Author name: Booksquare

We have been amused by the rash of articles touting the the future of e-books. Everyone seems to be focused on the technology — all we need, they suggest, is the perfect reader, and the future it ours! — while nobody seems to realize that e-books are being purchased every day in grand numbers. It struck us that the industry is focusing on the wrong issue when the BS mother-in-law, not the world’s most technologically adept person (but not the world’s least technologically adept person either), purchased, downloaded, and read an e-book. The book had the information she needed for

Forgive us, but we’re feeling a bit ranty this morning. We have long decried the lack of creativity in the news media. We realize that it’s not always the fault of the reporters, but we have to wonder why the press cannot be bothered to do a smidgen of research before writing “This Just In: Romance Novels Have Sex” stories. Let us all take a trip back to approximately 1984. That was when the first official release the now-defunct Harlequin Temptation imprint hit the shelves. Temptation was notable for a lot of reasons — creative storylines, for example — but

In the BS ‘verse, there are a few universal truths. Let’s focus on two: “it’s not the idea”, it’s the execution, and “if you have even a remotely successful movie, you will be sued.” The latter concept is so universal, you can practically set your watch by it. We do not pretend to have secret knowledge of the legal maneuverings behind the lawsuit du week — this one featuring Booksquare hero Jim Jarmusch and his film Broken Flowers — but we do know that creating scandal out of this statement is both silly and deliberately obtuse:

What is the estimate? The total number of blogs doubles every few months or so? A new blog is created every minute? There are more blogs than there are people? Something like that. It’s hard to be read in the crowd. You can ask a dozen bloggers why they blog — helpfully, you’ll get a dozen different answers. Perhaps we are secretly a nation of frustrated writers, or perhaps we have a lot of pent up words in our systems. Maybe it’s that everyone is an expert on one thing and needs to share their knowledge with the world. There’s

It the kind of week where it’s hard to get anything going. We do not suffer weather well in SoCal, and a strange conspiracy between an overheated sun and June gloom has lead to what is, for us, oppressive humidity. We, denizens of the region, do not object in principle to humidity. It is simply that we adhere to a strict schedule, and humidity is not allowed into the region until August or so. Everyone is moving slowly, even the Internet. It takes us twice as long to type a sentence as it should (it takes even longer to backspace

Jill, thinking she’d get us worked up this morning, sent along a lovely story about a county that has cut the budget for Spanish-language fiction for adults. They will continue to fund children’s books and non-fiction, but not “pleasure reading” for the adults. Because you know, when adults read for pleasure, there’s no telling what will happen. We have heard rumors that some adults who read fiction go on to become thinking, producing members of society. While we cannot get our hands on the study right now, we vaguely recall learning that fiction readers are often taxpayers just like non-fiction