sold several hundred copies.

“The standard line is that digitization kills books,” says editor Alexander Bick. “I think it’s more accurate to say there’s a symbiosis. The Internet generates most of our sales. We use digital technology like laser printing to produce our books…Our success contradicts the idea that bookmaking no longer makes sense.”

Bloggers and bookstores are often kindred spirits, but many bloggers link to the Amazon page for books they discuss in their posts. IndieBound recently added a book-linking feature that provides a user-friendly alternative: bloggers can link to book information and cover art on IndieBound, and users who follow the link and want to purchase the book can enter their zip code to find it at a local store. 

The bookseller/blogger Bookavore is on a mission to rally her fellow bloggers in support of independent bookstores. "I’d like to encourage as many people as possible to, when using a link that is about a book, link to IndieBound," she writes in a recent post. "I’m not asking anyone to stop linking anywhere, just to start linking to IndieBound as well (although, of course, I won’t stop anybody who decides to exclusively link to IndieBound; in fact, I might kiss them)."

Sources: Bookavore, IndieBound 

Imagine setting up a collective—a business venture, perhaps—tied strictly to majority vote. . . and then two successful decades later, finding yourself consistently in the minority. No harm, no foul, AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan tells the East Bay Express. In “Beyond Anarchy at PM Press,” Rachel Swan profiles the publisher’s amicable 2007 departure from AK Press and his current project: PM Press, which is armed with “all the attributes that helped AK at its inception: inexhaustible creativity; a staff of idealists willing to volunteer their time; [and] imaginative ways of bringing print to the digital realm.”

Kanaan tells East Bay Express that he's happy to see more of his ideas coming to fruition. " 'It's not that I want to be a dictator," said the publisher, explaining that PM is in fact more collectively minded than AK. It's just easier to run a collective when everyone agrees with you."

Source:  East Bay Express  

David Suzuki truly has a passion. His lifelong dedication to the environment spans across his many endeavors; most notably, he is a broadcaster, a scientist, an activist, and an author of 43 books. A Passion for This Earth (David Suzuki Foundation and Greystone Books, 2008), however, is not Suzuki’s book at all, but the product of his remarkable ability to inspire people to think critically, personally, and practically about our environment. A collection of essays from writers, scientists, and activists, the book presents an extensive selection of voices about a common passion: the earth and our role in its capacity to flourish.

Edited by Michelle Benjamin, A Passion for This Earth boasts a foreword by Bill McKibben, environmentalist and acclaimed author of several books including The End of Nature and Deep Economy. The essays range from the urgent call for action of Doug Moss’ “Save the Environment—Take Back the Media” to the anecdotal nature of David Helvarg’s “Saved by the Sea”:

As a young kid, I’d looked up at the stars and gotten pissed off, thinking I’d been born a generation too soon to explore other worlds. But that week in Key West I got hold of a mask and snorkel and got into the water and saw live rocks, and vibrant colors, sea cucumbers and a queen conch, a sea turtle and a small hammerhead gliding through a coral canyon amid shoaling fish and realized there was this whole other alien world right beyond the seawall. Sadly, in the blink of an eye that’s been my life, the Keys reef has gone from 90 percent live coral cover to less than 10 percent, devastated by pollution, physical impacts from boats, anchors and people and global warming.

A Passion for This Earth is a satisfying fusion of appreciation for nature and political activism that stems from the natural diversity of our earth, of the problems that face it and the people who choose to tackle the issues.

Now’s your chance to join Utne Reader’s first Conversations Collection online book discussion, taking place Tuesday, April 22, in  Utne.com’s Great Writing Salon. We’re kicking things off with Rock On: An Office Power Ballad by Dan Kennedy, a hilarious dissection of the music industry. We hope you’ll join us on Tuesday, when senior editor Keith Goetzman will be logged on to field questions and moderate a spirited discussion.

If Rock On is already sitting on your nightstand, head over now to our Great Writing Salon, where Keith has gotten the discussion ball rolling. Or come back to Utne.com on Tuesday, click “Salon” on the upper right-hand side of the page, click “Great Writing,” and visit the “Conversations Collection April Discussion: Death of the Major Labels” discussion. Be sure to log in to make your voice heard.

If you haven’t gotten your copy yet, you can order it here. 

We look forward to hearing from you.

—Bennett Gordon

In Philip M. Parker’s world, there’s no need for a writer to create a book. Parker has created a machine that can write books without the need for pesky and temperamental pencil pushers. According to an article by Marc Abrahams in the Guardian, the machine takes a topic, taps into a vast database of information, and spits out a book. “Parker estimates that it costs him about 12p to write a book, with, perhaps, not much difference in quality from what a competent wordsmith or an MBA might produce,” Abrahams writes. Looks like I should start searching for a new job.

—Bennett Gordon

Next time you read a newly-released, good contemporary novel, buy two. Or three. Then, years later, when the book becomes a modern classic, beloved by generations of literati, you can sell your precious mint-condition first editions and buy yourself nice things. That’s the plan of hypermodern book collectors anyway. Think of it as investing, but for people who know more about William Vollmann than bonds and dividends. (Me, I prefer my stable of hyper-volatile penny stocks. Hello, bankruptcy!) Read more about collecting hypermodern literature in Anne Trubek’s article in Good Magazine.

—Brendan Mackie