Bleary-Eyed Monday Morning Link Sausages

No hate mail from Saturday's rant... yet...

• Lots of e-books-in-the-marketplace chatter today, ranging from why are so many e-books misformatted? (hint: maybe the print versions weren't either formatted or coded correctly in the first place — relying on Quark quirks, for those that have electronic files at all) to Amazon UK attacking resale-price maintenance on e-books (the proper term for the so-called "agency model"... and yes, that is yet another side-effect of Leegin). And correspondingly, Macmillan USA has a film division (being run by someone who knows nothing about how to actually make a film)... which is going to lead to more and more demands for film rights in publishing contracts, in a return to the 1950s.
• There are some disturbing, but not shocking, figures hidden in PW's inadequately considered piece on National Book Award finalists (or, at least, those in fiction and nonfiction). Leaving aside the Franzen non-nomination non-controversy — it's not a bad book, it's just not excellent — note the in-print figures noted for each of these finalists. These are supposed to be the best of the year. In a nation of three hundred million, one might expect that the best books of the year would attract sales from more than 0.01% of the population, particularly compared to the actual (fully extended) cost of going to a feature film providing about a quarter of the entertainment time (based on average reading speeds) or a CD providing even less than that. And that's before remembering that the 20,000–30,000 figures cited in the article are before returns — those are just the in-print figures...
• At least for books, though, the problem of art forgery is much rarer. That said, this is some well-deserved karma for Christies — one of the leading conduits responsible for transferring Nazi-looted art to museums. And the thrown-away reference in Mr Haidt's piece to Piaget's research showing that six-year-olds have some notion of "karma," even if they can't explicate it, is all too appropriate for the world of art collection...
• I can't embed this video revealing Neo's worst nightmare (HT: Professor Lipton at Madisonian)... but put down that beverage and see for yourself.
• Professor Crawford notes one of the other reasons that the Comcast/NBCU merger must be rejected: Given R_____ M______'s long history of petty vindictiveness, a continued independent MSNBC will piss off Fox News too much to live. I'm hesitant to call MSNBC a "counterweight" to Fox — for all that Rachel Maddow is reliably "liberal," Keith Olbermann is a left-centrist and many MSNBC commentators and news editors are just plain centrists. However, given CNN's descent towards irrelevancy — thanks to its cost-cutting and alienation of its best reporters and editors, more so than how it has treated its purported "anchors" — MSNBC is now the most likely alternative to Fox News. And, as disturbing as that is, it is at least an alternative...