Two days ago a news surface item surfaced in which Arizona governor Jan Brewer was said to have been engaged in “intense conversation”—possibly a passionate disagreement—with President Barack Obama on a Phoenix tarmac. The AP pictures below suggest more was going on than just a friendly handshake:

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and President Barack Obama on Phoenix Tarmac in January 2012 | AP

Time Magazine has Brewer saying the mini-dustup was over statements she made in her autobiographical book Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight…To Secure America’s Border (title is frankly too long to post neatly here), which she says Obama found “disturbing.” Brewer is famous among some and infamous among others for her efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, and the legislative methods by which that end has been pursued.

Specifically, says Time, Obama took issue with Brewer’s retelling of an incidents at Arizona State University and later at the White House. In an interview (see Time link), Brewer explains that at the first ASU incident, Obama blew her off. On the second meeting at the White House, Brewer was there to discuss immigration but says of the meeting, “I felt a little bit like I was being lectured to, and I was a little kid in a classroom, if you will, and he was this wise professor and I was this little kid, and this little kid knows what the problem is and I felt minimized to say the least.”

As for their most recent tarmac encounter:

“I said to him, you know, I have always respected the office of the president and that the book is what the book is,” she told reporters Wednesday. She said Obama complained that she described him as not treating her cordially.

“I said that I was sorry that he felt that way. Anyway, we’re glad he’s here, and we’ll regroup.”

The two have agreed to meet again to discuss things further at some point in the future.

Brewer’s book which is ranked at or near the top of Amazon for political and governmental categories, and is currently the 7th-best selling book there overall. Publisher Broadside Books says this in promotion of “Scorpions” (abbreviated):

Sometime after dark on March 27, 2010, Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was found dead next to his four-wheeler on the grounds of his ranch on the Arizona-Mexico border. Krentz and his dog, Blue, had been missing since that morning. They were last heard from when he radioed his brother to say that he’d found an illegal alien on the property and was going to offer him assistance. The man Krentz encountered that day shot and killed him and his dog, without warning, before escaping to Mexico.

It’s difficult to overstate the impact of Krentz’s death, which turned the issue of Arizona’s unsecured border—a crisis that the federal government had repeatedly ignored—into a national concern. As Arizona sheriff Larry Dever said in his testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, “We cannot sit by while our citizens are terrorized, robbed, and murdered by ruthless and desperate people who enter our country illegally.” This momentum helped pass SB 1070, a bill that authorizes local law enforcement under certain conditions to question persons reasonably suspected of being illegal aliens, which Governor Jan Brewer and the state legislature had been working on for months. With the passage of this controversial bill, the state of Arizona became ground zero in the impassioned debate over illegal immigration. The Democrats and the media went into overdrive, denouncing the state and its governor as racists and Nazis.

Considering the size and reputation of Pennsylvania State University—“Penn State”—and its storied football program, and considering the recent Sandusky sex abuse scandal, and now the death of winningest college football coach ever Joe Paterno from cancer, it’s a surprise that PSU and Paterno literature isn’t more widely read.

It’s not for a dearth of literature on the subject—search Amazon for such books and you’ll practically be assaulted with the written word on Paterno—it’s just that none of them appear to be a hit. Amazon says its best-selling Paterno item is an autobiographical 1991 audiobook series called Paterno: By the Book, but even that has a mere 4 reviews. And so it goes with the others: 3 reviews, 5 reviews, 10 reviews at the most. Clearly JoePa and Penn State have been niche issues… until now.

One of the latest additions to the Paterno canon is Frank Fitzpatrick’s scarcely- but well-reviewed Pride of the Lions: The Biography of Joe Paterno. Publisher Triumph says only this:

Joe Paterno has scaled the heights of his profession, winning more than 400 games, a pair of national championships and nationwide respect for the program he built and sustained. In his mid-eighties now, he has vowed to continue with coaching, excited by the prospect of another promising team, and another autumn in Happy Valley. In this exciting new biography of a coaching icon, Frank Fitzpatrick, author of The Lion in Autumn, chronicles the life and career of the winningest coach in Division 1 football history.

It was released last August and so doesn’t quite extend to Paterno’s last few months of life, and for that reason probably doesn’t cover much of the sex abuse scandal in which he was not directly responsible but nonetheless involved. Sadly, that is probably what has piqued the public’s interest in the Paterno-Penn State relationship of late, but those who are looking for a tale of an inspiring life in football will do well to read this one. The nuanced feelings about Paterno’s legacy in the wake of the scandal and his death are aptly summed up by one reviewer:

The chapters that covered the late 60′s and early 70′s, when Paterno was getting his undefeated seasons with no national title to show for it, were perhaps the most interesting. Paterno showed a fire and loyalty to Penn State that I highly doubt any other coach would show. He turned down good NFL money to stay in Happy Valley.

It is a shame to read this book about Paterno, and read abot all the good he has done for countless people, football players and others, and to see that legacy scared by the Sandusky scandle. Regardless of your thoughts on Paterno or the scandle as a whole, this is a book that exposes a man who gave his life to a University and to a football program of young men and it should be read by all College Football fans.

With his fierce loyalty, his 400 wins and a 46-year win record of over 75% at PSU, the Brooklyn-born Paterno was nothing if not inspiring as a coach.

Apologies for the extended absence—a blown transformer and, later, downed cable lines have prevented me from doing much of import on Bookster in the last few days.

With that in mind, I’ll try to catch up on some of the literary news that has happened in the days I’ve been “incapicatated, as it were.

23 Year-Old Serial Killer Itzcoatl Ocampo | Police Photo

• Apropos of the Salman Rushdie row at India’s premiere Jaipur literary festival, in which protests and threats of violence prevented Rushdie from attending, even his contingency plan—a speaking engagement by video conference—was nixed after further threats of violence. Says the DailyMail:

The Muslim organisations opposed to him, though, made it clear they would regard the ‘very image of Salman on screen’ as ‘intolerable’. Their stand was articulated by the hawkish Paker Farooq, an advocate who heads the Association for Protection of Civil Rights. In his televised statement, the Diggi Palace owner said: ‘I have been informed that people who are averse to the video link have gathered on this property and threatened violence. ‘It is unfortunate but necessary to cancel the video link to avoid harm to this property, to all of you.

‘Rushdie responded to the blackout by tweeting, ‘Threat of violence by Muslim groups stifled free speech today. In a true democracy all get to speak, not just the ones making threats.’

• British author Neil Gaiman predicts traditional publishing will be extinct within 5 to 10 years, adding at the Guardian:

The music industry shows a possible future for publishing, he continued. “There are fewer rock stars travelling the world in their private jets than there were in the old days, but there’s a lot more good music.”

• The US isn’t the only country whose freedom-of-information act(s) (FOIA) have added to the public dialogue: one such request in Britain has yielded the information that authors Aldous Huxley (Brave New World), Roald Dahl (Matilda), and CS Lewis (Chronicles of Narnia), among others, privately turned down offers of CBEs and OBEs from the Queen of England during their lifetimes.

• As a followup to another previous story, publisher Peter McGee was warring with the Bavarian government over his intention to publish excerpts of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but has now agreed “to black out the pages containing the excerpts in order to avoid legal problems, according to the CSMonitor.

• The LA Times reports that an Orange County, California serial killer—an ex-Marine who stalked homeless with his Ka-Bar blade—was found to have a Life Magazine book called The Most Notorious Crimes in American History in his possession, along with a knife sharpener. The Marine Corps Times has more on the killer and his story.

• 83 year-old Where the Wild Things Are Maurice Sendak made a splash on Stephen Colbert’s show The Colbert Report earlier in the week, decrying e-books and expounding on “rumpus” in his curmudgeonly way. See the first seconds of each video below:

gizmodo

I don’t think I’ll ever fully go over to the e-book side of the great digital vs. print debate, but for purposes of convenience I am now alternatingly reading books on iOS. First a couple by Bukowski, and at the moment going back to see what Thoreau’s Walden was all about.

I will say, however, one of my frustrations with buying e-books is that unlike my print books, I can’t buy a book that works across platforms. I have purchased online editions of books in a PDF format, but those don’t work with iBooks on my Apple iOS devices, which in turn don’t work with Kindle or even the Kindle app for iOS. If I ever wanted to try the Nook, the Kobo or anything else, those are all different proprietary formats. Plainly and simply, buy an e-book and it will more or less work with just a single device—two if you’re really lucky.

At its recent event Apple made much ado of its updated iBooks app, as well as its new iBook Author software and more. But if one got the idea that Apple were trying to close the proprietary gaps between its competitors’ formats and its own—as it appeared to hint at by continually boasting of “openness” and the accessibility of its literary offerings—one would be wrong.

Now I know Apple elicits religious feelings in its followers (it’s true: see this link and the video from the BBC documentary ‘Superbrands’ below), so I’ll tread lightly.

Note that I’m a longtime user of Apple hardware, but its agency pricing schemes and now a few other things make it impossible not to suspect that Apple is turning increasingly to anti-competitive legal jockeying to carve out and protect its niche instead of to the innovation that put, and yes, continues to put Apple on the map.

For instance, writer Dan Wineman, having reviewed Apple’s new licensing agreement for its iBooks Author program (which is Mac-only to begin with), has called it an example of “unprecedented audacity”:

Apple, in this EULA, is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented.

ZDNet’s Ed Bott agrees in an article called “Apple’s mind-bogglingly greedy and evil license agreement,” adding that it would be as if “Microsoft said you had to pay them 30% of your speaking fees if you used a PowerPoint deck in a speech.”

He elaborates on a different section of the agreement and goes on to point out a nightmare scenario, in which:

You create a great work of staggering literary genius that you think you can sell for 5 or 10 bucks per copy. You craft it carefully in iBooks Author. You submit it to Apple. They reject it. Under this license agreement, you are out of luck. They won’t sell it, and you can’t legally sell it elsewhere. You can give it away, but you can’t sell it [the book, not the content].

This ties into another Bott complaint about the proprietary nature of Apple’s iBooks platform. In an article alleging that “Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books,” Bott points out that for years Apple has lavished praise on itself for using the ePub format in iBooks, which it still (for now) boasts is “the most popular open book format in the world,” but that with its most recent updates it has more or less abandoned the open standard by adding proprietary markup and functionality to the format which is designed to be unusable outside of the Apple realm. Thus, any authors seeking to make a universal version of their book, especially books with formatting and interactive content, will be out of luck, having to launch efforts instead to recreate that book in each company’s separate format.

Bott goes on to lament a few more bad Apple innovations with iBooks, and continues his jeremiad thusly:

Cynically, Apple is positioning this authoring tool and the new format as the savior of K-12 education. All school districts have to do is buy one iPad for every student and buy textbooks through the iTunes Store, and their problems are solved. Wrapping themselves in the education flag is a transparent attempt to win praise and deflect criticism.

What’s most infuriating to me about all this is that Apple had an opportunity to play fairly and still win. If the interactive capabilities in the new, enhanced iBooks format are so compelling, the resulting books should be able to compete on their own in the marketplace. …

Apple has chosen to leverage its dominant position in the tablet market to try to hobble its competitors in the ebook-publishing business. As Bjarnason argues, products created using Apple’s new authoring software will “forever be useless and unreadable in other reading systems.”

Others have stepped in to defend Apple on this count and more, but whether legally defensible or not, with its agency pricing, draconian (and possibly unenforceable) licensing agreements, and flip-flopping on “open” vs. “proprietary”, Apple increasingly appears to be turning to anti-competition as a guiding corporate strategy, with effects unknown to their comparative focus on true innovation.

Bott concludes by urging antitrust regulators to take “a long look at this pattern of anti-competitive behavior,” in much the same way they did with Microsoft.

At least with agency pricing, regulators already are.

Jeffrey Trachtenberg at the Wall Street Journal has a great article today about new models being tried by authors and publishers in the wake of pricing turmoil in the print and digital book markets.

If you follow along with the ongoing book pricing and print vs. digital sagas, you’ll know that Apple partnered with several large publishers to artificially set prices of e-books in what they call the “agency pricing” model (I call it a cartel). Such proposals were well-received by publishers who were watching their $14.99 print books give way to $9.99 (and cheaper) e-books, and to Apple, which presumably hoped prices would be set high enough to negate the better-situated Amazon’s price advantages.

That model has since come under fire in the US court system—still an ongoing battle—but with or without it, many self-published authors like Amanda Hocking and Barry Eisler were writing their own sensational successes rather than waiting around to be picked up by Crown or HarperCollins. Both have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and made six and seven figures doing it, although Hocking went from self-published to signed while Eisler remains independent. Both were offered lucrative deals.

In the same way, writers up and down the spectrum of sales and popularity are experimenting with their own novel pricing models. Trachtenberg mentions that author George Pelecanos, who has “never been a big seller,” is experimenting with a model in which digital editions of his books are sold for just “99 cents for the first month, and then $4.99 afterward.”

And Cemetery Dance Publications, a Maryland-based indie publisher, is trying out an annual subscription model in which readers pay $49 a year to have access to all the releases, new and old.

Even Amazon offers its Kindle Daily Deals, in which e-books are offered at a discount for a limited time.

Authors and indie publishers are hoping that these sorts of pricing gimmicks will afford them a place in the industry. While not optimistic that they’ll be moving books in the same numbers as the prolific and wildly successful James Patterson, they are hoping to get readers hooked on their characters, authors, and brands—and it appears to be working: one e-book publisher reports that each of the titles they offer sold as many copies in a day as they normally sell all year.

The question is: can authors and publishers recoup what’s lost in low prices with higher sales volumes?

It’s too early to tell, but there are two stories in the news which seem promising to those hoping the answer will be yes.

First, the Atlantic points out that the “average Kindle book [is] 6 times more expensive than self-published titles.”

As long as this gap exists, and as long as Apple and the major print publishers take pains to induce financial pain on would-be consumers of digital literature, there will be an alternative market with demand for less expensive titles. As long as the low end of that market is not overcrowded, there will be a willing—and growing—audience, which is good for the creators of that content. They warn, however, that the prices of self-published and firm-published e-books are converging. Yet even then, it is possible that self-publishers could offset fewer subsequent sales with their higher prices.

And second, as the Boston Globe indicates, “the number of people who own them nearly doubled between mid-December and January, a new study finds.”

Specifically, while just 10 percent of US adults owned tablets in December, a full 19 percent owned them after the holidays.

No downside to that for content creators.

Salman Rushdie | Andrew Harrer, Bloomberg News

I started off a recent entry saying that, while never safe, Salman Rushdie “was at least able to ferry himself between his residences” in New York and London “with only moderate concern for his wellbeing.”

That might have been overly optimistic, considering he recently pulled out of the Jaipur literary festival in India last Friday, citing what he believed were possibly credible death threats. He was due to discuss his award-winning 1981 book Midnight’s Children and to attend a number of other events, but as the Guardian reports, he released a statement alleging

[I had] been informed by intelligence sources … that paid assassins from the Mumbai underworld may be on their way to Jaipur to eliminate me… it would be…irresponsible to my family, to the festival audience and to my fellow writers…to come to the festival in these circumstances.

As I mentioned at the time, Muslim cleric Maulana Khalid Rashid Farangi Mahali, when apprised of Rushdie’s impending attendance of the festival, denounced him as a man who “hurt the sentiments of Muslims all over the world” before heading up calls for Rushdie to be denied a visa back into India. But as an Indian-born citizen, there are no such ban provisions—although his Satanic Verses book is still banned there.

Meanwhile, Islamic groups were planning marches in protest of Rushdie’s attendance, and one even offered a reward to anyone who could hit him with a shoe—a high insult in the culture.

When the 64 year-old author called an audible and mulled the idea of videoconferencing to ensure both his safety and his attendance, Muslim groups petitioned the Indian government to prevent it from happening. After similarly controversial Somalian writer Ayan Hirsi Ali read passages from the banned Satanic Verses, the same groups demanded an official investigation into the incident, calling such acts “a conspiracy to provoke Muslims by hurting their religious sentiments.”

And you thought SOPA was censorious.

Read Salman Rushdie books

Faddish books about self-improvement, politics and getting rich are no strangers to best seller lists, even at the very top of those lists, and they typically fade into obscurity after a day or two.

There are different types of books; ones that are here to stay for awhile. Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games books, for example, have absolutely dominated Amazon’s best seller list since the descent of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography. Catching Fire in particular, the second book of the Hunger Games series, has not left the top 100 for nearly two and a half years.

So I was inclined to believe radio host Mark Levin’s latest book Ameritopia was merely experiencing a “sugar high” the first day I saw it claim the #1 spot. I held off on writing about it on its second, and then third, days atop Amazon’s best sellers, but as it approaches a full week at the top, it’s emerging as a book with at least some staying power.

The book (full name Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America), which was published by Threshold Editions, is described as such:

Mark R. Levin’s Liberty and Tyranny made the most persuasive case for conservatism and against statism in a generation. In this most crucial time, this leading conservative thinker explores the psychology, motivations, and history of the utopian movement, its architects, and its modern day disciples – and how the individual and American society are being devoured by it.

In Ameritopia: The Unmaking of America Levin asks, what is this utopian force that both allures a free people and destroys them? In the end, Levin’s message is clear: The American republic is in great peril. The people must now choose between utopianism or liberty.

The book has been out just three full days (not including an additional stay on the best seller list for pre-orders of about 26 days), and yet shockingly there are already nearly 900 reviews, working out to an impressive (for a polarizing political book) four-star average. Perhaps not shockingly, about 97 percent of those reviews give it either the highest rating (five stars) or the lowest rating (one star). Ideological battles ensue amongst reviewers—the most recent (three-star) reviewer alleges that none of the negative reviewers are Amazon Verified Purchasers of the book—but this is all par for the course with political treatises.

Check it out below:

Hank Haney & Tiger Woods | rightonpar.com

Tiger Woods is “none too pleased” that former coach Hank Haney has written a Tiger tell-all (a designation Haney and publishers reject, although PR efforts suggest otherwise), say sportswriters.

ESPN’s Bob Harig reports that Woods consented to a phone interview today in which he said Haney’s decision to publish the details of their personal and professional relationships was “unprofessional” and a violation of “their working relationship, their friendship,” adding that he believes Haney’s motives were “all about making money and self-serving.”

Harig says that while Woods was “more disappointed than angry, more hurt than mad,” he is nonetheless “upbeat” about his golfing future, which is focused on prepping for Augusta. His next event is the European Tour next week in Abu Dhabi.

A lot has been written about Woods, particularly in the aftermath of the fateful family breakup in the wake of his cheating scandal, and yet, as Harig argues, “Nobody is going to feel sorry for Tiger Woods.”

Johnny Ramone, who is one of the founding members of the Ramones and widely considered one of the greatest (electric) guitar players of all time, can be rediscovered posthumuously with the April 1^st release of his autobiography Commando: The Autobiography of Johnny Ramone.

The WSJ points out that that his widow, Linda Ramone, says Johnny was inspired to write the book when he was diagnosed with cancer, adding:

Johnny’s legacy to him was so important, even while he was sick. … It was like he knew he was dying, and he wanted to do something.

Ramone died in 2004 at age 55 of prostate cancer, and Linda explains that the delay owed to her other efforts to keep his memory alive:

She said several factors were responsible for the delay in the book’s release, including lawsuits involving the band after Ramone died and other projects she was undertaking for his fans.

“Between all those years of doing different things for his legacy, I always had the book. But there was never the right time for the book,” she said.

It’s 176 pages, complete with many of his thoughts and quotations, as well as images chosen by his widow, who hopes to later come out with another picture book. She hopes someday the press will lead to a biopic.

The foreword will be written by Tommy Ramone and the epilogue by Lisa Marie Presley.

Here’s what else you can expect:

It includes Ramone’s musings from his childhood to his struggle with cancer. It also features other personal stories, including the attack on him that left him hospitalized, his altercation with Malcolm McLaren and his romance with Linda, who once dated Joey Ramone, the Ramones’ frontman, leading to a yearslong rift between the two musicians.

“It’s whatever people make out of it. I guess it was some sort of love triangle — Joey, Johnny and me. It happened, and of course he talks about it and he talks about how he feels about it,” Linda said. “The three of us all probably have a different story, but this is Johnny’s story.”

Pre-order below.

apple.com/education

In a followup to a previous story, Apple’s much-anticipated publishing media event was held today in New York, and the literary, academic and technology worlds are all abuzz.

Among the many announcements made today, not including those still being made, is the update and release of the iBooks app. That’s right: iBooks 2 is available today in the App Store for both iPhone or iPad. If you’re used to the iOS platform, you’ll be familiar with developments like the ability to highlight, make notes on, or define text, but Wired says iBooks 2 will add the ability to switch between text and multimedia simply by rotating the device and automatically converting notes and annotations into one set of index cards for later review.

Other reveals include the release of iBook Author, a free, Mac-only program with which authors can have complete control over the layout of their graphics and text. And for those concerned the technology will be a bridge too far, there are said to be “preview” and “publish” buttons for those satisfied with their soon-to-be publication.

Last time I reported that McGraw-Hill was known to be on board with the digitization of school textbooks, but sources have confirmed that textbook giants Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Pearson are also making offerings in the new Textbooks component of the online store.

A WSJ article today noted that students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus spend an average of $1140 on books and supplies each year, so students who’d like to make the switch to digital will be pleased to find books for as little as $14.99 or less. Oh, and yes, many have the ability to be updated without further charge. How well-received will that news be to students who bought a print textbook second-hand only to discover it was an obsolete edition, and that they must buy a new one?

Other announcements include the transformation of iTunes U into what Wired calls a “full-fledged learning management app”:

Teachers can post materials from syllabi to assignments, blog entries and updates, and everything else they need in order to communicate with students — on top of incorporating iBooks 2 and iTunes U audio/video content.

If you’re more of a visual person, watch the seven and a half minute video Apple created for the event:

And don’t forget to check out Apple’s freshly-updated interactive education subsite here.