Now that the parties have agreed to revenue sharing from book sales and library use, it becomes even more clear that Google Books is yet another Internet mediated disintermediation. Google Books is probably the best targeted marketing vehicle for the book industry since the original Amazon, because of its reach and ease of use and its ability to make transparent the previously opaque covers of books to help us find useful content. I’ve personally found it more useful than the usual suspects (book reviews, bestseller lists) when it comes to finding useful research works; sometimes you need to read the original book to decide if it’s useful to you rather than relying on third-hand opinion.

Here’s to a win for all involved–Google, book publishers, and above all, for you and me.

A few comics related links this morning. First, it will be of interests to comics historians, fantasy fans, and my sister that the full archive of Elfquest is going on line for free to mark the comic’s thirtieth anniversary; the archive will fill up over the coming year. That’s a whole lotta Pini, folks. If you thought catching up with the Sluggy Freelance archives took a long time, just wait.

The other freebie is an archive of the original art for the first issue of Elektra: Assassin, written by Frank Miller and lovingly painted by Bill Sienkiewicz. If you think Miller’s later work was weird, intense, and violent, just wait until you feast your mind on this one. (Greg Burgas wrote an excellent review of the series that might lend some context to the art.)

Browsing a Wired.com photo feature on the Internet Archive’s book scanning operation, I was struck by this image, showing a self-contained book press. PDF goes in, paperback bound book comes out.

I would pay for a copy of Cabell’s Early History of the University of Virginia, for sure, and maybe even the five-volume centennial History of the University of Virginia by Bruce, which has provided so much material for my Wikipedia articles. I hope they get this capability on line soon.

Interesting link from Slashdot regarding one individual’s effort to solve the library problem—also known as, how do you work with 3500 books? I like how they addressed not just the physical issues but also the cataloging questions.

Something to think about when I address my 550+ books…

Cracked.com is kind enough to provide a listing of the Nine Most Badass Bible Verses, an idea that sounds really silly unless you know your Old Testament. Yep: Samson and Elisha, Original Gangstas. And I have to admit that the verse about David is pretty darned good, too.

I can’t help but think that some of my seminarian friends would be able to flesh this list out considerably. Ideas?

I found a four-record set of Malone reading the whole bloody poem about seven years ago, in a now-vanished record shop in Central Square in Cambridge. The recording, on the once great Caedmon label (now an audiobook label for Harper Collins, with no sign of its back catalog reappearing anytime soon), was made in 1967 and, if the first side is anything to go by, probably drove every undergrad who listened to it completely nuts. Malone’s delivery is even-keeled, and he doesn’t attempt to sell the text, so little moments like the description of Scyld Scefing as a “good king” for his giving of gifts don’t get the reinforcement that the rhythm of the text would seem to indicate. But it’s still a great window onto the roots of the language.

I have a little bonus for this post: a clip from the recording, constituting the Prologue of Beowulf as read by Malone. I digitized the clip from my copy of the record; to date, I’ve only digitized one side of one LP, owing to the time required to do it properly (unlike CDs, vinyl has to be ripped in real time!) Hopefully it’s interesting to at least one person out there.

Prologue to Beowulf, read by Kemp Malone (Caedmon) – Download 2.6MB MP3

Item: BoingBoing pointed to an R Sikoryak adaptation of Crime and Punishment a la a Dick Sprang Batman comic book. In turn, the Again with the Comics blog post that reprinted the adaption linked to the Masterpiece Comics on R Sikoryak’s site, including a tiny reproduction of my favorite comics adaptation of a literary masterpiece: “Good Ol’ Gregor Brown.” One morning Charlie Brown awoke to find himself transformed into an enormous insect… I actually own that issue of Raw and shared the strip with my English professor in a class on modernity where we were reading the original “Metamorphosis.” Good stuff.

Item: Wired’s profile of xkcd creator Randall Munroe contains exactly one item about Munroe that hasn’t already been linked on BoingBoing: that he used to be a roboticist for NASA.

Item: So Penny and Aggie has been hawking free downloadable reprints in PDF form for a while now. I checked them out, and I was pretty impressed—Wowio’s a nice service and the quality is good, even if it limits you to three downloads per day. But it got me thinking: how much money is in the business model? And who else is on the service? So I started poking around, and all these indie comic books that I remember from when I was in middle school are in there. Like, stuff that was trying to cash in on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, before TMNT was a movie or even a TV show. Like Dragon (terrible, and terribly I owned the first few issues of it!). And, of course, like Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters. And there’s better stuff too: Steve Canyon, Flash Gordon, the Star Trek Key Comics from the late 1960s; and more. Of course they also do ebooks; I just added Civil Disobedience to my queue.

Thinking about John reminded me to look up some of my other authors from the first three issues.

• Mohit Bhasin, whom I served badly with a poor choice of anatomical clip art next to his poem in the first issue, appears to have kept up his dual pursuit of literature and medicine.
• Laura MacCleery is at Public Citizens Congress Watch.
• Kevin Corrie, our poetry editor, appears to have landed at Planting Seeds Records (if Google is to be believed).
• Jennifer Scappettone is on the faculty at the University of Chicago (though she apparently almost didn’t get into poetry thanks to the environment at UVa). She also apparently contributes to the group blog A Tonalist Notes, though I’m still looking for her posts—it’s a large team.
• Paul Bibeau’s book Sundays with Vlad: From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man’s Quest to Live in the World of the Undead was published last month. He’s freelanced for a variety of publications and is now the only person I know to have been both an advice columnist at Mademoiselle and an editor at Maxim. I plan to check out the podcast of his speech to the Jefferson Society at my earliest opportunity.
• April Thompson is a freelance writer and editor.
• Rebecca Dunham is on the faculty at the University of Northern Iowa; her collection The Miniature Room was a T.S. Eliot Prize Winner in 2006.
• Carol Golemboski is on the faculty at the Visual Arts Department at UC Denver.
• Lailee Mendelson works at Emory and had an article published in Salon a while back.
• Tyler Magill is still writing.
• Poulson Reed is the sub-dean at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Denver, Colorado.
• Jamie Gaughran-Perez is the editor of a zine called RockHeals, among other activities.
• Kim Seelinger has been practicing immigration law and teaching.
• David Sherwin is an art director, photographer, and musician in Seattle.
• Stacy Wray blogs, writes poetry, and is one half of the acoustic band Tumble.

I started, and finished, Deathly Hallows last night. Don’t worry: no spoilers from me. Just a note to mark the end of that particular journey.

But one thought: how the hell are they going to make that a movie? Jo hardly managed to fit it all into just one book.

Thanks to Zalm for starting me out right this morning by pointing to Kurt Vonnegut’s obituary. So it goes, indeed.