Poetry News:

1. — When Hank Williams died on New Year’s day in 1953, he left behind a legacy of honky tonk hits as well as an extended family that would grow to include a son, daughters and grandchildren. Milo Miles reviews an exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame called, “Family Tradition: The Williams Family Legacy.” —
2. — alt.NPR: Poetry Off the Shelf Podcast, Linh Dinh catalogues the myriad grades of Vietnamese chuckles. [MP3] —
3. — John Ingram, Chairman of the Ingram Content Companies, announced last Thursday that the company would fold the leading print-on-demand publisher, Lightning Source, Inc. into its main book business to create Ingram Lightning Group. —
4. — One of the failings of our education system is that we are educating people out of creativity. —
5. — That era of the poetry readings was also the folk era. So our intermission would be a folk singer, usually playing the auto harp. —
6. — Author of new book discusses his work linking corporate values with the decline of the tenure-track position, especially in the humanities. —
7. — His latest collection, The Late Show, includes “Gloss of the Past,” composed entirely of the names of lip glosses —
8. — ‘Paradise Lost’ poet turns 400 —
9. — Poetry, our national art, has never been so neglected or unloved. —

The magnitude of circadian advantage influences the outcome of Major League Baseball games in that teams with greater circadian advantage are more likely to win. Crossing multiple time zones further reduces the probability of success for traveling teams.

I posted some links last week regarding Amazon.com’s attempt to force publishers to use Amazon’s BookSurge print-on-demand service. Or the book won’t be available for sale on Amazon. I think Amazon took some non-BookSurge POD book’s “buy” buttons off, too. Is that still the case? My friend Scott’s book is only available through the used book interface now.

Evidently, most (all?) print-on-demand services (other than BookSurge) use Lightning Source to actually print the book. Lightning Source is a subsidiary of Ingram Book Group, which is a local (to me) Nashville company. (The printing biz is big in Nashville.)

I find it strange that I haven’t seen any local media stories about this, since Ingram is such a large local company (and the family is so prominent in the community). Unless I missed any mainstream media articles about this, the only local attention this has gotten is from some well-respected local bloggers — Rex Hammock & Newscoma. I guess POD is small potatoes in the business world.

POD & the WWW are 2 of the main reasons that I think that, for American poetry, this is one of the most exciting periods of time, ever. OK, I understand that hardly anyone buys poetry books these days, but for those of us who do, whoo boy, is there a groaning table.

An overview of why this sucks so much for small publishers.

A more detailed analysis of how this would affect a small poetry publisher.

And in the “first they came for POD” department: Newspapers, magazines, press syndicates, not just e-book and POD publishers, should beware of Amazon’s lock-ins.

So what can you do about it? Here are some ideas:

There are contact addresses here, so you can tell Amazon to quit bogarting POD distribution.

Boycott them & quit generating revenue for Amazon.com via your websites.

The Authors Guild is seeking input that will help them move forward with legal plans because of Amazon’s possible violation of antitrust laws.

This article suggests that the California Attorney General would be most interested in Amazon’s business practices.

(I still plan on using Lulu.com to publish my poetry manuscript this year.)