If, like me, you’ve been skeptical of Amazon’s steadfast refusal to disclose just how many Kindles it’s actually sold, you’re not alone:

It’s in Amazon’s best interest to keep Kindle sales details under wraps, said Michael Norris of Simba Information, a research firm that covers the media and publishing industries.

“They can keep this perception of being the market leader without releasing the details,” Norris said. “It’s interesting to sit through Amazon earnings calls and nobody pushes for Kindle details. It’s as if people are trained not to ask.”

In general, e-books net Amazon more profit versus physical books, Norris said. He points to an “amusing” July press release that said the company sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books.

“A lot of the Kindle bestsellers cost 25 cents — of course they’re going to sell better than hardcovers for $14,” Norris said.

“They’re comparing apples to Apple Jacks,” he added. “This kind of message management is beyond normal corporate public relations. And now I’ve gotten so used to it that I’m becoming suspicious of any stats they release.”

I’m sure Amazon has sold a good volume of Kindles by now. But I’m sure they’re not selling like hotcakes — it’s only after all the price cuts and heavy marketing that they started to move. If these truly were ever a hot item, Amazon would have been crowing long and loud about how fast they were flying off the digital shelves, just as any company with a similar best-selling tech device would. Their silence speaks volumes.

Anecdotally, I’ve seen evidence around me of how little penetration Kindles have had. It took a solid six months after the e-reader went on sale, before I saw one “in the wild” here in New York — and this is a prime territory for such a device. Meanwhile, I spied my first iPad being toted around within hours of its sales release. That’s a bit apples-to-oranges, in that there are several Apple Stores locally, and so there wouldn’t be the same lag in mail-order delivery. But still, I think it’s reflective enough of the reality that Amazon is trying to hide.

All told, the push for these dedicated e-readers feels like a race to the bottom. The now-standard notebook computers will morph into iPad-like designs, making other third-screen devices (other than phones) superfluous. Amazon and the other entrants in that space can cook the numbers all they like toward that end, but that won’t change the eventual outcome.

I’m going through my second reading of Bret Easton Ellis’ “Imperial Bedrooms”, and I’m struck by this matching set of questions:

“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”

“What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

These questions present themselves at different points in the book, but the duality they represent is pivotal to the plot. Not to give anything away, but they echo the sentiment — from Ellis’ prequel narrative, “Less Than Zero” — to “see the worst”.

All of which sets me to wondering: What if the answer to both questions is the very same event? A deed so foul that it victimizes the same person who carried it out — think crimes against humanity, etc. — should rank right up there in self-inflicted torment. I’m guessing that that’s not normal for most people, and thankfully so.

The American Psychological Association apparently feels that we’re due for a Seduction of the Innocent Part Two, with modern-day movie superheroes as the corrupters of young boys.

“There is a big difference in the movie superhero of today and the comic book superhero of yesterday,” said psychologist Sharon Lamb, PhD, distinguished professor of mental health at University of Massachusetts-Boston. “Today’s superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in non-stop violence; he’s aggressive, sarcastic and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity. When not in superhero costume, these men, like Iron Man, exploit women, flaunt bling and convey their manhood with high-powered guns.”

The comic book heroes of the past did fight criminals, she said, “but these were heroes boys could look up to and learn from because outside of their costumes, they were real people with real problems and many vulnerabilities,” she said.

Somehow, I think that Stan Lee is eating this up.

It’s true: When you massage the written word for a living, there’s no happy ending.

The job has its perks — an accumulation of random knowledge, for instance — but it also has its side effects when you unintentionally drink the copy Kool-Aid. Once you train yourself to spot errors, you can’t not spot them. You can’t simply shut off the careful reading when you leave the office. You notice typos in novels, missing words in other magazines, incorrect punctuation on billboards. You have nightmares that your oversight turned Mayor Bloomberg into a “pubic” figure. You walk by a beauty salon the morning after you had sex for the first time with a guy you’ve been seeing and point out that there’s no such thing as “lazer” hair removal, realizing that this may not be the best way to get to have sex with him again.

I’ve never consciously let grammar-policing get in the way of personal relationships. The closest I’ve come is in playing the spoiler to those early-Internet chain emails which contained the usual crackpot urban myths. Friends and family would inexplicably get mad at me for debunking nonsense like the Oliver North “warning” about Osama bin Laden back in 1987, and subsequently exclude me from the forward-message fun. (So I guess my compulsiveness paid off!)

Even though copyediting isn’t my primary gig anymore, I find the auto-editing switch in my brain never has turned off. In fact, it’s gone beyond bulls-eyeing mere typos — hardly a sporting pursuit since the advent of the filter-less Web. I now find it hard to read, watch, or listen to any lengthy piece, and not critique its overall structure: How it could have been shortened here, reworked in that section, and so on. I can’t decide if it’s a real problem for me or not. In some ways, it’s gratifying (on a strictly personal, internal level).

Who better than Franz Kafka — or, at least, his legacy — to get caught up in a courtroom-setting morass over ownership of the author’s personal papers?

A protracted legal battle over the contents of four safe-deposit boxes in a Swiss bank, believed by some to contain unpublished works by Franz Kafka or other material shedding light on his life, came to an end on Wednesday when an Israeli judge ruled that the papers should be made public. The decision follows the opening earlier this week of a vault at a UBS bank in Zurich, where the documents were stashed in 2008 by two Israeli sisters who had fought for two years to keep the papers private.

The first find is a handwritten, unpublished short story. If the trademark Kafka quirkiness holds, it should be about the alienation stemming from having your correspondence rifled through after your death — and be fittingly unfinished…

The alleged demands of SEO started taking a toll on online news headline-crafting years ago, and now we see the bland results:

Newspapers still have headlines, of course, but they don’t seem to strive for greatness or to risk flopping anymore, because editors know that when the stories arrive on the Web, even the best headlines will be changed to something dull but utilitarian. That’s because, on the Web, headlines aren’t designed to catch readers’ eyes. They are designed for “search engine optimization,” meaning that readers who are looking for information about something will find the story, giving the newspaper a coveted “eyeball.” Putting well-known names in headlines is considered shrewd, even if creativity suffers.

Early this year, the print edition of The Washington Post had this great headline on a story about Conan O’Brien’s decision to quit rather than accept a later time slot: “Better never than late.” Online, it was changed to “Conan O’Brien won’t give up ‘Tonight Show’ time slot to make room for Jay Leno.”

I still question why such pun-filled blurb creativity needs to be sacrificed. I can’t believe that Google or any other content-crawler would penalize a page that’s otherwise chock-full of pertinent keywords, just because the headline doesn’t precisely jibe. In fact, I’d think that a unique hed would make an article link stand out from the surrounding vanilla descriptions. As in the above example: After scanning line after line of “Conan-Tonight-Leno-etc.”, wouldn’t the clever wordplay of “Better Never Than Late” lure more eyeballs, just out of curiosity? I’d like to think so.

It may seem morose to dwell on the following passage out of Bret Easton Ellis’ “The Informers”, but it’s been in my head for the past few days, so I might as well share it. From the end of the story/chapter “On The Beach”:

I walk away from Mona. I know what the word gone means. I know what the word dead means. You deal with it, you mellow out, you head back to town… “I know what the word dead means,” I whisper to myself as softly as I can because it sounds like an omen.

Mortality and nihilism, tied up in a tidy package of misery. Does the job.

There are fantasy camps, and then there are kid-lit fantasy camps:

Children have always sought to act out elements of their favorite books, becoming part of the worlds that the works create. Now, organized role-playing literary camps, like the weeklong Camp Half-Blood in Brooklyn, are sprouting up around the nation.

Some take their inspiration from the Harry Potter books, like the wizardry camp run by the Brandywine Learning Center in Chester Springs, Pa., which simulates the experience of attending Hogwarts, the school from the novels.

Bookstores have joined in, organizing day camps structured around children’s books, like “The Double-Daring Book for Girls” and the “Ranger’s Apprentice” series. But the biggest buzz has recently been around Camp Half-Blood, based on the popular “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” series.

Total immersion in a day-camp setting. Although I have a feeling this is gateway recreation for future Star Wars, Star Trek, etc. fanboys…

The Hypostatic Union is the theological term for the reconciliation of the holy and the mortal within Jesus Christ — in short, “that in Christ one person subsists in two [distinct] natures, the Divine and the human”.

That duality — which allowed Jesus to suffer and die in a manner identical with any other person, while also giving Him heavenly awareness — may be too complex to grasp for some people. For them, Philip Pullman’s satiric novel “The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ” simplifies things, albeit sacrilegiously: By rending that union of Jesus and Christ, literally.

The makers of Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” dared only to propose that a very naughty boy had been born at the same time as Jesus in a stable adjoining his. Pullman outbids Python in profanity by having the Virgin Mary give birth to twins. One of these, Jesus, shows little gift for scholarship but exhibits charismatic talents. The other is full of scriptural knowledge and guile, and is his mother’s favorite on account of his sickliness. She gives him an ordinary name (not specified) for public purposes but to herself calls him by the pet name of “Christ,” meaning Messiah in Greek.

Life of Brian is one of my favorites, so Pullman’s book might be up my alley. Although the concept of twin Nazarene godheads is a little out there, even in a comic-novel setting. Why didn’t the author go all the way and give them a pet monkey?

Writer Rosecrans Baldwin theorizes that a novel isn’t a novel without an obligatory barking dog:

Having heard the dog’s call, it seemed like I couldn’t find a book without one. Not “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”. Not “Shadow Country”. Not “Ulysses”. Not Robert Penn Warren’s “All The King’s Men”, or Monica Ali’s “Alentejo Blue”, or Stephen King’s “It” or “Christine”. Not Jodi Picoult’s “House Rules”. If novelists share anything, it’s a distant-dog impulse.

Picture an author at work: She’s exhausted, gazing at her laptop and dreaming about lunch. “[Author typing.] Boyd slammed the car door shut. He stared at his new condominium, with the for-sale sign in the yard. He picked up a pistol and pointed it at his head. [Author thinking, Now what? Gotta buy time.] Somewhere a dog barked. [Author thinking, Hmm, that'll do.] Then Boyd remembered he did qualify for the tax rebate for first-time home buyers, and put down the gun.” If a novel is an archeological record of 4.54 billion decisions, then maybe distant barking dogs are its fossils, evidence of the novelist working out an idea.

Is the far-off bark really that widespread of a literary crutch? Should creative-writing courses start teaching “The Art of the Bark” to aspiring scribes?

I was skeptical of this claim, so I decided to do a quickie search with the one novel I’m currently reading: Bret Easton Ellis’ “Imperial Bedrooms”. Even better, I have the ebook edition, which is fully text-searchable via the Kindle iPhone App I’m reading it on. Sure enough, a search for “dog” brought up a solitary reference, to “dogs barking in the distance” (I haven’t read up to that part yet, so I didn’t dig any deeper).

I’m sure others with whole libraries stored on their e-readers can do a more thorough investigation, but I’m already convinced. The dog meme in long-form fiction seems to be a fixture. Woof!

One year after I learned about it, today was the release date for Bret Easton Ellis‘ latest opus, “Imperial Bedrooms”. It’s nothing less than a direct sequel to his groundbreaking debut novel, “Less Than Zero”.

And I scooped it up first thing this morning. Via the Amazon Kindle app for iPhone. This would be my very first ebook purchase (not counting a couple of freebie titles that I downloaded, mainly just to practice reading on the iPhone screen).

Why did I inaugurate my digital-literature collection with this title? One reason is that I’ve been craving a must-read book for a long while now. Nothing else I’ve come across in the past several months has come close to engaging me. Ellis’ body of work certainly delivers for me, so I gladly committed to a pre-order for his newest output. A revisiting of the nihilism of “Zero” is just the ticket.

The other reason is that, frankly, I resent having to shell out an inflated pricetag for a hardcover edition. Because I hate hardcovers. I vastly prefer paperback/softcover formats, sheerly for their easier portability and handling. I understand how the book publishing business works, and how the hardbacks generate the lion’s share of revenue. But I still don’t like it. So the opportunity to pick up the ebook edition, at a steep discount, was too good to pass up. My only reticence came with my level of comfort in reading a bona fide novel on a mobile device’s small screen; turns out that the Kindle app is a good reading medium. So, I’m set.

I’ve already knocked down the first couple of chapters (I’ve no illusions about stretching out this read — I fully expect to devour it within the week). It’s already immensely entertaining, with Ellis’ spare elegance providing a compelling narrative. Clay, Julian, Blair, et al are definitely being set up for a wild ride in the onset of their middle age, some 25 years after the events in “Zero”. One immediate distinction between then and now: Seemingly all those characters now have last names, implying that they’ve grown up to be more “real”.

Finally, it’s imminently appropriate that I’m reading “Imperial Bedrooms” on an iPhone. Because the ebook is sharing space with my Elvis Costello songs. The connection, of course, is Ellis’ seeming obsession with Costello’s oeuvre — to the extent that he named “Less Than Zero” and “Imperial Bedrooms” after a song and an album by the musician. Technology happily melds popular culture in the palm of my hand…

Much like the much-reused Wilhelm Scream sound effect, movie and television productions seemingly pass around the very same for-show-only newspaper:

Someone on Reddit recently put together a compilation of photos from various television shows, commercials and movies, showing how one newspaper prop gets around and is reused, and reused again. I don’t know the story behind this prop newspaper, but I assume it was created as a royalty free prop for television shows. Somewhere along the line, the prop became a reoccurring gag between propmasters.

See a small sampling for yourself, below. The giveaway is that headshot photo of the woman, along with the surrounding headlines and blocktext:

I suppose this could be an elaborately Photoshopped bit of fakery, but I’m prepared to believe it’s truly the incestuous laziness of Hollywood on display. I will say that, based on my own indulgence of old TV shows, this much-copied broadsheet probably didn’t come into use until the mid-1980s. That’s the era of at least a couple of the screenshots below: “Married with Children” and “Doogie Howser, M.D.”. I’ve paid attention to the onscreen newspapers in older 1970s reruns, and noticed that some of the legible headlines were often relevant to the news of that time period, which hints that those shows might have used real daily editions.

The larger joke: That such video entertainment includes characters that still read newspapers, given that dwindling behavior in real life. Rather than update their bag of tricks, Hollywood’s propmasters can just wait until print newspapers die out altogether, and the problem will solve itself.

Back in April, when the New York Times announced the opening of a Kansas City bureau, I thought it was a curious move. In an age of tanking revenues, it’s encouraging that the nation’s highest-profile newspaper would expand, versus contract, on-the-ground reportage. But — in Kansas City? Not internationally, not even in boomtown-areas like Florida or Texas — but in the sleepy Midwest? (Along with a sister-opening bureau in Phoenix, which at least makes a bit more sense as ground-zero of the illegal immigration debate.)

This week, the reason for a KC outpost becomes a bit clearer, with the appointment of A.G. Sulzberger as the new bureau’s chief.

Simply put, NYT opened a bureau in the middle of nowhere to serve as on-the-job training for Sulzberger. He’s the scion of the Times’ family ownership, and he needs experience in actually running a news operation (versus just beat reporting, which is what he’s been doing to this point). So the company’s set up, essentially, a franchise operation for the next generation of ownership to hone the family-business skills.

A curious justification for ramping up a satellite office. I’m sure KC’s pay scales and infrastructure are modest enough to make this a low-risk venture. Still, I can’t see a hotbed of news experience coming out of this setup.

In journalistic jargon, a think-piece is defined thusly:

noun – an article analyzing and giving the background of a news event, often with the author’s opinions and forecast for the future.

There’s no shortage of such in-depth scribbling being produced nowadays; some of the best examples are curated at Longform.org and other sites. But I never hear the term “think-piece” used. The only time I’m ever reminded of the label is when it’s mentioned in a ’70s movie I’m watching. Probably because of that, it does strike me as a dated phrase, sort of retro-mod-newspeakish. Nevertheless, maybe it’s due for a revival, both in name and strict form.

My hometown of Newburgh was the scene of some intense crime-fighting action yesterday, as the FBI rounded up scores of Bloods, Latin Kings and other hardened local gang members.

Yes, it’s a sobering thought, that the little town in which I grew up is, improbably, host to an urban-proportioned criminal element. Not that this sorry state of affairs is news by now. Somehow, Newburgh’s dug itself into this hole, and it’ll take more than one day’s daring Fed raid to correct things.

The funny thing: Said daring raid occurred only one day after the New York Times ran an in-depth article about Newburgh’s troubles. In that article, the FBI cited the need to “build a case” prior to any big crackdown.

I guess the case got built, in a sudden way — fifty miles down the river, too. Perhaps the cops have learned that Hudson Valley gangbangers are devoted readers of the Times, and figured the law-enforcement cover was blown. Amazing what investigative crime work can uncover!

Newburgh can thank the power of the press for the long-arm-of-the-law display. Too bad it had to come to that before anything at all happened.

Coming from a professional background which included regularly toiling every 30 days to help put out a monthly business magazine, the thought of jam-blasting a full-sized print edition in a mere two days is a bit mind-boggling:

Here’s how it works: Issue Zero begins May 7th. We’ll unveil a theme and you’ll have 24 hours to produce and submit your work. We’ll take the next 24 to snip, mash and gild it. The end results will be a shiny website and a beautiful glossy paper magazine, delivered right to your old-fashioned mailbox. We promise it will be insane. Better yet, it might even work.

Actually, I can certainly see the editorial portion being tucked away in a day. My biggest adjustment in going from daily newspaper production to monthly magazine-making was the extended deadlines, and just how much air there was to fill as a result. Certainly, those extra days were put to good use for extra content production, verification, aggregation, etc.; but there’s also a load of wasted time. Compactness can produce gold, as all those hourly deadlines on the newsdesk proved.

But. Starting from the ground up with conception, physical production, and all the rest, in 48 hours? Yeesh. That’s a different order of craziness. I’ll be curious to see the end result. The 48 Hour Magazine blog is offering up cryptic clues to the theme, which seemingly includes 19th Century print advertisements, Brer Rabbit, and the history of lottery offerings in New York. What a stew of a news-well…

A literary agent wonders about the appearance of a recurring locale in what she’s reading:

Why does every writer who wants some kind of mysterious setting pick Romania?

What gives? Is it the spooky Transylvania connection? Or are these authors attempting to write a roman à clef, with a poor geographical understanding of the format? You just don’t come across Eastern European memes that often in modern fiction.

According to Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen, all you need to pass yourself off as a U.S. senator is a fake ZZ Top beard and some furniture glue.

Oh, Jimmy. With investigative acumen like that, it’s a wonder how you ever got even a stringer’s assignment with The Daily Planet (let alone your own comic book title). Maybe journalistic standards are more lax in Metropolis. If I were editor of that newspaper, your material would never make it past the good ol’ agate page.

Leave it to a magazine formerly known as “Gentlemen’s Quarterly” to be a stickler on the finer points in porn terminology:

Grammar update: GQ house style apparently pluralizes “MILF” as “milves.”

Perhaps Condé Nast copyeditors are consulting with Urban Dictionary now. Language formalization often has murky origins.

I can’t believe I missed the original reference to “busty milves” in the cited article, about the lamentations of freely-available online smut. I suppose I was blindsided by the classy writing style.

When the paper upon which a piece of correspondence is written is more interesting than the written correspondence itself, you’ve got Letterheady.

The vintage 1950s Nudie Cohn parchment on display below is a prime example of the formal creativity that was once routinely disseminated via postal mail, envelope-by-envelope. The presentation was well worth the writing-space real estate that was sacrificed. Assuming you didn’t mind risking that the body of the letter itself might get lost on the page.

In his own words, here’s what Will Eisner was going for in his second full-length graphic novel, “Life on Another Planet”:

“This was… an attempt to produce a graphic novel that was constructed in the same structure as a classic literary work. By taking what would be a science-fiction plot and treating it from a more humanistic viewpoint, I hoped to come up with a book that would deserve adult interest.”

The book — originally entitled “Signal From Space” and based upon the broad sociological repercussions from a SETI-like confirmation of intelligent life in outer space — was written in the late 1970s. As such, it’s full of contemporary trappings: Cold War intrigue, New Age-ish religious cults, and corporate co-optation. These elements, among others, were what Eisner used to instill that “humanistic viewpoint”. As a result, the science-fictional catalyst to the story is largely relegated to the background.

There is an interesting plot device that Eisner came up with, and I’m surprised that I’ve never seen it employed anywhere else, before or since. It concerns an Idi Amin-like dictator (again, a contemporary element) who exploits the discovery of alien radio transmissions from “Planet Bernard” in a decidedly unique way:

ETERNAL PRESIDENT: Can we possibly pay on any debts to the other nations, Mr. Mbobe??

FINANCE MINISTER MBOBE: No, we owe over 100 billion to 5 nations, mostly in the West…

ETERNAL PRESIDENT: So… Then we shall freeze all foreign property… close the borders, and… WE SHALL SECEDE FROM THE PLANET EARTH… We will no longer owe money to anyone! I DECLARE OUR MEMBERSHIP IN THE PLANET BERNARD! Invite the Star People cult to Sidiami! WE ARE NOW A COLONY OF ANOTHER PLANET!!

This is a fairly brilliant concept. What’s to prevent some human-rights abusing thug regime from declaring its membership in the international community to be null and void, if it has the option of aligning itself with some absentee offworld master? As far-fetched as it seems, it makes perfect sense as the most cynical of maneuvers in power politics. Or, in an even more timely manner, in the late maneuvers of debt-burdened Eurozone countries…

And again, I can’t believe no one else has employed this concept in other mediums, whether in books, movies, or elsewhere. Eisner used it as an integral subplot, but I could see it as the main plotline for a farcical comedy. Someone in Hollywood needs to get on it.