This Week in Books 12/17/10

Books……… this week!

It was another big week for e-books and e-book readers, so let’s get started. First up is my former colleague Sarah LaPolla, who wonders, are we still really worried that e-books are going to destroy the (still here) physical books and the world of books as we know it? Really? Really really?

Meanwhile, another innovation looks poised to change e-books as we know it: a color e-ink will debut at CES in January (disclosure: link is to CNET, I work at CNET). To review: e-ink looks like paper and you can read it in the sun, though color e-ink is not yet capable of rendering video, and some find the colors to be somewhat muted. But soon you won’t have to choose between color LED and grayscale e-ink. The times they are a’innovatin’.

Speaking of e-books, Mashable put together a list of five innovative children’s e-books on the iPad.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg may be Time’s new person of the year, but for Publishers Weekly it was B&N CEO Len Riggio. To which the LA Times’ Carolyn Kellogg said: um, why?

Speaking of social networking, How Publishing Really Works responded with quite justified irritation and umbrage at a recent interview that was dismissive of the time some agents spend blogging. This is something I will be blogging about in full force, but the idea that agents who blog are somehow less serious or less hardworking than the ones that don’t is an idea that was past its time in 2007, let alone 2010. Look around. Every company in the world, big and small, is now trying to figure out how they can utilize social media. Why not agents?

Speaking of agents (and speaking of saying “speaking of”), Mary Kole has a great post about a very common question: do agents remember past submissions?

Reports of new Red Sox star Carl Crawford starting an antiquarian bookstore turn out to have been grossly exaggerated. As you were.

Still wondering what to get that special reader on your X-mas list? Well, the New York Times has one of the most creative gift guides I’ve ever seen for readers. Let’s just hope your 2010 avoided the general economic downturn if you want one of these items. Oh, and the Rejectionist had a list of her favorite books of the year, in which she had choice words for my favorite book of the year.

And my former client Jennifer Hubbard had a truly meaningful and staggering post about the ways in which writing and life interact and inform each other, sometimes in very unpredictable ways.

This week in the Forums, which are officially one year old, Christmas party in the Forums!, how you probably don’t want to try and find an agent via Craigslist, the what book are you reading now thread also turns a year old, why we love bad writing, how do you read, and what, exactly, is dark?

And finally, I’ve long been fascinated by Hong Kong’s now-destroyed teeming slum Kowloon Walled City, which if you haven’t seen, was an illegal, anarchic, unbelievably dense city populated by over 50,000 people. Sci-fi blog io9 recently uncovered a video of what it was like walking through its dark streets, and it’s so far beyond science fiction it’s hard to believe it actually existed in real life. Check it out:

Have a great weekend!