Litopia After Dark this week has a new format.  Buoyed up by the roaring success of our Summer Specials (thank you all for your wonderful feedback) we’ve incorporated a few of your favourite segments into the regular show.  This week not only do we discuss why there are so few males in the Publishing business, we also play Pitch The Nasty Agent.  Amazon gobbles up yet another massive internet company -  Shelfari, a social networking startup for book lovers – and we chat about our  experience of internet bookshelves before tackling Litopia’s Cry For Help – solving a problem sent in by one of our listeners.  Also a new book by Sarah Lyall called A Field Guide to the British, the the writing week in 60 seconds and the most fun you can have on a Podcast… Toad Suck, Arkansas, Reverse Shuffle Six Card Strip Pokerette (aren’t you even slightly intrigued…?)

On the panel this week are Dave Bartram, Donna Ballman, Eve Harvey and our very special guest, polymath Brian Clegg author of The Global Warming Survival Guide and Upgrade Me.

The Ustream Chatroom (8pm GMT) provided intelligent contributions as ever.  Come along next week and tell us what you think.

Links mentioned in the show…

Nilanjana S. Roy in the Business Standard…

If I had ten bucks for every time a journalist has asked me recently about the rise of women in Indian publishing, my bank account would be pleasantly plump by now.

The argument goes something like this:

1) There are now far more women in key positions in Indian publishing, demonstrating that we have stormed this male bastion

2) This will make publishing a less sexist industry, change the nature of the business and encourage women writers.

The truth is slightly different, as a group of us were discussing at a party for Women in Publishing. Fifteen to twenty years ago, publishing was seen as a gentleman’s game: most editors and CEOs were male and most of them, as Zubaan’s Urvashi Butalia noted, came from a public school background. The workplace may not have been aggressively sexist, but it was not especially supportive of women, either.

If you look at the scenario today, women occupy key editorial positions in most publishing houses, from Penguin India to OUP. The chief editors at Scholastic, Random House, HarperCollins, Picador and my own company, Westland, are all women. This would seem to indicate a massive shift in attitudes, and a more “feminised” workplace.

On seattlepi.com, John Cook’s Venture Blog…

Exclusive: Amazon.com buys Shelfari

Amazon.com is buying Shelfari, the Seattle social networking startup for book lovers, according to sources with knowledge of the situation.

The deal comes about three weeks after Amazon.com acquired AbeBooks, which holds an equity stake in Shelfari’s main rival, LibraryThing. Amazon.com already owned a portion of Shelfari, which received the funding from the online retailer and angel investors in February 2007.

There’s no love lost between Shelfari and LibraryThing, with LibraryThing founder Tim Spalding calling Shelfari a “bad actor” for engaging in what he called a massive campaign of astroturfing.” (That’s the practice of planting positive comments about a service on blogs.)

Spalding said he came up with more than 50 examples, writing in a blog post that “it’s icky to … go on and on about how much you ‘love’ Shelfari without mentioning you’re paid by them.”

In another post, Spalding accused Shelfari of being an unethical spammer. Shelfari apologized and fixed the problems.

It is unclear what Amazon.com plans to do with its equity stake in LibraryThing. (Update: Spalding declined to comment when I reached out to him this afternoon.)

In the New York Times, Matt Weiland…

It may be a truism that Britain and America are two nations divided by a common language, but it’s truer to say that the two nations are united by language and divided by everything else. These differences — of manners, mores, assumptions, expectations — are the subject of “The Anglo Files,” by Sarah Lyall, a re­porter for The New York Times. A New Yorker by origin and temperament, Lyall married an Englishman (the editor and writer Robert McCrum) and moved to London in the mid-1990s. “The Anglo Files” collects and expands on Lyall’s dispatches from her adopted home in the decade and a half since then. The result is what she calls a “field guide to the British.”

Lyall is a first-rate reporter, and her book has all the hallmarks of her journalism: it is warm, blunt, confessional, companionable. Which is to say: it is very American. The country she describes, “that oldest and most charismatic of nation-states,” as the writer Jan Morris once called it, is cold, private, oblique to the point of opacity and reticent to the point of silence. Which is to say: it is very British. The book’s charm lies in the collision of these two facts.

Lyall organizes “The Anglo Files” around lean case studies of British institutions (Parliament, cricket, drink) and traits (love of liberty and animals, obsession with the weather). She recounts, for example, the 2003 battle on the Hebridean island of North Uist between hedgehog lovers and wading-bird enthusiasts over an invasion of hedgehogs, which eat the birds’ eggs. Lyall makes plain not just the passion of British animal lovers, but their organizational zeal: Scottish Natural Heritage, the British Hedgehog Preservation Society, Uist Hedgehog Rescue and the Uist Wader Project fought for years before agreeing the alien hedgehogs should be airlifted back to the mainland rather than killed.

Download the show as mp3 file

Photo by Panda Evans

Filed under Litopia After Dark. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.