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.