On his coast-to-coast tour, filmmaker D.W. Gibson has learned much about unemployment, weight gain and strange verbs.

Gibson, 33, is part of a three-person crew crossing the country to interview people about the experience of being laid off. Or, to put it in the evasive language of corporations, “surplused,” “ managed out” or “non-reinstated.”

“The terminology is very interesting,” Gibson said.

Read the full article in The Columbus Dispatch

Thirty months before there was Cast Lead, there was the Dahieh War, a sustained assault against Lebanon during which the Israeli military flattened an entire neighborhood of tightly packed high-rises in southern Beirut called simply “the Dahieh” (the suburb.) The vast majority of the 300,000 people who lived until then in the Dahieh had fled before the flattening began, finding shelter in other parts of Lebanon or in neighboring Syria. The inhabitants of Qana, in South Lebanon’s mountainous Jabal ‘Amel region, were not so “lucky”. On July 30, 2006, the Israeli military bombed a house in Qana in which scores of civilians had sought refuge: Some 60 of them were killed, including at least 19 children.

We are now approaching the fifth anniversary of that massacre in Qana. (Tragically, the village had suffered an eerily similar tragedy during a precursor Israeli assault, ten years earlier.)

Read more in Mondoweiss

The U.S. Department of Labor reports the unemployment rate is 9.2 percent nationwide. In Missouri it’s 10.3 percent. The problem continues. A.N.Y. Based Film crew is in St. Louis this week documenting the history and stories of the unemployed.

D.W. Gibson is one of those behind the film, “America Not Working” and David Greenwalt is from The Go Network, a St. Louis group trying to put people back to work. For more info, email dwmgibson@yahoo.com or visit their website, America Not Working.com

Watch DW Gibson on FOX 2 St. Louis

When we talk about global warming, much of the debate centers on separating facts from fluff, and environmental activist Bill McKibben wants to set the record straight. The Global Warming Reader, a book edited by McKibben and out this month from OR Books, pulls together seminal texts of the climate change debate, with the goal of creating a complete picture of what we know about global warming. Selections range from a 19th century treatise to images from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and include a few unexpected gems, like Senate floor statements from climate change denier James Inhofe (R-Okla.).

I spoke to McKibben about his history with climate change literature, his ongoing battle against ExxonMobil, and, in the face of dismal environmental realities, how he avoids the temptation to curl up in a little ball on the floor.

Read the full interview on Grist

Start with The Dawn of Conscience by James Henry Breasted. It’s old, but then what it deals with is even older! It’s a brilliant introduction to ancient Egyptian life and thought – and its continued relevance today. The Crusades Through Arab Eyes (Saqi £14.95) by eminent Lebanese author Amin Maalouf is a great read. Take care though: it’s not the angle that western readers are used to. Everyone should read one Naguib Mahfouz novel. In English, Miramar is the one I’d go for.

Egypt: The Moment of Change (Zed £16.99) edited by Rabab El Mahdi and Philip Marfleet – this provides an excellent background and interpretation of today’s Egyptian revolution. Tweets from Tahrir edited by Alex Nunns and Nadia Idle will take you right up to the present and give you a sense of the Egyptian revolution as it unfolded.

Read the rest in The Guardian

From the moment she booked her flight Nadia Idle must have known that what she was doing was neither logical nor sensible. Why else tell only one friend? Why else e-mail her boss at War on Want only a few hours before take-off, unless she worried that the cool analysis of others might take the certainty out of the situation?

After two weeks of watching live television images from Tahrir Square, Idle, an Egyptian living in London, could view events from a distance no more. She had to be there. And so, on the night of February 7, she booked her flight and went, leaving only cursory crumbs to guide those who might wonder where.

Meanwhile, Alex Nunns, a writer, musician and political correspondent for Red Pepper magazine, watched in London. It wasn’t the live television footage from cameras stationed on top of buildings overlooking the square that transfixed him. It wasn’t the news reporters and network anchors who had flown from around the world, to set up camp on hotel balconies and describe events that, even then, seemed hardly credible.

What he found compelling were the words coming directly from the people in the square via Twitter. Their tweets offered an instant, emotional and personal connection.

Read more at The National

When we talk about global warming, much of the debate centers on separating facts from fluff, and environmental activist and Mother Jones contributor Bill McKibben wants to set the record straight. The Global Warming Reader, a book edited by McKibben and out this month from OR Books, pulls together seminal texts of the climate change debate with the goal of creating a complete picture of what we know about global warming. Selections range from a 19th-century treatise to images from Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, and include a few unexpected gems like Senate floor statements from climate change denier James Inhofe (R-Okla.).

I spoke to McKibben about his history with climate change literature, his ongoing battle against ExxonMobil, and, in the face of dismal environmental realities, how he avoids the temptation to curl up in a little ball on the floor.

Read the full interview at Mother Jones

The Transom recently learned that Emily Gould—former employee of publishing house Hyperion, blogger at Gawker, memoirist, and New York Times Magazine cover-writer—is setting out on a venture with close friend Ruth Curry to sell e-books, online, through an e-tail site called Emily Books.

Readers with long memories and obsessive streaks might recall Ms. Curry as Ms. Gould’s supportive best friend in Ms. Gould’s New York Times Magazine cover story about life on the Internet. They shared a secret blog about relationships! And it was Ms. Curry who recently emailed publishers at OR Books, an independent publishing concern that prints books on demand and specializes in e-books. Company co-founder John Oakes told the Transom that Ms. Curry’s email read in part: “Our goal is to be super-specialized and targeted and to build an audience that trusts us.”

Read more at The New York Observer

As all aspects of book publishing become digitized, synthesized, and aggregated through metadata systems, it should come as no surprise that galleys are following suit—even the coveted advanced reader’s copies and uncorrected proofs of yore are taking on a new, digital form.

Carrying the torch in the e-galley revolution is NetGalley, a company owned by Firebrand Technologies, that helps facilitate and fulfill galley requests from site members by providing them with DRM-protected files authorized through Adobe Digital Editions and accessible on Androids and iPhones, desktop computers, and multiple tablets and e-reading platforms. Through the site, members composed of reviewers, media professionals, bloggers, librarians, booksellers, and educators can peruse NetGalley’s available titles, which are provided by over 100 publishers (and counting), including divisions/imprints from four of the Big Six houses. Members can select titles, and NetGalley serves as gatekeeper, passing along requests to publishers for approval (their website even clearly outlines approval guidelines for each publisher). Publishers can set expiration dates for when the galleys will no longer be available, and NetGalley also supports the aggregation of other digital promotional items like video, audio, or artwork under any title’s record page so that publishers can easily create digital media kits for readers to access along with the galley.

Read more at Publishing Trends

On his application to get into journalism school at New York City’s prestigious Columbia University, DW Gibson said he wanted to be the next Studs Terkel, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning career included “Working,” an oral history of working people.

Gibson’s doing it now, but with a different twist.

“Not Working” will be the title of the book he writes upon completing a cross-country road trip with boyhood friend MJ Sieber, who runs a theater company in Seattle. They are collaborating on a companion film about people they meet, all over this land, who have lost jobs in the Great Recession.

Part of the time, they will be accompanied by mutual friend and playwright Mallery Avidon. She already has contributed haikus on folks they’ve encountered in California and Nevada. One example: “Sandra’s eye wilted/ Home Care Nurse one week notice/ She is fifty-six.”

Read more at The Salt Lake Tribune

OR Books will publish a new multimedia project called Not Working–author D.W. Gibson‘s book-length oral history with film and audio segments.

The video embedded above introduces the project. Gibson will travel around the United States and interview people who have been laid off during the recession. His subjects will range from hourly-wage earners to entrepreneurial executives.

Read more at GalleyCat

On Tuesday, June 21, the latest in the Digital Book World/Publishers Weekly Webcast series featured a discussion about e-book distribution for small publishers. The panelists were John Oakes, cofounder of the digital-first startup OR Books; Tom Woll, president of Cross River Publishing Consultants, Inc.; and Adam Salomone, associate publisher of The Harvard Common Press. Matthew Mullin of DBW moderated.

The first part of the discussion was about digitization, and Salomone started by recommending a conversion partner for small publishers when developing digital content. Salomone explained that your partner should be familiar with your product. At Harvard Common Press, for example, cookbooks are its primary titles, so they chose a partner that was familiar with digitizing cookbooks. Salomone continued by saying that it’s crucial for small publishers to ask their conversion partner for conversion samples, and that to expect at least two back-and-forths and a four week timeline for the process.

Read more at Publisher’s Weekly

In our first exciting episode posted yesterday, I discussed things that were, in my judgment, receiving a disproportionate amount of discussion and attention from the publishing community. We seem to have a desire to discuss cool, sexy and more futuristic topics than those that are essential to getting us from here to there. The difference between the two is that the more practical matters involve a lot of hard, ‘dirty-fingernail’ work in the belly of the beast that are not sexy at all.

Today, I’ll point to a handful of things that are critical for us to be figuring out (and in most cases doing NOW) to position ourselves for success now and in whatever future unfolds. None of these is a silver bullet, but taken together and shaped to individual publishers’ specific situations, they can help keep us moving ahead as the ground continues to shift without betting the company on some specific outcome. All bear discussion in search of workable solutions that are more broadly applicable than only to the Big Six.

Read more at baitnbeer.com

OR Books and DW Gibson are proud to be launching Not Working, a multimedia project that will include a book-length oral history as well as ongoing film and audio segments.

Beginning on June 22, Gibson will spend the summer and early fall travelling across the US, beginning in Orange County, California, finishing in Camden, New Jersey. Accompanied by a videographer, he will interview individuals who have become unemployed as a result of the economic downturn over the last three years. Interviews will center on each person’s story of losing a job: the Friday visit to HR, the form letter, the pointed email, the profane text, the security escort. Gibson will visit epicenters of the recession such as Fresno, California; Reno, Nevada; Kansas City, Missouri; and Columbus, Ohio.

The project is a response to Stud Terkel’s seminal book Working, first published in 1972. Familiarity with Terkel’s book will absolutely enhance one’s interest in this project, but it is by no means a prerequisite. Not Working communicates on its own. By presenting the voices and faces of those affected, it reveals the Great American Recession not just as a set of statistics or a political debating point but as an intensely human tragedy that is sweeping the country.

“The reactions that DW is capturing so effectively are filled with emotion – the tension, humor, sadness and anger associated with losing one’s job are all starkly present,” says OR Books co-publisher Colin Robinson.“These personal close-ups are the essence of the project.” Interviews will feature those who have lost their job because of economic considerations, not poor job performance. These are workers who have been “let go” by forces beyond their will, ability, and sense of commitment. Those interviewed come from all levels of responsibility and income: from hourly wage earners to executives, with every tax bracket in between.

Unemployment affects the majority of Americans, directly or indirectly, and it is an issue that will certainly be central to the 2012 elections. Some interviews have been arranged before the cross-country trip begins; others will be found along the way. This project will operate in real time, capturing every place and life it enters on film, in sound and on the page.

Not Working will be published as a book in the early spring of 2012 by OR Books.

On Tuesday, January 25, 2011, Egyptians were scheduled to enjoy a national holiday: Police Day. But rather than being fêted by a grateful populace, Egypt’s police spent January 25 facing the greatest challenge to their authority in living memory. In accordance with a pre-arranged strategy, citizens began protesting at scattered sites across the city and attempted to converge at Tahrir Square in the heart of downtown. A sufficient number reached Tahrir that the police were thrown into a defensive posture from which they would never recover. Egypt’s so-called January 25 Revolution had begun, and its first stage would end less than three weeks later with the stunning resignation of President Hosni Mubarak. As a long-time resident of Egypt (I’ve taught philosophy at the American University in Cairo since 2000), I was astonished by these events. But I witnessed them primarily from abroad, having left for India via Bahrain on January 12, on a badly needed winter vacation. For this reason I, like most Americans, followed the events of this internet-triggered revolution largely on the internet itself.

Read the rest at The LA Review of Books

OR Books, the e-book and POD-only startup that sells direct-to-consumer, has entered into a partnership with Just World Books, a similar startup POD publishing house specializing in serious nonfiction, launched by jounalist Helena Cobban in 2010. OR Books will provide JWB with production, marketing and rights sales and assist JWB in speeding up the growth of its e-book list.

Read the rest at Publishers Weekly

OR Books and Just World Books are pleased to announce a strategic cooperation agreement that will extend the reach of the two companies and improve their efficiency.

Both publishers share a commitment to timely and high-quality turnaround of manuscripts with a strong focus on current affairs and international issues. They achieve this through publishing exclusively in print-on-demand paperbacks and e-books, and selling direct to the reader via extensive internet promotion. Under the agreement, OR Books will assist JWB in the production, marketing and rights sales of its titles.

OR Books began publishing in the fall of 2009 with its first title Going Rouge: Sarah Palin – An American Nightmare, which became a New York Times bestseller. Since then, it has published books by Gordon Lish, Raja Shehadeh, Micah Sifry, Norman Finkelstein, Laura Flanders and Douglas Rushkoff, among others. It s latest book Tweets from Tahrir was described by the New York Times as “a feat of nearly real-time publishing.” Next month it will release The Global Warming Reader, edited by Bill McKibben. It is run by John Oakes and Colin Robinson, who formed the company in 2009 to exploit the possibilities offered by new digital printing, ebook, and distribution technologies.

Just World Books (JWB) was founded in 2010 by Helena Cobban, a long-time writer and blogger on international affairs who contributed a long-running column to The Christian Science Monitor. The most recent of JWB’s five titles is Food, Farming, and Freedom: Sowing the Arab Spring by Lebanese agronomy specialist and social activist Rami Zurayk. JWB’s other authors include veteran diplomatist Chas W. Freeman, Jr, and Afghan-affairs specialist Joshua Foust.

Cobban notes that the new cooperation agreement allows JWB to mesh its activities with several important aspects of OR’s publishing operations: “OR Books shares with Just World a strong commitment to books of cutting-edge social and political relevance. I think their list is amazing! But we have important complementarities, too, when it comes to how to publish. Independently, we each arrived at the same sort of model for making books work in the 21st century – selling direct, only producing books once they have a customer, and promoting heavily. I value the savvy Colin and John have accumulated during their extensive careers in New York and London and am looking forward to working with them and their team.”

For their part, Oakes and Robinson say they greatly admire the program JWB has published to date and appreciate the value of the range of international contacts Cobban has brought into JWB from her long career in journalism. “The new model of book publishing is going to be far less territorially restricted and more global than the business has been hitherto,” Oakes said. “We have already achieved significant book sales around the world, as well as a robust presence in the foreign rights market, but we think Helena can help us strengthen that. We are very excited about working with her and JWB going forward.”

[Beyond the Pale] talks with Raja Shehadeh about his great uncle Najib Nasser, whose opposition to the Ottomon Empire’s entry into WWI on the size of the Germans led him to flee his home and travel through the region of the great Rift Valley (today divided among the states of Israel and its Occupied Territories, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan). In A Rift in Time, Shehadeh traces his great uncle’s footsteps and experiences both a temporal and geographic rift.

Hear the interview at Beyond the Pale

Tweets from Tahrir , a small paperback containing — mostly — English-language tweets sent by people on the ground in Cairo during this winter’s Egyptian uprising is unexpectedly poignant and moving, and even exciting and suspenseful in places.

Obviously only a small minority of those in Tahrir Square were tweeting in English (and a larger minority were tweeting at all), but through this book, a picture of Twitter as a means of quickly bridging together different constituencies emerges — not everyone was tweeting, but everyone knew people who were tweeting, whether they were in the Square, discovering what was going on elsewhere among the hundreds of thousands of people; or elsewhere in Cairo and wondering if they should take to the streets; or watching from around the world. Twitter, text messages, Facebook and phone calls became a way of shaping the narrative, rebutting the official state media, arguing about the purpose and character of the uprising, and deciding when to hold fast and when to retreat. You get a real sense of Twitter as a thin, somewhat unreliable nervous system that nevertheless turns a crowd into a group capable of explicitly negotiating its actions rather than simply surging to and fro.

Read the rest on Boing Boing!

(via The Rumpus)

The book gives you a chance to enter back into instantaneity. That this is nerve-wracking, moving and insightful rather than tedious is because of the quality of the authors but even more, I imagine, the ability of the editors, Nadia Idle and Alex Nunns. A book of tweets sounds like a dumb idea but isn’t at all. It is not going to replace other types of memory, whether an Egyptian-revolution PowerPoint or, say, the excellent Roula Khalaf’s reporting trip back to Tunisia in The Financial Times last Saturday.

Read more in The New York Times Magazine

There was a time when it was possible for Jews and Arabs to live together peacefully in Palestine and to intermarry. Both groups are Semites and share more similarities than they have been willing to acknowledge. Not anymore. Now those who try to cross the line have to pay a heavy price that sometimes costs them their life as has been the case of the actor and director Juliano Mer-Khamis who was killed earlier this month.

Read more on The Hill

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Watch the segment!

PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature presents

Revolutionaries in the Arab World

Featuring Rula Jebreal (Miral), Issandr El Amrani (The Arabist), Adbelkader Benali, Alex Nunns (editor of Tweets from Tahrir), and Abdellah Taia

Wednesday, April 27, 7:30 p.m.

92nd Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center, 1395 Lexington Ave., New York City

This panel will explore the sweeping political changes in the Arab world. Hear from experts and on-the-ground bloggers how social media and citizen journalism galvanize the revolution. In the borderless world of the Internet, where revolutionary ideas spread at lightning speed, will other despotic regimes collapse? Which ones? And how does an autocracy transition into a democracy, and at what cost? Alex Nunns, editor of Tweets from Tahrir (O/R Books) — a collection of key tweets from the activists who brought heady days of revolution to Egypt in early 2011 — will be joined by Palestinian author/journalist Rula Jebreal (Miral), blogger Issandr El Amrani (The Arabist), Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia, and Moroccan-Dutch writer Adbelkader Benali to tackle these urgent questions. For more info

Tickets: $20/$15 PEN Members, students with valid ID. Call (866) 811-4111 or visit ovationstix

Co-sponsored by the 92 Street Y, Unterberg Poetry Center

PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature, New York City, April 25-May 1, 2011 – More than 100 writers from 40 nations will convene in New York City to celebrate the power of the writer’s voice as a bold and vital element both on the page and in public discourse. Chaired by Salman Rushdie and created in2001 as one means of combating American cultural isolationism, the Festival will include panels, lectures, readings, one-on-one conversations, and readings at venues across the city, including the festival’s hubs — The Standard, New York and the High Line. The stellar line-up of authors will include Gioconda Belli, Harold Bloom, Ernesto Cardenal, Deborah Eisenberg, Jonathan Franzen, Malcolm Gladwell, Hanif Kureishi, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Andrea Levy, Amélie Nothomb, Cynthia Ozick, Elif Shafak, Wallace Shawn, Vladimir Sorokin, Wole Soyinka, Irvine Welsh, and Edmund White, among many others. Check out our complete schedule of events