Right now, right today, right this minute, only one book matters in Canada - in both the news media and in the blog-o-sphere.
It is tiny and it is virtual, the very antithesis of the tradition that a book's newsworthiness could be literally weighed on a set of luggage scales.
No 1000 page hardcover published by a big name publisher and featured in bricks'n/mortar bookstores, this work is only 46 pages long (or so they say - because on the internet, no one knows you are a page) and being a virtual ebook, is about as massive as the elusive Higgs boson.
So what is driving the media & blogger frenzy ?
The old fundamentals : content, content, content.
Paula Todd's book title, "Finding Karla Homolka" * , would be story enough in Canada, with about 120% of the Canadian population interested in knowing the whereabouts of the notorious serial killer.
But the kicker is in the subtitle, as Paula finds the ex-con now a mother of three healthy kids.
Todd discovered the elusive Karla on her own - scooping the big media - something we bloggers can all cheer on.
It is true Todd was once a reporter with Canada's biggest private media empire (CTV/Bell Media) so she was no lonewolf freelancer, but rather a well-connected freelancer, but still her story does add a certain frisson to all of us working outside "the bricks and mortar media".....
* The ebook is published by Canadian Writers group, which bills itself as a literary agency for freelancers , not as a publisher (!!!!!!!!)
On Oct 16th 1940, Gotham's concrete jungle rescued the NATURAL penicillin stone its (British) builders had rejected and gave the world's first antibiotic shot. Alexander Fleming's ARTIFICIAL penicillin (ironically from leafy green Oxford !) won a Nobel but failed morally and technically. Instead Manhattan Natural radiated hope to a world tired, huddled and wretched. On its 75th, let's remind terrorist Ramzi Yousef about a Manhattan project that saved far more lives than the A-Bomb ever killed.
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