The economics of used books

I spent a lot of time on the el yesterday riding all over Chicago, and there were lots of folks reading books. When you actually look at what people read, you realize that the reading habits of average folks range far beyond the coverage of newspaper book sections. In terms of what actually gets read, genre fiction certainly seems more popular than literary fiction. Here are the books people were reading on the red, purple, and brown lines yesterday.The Tristan Betrayal (a posthumous effort by Robert Ludlum that inspires PW to say “Perhaps it’s time to let the master rest in peace.”)Five Quarters of the Orange (Joanne Harris’ follow-up to Johnny Depp-vehicle Chocolat)Dutch II (part 2 of a trilogy by Teri Woods – and put out by Teri Woods Publishing – that scores an Amazon ranking of 1,229)Devil in the White City (I think every resident of Chicago has read Erik Larson’s account of murder at the World’s Fair.)Great Expectations (I love it when I see people reading classic novels on the el – it can restore ones faith in society, I think)Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (Jonathan Safran Foer is reaching the masses!)Hotel Pastis (Peter Mayle’s “novel of Provence”)Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen never goes out of style)Deception Point (The obligatory Dan Brown thriller – law requires that at least one Dan Brown novel be present in every train car and a dozen on every airplane.)Elantris (PW says: “[Brandon] Sanderson’s outstanding fantasy debut, refreshingly complete unto itself and free of the usual genre cliches.”)Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth (Lana Turner never goes out of style either)We Thought You Would Be Prettier (Laurie Notaro’s “true tales of the dorkiest girl alive” – ranked 1,446 on Amazon)

Canadian writer David Bernans is embroiled in controversy after being barred from reading his novel, North of 9/11, a fictional account of the reaction to 9/11 in Canada. He had planned to do a reading on the campus of Concordia University in Montreal, but “after filling out an online application to hold a public reading on campus, Bernans received an e-mail on July 25 stating his request had been declined by Concordia’s ‘risk management team,'” according to news reports.A description of the book:North of 9/11 is the story of Concordia student, Sarah Murphy, a political activist determined to stem the tide of war mania emanating from the United States, and racist hysteria affecting her friends Hassan and Hakim. Sarah overhears a conversation between her father, and the executive of a Montreal-based aerospace manufacturer involved in production for the Pentagon.Sarah and her friends plan a non-violent direct action to draw attention to Canada’s participation in US war efforts. Activists are questioned by the RCMP, phones are tapped, movements are shadowed. The RCMP closes in on the presumed sleeper cell while bombs fall on Afghanistan.Update: The Guardian picks up the story, says the University is calling this a mix up due to human error. Bernans isn’t buying it.

If you read a lot of blogs, you’ve either discovered RSS by now, or you are spending a lot of time visiting your favorite sites each day. If you don’t know what RSS is, this site explains it pretty well. Basically, you can subscribe to the blogs that you like, and when the owner of a blog puts up a new post, it shows up in your “feed reader.” No more checking and rechecking all your favorite blogs to see if anything new has been posted.The really cool thing is that lots of newspaper sites have begun to jump on the RSS bandwagon in recent months, and now you can subscribe to their news feeds, most of which are divided into categories – world news, sports, etc. Why do we care about this at The Millions? Well, a handful of newspapers now have special feeds for their book sections, making it much easier to stay on top of all the reviews and book industry gossip. All the links listed below are to book news feeds. If you are already set up with a feed reader, go ahead and subscribe. If you aren’t set up yet, I recommend using Bloglines or My Yahoo. Here are the feeds I’ve found so far:New York Times > Bookswashingtonpost.com – Book Worldwashingtonpost.com – Jonathan Yardley – The Post gave Yardley his own feed, which I think is pretty cool.Guardian Unlimited BooksChristian Science Monitor | BooksLondon Review of BooksPowell’s Books: Overview – You may have seen Powell’s Review-a-Day where each day they post a book review from places like Salon.com, New Republic, and the CS MonitorSeattle Post-Intelligencer: BooksTelegraph Arts | Booksbaltimoresun.com | books & magsNPR Topics: BooksArts and Letters Daily – ideas, criticism, debate – not strictly book news, but a consistent, daily collection of links to thought-provoking articles many of which happen to be book reviews (not included in the Book News via RSS feature to the right)added 2/16/06: USATODAY.com BooksThere are quite a few publications that don’t yet have book news feeds, but hopefully they will add them soon. If you spot any new book news feeds or know of any that I missed, leave a comment or send an email, and I’ll add them to this post, which as time goes on will become a compendium of all the book news feeds out there. Finally, if you don’t want to bother with setting up your own feed reader but still want to keep up on all the book news, you can go here.Update:I found some tools to aggregate the book news feeds, and now the latest book news shows up in the column to the right. Enjoy!