iPhoney baloneys
A perp walks into an independent bookstore, sees a book he wants and uses an iPhone to take a photo of it. Or worse, he enters the title directly into his Amazon account. A clerk watches, silently screaming inside. For bookstores, this scenario poses a delicate problem: When does mobile browsing become an abuse of retail space?

Denver’s Tattered Covers store has come up with a good response.
Avoiding a guilt-based message, the store treats these customers as customers, not criminals, and is addressing their hybrid needs by posting QR codes around the shelves that take the customer to the store’s own website. The same article reports on Harvard Bookstore’s —in my opinion, wrongheaded—response, which is to use a a signage and video campaign to call out book scanners as social imposters-veritable 3G Gatsbys!-mingling among true customers:

The People’s Giller
The Scotiabank Giller Prize and the CBC have teamed up to create a new category in book selection, the Reader’s Choice Contest, allowing readers to vote for one novel to be included on the long list. This is perhaps The Best New Idea Ever for a literary prize. The Giller, being a privately funded prize, is in an excellent position for responding fast to readers and changing technology, but let’s hope other prizes get inspired to add the frisson of democracy to their proceedings.

A Queer Story reading night
Another Story bookstore hosts A Queer Story, a reading and writing workshop with Toronto authors Farzana Doctor, Vivek Shraya, and Zoe Whittall. The store promises that, in addition to giving readings, the authors will talk about technique and provide feedback to participants.

Thursday August 11, 7 pm. PWYC. Another Story Bookshop 315 Roncesvalles, 416-462-1104, anotherstory.ca.

“It’s Less Than Zero meets Deep Blue Sea! It’s American Psycho, but underwater!”
Screenwriter Paul Schrader-of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull fame-has signed on to direct Bait, a shark-themed horror film script by novelist Brett Easton Ellis this fall. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the script “follows a young man itching to take his revenge against the wealthy. The man, who works at a posh beach club, angles his way on to a yacht filled with the obnoxious elite, commandeering it into waters filled with the finned man-eaters.”