26 per cent - a rise of 10 per cent in just three months - do not believe the world is getting hotter. link

I really didn't see this coming. Apparently a decreasing number of people accept the idea of manmade climate change. A couple of screw-ups and a bit of fudging by some researchers has invalidated the whole concept for a lot of people and apparently that's giving the Conservative Party some political cover to back off on their pledges to do something about CO2 levels if (when) they get into power (link).

And here's The Clamour King - out loud.

UK site

US site

Ooooh, look here. Or listen, rather, to the new audio book of The Affinity Bridge. It's the first in a series of Audio Snowbooks (Snaubooks, if you will) coming over the next few months. Next up: The Osiris Ritual and The Clamour King.

Isn't it weird, and also super, to hear a familiar book read aloud? There's a clip on the Audible site where that link above goes to for you to have a listen.

I can't remember if I've recommended Clay Shirky's book about publishing (it's got a slight emphasis on newspapers rather than books, perhaps) and the interwebs, but if I haven't, I should have done. (If only there was a way I could check, but who wants to go through all the longhand drafts of their blog posts looking for familiar phrases?) It's called Here Comes Everyone and it's good for people trying to think about the commerical future of publishing. (Surprisingly, that doesn't describe by any means the majority of publishers, but maybe there are a few interested readers out there.) Well, here* is a little flavour of his thinking in a very easy-to-watch talk about privacy and information overload. Link.

*Yet again, prompted by BoingBoing linking to it first.

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Is it possible that this book is real? Click the picture to see it a little better. Found via BoingBoing. More here. Like this gem.

There is something about the way that technological progress affects the world of publishing that I keep coming back to. It starts with what various pundits (and, I suppose, Karl Marx originally) called the 'means of production'. Every year it gets easier to be not only the author of a book, but its publisher - at least in the limited sense of being able to arrange the production of a pallet of professionally-printed paperbacks from the comfort of your own laptop.

But maybe that's OK because, as we all know, publishers perform other important roles besides FTPing files to the printers and saying 'go!'. For a start, they act as gate-keepers to the retailers - and the retailers in turn act as gate-keepers to the readers. Books generally have to pass through both sets of gates to stand a chance of building a readership. But that publishing gate-keeper role is not about consensus. Publishers each have their own idea about what's printworthy. I've lost track of how many blockbusting millionaire authors were turned down by the first fifteen publishers they approached.

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Not motivated by my love of books, but instead by my (newly discovered) love of fire, I'm linking you to an old news story about a fire in a gas pipeline last May. I don't know, there's something about a giant, churning fireball towering over suburban streets that sort of grabs my attention. (And since no one was killed I don't feel it entirely inappropriate to gasp in appreciation a little at the photos.) There's a bunch of them here on this Russian blog that I can't read a word of - and elsewhere on the web if you care to look.

So you know Steve Jobs? The guy who resuscitated Apple computers and brought the iPhone into being? He's a bit of an electronics industry legend and guru. This is what he said a little while back about handheld e-readers:

"It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore," he said. "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore."

Just thought you'd like to know. (Source article here.)

"Most predictions for 2020 based on models derived from controlling the supply side, that is, from the monopoly on the means of producing and distributing books, will be wrong. By which I mean, the supply chain book publishing and retail model is ending. The book retail chains will disappear, just like Circuit City, Sharper Image, Tower Records disappeared. And the corporate publishers will likely all but disappear just as Atari, Digital, Wang disappeared though the backlists will be spun off to private equity companies looking for semi-predictable IP-based cash flow, and a couple of front list publishing enterprises will likely be operating trying to emulate the Hollywood blockbuster model with just about enough success to be able to stay in business."

In case you're interested, seven more straightshooting predictions from Richard Nash about the future of book publishing here.