I guess a cynic might say that nobody’s reading because everybody’s publishing. Either way, the traditional paper book is obviously practically extinct. Some staggering numbers for you to ponder over the weekend (”On-Demand Titles Drive Jump in Book Output,” by Jim Milliot, Publishers Weekly):

The production of traditional books rose 1% in 2007, to 276,649 new titles and editions, but the output of on-demand, short run and unclassified titles soared from 21,936 in 2006 to 134,773 last year, according to preliminary figures released Wednesday by R.R. Bowker. The combination of the two categories results in a 39% increase in output to 411,422.

I think it’s the “quiet Dick Cheney whispering ‘hush’” that creeps me out the most. Take a look inside at the Goodnight Bush site. (Via.)

I received an e-mail yesterday from Marianne Goss, who wants to promote her site, www.positivelygoodreads.com, “an upbeat reading list for people who often find serious novels depressing”. In the event that there are a lot of like-minded readers out there, I’m happy to share the link. But as someone who thrives on darkness and despair, I don’t think I’ll be consulting the list myself.

Here’s an excerpt from an essay Goss wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times (”Literary fiction doesn’t always have to be downbeat“):

Why is it that someone who presumably loves to read fiction has been having trouble finding novels she wants to read? Could it be because literary fiction — the term used to distinguish serious fiction from the commercial variety — is often grim? . . . “Literary fiction,” says a Web site I came across as I was searching for some possibly upbeat titles, “rarely has a happy ending.” When did this become literary dogma?

It’s not dogma, but because so many hack novels end with happy endings, serious writers tend to avoid them like, er, the plague. Writers who attempt ”serious” or “literary” novels are usually investigating the messiness of life and the deeper truths of human existence. And given that one of the deepest truths of human existence is that our time on this planet is measured in double-digit numbers, there may be a reason for the shortage of happy endings.

But isn’t there pleasure in even these kinds of explorations? I’d hardly consider Richard Powers’ The Echo Maker to be easy reading–or, for that matter, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road–but there’s a certain kind of solace in seeing mature minds tackle sadness. We read them and we know that we’re not alone in our fear and unknowingness. And when we’re ready for a change of pace, we read Will Self or P. G. Wodehouse.

You know, the more I think about this, the more I’m mystified by Goss’ complaint. Is it really that she wants literary fiction to be more uplifting–or does she wish that happy endings felt more important? Maybe this is a simple case of genrephobia. Would it help if we got rid of the term “literary fiction”?

Did you hear about the 2008 Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction? It’s a funny story. From the Guardian (”Hay festival: Will Self wins comic fiction prize,” by Richard Lea):

A prize winner may come to seem almost inevitable after the announcement, the newly-crowned work suddenly towering above its former rivals on the shortlist like a literary colossus.

The award of the 2008 Wodehouse prize for comic fiction to Will Self took the process to its logical conclusion, with the victory for his latest novel, The Butt, literally inevitable since the day the shortlist was announced last month.

Keen-eyed readers of the programme for this year’s Hay festival - published on the same day as a Wodehouse shortlist that included Self, Alan Bennett and Garrison Keillor - will have noticed Self described as the “winner of the 2008 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for comic fiction”.

The programme “gave away a little more than we had meant to,” admitted the festival’s press officer, Hannah Lort-Phillips.

USA Today calls Scott McClellan’s What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception “surprisingly scathing” (”Ex-spokesman’s book blasts Bush administration,” by Mike Allen). Maybe they missed the excerpt that was released last fall. The New York Times, of course, is not surprised (”In Ex-Spokesman’s Book, Harsh Words for Bush,” by Elisabeth Bumiller).

Well, not paper-and-glue books–those would be too heavy and would take up too much room. But, in two fascinating extraterrestrial tales, the always forward-thinking Baen Books is giving its e-books away free to astronauts–at least, to those astronauts currently residing on the International Space Station–and, thanks to the success of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, the Red Planet just got its first library (”Well red: Nasa’s literary mission to Mars,” by Jim Gilchrist, The Scotsman). Most of the material in the library (all of it housed on a silica-glass DVD) pertains to, naturally, Mars. Seems like sound readers’ advisory, but what if the Martian residents or visitors want to read about something new for a change?

For those of you interested in judging books by their titles, David McKie (”The Great Trimalchio,” the Guardian commentisfree) investigates what playwright Neil LaBute calls “a rarely considered miniature art form”: book titles. Many trivia fans already know that Margaret Mitchell considered calling Gone with the Wind the more pedestrian Pansy–but how many know that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise had a working title of The Education of a Personage?

Four years ago, Bill Ott wrote about working titles in the Back Page, and even offered a quiz on the subject. And if you knew that Farewell, My Lovely had a brief existence as Zounds, He Dies, I want you on my pub-quiz team, if I ever get around to starting one.

For those of you interested in judging books by their front covers, PRINT Magazine chronicles a trend with legs (”One Leg Leads to Another,” by Steven Heller).

(Thanks, Dan!)

On the Guardian’s theblogbooks, book reviewer Chris Power admits that even he sometimes chooses books by their covers. Not the front covers, but the back covers, which often consist of synopses or blurbs or both:

The problem with your common or garden synopsis is that it boils off all the stuff that attracts me about fiction - style, wit, inventiveness, rhythm - and leaves the bare bones of plot and/or setting, which I couldn’t care less about. It makes no odds to me if a book’s set in Carthage, Highgate or on the moon, nor whether it revolves around a moneylender’s murder, a British ex-consul glugging mescal on the Day of the Dead, or the Holy Grail turning out to be Mary Magdalene; I just want to be stimulated by the writing. It’s not the “what”, as they say, but the “how”.

There are ways around this, of course, even when the book is yet to be reviewed. One is the puff: get a famous stablemate or similar author to enthuse, e.g. Irvine Welsh praising Niall Griffiths; Ian Rankin bigging up Henning Mankell; or Tom Clancy claiming to find more doorstopping thrillers than he could ever have time to pick up unputdownable. Another is for the publisher to supply a critique of their own, although these tend to be both untrustworthy and, frequently, meaningless. Thus the novel I quoted from above possesses, according to its publisher, “graphic-novel sharpness”. Weeks after first reading this I still have no idea what it means.

The method I endorse to best avoid this sort of thing is judicious quotation from the book itself. Not the first paragraph, because everyone can flick to that easily enough themselves. Just a really good, representative section - say, the beginning of a passage the author would read at an event - or a single brilliant line. Penguin Classics do this rather well, but their publishing remit starts them off at something of an advantage.

Great idea. Read the comments.

And, just in time for Father’s Day . . . Harper Entertainment is betting that it’s not just young boys who are interested in retro, clip-arty activity books–their fathers may be, too:

This one, however, makes me kind of sad, and not only because my poor book-loving father never taught me how to flush a radiator: