Premier's choice

Jointly administered by the Ontario Ministry of Culture and the Ontario Arts Council, the Premier's Awards for Excellence in the Arts were handed out Tuesday evening at midtown Toronto's Wychwood Barns arts and culture centre.

Filmmaker Ron Mann won in the individual category and Toronto Artscape won as Arts Organization. Coincidentally, serendipitously, the wonderful Wychwood Barns recovery project, in which decrepit, decommissioned TTC streetcar repair barns were transformed into parkland and a series of arts offices, performance spaces, studios and live-work units (as well as a green barn dedicated to year-round urban farming) is a Toronto Artscape success story.

You'll find more details on the awards in the Ministry's official press release.

And you will find details on all the finalists for these awards here.

Here's a photo of an individual finalist, Ontario lit's own A.F. Moritz (winner of this year's Griffin Prize for Poetry) receiving his finalist certificate from Minister of Culture Aileen Carroll.

Ontario honours its writers

(Paul Prud'Homme is interviewed on the terrace at the Park Hyatt hotel in Toronto after receiving the Trillium for French language children's book.)

... and the 2009 Trillium Book Award winners are:

Prix litteraire Trillium
Marguerite Andersen, Le figuier sur le toit

Prix du livre d’enfant Trillium
Paul Prud’Homme, Les Rebuts: Hockey 2

Trillium Book Award
Pasha Malla, The Withdrawal Method

Trillium Book Award for Poetry
Jeramy Dodds, Crabwise to the Hounds

(Ontario's Minister of Culture, Aileen Carroll, with poetry winner Jeramy Dodds)

if Dan Brown can't make e-books work, who can?

(image courtesy Simon & Schuster)

Simon & Schuster will announce tomorrow they are making 5,000 of their titles available for sale as e-book files on Scribd.com, a website formerly criticized by publishers for allowing piracy.

In a report in the New York Times, S&S is portrayed as taking on Amazon.com and their proprietary Kindle e-book format. S&S titles will apparently not be available in a Kindle-friendly format, but will be available to iPhone users and Sony customers.

From the Times story:

Simon & Schuster will sell its books on Scribd for 20 percent off the list price of the most recent print edition. Amazon sets a price of $9.99 for many popular e-books, meaning titles there might be less expensive. But Scribd will allow publishers to see what is selling and change their prices accordingly.

Scribd also gives publishers 80 percent of revenue. Amazon reportedly gives publishers about half of the list price of books sold for the Kindle, but also discounts many titles and in some cases chooses to make no revenue itself from those sales.

Simon & Schuster will sell its books with anticopying software from Adobe, which means those books can be transferred to devices like the Sony Reader and some mobile phones, but not to Amazon’s Kindle.

At the recent bookcamp Toronto, one early presentation suggested e-books would not become truly marketable until publishers give up on the idea of anti-copying DRM -- apparently there's no market for e-books you can't share with anyone and everyone. Simon & Schuster and Amazon seem to be betting on other ponies.

could the Google settlement get any more complicated?

Yes.

U.S. Presses Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Book Settlement

Highlights from the New York Times:

The complex settlement agreement, which is subject to review by a federal court, was aimed at resolving a class action filed in 2005 by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google. The suit claimed that Google’s practice of scanning copyrighted books from major academic and research libraries for use in its Book Search service violated copyrights.

Under the settlement, announced in October, Google would have the right to display the books online and to profit from them by selling access to individual titles and by selling subscriptions to its entire collection to libraries and other institutions. Revenue would be shared among Google, authors and publishers.

Critics said that the settlement would unfairly grant Google a monopoly over the commercialization of millions of books.

The Times goes on to explain that this is an investigation and not necessarily a halting of the settlement.

Remember when the Internet was going to make everything simpler and faster? When was that?

the problem with poetry

There's a minor fuss happening online today concerning poetry and how we either appreciate it or do not.

Two of the main voices are British critic James Wood (writes for the New Yorker; made a funny speech at last week's Griffin Prize dinner and then danced the night away) and British columnist Harry Eyres (writes for the Financial Times; wishes to examine poetry-hating).

A transcript of Wood's speech appears in the Globe & Mail. In it, he bemoans the shrinking of poetry's public space:

There are at least two effects of this shrinkage. One is that, pragmatically speaking, poetry has less muscle, less heft, less public presence, than it should have. “Not bad, for a poetry reading,” is how people talk, already twisted into a cringing posture of self-disrespect. The second is that the crucial function of criticism – to explain texts – is not going on in the world of poetry. The middleman – the critic – has been capitalistically excised, and the poem and its audience stare at each other across a vast ignorant space. Recently I heard the poet Robert Pinsky and the thriller writer Elmore Leonard on the radio. Pinsky had just reviewed Leonard's new novel. (Tellingly, we can't imagine Leonard reviewing Pinsky, for that would seem, commercially speaking, like the master dressing his own valet.) Pinsky said that some of Leonard's prose had the compression of verse, then asked the novelist if he read much poetry. No, was the reply – it's too difficult to get into.

Eyres is more to the point in his column, flatly claiming respect for poetry no longer exists, and simply wanting to know why that is so:

Poetry is up against it in all sorts of ways. Unlike video games, reality television, amateur dance troupes, it is not a cultural phenomenon that is generally welcomed into people’s lives. But what could it do for us, if we would allow it?

I don't know. Both arguments paint poetry as some forgotten ancestor of modern entertainments and distractions. Is poetry dead? Hardly. It may seem quiet these days compared to more amplified cultural offerings, and it may sit at a far table near the back of the party, but that's a lively table and you can be sure the best toasts will come from it.

I do agree with Wood that the decline of poetry criticism is alienating to the form, but I'm not sure poetry is the only victim of this trend. Besides, once this Internet thing really finds its legs, there's bound to be tonnes more of this stuff.

like camping, with books

I had to get myself out of the city in the early afternoon on Saturday -- parents' 50th anniversary party to attend -- but before heading north I stopped in at U of T for the first ever bookcamp Toronto.

Essentially a gathering of book industry types with open minds, bookcamp was one of those cool "unconferences" you've been hearing so much about lately. For the uninitiated, an unconference means you write your own nametag, feel free to speak whenever the spirit moves you, and generally bask in the warm glow of the Internet's unstoppable democratization of everything (while tweeting.)

I really wish I could have stayed for more, and am hoping to find some more detailed accounts of the happening online somewhere in coming days.

I sat in on two early sessions -- one wondering if Digital Rights Management can ever succeed in building a paying readership for e-books, and the other wondering if the Internet has managed to throw the last clods of dirt on authoritative literary criticism's grave. Both were interesting discussions, and I'm not sure if either changed any longstanding opinions in the crowd.

It's hard to come to any conclusions about an event I mostly missed, but it seems bookcamp was designed to delve into the ongoing evolution of these things called books. The short bits of unconference I experienced made it clear that we are in a very active phase of that evolution. Kindlers abound and are buying more and more electronic texts (despite DRM); pirates lurk just over the horizon justifying their thievery in the name of consumer freedom; publishers make lucky discoveries about marketing even as they worry about sustainability.

We live in interesting times.

UPDATE:

As I was writing my post, Steven Beattie over at QuillBlog was writing one of his own. His has a link to even more info! Go read it.