[Culture minister Margaret] Hodge has spent the past six months in a consultation process that asks some unsettling questions. What, really, is the point of a public library in the 21st century? How should libraries respond to today’s 24/7 culture and the greater availability of cheap books? Why can’t that beardy librarian double as a barista?

What has been done to public libraries in the United States is now being done to public libraries in Britain.

The London Review of Books has Keith Gessen’s article on the trials of Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.

He seemed to be moving in the direction Russia wanted to be moving: back into the club of advanced nations, rather than the club of basket-case states that lost wars to tiny mountain republics and periodically defaulted on their foreign debts. But somehow Khodorkovsky took it all too far, or too seriously. As Richard Sakwa describes in voluminous detail in his book on the Yukos affair, Khodorkovsky began trying to break the government monopoly on oil pipelines, planning an independent Yukos pipeline to China; and he also began negotiating a huge share swap, in essence a merger, with either ExxonMobil or ChevronTexaco. He began, in short, to believe his own press. ‘Khodorkovsky,’ one very sceptical American financier told me, ‘was the only one of the oligarchs who forgot that he was an oligarch, that is, a crook. He decided that because he’d stopped stealing from the company that he was a great businessman, a builder of value! The other oligarchs, when they saw the fuzz, knew they should run. But Khodorkovsky forgot.’

Mark Muro explains how Kindles are made.

A piece at National Public Radio bemoans the trivialization of American culture.

Perhaps the tendency to trivialize is born of bandwagonism or laziness. Idiomatically speaking: It’s easier to tear down than to build up. Or maybe we devalue valuable things because, as Herbert Marcuse observed, of society’s tilt toward repressive desublimation. In Marcuse’s mind, our capitalist culture renders a strong, often threatening urge into something weak and nonthreatening. For instance, marketers learn to satisfy our desire to be closer to nature by selling us Patagonia fleece jackets that we wear in our all-terrain Land Rovers driving to the mall.

This desublimation is repressive, Marcuse asserted, because it muffles social criticism and supports addictive consumerism. Consequently, contemporary society is spiritually and intellectually stagnant.

Recommended with reservations.

In the Washington Post, Patrick Anderson reviews Henry Porter’s The Bell Ringers.

This is a sophisticated, engrossing and important political thriller. Porter wants us to see that the same technological tools that can be used to fight terrorism or to make government more efficient can also, in the wrong hands, be used to destroy freedom. Perhaps Porter’s most important updating of Orwell is to show how corporate money might work with political corruption to create a dictatorship behind a democratic facade.

In The Guardian Naomi Klein alleges that corporate culture has taken over the US government.

No one approached the task of auctioning off the state with more zeal than Bush’s much-maligned defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. Having spent 20-odd years in the private sector, Rumsfeld was steeped in the corporate culture of branding and outsourcing. His department’s brand identity was clear: global dominance. The core competency was combat. For everything else, he said (sounding very much like Bill Gates), “We should seek suppliers who can provide these non-core activities efficiently and ­effectively.”

. . .

Though it’s too soon to issue a verdict on the Obama presidency, we do know this: he favours the grand symbolic gesture over deep structural change every time. So he will make a dramatic announcement about closing the notorious Guantánamo Bay prison – while going ahead with an expansion of the lower profile but frighteningly lawless Bagram prison in Afghanistan, and opposing accountability for Bush officials who authorised torture. He will boldly appoint the first Latina to the Supreme Court, while intensifying Bush-era enforcement measures in a new immigration crackdown. He will make investments in green energy, while championing the fantasy of “clean coal” and refusing to tax emissions, the only sure way to substantially reduce the burning of fossil fuels. Most importantly, he will claim to be ending the war in Iraq, and will retire the ugly “war on terror” phrase – even as the conflicts guided by that fatal logic escalate in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In the New York Times, Roxana Robinson reviews Jonathan Dee’s The Privileges.

At the core of this intelligent and ambitious book are questions about values. Dee’s primary message — that the family is essential to society, that we abandon it at our peril — is persuasive. Less so is the notion that uxorious idealism, not greed, might lie behind insider trading.

Universities (even those with enormous endowments) have historically taken advantage of recessions to bring austerity to teaching. There will be hiring freezes and early retirements. Rather than replacements, more adjuncts will be hired, and more graduate students will be recruited, eventually flooding the market with even more fully qualified teacher-scholars who will work for almost nothing. When the recession ends, the hiring freezes will become permanent, since departments will have demonstrated that they can function with fewer tenured faculty members.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has William Pannapacker’s bleak prospectus for those seeking graduate degrees in the humanities.

If you wanted to try to make sense of the global banking crisis, instead of merely weeping openly at your A.T.M. balance, 2009 was a very good year. Bookstores were filled with volumes that, with expert 20-20 hindsight, explained how capitalism went to hell.

For the New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews John Lanchester’s I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay.

Poets & Writers has a piece by Kevin Nance on Northwestern University’s gutting of its prize-winning journal TriQuarterly.

After the magazine’s final print issue this spring, it will become an online-only, student-run publication associated with Northwestern’s new MFA program in creative writing, located on its Chicago campus. The positions of the magazine’s longtime editor, Susan Firestone Hahn, and associate editor, Ian Morris, will be eliminated.

For the New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Dominick Dunne’s Too Much Money.

It is this book’s style to obfuscate ever so slightly (the Astor name becomes Harcourt, and the troublemaking relative becomes a nephew) while still allowing — no, insisting — that readers’ noses stay pressed to the glass of New York’s whirl of bold-face names. If you can’t figure out or don’t care that the talk show host called Harry Sovereign may be Larry King, this is not a book for you.

In The Atlantic Monthly Hanna Rosin asks, “Did Christianity cause the crash?”

Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg at The Wall Street Journal reports that Random House again is making specious claims to digital rights.

Farhad Manjoo at Slate covers Amazon’s remote deletion of e-books.

The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have. Here’s one way around this: Don’t buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it.

In The Globe and Mail Andrew Nicoll, author of The Good Mayor, recounts how his former agent urged him to pose as a woman in order to sell his novel.

I am a bloke of the brick-outhouse variety, a little over 6 foot tall and a little under 280 pounds. In my youth I played a bit of rugby – which is like football but without the helmets. I am a heterosexual man with a 16-colour default setting, completely unable to tell cerise from fuschia; I couldn’t find “rose-whisper” on a colour chart with the aid of a sat-nav.

On WHYY’s Fresh Air Terry Gross interviews Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

Like the slavering maws of a multipartite mythological beast, the intentional flaws of Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader swiftly swivel to rain disdainful and fetid organoleptic disaster upon all who dare approach the sacred mount.

In the New York Review of Books, Andrew Delbanco examines the funding of American colleges and universities.

For years, we have witnessed a growing gap between rich and poor colleges, the privatization of public universities, and aggressive if not reckless investment and spending practices at wealthy institutions, where the allure of gain appears to have overwhelmed the consciousness of risk. Now we are also witnessing drastic budget contraction at the most fragile and vulnerable institutions. Higher education has always been a mirror of American society—and, for the moment, at least, the image it reflects is not a pretty one.

Not recommended.

At Salon Sarah Hepola reports the disappearance of gay-themed books from Amazon’s search results and sales rankings.

In The Atlantic Monthly, Christopher Hitchens returns to Marx.

In the first volume of Capital (the only one to be published in his lifetime; the succeeding ones were works of Talmudic exegesis by his disciples), he has capitalism speaking in the words of Shylock; includes an extract from Timon of Athens wherein money is described as the “common whore of mankind”; and offers still another denunciation of the cash nexus, from the Antigone of Sophocles. One of the most famous phrases of Marx’s vast correspondence during the writing of the book expresses his hatred for having to work on “the economic shit,” and one recalls Lenin’s revealing opinion about gold—that it was fit only to supply the flooring for public lavatories. One pleasure in the rereading of Marx is to savor the trenchancy and aptness of his literary allusions.

Recommended with reservations.

On National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, librarian Robert Darnton outlines his opposition to Google’s book scanning project.

For National Public Radio’s All Things Considered, Lynn Neary covers publishers’ and booksellers’ objections to Amazon’s Kindle electronic reading device, the second version of which was recently announced.

Recommended with reservations.

The New York Review of Books has Robert Darnton’s analysis of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers.

. . . Google will enjoy what can only be called a monopoly—a monopoly of a new kind, not of railroads or steel but of access to information. Google has no serious competitors. Microsoft dropped its major program to digitize books several months ago, and other enterprises like the Open Knowledge Commons (formerly the Open Content Alliance) and the Internet Archive are minute and ineffective in comparison with Google. Google alone has the wealth to digitize on a massive scale. And having settled with the authors and publishers, it can exploit its financial power from within a protective legal barrier; for the class action suit covers the entire class of authors and publishers. No new entrepreneurs will be able to digitize books within that fenced-off territory, even if they could afford it, because they would have to fight the copyright battles all over again. If the settlement is upheld by the court, only Google will be protected from copyright liability.

Salon is running an Associated Press story on a financing deal between The New York Times Company and Mexican telecommunications billionaire Carlos Slim.

The Atlantic Monthly has “We Are All Businessmen” by Mark Fabiano.

The bus bounces over the lot and onto the road. Blue smoke makes us all cough, and the driver grinds the gears as he shifts up. The town passes from view and we head into the countryside, where there are no foreigners. The ride is bumpy, and there are no scenic views. I often wonder what Mr. Richard and the others would see if they came along. Like this. My best part of the day is getting off the bus in my village and walking down the road to my house. Of village life, they never see how we may live, our families working in the spice garden. Yes, they know about the kingfishers and monkeys. They don’t know how we strive daily to make our house clean from the dust, and without electricity and running water, we live OK.

Forbes notes that Amazon is acquiring AbeBooks.

At The Globe and Mail, Andrew Pyper delivers a sobering report.

The pressures on writers coming into the second decade of the quickly aging century go well beyond the previous demands of meeting deadlines and improving one’s craft. The midlist–we are soberly told by agent and editor alike–is, like the Titanic, a place no less doomed for all its comforts and good taste. Gone are the tweedy days of publishers sticking by an author because their editors believe in him. Now every book has to “work.” That is, move product. A lot.

On National Public Radio’s Morning Edition, Clark Davis covers BB&T CEO John Allison’s attempts to buy Ayn Rand a place on campus.

Most managers in the industry have reacted to the collapse of their business model with a spiral of budget cuts, bureau closings, buyouts, layoffs, and reductions in page size and column inches.

In The New Yorker, Eric Alterman contemplates the end of the American newspaper.

James Donald at the China Post covers the recently concluded Taipei International Book Exhibition.

Things turned more serious when a well-travelled Li [Ang] told the audience of her concern over mounting political and economic pressures preventing Taiwan’s culture from reaching the rest of the world.

The American Booksellers Association notes Amazon’s plan to fight a New York proposal that the online retailer collect and remit sales tax for sales to in-state customers.

National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation interviews Francis Wheen, author of Marx’s Das Kapital.

At the Washington Post, Shashi Tharoor reviews Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Neoliberal capitalism, [Klein] argues, thrives on catastrophe: Not only are fortunes made from the misfortunes of the masses, but the global dominance of free-market capitalism is built on the infliction of disasters on the world’s less fortunate.

It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals.

At the London Review of Books, Slavoj Žižek explores the issue.

The New York Times has an article on new books that deal with rampant corporate crime.

The New York Times has an article on the decline in corporate funding for the arts.

When companies do support culture, they are increasingly paying for it out of their marketing budgets, which means strings are attached to the funds: from how a corporation’s name will appear in promotional materials, to what parties it can give during an exhibition, to the number of free or discounted tickets available to its employees.

These tech robber barons simply do not understand education, medicine, or the arts. Steve Jobs apparently agrees with Bill Gates (but Michael Dell, of all people, dissents) that schools should operate on a corporate model and serve strictly as training grounds for corporations.

Meg Rosoff at the Guardian’s books blog writes of the difficulty in coming up with a title in the advertising age.

. . .as my wise and trustworthy editor has pointed out numerous times and at great length, Dark Ages as a title will not sell. It will not sell because it suggests darkness, gloom, unhappiness. What’s worse, it suggests history.

The New York Times is running a story on university fund-raising.

On a hilltop patio with a stunning view of the J. Paul Getty Museum, as guests sipped bubbling guava-pineapple martinis, John Sexton, the president of New York University, was far from home, chatting up the crowd.

The 70 guests assembled in Los Angeles for this event on a beautiful spring evening, had already given $5,000 or more to N.Y.U. The parking area at the top of the private street that led to the mansion, owned by Nancy Moonves, former wife of the television mogul Leslie Moonves (and mother of two N.Y.U. students), was filled with Lexus and Mercedes sedans as well as a sleek Ferrari.

“I thank you,” Dr. Sexton said, “and I ask you to do 10 times as much as you are doing.”

Poets & Writers has an article about how the U. S. publishing industry is turning to China for profit.

HarperCollins decided to give everyone who cares about books a solstice present: sleazeball editor Judith Regan’s head on a slightly tarnished silver platter.

Enjoy the longest night of the year!

Microsoft has released a beta version of its competitor to the controversial Google Book Search.

In an article on the aftermath of the cancellation of O. J. Simpson’s book, the Associated Press (by way of the New York Times) reveals that Simpson was well aware of the tasteless nature of the work and that his only motivation for participating was grabbing some of that good “blood money” (for his children, you see).

The New York Times has a story about O. J. Simpson’s forthcoming book (ghost written, no doubt), which is tentatively titled If I Did It, Here’s How It Happened. My fervent wish is that people will know better than to buy into such a calculated cash grab, but I am prepared to be disappointed on that count. The sleazy tell-all has long been a trash publishing staple. This level of crass exploitation is something new, however, and hopefully does not signal a trend.

An AP article (by way of CNN) again airs Bill Gates’s views on education.

[Gates] spoke of some creative school programs–particularly charter schools run by private companies–that should be a model for innovation in the nation’s schools.

Yes, just as in the past his primary objection to American education is that it is more than a corporate training ground.

Canada’s Globe and Mail has an article on the woes of author Nancy Huston. Her French-language novel, Lignes de faille, recently won the Prix Femina and was expected to be published in English in North America. Her publishers apparently want her to change or remove passages about George W. Bush, Jesus, and the war in Iraq. They seem to think that the passages, as they stand, might offend Americans, leading to poor sales (all they really care about, of course).

Slate has a short article on businesses that refuse to accept cash. The mind boggles.

Slate has an article on authors’ sometimes absurd efforts at cultivating mindshare, with a focus on Hemingway’s exploits and ad copy.

The Marxists Internet Archive has seen substantial updates recently and is well worth visiting. Every time I reread Capital, I am amazed anew at its clarity and accuracy in describing the system.

The Third Rome: Holy Russia, Tsarism and Orthodoxy (excerpted at The American Journal of Russian and Slavic Studies) by Matthew Raphael Johnson contains the following sentence as part of a rather confrontational paragraph: “In post-modern times, what mass semi-literacy has done is provide the state, as well as far more powerful private concentrations of capital, the ability and media to control far greater masses of people, all the while they believe themselves to be free.”

David Barboza writes in today’s New York Times about Yu Hua’s novel Brothers.

The Washington Post has a positive review of T. Christian Miller’s Blood Money: Wasted Billions, Lost Lives, and Corporate Greed in Iraq.

Our world, the world of soft power, where people are persuaded to believe that they want the lifestyle, the commodities, the cheap celebrity, that the money-mongerers want them to want, has done something much more complicated to books than to ban them. Freedom of choice, as it is called, floods the market with trash, so that readers are genuinely bewildered about what is and isn’t worth the time, and books are marketed as five-day-wonder disposable objects.

Read the rest of the article at The Times.

A Boston Globe article reveals the lengths to which authors are forced to go to protect themselves from sales tracking algorithms.

A copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio was sold at auction for $5 million.