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The diary of a nobody is a pleasure for everybody

New technology means that anyone can now publish an autobiography.

A recent item of American publishing news should prompt a surge of excitement among frustrated scribblers. Amazon has purchased BookSurge, a business specialising in "on-demand printing". Sounds arcane? Consider the significance.

For years, authors unable to find a commercial outlet have been obliged to pay specialist firms for the privilege of "vanity publication". Yet new technology makes it possible to print very short runs of books - even single copies - and to price these comparably with mass-produced commercial titles. Equally important, online traders can tap niche markets inaccessible to on-street booksellers - hence Amazon's takeover ... Guardian Unlimited

High Noon approaching for Google and academic publishers

Google is heading for a possible showdown with academic publishers according to an article in the latest issue of Nature. It seems that while Google has committed itself to putting the contents of the world's great academic libraries online, it has yet to get the agreement of the publishers of copyrighted works ... MacUser

'Collapse': How the World Ends

Eight years ago Jared Diamond realized what is, for authors, increasingly a fantasy - he published a serious, challenging and complex book that became a huge commercial success. ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' won a Pulitzer Prize, then sold a million copies, astonishing for a 480-page volume of archeological speculation on how the world reached its present ordering of nations. Now he has written a sequel, ''Collapse,'' which asks whether present nations can last. Taken together, ''Guns, Germs, and Steel'' and ''Collapse'' represent one of the most significant projects embarked upon by any intellectual of our generation. They are magnificent books: extraordinary in erudition and originality, compelling in their ability to relate the digitized pandemonium of the present to the hushed agrarian sunrises of the far past. I read both thinking what literature might be like if every author knew so much, wrote so clearly and formed arguments with such care. All of which makes the two books exasperating, because both come to conclusions that are probably wrong ... New York Times > Books

Illustration: Lou Beach

China publishes first comprehensive archaeology books

China today published the first two volumes in a series on Chinese archaeology, the first of its kind which will sum up the theories and discoveries in the subject, the state media reported.

The classics will include volumes of introduction, the Palaeolithic Period, the New Stone Age, the Xia and Shang dynasties, Western and Eastern Zhou dynasties, Qin and Han dynasties, Wei and Jin and Southern and Northern dynasties, Sui and Tang dynasties, and the Song, Liao, Jin, Yuan and Ming dynasties ... New Kerala

A Fantasy Field Trip to Jurassic Park

A Conversation With Richard Ellis.

The career of Richard Ellis advances the maxim that scientific knowledge is often moved forward by the work of committed amateurs.

Mr. Ellis, an unpaid member of the paleontology department at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, where he has an office, researches the habitat, activities and daily lives of animals, past and present.

He then weaves that research into books, 14 so far, that describe and illustrate what he has learned.

Extinct species - and how they got that way - is the subject of his latest effort, "No Turning Back: The Life and Death of Animal Species" ... New York Times

Global warming? Now that really is fiction

Interview: Jasper Gerard meets Michael Crichton.

A giant wave envelops a tropical island. Victims scramble for survival. The world watches in horror. Michael Crichton has a knack for novels that are of the moment, but never has his fiction collided so savagely and swiftly with reality. Until now, with State of Fear, the Jurassic Park author’s latest blockbuster.

As befits one of the world’s top-selling authors, there is a monster twist in the book. So while the real tsunami was a product of nature, Crichton’s fictional one was started secretly by obsessive environmentalists trying to frighten the world into believing that global warming is about to cause the apocalypse.

For after three years of painstaking research, the father of the techno-thriller believes he has reached a shocking conclusion: global warming is hot air ... Times Online

Slaughter in the American West

Review by Lawrence Straus:

Survival by Hunting: Prehistoric Human Predators and Animal Prey. George C. Frison. xx + 266 pp. University of California Press, 2004. $34.95.

George Frison is an original of American archaeology, a towering figure in the field of Plains prehistory. His fascinating and instructive new book, Survival by Hunting, is part personal memoir, part overview of Paleoindian adaptations, and part guide to the hunting of Pleistocene and Holocene mammals on the High Plains and in the Rocky Mountains ... American Scientist Online

Google Library

As has been reported quite widely, Google has begun a massive digitization project with five libraries:

* Stanford University (all 8M)
* University of Michigan (all 7M)
* Harvard University (pilot of 40,000 out of 15M)
* New York Public Library (pilot; expand to 20M)
* Oxford's Bodleian Library (1M public domain)

The total covered by existing agreements is said to be 15 million. Each is estimated to cost $10 to scan. Stanford's scanning unit is said to be able to do 100,000 pages a day. Oxford's scanning unit is said to be able to do 10,000 books per week. If all of them are that speed then by my math it will take a little over five years to scan them all. Similarly, the University of Michigan says the project will take six years ... Google Weblog

The Pursuit of Knowledge, From Genesis to Google

One warm afternoon in the late 19th century, two middle-aged office clerks met on the same bench of the Boulevard Bourdon in Paris and immediately became the best of friends. Bouvard and Pécuchet (the names Gustave Flaubert gave to his two comic heroes) discovered through their friendship a common purpose: the pursuit of universal knowledge. To achieve this ambitious goal, they attempted to read everything they could find on every branch of human endeavor and, from their readings, cull the most outstanding facts and ideas. Flaubert's death in 1880 put an end to their enterprise, which was in essence endless, but not before the two brave explorers had read their way through many learned volumes on agriculture, literature, animal husbandry, medicine, archeology and politics, always with disappointing results. What Flaubert's two clowns discovered is what we have always known but seldom believed: that the accumulation of knowledge isn't knowledge ... The New York Times

Google borrows books from leading libraries

Books from some of the world's largest academic libraries are to be scanned and made instantly searchable by Google.

The internet search engine has revealed plans to scan the whole of Michigan and Stanford University libraries, along with some archives at Harvard University and the New York Public Library, all in the US, as well as archives at Oxford University library in the UK.

Google has developed its own technology for scanning books rapidly and in a way that will not physically harm fragile old texts. Details have not been disclosed but Google spokesman Fabio Selmoni describes it as "a combination of digital and mechanical technology" ... New Scientist Breaking News