Google is offering free downloads of out-of-copyright classics.

The publishers quoted in the piece poo-poo the economic impact of this move, as they probably will with every move Google and others make to shift the publishing landscape, but this is a nice big step down the road to a more digital culture. If I were in college and facing ridiculous fees for overpriced textbooks, I'd be thanking Google and ordering an extra large pizza.

If you missed Sarah Inman on C-Span Sunday, you can watch her here. She raised the issue of "secession" — a hot topic among some New Orleanians but little reported on and usually just dismissed (as the panel does here) — equated New Orleans with the Third World and pondered aloud whether the fact that she gets more unwanted sexual advances in New Orleans than elsewhere says more about her or the city. Plus, she propped up our beautiful little book throughout the whole panel. Makes a publisher proud.

Update: Sarah's bit starts around the 21:45 mark.

A year has passed but the world isn't forgetting New Orleans and Katrina just yet.

For what it's worth, New Orleans has been at the top of Buzztracker for the last four days. Eclipsing the usually unseatable champions Baghdad and Gaza as the focal point of world news.

Buzztracker 8/27
Buzztracker 8/28
Buzztracker 8/29
Buzztracker 8/30

In honor of this most unfortunate anniversary, even sister site cannedcoffee.com has turned to New Orleans. Rex Noone, author of the lagniappe in Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?, discusses his very troubled city while sipping an iced coffee from Starbucks.

Over on Voices of New Orleans, David Rutledge writes about the loss of an American city.

And finally, Jason Berry, author of Last of the Red Hot Poppas, has this to say in today's Boston Globe.

To all those people on the Gulf Coast who had their houses or loved ones washed away from the broken levees or who have been trying to repair your lives despite the broken promises of our government and the sickening nonchalance of our leaders, to all those people who feel forgotten and alone, we send our prayers from our one-room office in a Seattle warehouse district. We Americans have to do better. We just have to.

Sarah Inman and David Rutledge will be at the Sheraton on Canal Street this Sunday from 2 to 6:30 as part of a big event hosted by the New Orleans press club to honor the writers who produced works after Katrina. The event, called "The Katrina Collection: An Afternoon of Authors," will start with a book signing and end with back-to-back one-hour forums where the public can pose questions to the authors. Sarah will be representing Chin Music Press and Do You Know ... at the forums, and both Dave and Sarah will be at the signings.

C-Span is planning to air the forums live, so check in at 2:15 PST (4:15 in New Orleans) to hear Sarah Inman talk about Katrina, life in New Orleans and her favorite antidepressant (hint: starts with an X).

The late great Governor Rex LaSalle and his cohorts arrived safely in the US after a harrowing week stuck in a container with agitated bomb-sniffing dogs nearby.

For Rex — the fictional guvna of Looziana featured in Jason Berry's new novel, Last of the Red Hot Poppas — it was just another crazy week in an event-filled life (and death). We're hoping the trips from here to our distributor and to bookstores nationwide in the next couple of weeks are boring as sin for Rex and the gang. Then our beautiful little book can sit seductively on the shelves and call out to you to touch, flip through and ultimately read it.

And just for good measure, writer Lee Smith sent us this comment on the book today that we think sums up Jason's work very nicely:

"Both wildly entertaining and deadly serious, Last of the Red Hot Poppas is a fabulous read — nobody understands Louisiana politics (and its larger-than-life characters) better than Jason Berry. I couldn't put this one down."

So look for Poppas to appear in your bookstores in early September. Or if you just can't wait (as Rex would tell you, life is just too short to dally), order directly from us and get free shipping until the end of the month.

Yes, I know it's Tuesday. I overslept. This week's canned coffee review is by Sera Bright.

Review a can of Japanese coffee? Sure. But first, can I tell you a little story, which may or may not contain little fibs? OK, so there's this guy, and he's an aggressive, salesy, type-A type fellow. A real, what's the word, jackass. A jack of all asses. This guy, he makes everyone nervous, not least of all because of his face issues. Turns out "he ain't got no frickin' eyebrows," as the haggard, smoker's laugh woman who works at the gas station put it, which, combined with his bossiness, puts people on their heels to say the least.

Keep reading at cannedcoffee.com.

Anybody interested in Spike Lee's new documentary on New Orleans airing on HBO next Monday and Tuesday should check out this review of a live screening in New Orleans. Sounds like Spike's on his game!

We gave up coffee for two months. It was a silly thing to do, we admit, and we hope we don't try it again. But now we're back. And since I am officially banned from posting a canned coffee review, it is with great honor and a tinge of jealousy (but never, ever any irony) that I introduce my brother Dave's first review (and yes, we realize it isn't Monday; we just couldn't wait).

There is a can of coffee, Coca-Cola red with letters in white: “Cafe Coconut.” There is a small apostrophe between the f and the e in “cafe” (for some reason), and no accent on the e. At the top of the can there are the islands of Hawaii, also in white, and a statement, “Made in Hawaii.”

Keep reading at cannedcoffee.com.

A couple of days ago, we sent out the August CMP newsletter. You can see a copy of it here. If you've been subscribing to our mailing list for a while, you'll have noticed that we made the switch from plain text to HTML.

So why the switch to HTML?

Essentially, if you follow some basic guidelines, I think the usefulness of the markup outweighs any of the negative points. I think the end result is easier to read, cleaner and more functional. For a quick comparison before I break the guidelines down, look at this: HTML Version | Text Version

In summary: using HTML in a newsletter should increase readability and functionality.

CMP Guidelines for HTML Newsletters:

• No images


• No link shrink


• Simple markup


• Follow standards


• Use CSS

Why no images?

Well, one of the nicest things about email is its ability to be indexed. Email is wonderful for parsing, cataloging, searching, etc. If you replace what would have been plain text with images, you remove that function.

If you must have images, then there are at the very least two rules to be followed: 1) don't use them to replace what could be text, and 2) don't imbed them in the newsletter. Keep them on a server and reference them as you would images on a normal webpage ([img src="http://image.jpg"]).

Why not imbed images? Because it's poor etiquette — it slows down servers, slows down mail clients and fattens inboxes. Keeping the images on servers means that the burden of the image is placed on the server and not the client. It also means that if the image is removed from the server, it can no longer appear in the newsletter. But even so, as long as critical text is still provided as plain text, then the meaning of the newsletter is retained.

Link shrink
Services like Tiny URL are ostensibly nice when you're sending URLs in plain text (and thereby aren't able to mark them up into links) but, to be honest, I've always felt them to be sneaky. I like to know what I'm clicking on, and I have a feeling a lot of other people out there do too. Since we're using HTML now, there' s no reason to shrink links into small URLs. Keep the original URLs so that even the most paranoid of recipients can, at the very least, right click-copy, and paste the URL into their browser to make sure it's a spam-free link.

As far as simple markup, standards and CSS, this is all to ensure that the newsletter appears as intended on the host machines. Indeed when marking up a newsletter, we should be formatting with a clear purpose in mind: readability and functionality.

One note on the CSS: make sure you use inline CSS. Don't link to an external stylesheet or include styles in the header — this won't work on all mail services. Of my limited testing between Apple's Mail, gmail and another generic web-based mail reader, the only version of the newsletter which looked identical on all three was the inline CSS one. Unfortunately this clutters the markup. But since these newsletters are fairly simple to begin with, I think the universal compatibility is well worth the slight messiness behind the scenes. (View the source on the HTML version to see what I'm talking about.)

Let the newsletter structure dictate the markup. For the CMP newsletter, we broke it down into five sections. From top to bottom: The main headers, contents, body, unsubscribe instructions and links to our projects. Chances are, we'll never need more than this. If you return to the comparison link above, I think you'll find that the non-obtrusive integration of the links into the body of the HTML version is far more functional than embedding links alongside text in parentheses.

So if you're sending HTML newsletters already, maybe it's time to double check and make sure you're keeping it clean, functional and to the point. And if you're doing it hardcode ASCII style, maybe it's time to reconsider HTML.

This came to my attention today while doing some maintenance on Buzztracker — we've broken 1,000,000 indexed articles. 1,094,976 as of 12:45 AM JST to be precise.

A big thanks to everyone who has supported this project and continues to use and find value in it.

Last of the Red Hot Poppas is back from printing! The Poppas sub-site is up and ready for advance orders. It's also stock full of risque book close-ups.

The book has been in our hands now for over a week, and I think it's safe to say the production quality has met and exceeded our high standards. Kohiyama-san over here in Tokyo has been instrumental in pushing the final production through to meet our tight schedule.

Let me just quickly run through a list of things about the book:
1. It's very well made. The binding, the printing, the glue, the bookmark, the size of the signatures, the evenness of the ink ... It's all impeccable. If you were in any way disappointed with the build quality of Do You Know, Poppas goes back into old-school Kuhaku-esque well-madeness. In fact, I think it goes beyond the Kuhaku production quality. If you like well-made books, Poppas will not dissapoint.

2. The poster came out great. Poster?! We worked closely with Leslie Staub to get a great piece of art for the cover. Leslie produced a beautiful painting which everyone who purchases the book gets a full-sized reproduction of — one idea led to another and the cover ended up turning into an intricately folded A2 poster. That's another blog post in and of itself.

3. The papers all work really well together. We ended up using about five different papers in the book (cover, board-covers, end-papers, tobira, body-text) and (to much relief!), it feels singular and natural.

4. Because of all the papers and layers, working your way into this book is a weirdly sensual (in a book-gets-sexy kinda sense) journey in and of itself.

For now, check out the sub-site and don't forget to download the first chapter if you want a sneak peak at Jason Berry's great novel before ordering.