There are two ways of looking at Cablevision’s $650 million purchase of Newsday from Tribune Co.:

1. Underlying the apparent mismatch between a dominant cable provider and an entrenched but struggling newspaper is a potentially lucrative synergy:

But even if the prospective deal has an element of vanity to it, Cablevision could make the following argument. It has roughly three million cable subscribers in Long Island, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, while Newsday has about 300,000 subscribers. Cablevision’s customer relationships could help it sell more subscriptions, while overlapping ad sales forces at the two companies could result in cost savings. And Cablevision owns a 24-hour local news channel in Long Island, which could use the news gathering capacity of Newsday — and in theory cut costs.

This makes the acquisition of Newsday the equivalent of securing an established and dedicated advertising channel for Cablevision. Nassau County is prime demographic territory, so any additional inroads a media company can make and present to ad clients is extremely valuable.

2. In order to extract the maximum value out of its unwanted asset, Tribune owner Sam Zell orchestrated an elaborate competition among Newsday’s suitors:

The trick was for Zell to turn this into a bidding war. That was difficult at first. The three interested parties acted as if they had the upper hand. Cablevision did some tire kicking, but the Dolans didn’t make an offer. [New York Daily News owner Mort] Zuckerman reportedly made a lowball bid.

Zell turned up the heat by entering into negotiations with News Corp. to accept $580 million for a majority stake in Newsday. [Rupert] Murdoch clearly felt he had the inside track. He began courting Long Island’s political leaders whose support he would surely need to get the deal approved by the FCC in Washington. That’s because News Corp. already owns the [New York] Post and two New York City television stations.

It now appears Zell was using News Corp.’s offer to establish a floor for the bidding. Zuckerman soon matched News Corp.’s offer. Then Cablevision did what non-strategic bidders often do in such situations. It offered to pay a higher price than either newspaper publisher.

And viola, Newsday becomes a hot property. Where it goes from here under the Dolans’ stewardship remains to be seen.

Something out of my current fiction-reading that rings true for me:

“…I’ve always found the minute portraiture of nineteenth-century fiction fairly useless. For me, those precise descriptions of the hero’s nose/mouth/eyes/moles/forehead never come together as an actual face. Maybe it’s a failure of synthetic imagination on my part, but in my mind they always end up jumbled, like a portrait in the analytic cubist mode. It’s always easier to visualize the minor characters, with their bestial analogues, done in the broad stroke of caricature — Mr. Fox, Mr. Rat, Miss Sheep. Then, too, as a reader I like to take a certain amount of responsibility for filling in the details.”

- Connor McKnight, protagonist from Jay McInerney’s “Model Behavior”

I’ve always experienced a similar shortcoming whenever trying to mentally reconstruct a detailed description of some literary character. It never gets to the “cubist mode” stage for me, though — I simply don’t bother to connect the intended dots, and the visages just remain vague.

For that reason, I avoid prose that goes into such exacting detail, because it does nothing for me, and in facts bogs down the flow. I prefer a sacrifice in that area in favor of better-paced plot and dialogue. And I guess I take that “responsibility for filling in the details” to heart — give me enough of the framework, for character and even setting, and I’ll come up with the construct.

(Yes, my “current” reading material is a decade old. What can I say, I’ve been pretty disappointed by the new releases I’ve sampled lately, and so have gone back to the well, author-wise. And actually, there’s a lot of McInerney that I’ve never read before, including this novel.)

There’s no ambiguity about the inspiration for Tyler Knox’s “Kockroach: A Novel”, as the book’s opening line should tell you:

As Kockroach, an arthropod of the genus Blatella and of the species germanica, awakens one morning from a typically dreamless sleep, he finds himself transformed into some large, vile creature.

And if it doesn’t tell you, then I’ll let one Franz Kafka enlighten you, “Metamorphosis”-style:

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug.

I’m a sucker for such literary remixing, as my earlier reading of Joe McGinniss Jr.’s “The Delivery Man” as latter-day “Less Than Zero” attests. If nothing else, it shows off an author’s reverence for the writerly giants.

Notice the level of reversal that Knox imbues in his prose. Not only does he accomplish the bug-to-man change (that “large, vile creature” being a human), but he picks up on Kafka’s granting of “anxious dreams” to Gregor Samsa to, in turn, establish that Kockroach, being a cockroach, would be bereft of any dreaming at all prior to all this. Dealing with more active mental faculties becomes a key driver in Knox’s telling.

I only wish “Kockroach” had held up beyond its opening couple of chapters. A nice enough attempt at hardboiled comic noir, but ultimately a bit of a mess, with most of the characters (including, regrettably, the lead female, who also serves as one of the three narrators) being too underdeveloped to keep the story going. A transformation — in the form of another editorial proofing or two — could have done wonders.

My publishing roots compel me to hit the new MoMA exhibit on George Lois‘ iconic Esquire covers from the 1960s and 70s.

While the heady news topics of those times provided ample raw material for Esquire and Lois to weave their magic, there was a much more fundamental design concept at play:

What was remarkable then — and seems even more so now, when virtually every magazine cover is a thicket of text lines running behind or on top of one celebrity or another — is that the Lois covers were virtually textless. They achieved their effect by communicating a single idea through an image.

Relying upon a single image to sell an issue (and that’s what it comes down to for any magazine, really) is a chancy high-wire act. Either the casual browser bites on the compelling cover, or else s/he ignores it and moves on. That’s probably why so many publishers hedge their bets by loading, and overloading, their covers with so much accompanying bullet and blurb text.

And for me, it’s become a turnoff. In fact, I recently canceled my subscription to Lois’ old periodical stomping grounds, in large part because I was finding that those text-gorged covers were constantly turning me off each month. Far from enticing me to open the cover and dive in, the instant in-your-face design seems a bit too desperate for attention.

In a way, it pains me to make that observation. For years, I considered the standard teaser-cover to be pretty user-friendly, even to the point of being a good template for online publishing adaptation (think of each of those cover blurbs as a hyperlink). But somewhere along the way, the aesthetic became diluted, I think.

Today, Lois’ image-only style would stand out simply because every other mass-market title persists with the textual path. It’d be a refreshing change.

As the New York Rangers get set to embark upon Round Two of the NHL playoffs, I can’t think of any stranger soap opera material than news of Sean Avery seeking out, and landing, an internship at Vogue Magazine.

Avery, who makes $2 million a year with the Rangers and has cavorted with starlets since his days with the Los Angeles Kings, initiated the contact with Vogue editor Anna Wintour.

“He is ridiculously obsessed with fashion,” Avery’s publicist Nicole Chabot told ABCNews.com. “He loves it more than anything in the world. It’s something he has always wanted to do.”…

Though his assignments are “evolving,” Avery will go to Paris Fashion Week with international editor-at-large Hamish Bowles, according to Chabot.

Presumably that Paris trip is scheduled for after June; Rangers faithful would be less than pleased to lose Avery’s agitating skills in the midst of a Stanley Cup run.

I can only guess that this timing is designed to encourage mindgames among upcoming playoff opponents. No one wants to get pushed around by a budding fashion-mag internist…

So if inveterate Wikipedia contributors want to add/edit entries in a printed-book version of the encyclopedia-like resource — which publisher Bertelsmann plans to produce, drawing from the German edition of the website — will they have to stock up on Wite-Out and scissors?

The media company — whose units include publisher Random House Inc. and music venture Sony BMG — said Wednesday that it plans to publish “The One-Volume Wikipedia Encyclopedia” starting in September with the content made up of 50,000 of the most-searched terms on the German language edition of Wikipedia.

Beate Varnhorn, the head of publishing at Bertelsmann Encyclopedia Institute said the “condensed, one-volume print edition” would bring Wikipedia to a new audience.

She told The Associated Press that the sheer number of entries on the German Wikipedia — at last count they numbered approximately 740,000 and would likely fill hundreds of printed volumes — meant publishing all of it was not “a good project for the German book trade.”

But an annual collection of the most-sought out terms made sense, she said. “A yearbook really can be a documentation of the zeitgeist.”

I can see this move as widening the audience scope of Wikipedia, but in a decidedly dumbed-down way — it reduces the site to a top-ten list. Naturally the flavor-of-the-month entries will get the most action, and by extension would spur the bulk of sales for any published product.

Speaking of those sales:

Like its Web-based namesake, the book will be under a free license, meaning its content can be distributed and copied, including commercially. Copies of the 992-page book — available only in German — will retail for $31.80.

Bertelsmann has agreed to pay Wikimedia Deutschland eV, which promotes the German-language version of the online encyclopedia, $1.59 a copy, said Arne Klempert, the group’s executive director.

“To some extent it’s marketing for Bertelsmann. They are using free content, free knowledge,” he told The Associated Press. “Legally, they don’t have to pay anything for the content but they don’t want to give the impression that they are acting on the back of the Wikipedia authors, so they decided to give something back for that reason.”

Despite the stated ground rules under the free documentation license, I’m sure this exercise in crass commercialism will raise hackles among those with nothing better to do. Likewise, how many article-writers are going to feel miffed over their words generating profit for someone else — again, even though that’s part of the deal? Most Wikipedians blanch at any moves toward directly monetizing the site’s content; even couching a print product as an attempt to spread the word will be met with hostility.

Despite the creeping acceptance in venues high and low — including among far too many media professionals who should know better — I still regard the use of Wikipedia as a reference source to the equivalent of citing graffiti. Bottom line, if a page can be altered at any given moment, it’s not worthy of trust. I’m afraid an enshrined, faux-legitimized hard-copy version will only accelerate the false sense of security it engenders.

What can be gained from reading Mary Roach’s “Bonk: The Curious Couple of Science and Sex”, an irreverent look at the study of sexuality?

If nothing else, you’ll learn that Egyptian lab rats clothed in polyester pants have sex less often than those wearing cotton or wool slacks.

I have a feeling that, for untold thousands of readers, that single fact is the deciding factor for whether or not to pick up this book.

The bad news: Most U.S. middle- and high-school students are lacking in the coherent-writing department.

The good news: Thanks to today’s keyword-driven online writer’s and publishing market, which drives paying-job quality down to the lowest common denominator, no one’s expecting future generations to be particularly lucid with the written word.

No worries. I’m sure podcasting or some other fool comprehension-minimal medium will rush in to fill the void.

In 1938, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster got $130 (roughly $1,800 in today’s dollars, per this historical inflation calculator) in exchange for selling all rights to a little character by the name of Superman.

Seventy years later, their heirs have legally reclaimed part of the copyright to the world’s more famous (and marketable) superhero, potentially complicating Time Warner’s use of the character in films and other media.

Compensation to the Siegels would be limited to any work created after their 1999 termination date. Income from the 1978 “Superman” film, or the three sequels that followed in the 1980s, are not at issue. But a “Superman Returns” sequel being planned with the filmmaker Bryan Singer (who has also directed “The Usual Suspects” and “X-Men”) might require payments to the Siegels, should they prevail in a demand that the studio’s income, not just that of the comics unit, be subject to a court-ordered accounting.

What this recounting fails to mention: If the ruling stands, it opens a can of worms. Practically every iconic comics and pop-culture character is probably covered under this precedent: Batman, Spider-Man, Bugs Bunny and hundreds others. The intellectual property held by companies like Time Warner are consistently undervalued; a flood of legal claims not only would rightfully revert rights back to the creators and their families, it might also bring to light just how much money their creations bring to corporate bottom-lines.

Much as Monday Night Football and Terrell Owens taught up almost four years ago, you simply cannot put a black man and white woman together in American media and not have people go (pardon the pun) apeshit.

But the image is stirring up controversy, with some commentators decrying the photo as perpetuating racial stereotypes. [LeBron] James strikes what some see as a gorilla-like pose, baring his teeth, with one hand dribbling a ball and the other around [Gisele] Bundchen’s tiny waist.

It’s an image some have likened to King Kong and Fay Wray.

“It conjures up this idea of a dangerous black man,” said Tamara Walker, 29, of Philadelphia.

And in fact, some think that photographer Annie Leibovitz, who shot this April 2008 cover of Vogue, took her inspiration from the semi-famous “Destroy This Mad Brute” World War I propaganda poster, which predates King Kong.

As always, image is everything.

Here’s a very good observation drawn from Audrey Choi’s novel “A Person of Interest”, appropriately enough made by the author herself:

To this end, “A Person of Interest” is about the way we alienate people who become objects of our suspicion, and about the way Lee, the protagonist, fails to “perform his innocence properly,” Choi says.

It’s a familiar reaction: Just the accusation is enough to convict someone in the court of public opinion. “Performing innocence” becomes an active imperative, versus what should be a passive status quo; having done nothing and being secure in that actually offers no security at all. If the accused does nothing and relies upon the process to eventually absolve him, he might prevail, but might still carry around the taint of simply being suspected at one point.

In the wake of a fresh round of high-profile literary memoir forgeries, in the form of Margaret Seltzer and Misha Defonseca, there comes an earth-shattering revelation out of the world of fiction: Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis”, that classical metaphorical study on modern alienation, has been scandalously discovered to be a true story.

“I’ve been teaching ‘The Metamorphosis’ for years, said a professor of literature at Princeton, who insisted that he be identified as P. “I’ve called it one of the most sublime pieces of literature ever written. Elias Canetti called it ‘one of the few great and perfect poetic works written during this century.’ To find out that it’s actually true is devastating.”

The actual condition of Kafka’s neighbor, a Prague salesman who didn’t return our calls or e-mail messages requesting comment, is known as entomological dysplasia, and is somewhat rare. It results in the development over time of a hard carapace, a segmented body and antennas.

In a telephone interview, Mr. Kafka was contrite and tearful. “I know what I did was wrong,” he said. “I’m very alienated from myself, but that’s no excuse to lie. I took someone’s life and selfishly turned it into an enigmatic literary parable.”

There’s nothing left to believe in. Das Nichts.

From Frank Miller’s seminal “Batman: The Dark Knight Returns”:

Joker: They could put me in a helicopter and fly me up into the air and line the bodies head to toe on the ground in delightful geometric patterns like an endless June Taylor Dancers routine —

– And it would never be enough.

No, I don’t keep count. But you do.

And I love you for it.

I don’t think I have to spell out who keeps count in this scenario.

Name-dropping actual name-brands is nothing new in literature; the works of one Stephen King come readily to mind.

Having those brand-names inserted into a novel’s narrative and dialogue per an advertising/marketing agreement? It’s been around for a few years now, and it seems to be gaining currency, particularly among youth-targeted fiction. But there are different approaches to injecting interwoven ad messaging — including the option of foregoing the exercise altogether upon re-issue.

With “Cathy’s Book: If Found Call (650) 266-8233,” a genre-bending mystery for young adults by Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman that was published in 2006, the authors learned that product placement could be a touchy subject. After their publisher, Running Press, an imprint of Perseus Books Group, revealed that the authors had agreed to have characters wear specific makeup lines made by Cover Girl in exchange for promotional ads for the book on beinggirl.com, a Web site aimed at adolescent girls and run by Procter & Gamble, Cover Girl’s parent, the book came in for criticism. Ralph Nader’s advocacy group, Commercial Alert, urged book review editors to boycott it, and the novelist Jane Smiley wrote a disapproving op-ed article for The Los Angeles Times; The New York Times wrote a critical editorial as well.

Now the novel — which features a series of clues that are given out in voice mail messages, Web sites, letters and other documents included with or referred to in the book — is set to come out in paperback on Monday, and all the references to Cover Girl’s products have been removed. A drawing in the hardcover edition, for instance, shows Cathy wearing “Cover Girl lipgloss ‘Demure,’ ” and “Waterproof Mascara —’Very Black’ ,” but it appears in the paperback version without any makeup noted. And at the end of the hardcover edition, Cathy talks about wearing “a killer coat of Lipslicks in ‘Daring’ “; in the paperback she just says, “a killer coat of lipstick.”

The justification is that the marketing agreement applied only to the first-edition hardcover, so the clean-up for paperback is just as much a business deal. But we are talking about making the novel’s prose unusually malleable, to the point where it doesn’t represent a permanent record. Not that we’re talking about Shakespeare in this instance, but how does this affect other genres should the product-placement arrangement gain popularity? It’s a slippery slope.

Nothing screams “meme” like the literary exercise of boiling your autobiography down to six little words.

You can add your super-succinct vitae over at Smith Magazine. However, considering they’ve already culled the most notable submissions — including celebrity contributions from Stephen Colbert, Harvey Pekar, Chuck Klosterman and others — into a book called “Not Quite What I Was Planning”, doing so now strikes me as anti-climactic.

So I’m going to script mine right here:

Here I am. Hard to believe.

It actually wasn’t as hard to craft as I thought it would be. Surprisingly multi-faceted for such an economical use of words.

Not that I’m trying to hijack Smith, but feel free to contribute your own personal 6-word scribbling in the comments below.

To protest the de facto quota system imposed by newspaper comics-page editors upon minority-focused comic strips, a group of cartoonists have written and drawn essentially the same strip for today’s Sunday section to drive home the point.

Plans for the protest began with Cory Thomas, a Howard University grad whose strip, “Watch Your Head,” deals with college life at a predominantly African American university. Thomas, Trinidad-born and D.C.-bred, says he was frustrated by the number of times his strip was turned down by newspapers that didn’t feel the need to sign him up, because, well, they already had a black comic strip. Most editors, he says, only allow for one or two minority strips, viewing them all as interchangeable. Never mind that his strip is a world away in sensibility from the scathing sociopolitical musings of Darrin Bell’s “Candorville” or the family-focused fun of Stephen Bentley’s “Herb and Jamaal.”

So Thomas drew a strip addressing that, and then enlisted the help of Bell. From there, they got others to agree to participate: Bentley, Jerry Craft (”Mama’s Boyz”), Charlos Gary (”Cafe con Leche” and “Working It Out”), Steve Watkins (”Housebroken”), Keith Knight (”The K Chronicles”), Bill Murray (”The Golden Years”), Charles Boyce (”Compu-toon”) and editorial cartoonist Tim Jackson. Alcaraz, who says he found out too late to meet his deadline, will be chiming in on Feb. 11.

Ironically, that 1-2 minority strip allowance means that most readers won’t get the full effect of this protest — because they’ll only see one of the participating strips.

So here’s the online versions of each of the participating strips. The ones I could find, anyway. There could be more participating; I’m not going to scan hundreds of strips for verification. Also, despite being on the above list, and being acknowledged by strip artist Keith Knight, the K Chronicles strip that appears to be running today doesn’t match up with the rest of the group. But otherwise:

- Candorville’s take

- Herb and Jamaal’s take

- Watch Your Head’s take

- Compu-toon’s take

- Housebroken’s take

- Cafe con Leche’s take

- And Mama’s Boyz creator Jerry Craft provides a roundup of the rest.

Here’s the basic script (modified significantly in some strips, but with the same gist):

Old Guy: Bah! I hate this comic strip! It looks like another “Boondocks” rip-off! The newspaper got rid of the old goodies to bring in this tripe? It must be tokenism! This PC nonsense is out of control! They need to get back to the kinds of strips that everybody can relate to!

Person sitting next to Old Guy: “Everybody”, meaning you?

Old Guy: Ha ha. Oh, that Dagwood…

It’s funny how most (though not all) of the strips went with the same stereotypical gray-headed old man bitching about his favorite dinosaur ‘toon being displaced by something he can’t relate to. That gets to the heart of the matter, actually: Print newspaper readership is increasingly being reduced to older demographics, and they’re irrationally attached to comic strips that have been around for decades, regardless of whether or not those strips still have any gas left in them. From my past experience at the St. Petersburg Times (where, coincidentally, this event first got some traction, courtesy of Eric Deggans), making any changes to the comics page is guaranteed to bring a tidal wave of negative reader reaction.

So the upshot? I think it’s less a question of actively “balancing” minority respresentation on the comics page, than it is a situation where paralysis has set in. Declining readership forces the papers to be that much more responsive to their core customers, and ultimately it’s not worth trying to be innovative in an otherwise inconsequential section of the paper. The result is a patch of newsprint that’s perpetually hard to break into.

Personally, I don’t have a dog in this fight, as my paper of record doesn’t run any funny pages (other than a single avant-garde feature in the Sunday Magazine). I really thought I’d miss the strips more, but I don’t; probably speaks to the calcification of the medium.

Chaz over at Dustbury got a real kick out of the pre-Super Sunday existence of an Amazon.com pre-order page for “19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England’s Unbeatable Patriots (Paperback)”. So much so that he took a screenshot for posterity.

Not only should he update that screenshot to include the new Tom Brady cover on display, he may also want to snap a jpg of the companion “New York Giants: 2008 Super Bowl Champions [ILLUSTRATED] (Hardcover)”.

Yes, only one set of prospective memorabilia collectors will get their money’s worth. Take into account the money-hole that such pieces of publishing kitsch are, and interpret that previous sentence either way.

To make it crystal-clear that Joe McGinniss Jr. is channeling Bret Easton Ellis’ “Less Than Zero” in his debut effort “The Delivery Man”, he starts off the novel with these three words:

Find Yourself Here

A literary echo of the signifier from “Zero”: Disappear Here. It sets the stage nicely for parallels between the moral nihilism of 1980s LA youth culture and the spiritual hollowness to be found among denizens of present-day Las Vegas.

I think “Delivery” did a pretty good job of convey that, although ultimately it doesn’t paint as dire a picture as Ellis’ decadent landscape. The flashback-delivered backstory concerning the protagonist’s sister was all-too-obvious in informing the main characters’ motivations, and thus is probably the weakest part of the book. Otherwise though, I think it was a very good effort, and I enjoyed the read.

McGinniss’ hat-tip to Ellis isn’t surprising, since the two writers share an extensive common history, including mentorships and entrees into book publishing. So it’s only right that elements of his novel’s structure pay homage to Ellis’ iconic fiction.

Next step for McGinniss, of course: Getting his motto worked into a Brit-pop song. Only then will he have arrived.

It’s a pretty obvious joke, to post about Pierre Bayard’s “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read” while not having read it, nor having any intention of reading it.

But I’m gonna do it anyway.

Partly because this excerpt from the book’s introduction saves me from picking it up. And I’ll go one step further and boil down the intro to this most pertinent portion:

There is a tacit understanding in our culture that one must read a book in order to talk about it with any precision. In my experience, however, it’s totally possible to carry on an engaging conversation about a book you haven’t read — including, and perhaps especially, with someone else who hasn’t read it either. Moreover, as I will argue, it is sometimes easier to do justice to a book if you haven’t read it in its entirety — or even opened it. Throughout this book, I will insist on the risks of reading — so frequently underestimated — for anyone who intends to talk about books, and even more so for those who plan to review them.

A better understanding of a work through non-reading. I wish I could spurn this advice, except that I’m as pressured as the next average reader — always full of the best intentions, but rarely with the energy or time resources to actually crack open the desired book.

So I sometimes resort to faking it. I probably do it far more often with movies, although I readily admit to not having actually caught the flick — the preponderance of preview trailers and buzz make it a lot easier to fill in the blanks for silver screen offerings. And more to the point, there’s less stigma in not having taken the time to gawk at a moving-picture presentation than to have neglected the printed word; the former is more passive, even with serious flicks, while the latter is expected to demand more mental energy.

All that said, I’ve actually got my eye on a couple of tomes to digest over the next couple of weeks. I’ll keep the faking-it advice in reserve for future application.

“Ambush”, the latest release from Rampage, has been on my iPod for a few months now. I got it as the Free Single of the Week off iTunes, and liked it enough to listen to it, but haven’t kept it in my go-to rotation.

But for some reason, my iPod’s shuffle setting has ticked up “Ambush” on a regular basis over this past week. That being the case — and the fact that I like the track’s groove enough to not fast-forward to the next random selection — I’ve noticed one set of lyrics that stands out for me:

Brooknam is just where I’m from

“Brooknam” being, of course, a designation for the rough parts of Brooklyn, combining “Brooklyn” and “Vietnam”. It signifies Rampage’s street cred effectively enough.

The use of “Nam” as a recognizable shorthand for a warzone, to be subsequently applied to any rough-and-tumble American neighborhood, speaks to the social resonance that the Vietnam War still has decades after the war ended. The source above traces “Brooknam” as coming into existence only ten years ago, so it suggests a good degree of currency.

Hearing this lyric brought to mind an even older example of this same New York-Vietnam amalgamation, albeit a wholly-fictional one. The groundbreaking mid-1980s graphic novel “Watchmen” includes a very brief (and somewhat cryptic) reference to “Viet Bronx”. The same idea can be inferred: A warzone in the run-down south Bronx, where gang warfare is still an unfortunate fact of life. (This may or may not materialize in the upcoming “Watchmen” major motion picture.)

Not sure any other boroughs/neighborhoods combine well with either Vietnamese syllable. “Staten Nam”? “Viet Harlem”? The applications may have run their course with the nicknames used in the title of this post.

The Weekly Standard’s Jonathan V. Last takes a look at the continuing resistance in the book world over Google Book Search and the related Google’s Library Project.

Here’s what it boils down to:

Google’s defense of its book-scanning project, says Mr. Last, represents a misguided extension of the company’s guiding vision: that information only has value when people use it, after it has been delivered to them and appropriately organized by a service like Google’s. The creation of a gigantic digital library might sound incredibly useful and appealing, says Mr. Last, but it risks violating the principle embodied in intellectual-property law that created works have value.

In other words, permission’s not required if it enhances — i.e., disseminates to the wide reach of the Web — the product. Google feels it’s performing an inherently good service by enlivening dead-tree material.

This pretty much confirms my assessment of Google’s fundamentally wrong-headed approach when it comes to intellectual property rights:

It’s very much an entitlement-based attitude: Because Google’s mastered the technique, the company feels it can forge ahead without initial consensus-building. In the long run, it’s a fatal flaw in running a business.

Not that it’s hurt Mountain View’s stock price just yet. But hopefully, there’ll be a reckoning at some point.