More in a similar vein–except substitute Harvard for Oprah. And periodicals for books. From the New York Times (”At Harvard, a Proposal to Publish Free on the Web,” by Patricia Cohen):

Publish or perish has long been the burden of every aspiring university professor. But the question the Harvard faculty will decide on Tuesday is whether to publish - on the Web, at least - free.

Faculty members are scheduled to vote on a measure that would permit Harvard to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.

The concept–an open-access publishing system that would require authors to “opt out” if they didn’t want their works to be published for free–is, of course, controversial. And, as one prof notes, it’s redundant in a way, because already, thanks to technology, "any professor who wants to put his or her article up online can."

And Stuart Shieber, a professor of computer science, proves the value of a Harvard education:

"As far as I know, everyone I’ve ever talked to is supportive of the underlying principle. Still there is a difference between an underlying principle and specific proposal."

It seems like everybody’s offering free downloads this week. Well, not everybody–some folks are selling by the chapter. But, anyway, Oprah’s offering free downloads of Suze Orman’s Las Mujeres y El Dinero (and its English-language translation, Women & Money, too)–but only until tomorrow evening. And you’re not allowed to share it. Frankly, I’m so concerned about my overpowering desire to share that I’m going to nip this one in the bud and not download it.

Like this: “O. J. Simpson’s Former Agent to Publish Book: How I Helped O. J. Get Away with Murder,” by Leon Neyfakh, The New York Observer.

Brought to you by Regnery Publishing.

Free books (”HarperCollins Will Post Free Books on the Web,” by Motoko Rich, New York Times)…

In an attempt to increase book sales, HarperCollins Publishers will begin offering free electronic editions of some of its books on its Web site, including a novel by Paulo Coelho and a cookbook by the Food Network star Robert Irvine.

…and by-the-chapter (”Random House and HC Test Drive Online Access to Their Books,” by Jim Milliot and Rachel Deahl, Publishers Weekly):

In the Random test, Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, published in hardcover in January 2007, is being made available in six chapters and an epilogue - the content bunches are priced individually at $2.99 each - at www.randomhouse.com/madetostick. Consumers who buy a chapter will receive an e-mail with a link for downloading the purchased file, which cannot be shared electronically.

While the first idea isn’t really anything more than Amazon is doing with “Search Inside!,” I’m very excited about the second idea. As soon as they extend it to fiction, I’ll be able to buy John Grisham novels the way I’ve always wanted to–every other chapter.

Hello, New York Times. Nice to have you with us.

“Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular,” by Norimitsu Onishi (January 20, 2008)

“Cell Phones’ Latest Plot Twist,” by Stevenson Swanson (Chicago Tribune, November 12, 2007)

“Ring! Ring! Ring! In Japan, Novelists Find a New Medium,” by Yukari Iwatani Kane (Wall Street Journal, September 26, 2007)

In the Guardian’s theblogbooks, Jean Hannah Edelstein attacks “sizeism” in fiction and suggests that novellas might be the perfect antidote to the reading public’s (supposedly) declining attention span:

And then I had an epiphany: could it be that we should look to classics like Ethan Frome to find the key to saving fiction from the worrisome tides of publishing sturm and drang, the statistics that indicate that people distracted by the trillions of choices provided by digital media are giving up on fiction? Might the way to stop our atrophied attention spans becoming terminally distracted be to simply publish more short books?

I’m in favor of shorter books in the same way that I’m in favor of 100-minute movies and 3-minute pop songs–works of art are usually made better by some judicious cutting. But I suspect that novellas have never caught on for the same reason short stories are dying out: because so many people view reading as being more like homework than a hobby, if they are going to read, they want to feel as though they’ve “accomplished something.”

From the Department of Really, What Did You Expect?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A book publisher that bought an ad on Don Imus’s radio show is suing the shock jock and his former bosses at CBS Radio for more than $4 million, saying Imus insulted the book he was paid to promote.

(”Advertiser sues Don Imus for unscripted comments,” Reuters)

More on the Ishmael Beah controversy in The Australian. Another former child soldier, Kabba Williams, has questioned Beah’s account of events (”Child soldier questions Beah’s tale,” by Peter Wilson):

“That is not true … 1995 was the period when Ishmael got involved in the conflict,” Mr Williams told The Australian in a telephone interview yesterday.

However:

Mr Williams said he was not surprised by what he believed were the inaccuracies in Beah’s account because the traumatic adolescence of the child soldiers meant “a lot of us do not know our own childhoods”.

The publisher, however, may need to take some blame for another, far less forgivable, error:

Beah, according to his own account, spent at least 10 months wandering between villages before reaching the relative safety of the village of Yele in Bonthe district, only to be recruited by the soldiers occupying the town.

A map that has appeared at the front of Beah’s book in its many reprints — more than 650,000 copies are in print and a new soft-back edition is about to be released in Europe — shows that trek as a winding, 1000km route between Mattru Jong and Yele, about 450km to the southwest.

But the map is deeply flawed. In fact, Yele is just 6km southwest of Mattru Jong.

According to a recent report in The Australian (”Africa’s war child,” by Shelley Gare, Peter Wilson, and David Nason), the timeline is wrong in Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier. The story of how the discrepancies came to light–and the responses of Beah’s publisher and guardian–are both fascinating and troubling. And while the book’s success and Beah’s visibility ensure that there will be a lot more talk about this, it’s likely to be a lot more delicate than the James Frey proceedings–as well it should be. Even if, as the article suggests, Beah’s time as a soldier lasted months, not years, no child should have to experience that kind of horror for even a moment. There are other questions worth asking, though.

If confirmed, the revelations do not mean Beah’s tale isn’t truly terrible. They don’t mean that he hasn’t been through experiences that most of us in the developed world will never have to face even in our nightmares. They don’t detract from the fact that, as his New York agent Ira Silverberg told Inquirer, of the inspiring book, “Beautiful things have come from the success he has seen.

He’s changing policy now; he testified before (the US) Congress; fought for the rights of the 300,000 …”

But this does raise questions about the way Ishmael Beah’s book came about and how thoroughly his story was checked out.

Does our enduring hunger for authentic stories, for human symbols, and for stories of redemption cause us to vet some stories less thoroughly than others? Interestingly, Frey’s own troubles triggered a halfhearted fact-check.

In an earlier interview with The Los Angeles Times, Crichton said she had asked Beah to vouch for the accuracy of his story after the memoirist James Frey had confessed to making up material in his own book. Times reporter Josh Getlin wrote: “Crichton was willing to take the leap after Beah assured her that he has a ‘photographic memory’. He reminded her that he had grown up in a culture with a long-standing oral tradition and had learned to tell stories from memory around a fire.”

(An interesting and probably unrelated side note is that Beah’s agent is Ira Silverberg, who also repped JT Leroy.)

A follow-up article yesterday (”Ishmael Beah’s flaws ‘poetic licence,’” by David Nason and Shelley Gare) featured thoughtful remarks from Dan Chaon (You Remind Me of Me, 2004) who, as a creative writing professor, helped Beah shape his first draft. Given his own interests as a novelist, Chaon was more interested in the storytelling than the dateline:

“If it turns out there are factual errors, I wouldn’t necessarily be all that concerned about it,” said Professor Chaon of Ohio’s Oberlin College.

“I don’t think the book is being presented as a piece of journalism. It’s being presented as a memoir.”

This seems to be the increasingly accepted point of view: in a memoir, expect some inaccuracy. And I can certainly agree with that. Without perfect memory, no memoirist is going to be as good as a reporter. (And lots of reporters have been reported to have their own problems.) But when the memoir isn’t about the writer’s wacky family–indeed, when the memoir has its own effect on world events–it would behoove the publisher to fact-check it as carefully as possible, knowing the kind of scrutiny it’s going to come under. And if some of the facts are in doubt, just say so.

I wouldn’t take a young person’s word about their experiences verbatim, regardless of what their experiences have been–but that doesn’t mean I’d discount the essential truth of their experience, either.

Publishers, heed Edward Champion’s demand that we “Stop bowdlerising books for kids“! (British spelling because it’s in the Guardian’s theblogbooks.)

Perhaps this new emphasis on books-as-manuals is why today’s children’s book publishers have been more gutless when reissuing their backlist titles. Presumably motivated by the fear of “corrupting” young minds and offending readers, publishers have edited and elided passages and pictures with a politically correct zeal resembling Soviet agitprop.

Great links to the new and old versions of Richard Scarry’s Best Word Book Ever, too.