…fiction-delivery vehicles, after poking a little fun at DailyLit.com and the idea of reading War and Peace via e-mail, I thought, what the hell, you never know until you try. So I subscribed, and this morning I read chunklet 13 of 675. It sure isn’t ideal, because when you’re checking you’re e-mail you’re not really in an enjoy-great-literature frame of mind–also, if you haven’t had your coffee yet and you need to refresh your memory, you have to find the previous e-mail instead of simply turning to the previous page. And yet. I’ve never read War and Peace, and have always wanted to, and am continuing to do so.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Has it already been a year since the New York Times reported on podcasted novels? NPR talks to Scott Sigler, one of the PodNovelists (TM) profiled in that story. Now this is a fiction-delivery vehicle I can get behind.

My blog was down on April 1st, but I thought this was pretty funny: “Google Book Search now smells better.” I also thought it was pretty funny that Time Out Chicago did a prank issue reporting their sale to Donald Trump–fooling Crain’s Chicago.

One of my fondest memories of falling for a prank: some years ago, NPR did a story about how the Boston Celtics were recruiting some Irish phenom who said he’d sign with the team only if they stopped pronouncing the team name with a soft “c”–and, I believe, sang the national anthem in Gaelic.

Funny how ridiculous stuff can seem believable when it’s delivered with a straight face.

Well, it beats cell-phone novels, but I still don’t think this is the fiction-delivery vehicle for me. From the Guardian (”New look for the short story,” by Joel Rickett):

Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.

The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.

It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.

I started reading “The 21 Steps” but abandoned it after the scrolling maps made me feel a bit seasick. It’s an odd sensation, really: simple words can evoke a world in our imaginations, but as soon as the words are married to real-world images, they lose much of their power. Similarly, it can be fun to look at a map and imagine what the places really look like, but here, the Google satellite view just made me frustrated because I wanted to see what the place really looks like at street level and inside the buildings.

Anyway, here’s the site for all six stories. Three have been published and three more are still to come. Maybe I’ll like the others better than Cumming’s. I’m sure that gamers are more likely to like the project than I am….

As I wrote yesterday, I still have some catching up to do, which is why I’m a week late with the winner of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year: If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs.

The self-help manual, by an American writer called Big Boom, won 2,870 votes (33%) since the shortlist was announced on 22nd February. The runner-up is I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen (20%) and in 3rd place is Cheese Problems Solved (19%).

Not bad, but I prefer some of the past winners (”‘Closure’ wins oddest book award,” Reuters):

The annual competition was launched in 1978 at the Frankfurt Book Fair when it was won by the memorably titled “Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Nude Mice”.

Since then, with the exceptions of 1987 and 1991 when no award was granted due, according to Rickett, to a lack of oddness, the weird and wonderful titles have flowed thick and fast with some eyebrow raising winners.

“Joy of Chickens” took the 1980 title, with “The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling” in 1983, “Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual” in 1990, “Living with Crazy Buttocks” in 2002 and “Bombproof Your Horse” in 2004 are but a sample.

However, the 1997 winner “Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition” does stand out among the glittering array, and in September this year the public will be asked to vote for the oddest of all the winners.

From the Australian, a story about the British Society of Authors‘ fears that Internet will kill writing as we know it (”Writers lament effects of internet“):

Ms Chevalier said the century-old model by which authors were paid a mix of cash advances and royalties, was finished.

“It is a dam that’s cracking,” she said. “We are trying to plug the holes with legislation and litigation but we need to think radically.

… 

“For a while it will be great for readers because they will pay less, but in the long run it’s going to ruin the information. People will stop writing.”

Fortunately for these worried writers, there’s a terrific precedent already in place: the music business, when threatened by peer-to-peer filesharing, also tried to “plug the holes with legislation and litigation” and now enjoys more robust health than ever.

I kid, people, I kid.

It’s a complicated issue, but it’s certainly not the same as the crisis facing the owners of the music industry. And as someone who is intimately acquainted with the going pay rates for writing, I can say definitively that poor pay will not cause writers to stop working. Writing pays more and more poorly and yet more and more people want to be writers. If people only wrote for the money, then we’d have a problem on our hands.

OK, let’s see: there’s booksfree.com… BookSwim… Paperspine… and the newest “Netflix for Books,” NovelAction.com, which adds, ahem, a novel twist: instead of just sending them money and getting books on loan, you send them money and books. When I was growing up, there was something like that, but I forget what it was called.

Oh, yeah: a “used bookstore.”

Actually, the NovelAction concept, which I have admittedly only skimmed, seems to be that you’re trading books, and they’re making their money off the shipping fees. Given that used bookstores are an endangered species, it seems like an all right idea. But given that planes, trains, and automobiles (well, mostly planes and automobiles, and also ships) are prime culprits in global warming, I sure wish the trend were not toward Netflix models but toward neighborhood bookstores that were within walking distance.

But if you’re really the kind of person who doesn’t need to own books–who doesn’t mind reading something that someone else has read before giving it back and getting more used books–there’s a place that doesn’t charge you anything unless you’re deadline-challenged.

Oh, yeah: a “library.”

I hear tell they even have movies, too.

Batting second: Game On.

Batting third: Super Sized:

And, batting cleanup, Vending Machine.

Keep up with the latest NLW videos here.

With National Library Week fast approaching, hard-working American Libraries associate editor Daniel Kraus has been working hard on a series of humorous video homages to libraries and the hard-working people who make them work. Batting leadoff, Reference Desk:

(And thank goodness for anonymous commenting–safe haven for the hit-and-run artist.)

If you think things have been slow around here lately, you’re right. Given my travel schedule last week, I managed only one post. Still, I returned to work Monday, raring to go and ready to blog. When I hit “publish,” however, nothing happened. Well, the page turned white, but my text disappeared into the ether. Turns out I was the victim of a “malicious bot.” The problem was fixed late yesterday (when Monday morning’s rewritten post finally appeared)–and now I really have a lot of catching up to do. Thanks for reading, and bear with me.