Like a steaming bowl of chicken soup or a warm, fluffy blanket, a novel by Georgette Heyer is a comfort. Her heroines are always bright and dazzling and her waggish heroes firm but good-hearted. Heyer’s knack of balancing melodrama and wit keeps some of the most ludicrous plots fresh and engaging, and April Lady’s premise is utterly absurd.
Earl Giles Cardross has recently married his considerably younger Lady Nell, choosing her from society’s debutantes by falling in love with her at sight. Their marriage is one of necessity to Nell’s noble but financially-stricken family and, unfortunately for Nell, her ninny-headed mother impresses this upon her. Nell, who is as struck with Giles as he is with her, is overly demure and distant as a new bride because she does not wish to be bothersome as a “convenient wife”. Naturally, she throws her energy into society, balls and the ton, but by settling the debts of her gambling brother, she runs up her own on gowns and bonnets. Nell reluctantly tells Giles that she has overspent her quarterly allowance and he promptly clears her accounts but is left with the impression that Nell has married him for his riches. When Nell discovers a forgotten bill she is ashamed and hides it from Giles, fearing to lose his affection and further excite his perception of her as a gold-digger. She enlists her black-sheep brother to raise the funds instead of risking Giles’ wrath by revealing her plight.
A multiplicity of mix-ups and preposterous schemes for procuring the “blunt” follow and although the reader knows Nell and Giles will be reconciled eventually, the journey to that point is erratic and unpredictable.
April Lady sprints along, juggling and incorporating subplots to create a finely-polished and enthralling tale. Heyer’s blend of historical romance and immaculately-timed comedy is like a Jane Austen and PG Wodehouse cocktail—charming and pithy.
Part of the success of April Lady is Heyer’s well-drawn characters. In other hands, Nell would be insipid and frustrating for not clearing up the misunderstanding with her husband immediately. Instead, she enchants with the cool management of her unruly brother, Dysart, and idealist sister-in-law, Letty, and has a ready-wit to counter the quibbles of her fashionable and fastidious cousin, Felix. Giles also is well-fleshed out as the charismatic and droll, much-put upon earl and his fast-paced dialogue keeps the pages turning.
April Lady’s comedy of manners is best shown, however, through Dysart, the compulsive gambler and loveable scamp whose aid to Nell includes holding her carriage up in a highway robbery. His inebriated antics are hilarious, especially at the climax of the book, and the quips of this good-natured daredevil are expertly rendered in the colloquialisms of Regency England.
Heyer wrote forty historical romances in meticulously-researched detail. Her novels, which were published from the 1930s to 1950s, may not suit all readers because her wild heroines are always and eventually tamed by their leading men. However, if some light-hearted, feel-good escapism is what you need, this book is for you.
Danny Skinner works for the Edinburgh council as a successful health inspector which he slots around his drug and alcohol binges. He is confident, stylish and has a way with the lassies but his love of a pint is estranging him from his ex-punk mother, endangering his career and destroying his relationship with his beautiful fiancée.
Meanwhile, he’s searching for the identity of his father, using information from a local, minor-celebrity chef’s latest publication, Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, which is linked to his mother’s waitressing days at the time of his conception.
When the conscientious Brian Kibby comes to work at the council, Skinner forms an intense and irrational hatred towards the clean-living and shy teetotaller. Kibby is socially awkward and has a passion for model trains, Star Trek conventions and non-violent video games; he epitomises the nerdiness that Skinner doesn’t have and is an unlikely nemesis. But as Skinner’s alcoholism escalates—he loses his fiancée and nearly his job—and the two compete for a promotion, Skinner’s abhorrence of Kibby triggers a supernatural curse. The hex ensures that Kibby takes on all the effects of Skinner’s hard living: hangovers, violent injuries from soccer hooliganism, repercussions of a brutal rape, obesity and eventually the need for a liver transplant. Skinner relishes this lack of consequence and delights in inflicting as much physical and mental pain on the luckless Kibby.
Welsh has littered this book with confusing first-person perspectives where anyone and everyone—a nurse, a cashier or a lady getting her hair cut—will get a few pointless paragraphs then slip into obscurity. Amongst this clutter of periphery characters’ viewpoints, the plot occasionally surfaces but is laboured and predictable. The big reveal of Skinner’s father is obvious from very early on and Welsh leaves nothing to his reader’s imagination—Welsh is explicit about what will happen at the time of the hex but references Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray just in case.
The result is a tedious read full of some very contrived elements: Skinner, despite his full-time hedonism, is purported to be a thinker because his shelves are full of poetry; his behaviour is spuriously equated with that of Bush and Blair in a lame political spin; and his American love interest is called Dorothy Cominksy and has a “dot.com business” (shorten Dorothy’s name for the wit).
Unusually, Welsh’s signature Scottish-phonetic dialect is toned down and set against a more elegant third-person narrative but the two styles clash and grate, adding to the reader’s disorientation. Unfortunately, Welsh’s new-found style is damaged by clichés (“twisted like a knife”), tautology (“nodded affirmatively”), predictable adverbs (“meticulously prepared”) and bizarre turns of phrase (“a fart slipped out of him, as poignantly weeping as a lover’s last farewell”). This is aside from occasionally misplaced words that render passages ridiculous—characters don’t leave, they make “a defeated egress”.
Mr Welsh’s editorial team has done him a disservice—the book should have had a sound structural edit and a thorough copyedit prior to its publication. Then again, bad writing is bad writing.
eMarketer estimates that there are currently 18 million users of Twitter in the US and by next year there will be 26 million - a total of 15 per cent of the total US population. This kind of growth cannot be ignored and retail opportunities are being explored, and how-to principles devised that describe how Twitter's potential can be maximised for businesses. eMarketing Hubs has created such a guideline but there are many more out there, such as Harris Fellman's 35-minute video Coup de Twitter.
Although Twitter can be lucrative to businesses, they'll need to be conscious of how they promote themselves if they wish to avoid potential alienation - Twitter 'spammers' are becoming more prevalent and a new name has been coined to refer to them: 'spitters'.
A winner of the 2009 Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing has been withdrawn from sale after a complaint made by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. Cambridge University Press won the 2009 Secondary Single title for their first edition of Cambridge Studies of Religion by Christopher Hartney and Jonathan Noble. But after complaints received about content of the Judaism chapter contained in the book they've had to pull all stock until problematic passages have been resolved.
CUP's website cites that the chapter on Judaism is currently under review, the results of which will be included in all reprinted copies, if they re-issue the product. CUP will be using their academic resources and an independent expert in Judaism for the review - it is highly likely that once the appropriate changes have been made, the book will be available again.
The website of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies no longer has any information about the issue but did describe the book as having anti-Semitic slurs in a Sydney Herald Sun article on Tuesday. The lack of information on their website is probably due to the matter being swiftly and responsibly responded to by CUP's managing director, Mark O'Neill. CUP's marketing department has also been quick to follow up by contacted all stakeholders and informing them of the problems the text has. In fact, J-Wire, the Jewish online news from Australia and New Zealand, has applauded the actions of the publisher and their recognition of the text's unsuitability as an HSC learning resource.
I've read the material (chapter 12 - Judaism: the basic facts) that has sparked the controversy and it is easy to pinpoint the areas of text which are troublesome. To me, it is quite clear that there is no deliberate religious vilification at play, rather some very ambiguous sentence structure that should have been cleared up by the proofreading stage and some obvious editorial oversights which should not have been overlooked.
The Australian Jewish News' reaction on Monday sparked a few extremist and highly inflammatory comments - comparisons to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and concerns that the book was the product of some kind of Muslim conspiracy! (Perhaps that sentence shouldn't have ended in an exclamation mark, comments like these are highly disturbing and echo the stereotypical and racial vilification that the book has been accused of inciting.)
My Jewish boyfriend is a level-headed sort. He's read the Judaism chapter and sees that some of the facts need to be modified and some ambiguity cleared up. But he hasn't summoned an angry mob to appear outside CUP's doors or snuck into their offices to pin prawns underneath the desk areas of my CUP friends. Not yet anyway....
It seems like the crew at CUP have the matter calmly in hand and it is good to see that pillars of the Jewish community are working with the publishing house to resolve the situation amicably. Not much more to say really.
The textbook market for ebook products has been slower to catch on than that of trade. However, educational publishers have actively developed ebook products for students and educators over the last few years, especially in the US, using partners such as Vital Source.
Vital Source has partnered up with many of the world's leading educational publishers and is fast becoming a major player in the ebook texbook market. Some of the main educational publishers on board include:
Elsevier
John Wiley & Sons
McGraw-Hill
Pearson Education Group
Oxford University Press
Blackwell Publishing
The principal educational publishers in Australia have also dipped their toes into ebook manufacture and are commonly using the VitalBookTM format. For example, the first edition of McGraw-Hill's Advertising and Promotion, published in 2008, has an integrated ebook with the textbook that allows note-taking, search and highlighting abilities. Similarly, Wiley's second edition of Organisational Behaviour, published a couple of months ago, comes with a Vital Source ebook to assist the student's study.
However, when you look at Australia's leading educational publishers' websites it is not clear what types or even which ebooks are available. A simple search doesn't bring much up - indeed, I only know where to look because these books are my publishing house's competition.
Leaving this unusual non-promotion aside, it seems that the ebook market in Australia is largely unchartered and in its early stages of growth. Compared to the US (and even there it is a budding rather than thriving industry) Australia only started developing educational ebooks over the last three or so years.
On the whole, the trend seems to be in educational publishing to have an ebook as a standalone saleable item and then bundle it with a printed product after its first year. This is hardly an encouraging set of circumstances for the educational ebook - the need to bundle ebooks shows that there is not too much demand for them.
But perhaps this is because there's a climate of uncertainty on how best to incorporate ebooks in education. Everyone seems very eager - publisher and consumer - but textbook (hardcopy) sales are not dropping.
Educational ebooks are in an interesting place at the moment, there is demand but noone has really worked out how best to sell or use them. In terms of using them, for example, do they need to be online, downloadable or available through ebook readers? And with regards to selling them, should they be packaged with the textbook, sold as a standalone ebook (as a percentage of the printed price which is cheaper but doesn't allow the student to keep the ebook once it expires), or as individual ebook chapters?
My company feels that ebook chapters will be the way of the future - students can buy the chapters they need to save money. But the way educational ebook demand will go is not clear yet.
The institute of the future of the book is a US-based organisation and website that investigates, comments and acts upon the shift from the printed and bound to the digitally based. Their mission is to record this shift from the book to the networked screen, and to promote and assist the evolution of the book into its new format.
Their blog, if:blog, is a daily collection of news, thoughts, research and ideas about the transformation of reading and the tangible book. Fiercely positive about what digitising the book means, the blog is an archived plethora of material that includes (but is not limited to) discussions on the fate of independent booksellers, the morals of Wal-Mart, Amazon and Target's price setting, book-reading devices, vooks, copyright and copyleft, education and interactive media. One post I really liked was What I heard at MIT, which, although three years old, nicely encapsulates a lot of the jargon, uncertainty and mixed messages I hear flying around publishing proposal meetings.
However, it is the institute's projects that I find really interesting such as the blog-based peer review of Noah Wardrip-Fruin's manuscript published by MIT. Fruin, a professor of communication at UC San Diego, submitted his manuscript in chunks over ten weeks to Grand Text Auto, a community of bloggers made up of writers and digital artists who are interested in multimedia, games and all things digital. They reviewed and gave feedback on his work - exactly the same as the traditional process of providing academic manuscripts for academic peer-review prior to being published. Except, this was an open-peer review using a community of bloggers. The institute helped by adapting the CommentsPress functionality to accommodate the reviewers' task.
Most of my digital media experience in the educational publishing industry has been limited to CDs - and these have always been supplementary products rather than standalone-saleable items.
Although some of these CDs have been for student use, taking the form of podcasts that give practical examples to the theory the textbook contains, the majority of the CDs created have been solely for the instructor's use.
A typical instructor's CD would contain PowerPoint slides (for lectures and tutorials), an Instructor's manual (a guide on material to cover in lectures and tutorials), a Solutions manual (answers to all the questions in the textbook), ExamView testbank files (a database of hundreds of different types of questions formulated from the textbook that the instructor can use for assessment purposes), student quizzes (for homework and tests) and all the low res images contained in the textbook (for instructors to use however they wish).
Over the past year, we've abandoned the use of CDs - all content that was originally on CD is now uploaded onto our (now very stable) website instead. As each book has an automatic companion website dedicated to it, the process is a simple matter of uploading supplementary content for the textbook on to the companion website shell, then going live.
Some of our blockbuster books have more supplementary features and require something snazzier than the bog-standard companion site. In these cases our multimedia team builds individual websites from the ground up. Everything is password protected and bound up with the sale of the textbook, or adoption by a tertiary educator, so this link to MKGTwill only provide you with limited access.
As well as acting as a central depository for instructors (and sales reps) the use of the internet as a platform for providing additional product has enabled the growth of numerous additional supplementary products for students. These include material such as: flashcards, crossword puzzles, quizzes (multiple choice, true/false, short answer, fill in the blank, etc), glossaries (with audio), weblinks, internet exercises and so on. In fact, one of my books, Principles of Macroeconomics in New Zealand 2e, has three additional chapters, only available online.
Currently, our US colleagues are promoting iChapters for products with electronic formats, which includes ebooks, individual chapters, audio and video. We'll be moving in to this iChapter market next year.
