It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman renouncing his American citizenship. In a book publishing move that can only be described as a punch in the face to fans of a more-than-70-year-old American cultural icon, DC Comics will have the famous Superman brand renounce his U.S. citizenship before the United Nations.

In “Action Comics” No. 900, Superman announces his plans to renounce his U.S. citizenship. In the issue, after appearing in support of protesters in the Middle East, Superman finds himself at odds with the U.S. president. Superman’s appearance has been construed as an official move by the U.S. government.

Superman thus plans to renounce his American citizenship at the United Nations the next day, and to work as a more global superhero.

The iconic nature of the hero has people discussing the announcement on the Internet and in comic shops. Stores across the metro area reported strong sales, with many selling out of the issue.

“I can see him wanting to be more global, not have people think that he’s pursuing a U.S. agenda,” said Eric Neal of Second Chance Books in Warr Acres.

It’s not the first time a comic character has been fed up with being seen as part of U.S. policy.

In the 1970s, Marvel Comics’ Captain America — aka Steve Rogers — gave up his famed suit and shield and adopted the identity Nomad around the time the Watergate scandal began heating up.

DC Comics says the story is not about criticizing the U.S. In fact, the comic book publisher says, the Man of Steel remains as American as apple pie, baseball and small-town life.

“Superman is a visitor from a distant planet who has long embraced American values,” DC’s co-publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio said Thursday in a statement. “As a character and an icon, he embodies the best of the American Way.”

And, they added, Superman, like his U.S. citizen alter-ego, Clark Kent, remains, “as always, committed to his adopted home and his roots as a Kansas farm boy from Smallville.”

Neal points out that Superman simply announces his intentions, but doesn’t actually renounce his citizenship in the issue. So the story might play out differently than people expect.

“I suspect that since he doesn’t actually renounce his citizenship in the comic, it probably won’t happen,” he said.

Reporting with poetry book publishers and christian book publishers.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books was created in 1996 to promote literacy, celebrate the written word, and bring together book publishers with those who create books with the people who love to read them. Between 130,000 and 140,000 people attend the event annually. The Times has launched its first mobile interactive guide to help attendees explore this weekend’s Festival of Books. Through ebook publishing, the festival is now available for free download for iPhone, iPod Touch and Android users, it includes the following features:

• Customizable schedule of events
• Special section for poetry book publishers and christian book publishers
• Detailed “search” by activity, author, book title or genre and descriptions of all panels, participants, performers and exhibitors
• Maps of the Festival grounds, including information about dining options, parking and public transportation
• Integration with users’ Facebook and Twitter accounts for posting photos, status updates and tweets
• Easy access to up-to-the-minute news from the Festival’s Facebook and Twitter feeds as well as USC traffic updates

All attractions, including the Festival’s eight outdoor stages, hundreds of panels, exhibitors, book sellers and live entertainment, will be comfortably located around the USC campus’ central Trousdale Parkway. Other conveniences added this year include additional information booths, sit-down dining and more concession stands, a shaded rest area, an increased number of parking spaces and valet parking option for panel pass purchasers. Triangular shuttle service between Union Station, Los Angeles Convention Center and USC will also supplement existing public transportation.

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is presented in association with USC, presenting sponsor Target, major sponsors Buick and GMC and official ticketing provider Eventbrite.

Late last year, the world’s most expensive book – a beautifully-preserved copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America – sold at Sotheby’s for £7.3 million, or around $10 million., as widely reported by book publishers and Amazon.

But that’s peanuts compared with the asking price on Amazon for an out-of-print but not particularly rare book on developmental biology. If you’re after a copy of The Making of a Fly: The Genetics of Animal Design by Peter A Lawrence, you could be looking at a cost of $23.6 million.

The reason? The algorithms used to set Amazon pricing by two internet merchants, “profnath” and “bordeebook”, as deduced by by UC Berkeley associate professor Michael Eisen. He was a trifle shocked, when a student attempted to pick up a copy of the book a few weeks ago, to see it listed at $1.7 million.

“At first I thought it was a joke – a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each being offered for well over a million dollars,” he says.

“And the two sellers seemed not only legit, but fairly big time (over 8,000 and 125,000 ratings in the last year respectively). The book publisher prices looked random – suggesting they were set by a computer. But how did they get so out of whack?”

the next day, Eisen found that the prices had gone up – and worked out the pattern. Both companies were using a simple algorithm, pegging their own pricers to those of the other.

Once a day, profnath would attempt to marginally undercut bordeebook, setting its price at 0.9983 times its competitor’s. The prices would remain close for several hours – until bordeebook ‘noticed’ the change and set its own price to 1.270589 times profnath’s. This may have been because it didn’t actually posess a copy, and needed to build in a profit margin.

These two merchants are hardly likely to be the only players setting such algorithms – and similar pricing spirals could get even weirder if there are more than two players in the loop.

But one person who should be pretty pleased is the author himself. As Eisen points out, “Peter Lawrence can now comfortably boast that one of the biggest and most respected companies on Earth valued his great book at $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

In the end, after the price peaked at over $23.6 million, someone appears to have noticed. A new seller, jasonpitt, now has it up for a slightly more affordable $158.90 – although bordeebook is still optimistically looking for $976.98.

Don’t worry, though: Amazon’s Buyback scheme will take it off your hands when you’re finished with it – for the princely sum  of $2.34.

This month sees the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible. It is the greatest book in the English language from any book publisher or christian book publishers perspective. It made English, and remade England.

It has been printed in millions of copies and hundreds of editions. It gives us our most memorable phrases and arresting images – from ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’ to a ‘sting in the tail’.

Called into being by a king, it has carried ideas of truth and freedom and justice and human dignity to the furthest corners of the globe. Its cadences can be heard in the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King and President Obama. It is the spice in the new English of the Indian Subcontinent. And yet, extraordinarily, this supreme achievement was the work of a committee – or so we have always been told.

Closer examination reveals a very different story, which overturns our notions of the chronology of this great book and reintroduces an unjustly neglected name to our pantheon of great writers, William Tyndale.

James VI of Scotland succeeded the childless Queen Elizabeth I as James I of England in 1603. There were high hopes for him, and none higher than James’s for himself. He had been king of Scots since he was in his cradle. He was learned; a polished, published author and a patient, canny politician. Above all – and in sharp contrast to the ageing Elizabeth, who had  frozen into a sort of querulous immobility – he had vision and ambition.

James I had set himself three main tasks. He wanted to end the long, debilitating war between England and Spain. He was determined to bring about a political union between his two separate kingdoms of Scotland and England. And he even dreamt of reuniting the Christian church, which had been riven by the Reformation into warring factions, as Catholics fought Protestants and Protestants fought each other. All three conflicts, James resolved, would be settled by his deft mediation as the universal Rex Pacificus – ‘the peacemaker king’.

It was indeed an ambitious programme. Less than a decade later, it mostly lay in ruins. England and Spain were at peace, but the English parliament had thrown out a  union with Scotland; while the Gunpowder Plot, in which a handful of renegade Catholics had schemed to blow up king, Lords and Commons, had set back Catholic emancipation by generations.

One thing, however, survived from the wreck: the scheme for a new, agreed translation of the Bible. The scheme had first been floated at the Hampton Court Conference, held in Henry VIII’s Thames-side palace in 1604 to try to resolve the bitter disputes within the Church of England between the Puritans, who wanted a stripped-down Protestantism, and the bishops, who were determined to retain a more ceremonious national Church. James, who presided as an anything but impartial chairman, leapt at the idea.

Fifty-four scholars were nominated as translators, of whom 47 actually served. They were divided into six separate ‘companies’ or committees, two meeting at Oxford, two at Cambridge and two at Westminster, and the Old and New Testaments and the Apocrypha were parcelled out among them. Each committee then went through its alloted portion, line by line and word by word.

They began with the original texts in Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic; they compared and contrasted later translations in Latin and many other languages; they scoured reference books and commentaries; they  consulted with other scholars on specific issues. And, being academics, they debated and quarrelled endlessly and ferociously.

Contrary to popular belief, however, what the  translators did not do was to start the work of translation from scratch. Their instructions, whose substance was dictated by James himself, were quite explicit  on the point. Instead, they were to base themselves on the main English Bible translations of the 16th  century: ‘Tindall’s (sic), Matthew’s, Coverdale’s, Whitchurch’s, Geneva’.

And the greatest of these, and the foundation of all the others – including the King James version itself – was Tyndale’s. It was one translator against 50, but there is no doubt where the balance of creativity lies.

William Tyndale, martyr, Bible-translator and a controversialist so formidable that he left even Sir Thomas More floored in argument, was a near-contemporary of Henry VIII: Tyndale was born in about 1494; Henry some three years earlier.

And Tyndale, like the young prince, benefited from the first wave of Renaissance scholarship in England. Tyndale probably laid the foundations of his excellent knowledge of the Classics at Katharine Lady Berkeley’s Grammar School at Wotton-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, a few miles from his place of birth. And he polished it at Magdalen College, Oxford, where Wolsey had cut his teeth as star student and ambitious young don.

Tyndale’s academic career progressed  smoothly, too. He graduated BA 1512; in 1515 he was ordained a priest and, a few months later, he began his further studies for the MA. But the next year, Tyndale’s life – and the whole history of the 16th century – changed.

The great Dutch scholar and book publisher Erasmus had spent much of the past decade in England, where he had been one of Henry VIII’s youthful mentors. The Bible had been one of his preoccupations and, in 1516, he published the fruits of his labours in the form of the first printed text of the Greek New Testament, with a radically revised Latin translation alongside.

Erasmus called his work the Novum Instrumentum (The New Tool) and it divided his world like a freshly honed razor. On one side were men such as Sir Thomas More and, for a long time, Henry VIII himself. They were determined that the Bible should remain a clerical monopoly in Latin, safe from the prying eyes of  ordinary folk. On the other side was the German reformer Martin Luther, who was equally determined to put the Bible into the language of the people and let it do its work in the world.

Tyndale was with Luther, and his life’s work now became to translate the Bible into English. He began his task in England. But the clerical establishment proved bitterly hostile and threatened him with the terrible charge of heresy, for which the punishment was burning alive.

In one such encounter his persecutor told him ‘we were better without God’s law than the Pope’s’. Tyndale replied in words that have echoed down the centuries.

‘If God spare my life,’ he said, ‘I will cause a boy that driveth the plough shall know more of the Scripture than thou dost.’

Realising now that ‘to translate the New Testament… there was no place in all England’, Tyndale fled abroad, first to Cologne, then to Worms and, finally, to the great trading city of Antwerp.

In 1526 he published his first version of the New Testament. Then, somewhere and somehow, he learned Hebrew and began the even greater task of translating the Old Testament.

He worked with his usual speed and, in 1530, he published the first five books of the Old Testament, known as the Pentateuch.

A translation of the Prophet Jonah followed, and he began work on the historical books, Kings and Chronicles. Finally, in 1534, he published a thorough revision of his New Testament in which he improved his own high standards.

It is an astonishing achievement. Still only in his thirties, Tyndale was working underground, with little assistance and few resources. He had to deal with much of the drudgery of printing and distribution himself. And yet this was the result:

‘Though I spake with the tongues of men and angels, and yet had no love, I were even as sounding brass: and as a tinkling cymbal. And though I could prophesy, and understood all secrets, and all knowledge: yea, if I had all faith so that I could move mountains out of their places, and yet had no love, I were nothing.’ (I Corinthians 13. 1-2)

All the great phrases, which have become the very fabric of the language, are there, too: ‘the spirit is willing’; ‘fight the good fight’; ‘the powers that be’. Yet More denounced Tyndale’s great work as ‘a filthy foam of blasphemies’.

This was because Tyndale, basing himself on Erasmus, had dared to translate key words in their Greek meanings as ‘elder’, ‘congregation’, ‘love’ and ‘repent’, instead of the officially approved ‘priest’, ‘church’, ‘charity’ and ‘do penance’.

A hundred years of strife was in the difference, and Tyndale was one of the first victims. He was betrayed to the Flemish authorities, condemned and, having been strangled first (out of respect to his scholarship), his body was burned at the stake.

It is hard to exaggerate the difference between the lonely, hunted Tyndale and the comfortable cohorts of the Jacobean translators, with their fellowships and deaneries. Nine-tenths of Tyndale’s New Testament are reproduced word for word in the King James version.

This is no more radical a revision than the work of any modern publisher’s editor in preparing an author’s manuscript for the press. But there is an alchemy nonetheless. Tyndale had written for the ploughboy. The Jacobean translators were preparing an official text for an established Church which, Protestant though it was, had taken over much of the pomp and circumstance of its old Catholic predecessor.

So back came the traditional translations of the disputed words, such as ‘church’ and ‘charity’. Out went Tyndale’s vivid colloquialisms.

‘In the twinkling of an eye’ became ‘in a moment of time’. ‘Tush, ye shall not die’, Tyndale’s Serpent tells Eve in the Garden of Eden.

‘Ye shall not surely die’, the Tempter says more decorously in the King James Bible. And everywhere the translators aimed for smoothness and dignity: ‘If the words are arranged this way, the statement will be more majestic,’ one argued.

The result should have been an uneasy compromise. Instead it was a miracle. Tyndale supplied the muscle; the Jacobeans the majesty. And English ever since has been able to move effortlessly from one to the other. At the same time, the language began another and even greater journey.

In 1607, halfway through the work of the Jacobean translators and christian book publishers, the first lasting English settlement was established in North America, fittingly enough at Jamestown.

With the Empire as the medium and the King James Bible as the message, English had begun its path to global dominance.

You know that joke that shows everything’s better when you add “in bed” to the end?  The same can be said for books, according to a report by Sony released Friday.

The book publishers survey, conduced in March, showed that 79% of Americans are most likely to read books in bed. That’s more people choosing to read in bed than in the living room (73%), on vacation (37%) or while commuting (8%).

Sony conducted the international study with American, British, Canadian and Australian readers to commemorate World Book Day, celebrated most places on April 23. It is also to promote the Sony Reader, its longtime e-reader, although the questions didn’t focus on e-books.

In addition to the where-do-you-read question, Sony asked readers which celebrities they’d like to hear book recommendations from, and which classic characters they liked the most. The results varied by country.

In most places, readers turned to comedians for book recommendations — Ricky Gervais in England, Andrew Denton in Australia and Ellen DeGeneres in the U.S. were the most popular. Canadians said the more serious Peter Mansbridge, national broadcast anchor, and French Canadians opted for singer Celine Dion.

Americans, Canadians and Australians agreed on their most favorite character in literature: Sherlock Holmes. England, perhaps uncharacteristically, went for more flash: its readers said James Bond.

In one regard, Americans’ preferences stood out from the rest. While Winnie the Pooh is on top in most countries surveyed, only about one in 10 U.S. readers said A.A. Milne’s lovable bear was their favorite for children — to which Pooh might say, “Oh, bother.” Instead, 20% of Americans said their favorite books for children are those written by Dr. Seuss.

And where do they like to read them? As Dr. Seuss writes in “Hop on Pop,” “Red, bed, I am in bed.”

The book publishing industry is bracing itself for another scandal as one of the best-selling authors in recent years has been accused of fabricating parts of a popular memoir.

Greg Mortenson has been catapulted to celebrity since the 2006 publication of Three Cups of Tea, (Penguin Book Publishers) which he said was a non-fiction account of his travels in Pakistan. The book describes how in 1992, he got lost while descending from an attempt on K2, the world’s second-highest mountain, and was taken in by a group of villagers.

Mr Mortenson wrote that to repay that hospitality, he founded the Central Asia Institute, a non-profit foundation that builds schools in rural Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Three Cups of Tea, which has sold more than 4m copies, was published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin. Penguin, like the Financial Times, is owned by Pearson.

On Friday, 60 Minutes, the CBS news programme, aired a segment that called into question the veracity of many of the stories central to the book. On Monday, author Jon Krakauer, who appeared in the 60 Minutes segment, released a digital booklet Three Cups of Deceit, which chronicles what he says are fabricated parts of Mr Mortenson’s books.

Viking said it would review the book and its contents with Mr Mortenson. “Greg Mortenson’s work as a humanitarian in Afghanistan and Pakistan has provided tens of thousands of children with an education. 60 Minutes is a serious news organisation and in the wake of their report, Viking plans to carefully review the materials with the author,” it said.

If the story is proved to be even partly fabricated, it would be another black eye for the book publishers industry: several works of non-fiction have been shown to be at least partly fictionalised in recent years. Other examples include James Frey’s, A Million Little Pieces published by Random House Book Publishers, that became the investigative subject of the smoking gun website exposing the supposedly non-fiction book as largely fictional.

The 60 Minutes report pointed to several passages that it says are exaggerated or fabricated. It suggested Mr Mortenson did not visit Korphe, the village he describes in the book, until a year after his descent from K2.

In statements to the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, in his home town of Bozeman, Montana, Mr Mortenson acknowledged he had taken literary licence in parts of the story. “The time about our final days on K2 and ongoing journey to Korphe village and Skardu is a compressed version of events that took place in the fall of 1993.”

The 60 Minutes report also claimed that a group of Pakistani men who Mr Mortenson said were members of the Taliban who had kidnapped him, were in fact lawyers and other professionals, who were assigned to protect him.

New Zealand readers will soon be able to turn the electronic pages of more local books, thanks to Digital Publishing New Zealand, a not-for-profit company set up by Copyright Licensing (CLL).

The book publishing company, which manages licensing fees for copyright holders, set up a fund to convert print books into an e-book digital format and its $50,000 contribution was matched by Creative New Zealand.

CLL chief executive Paula Browning says the purpose of that fund is to get a “core collective of New Zealand content” ready and available for reading by New Zealanders and others by the middle of the year.

Applications for funding closed last month and 582 titles were put to a selection panel of publishers, editors, writers and academics. The 263 titles to appear on http://www.greatnzebooks.co.nz were selected according to a list of criteria which included titles that will contribute to New Zealand literature and culture, are of literary merit, and will engage New Zealanders in digital reading.

The applications “were from publishers who are still either getting started digitising or still have titles to digitise”, says Browning. “There are some New Zealand publishers who have really taken the bull by the horns and have been digitising their own stuff for quite some time.”

Although publishers were not able to get funding for works already formatted for e-book readers, they can still submit their titles to the website. They will include those of authors such as Lloyd Jones and Katherine Mansfield.

Works in the conversion list include several poetry collections from Bill Manhire, C K Stead’s poetry and non-fiction collection Book Self, two of James Belich’s historical works, two children’s books by Joy Cowley and 10 novels by Barbara Anderson. Owen Marshall is also there, as is Kapka Kassabova and art curator and critic Justin Paton.

Fiction titles made up 31% of applications and non-fiction made up 60% of applications, the majority of both types being approved for funding. The rest were poetry works.

“We didn’t look at it from either an author or a publisher’s perspective; purely from the title and whether or not we felt it was worth being included,” says Browning.

There are some notable absences among those 263 titles to get funding. Janet Frame is not on the list because “the rights haven’t been agreed with the family trust”, says Browning. “Rights is a significant issue in digitising because the rights that you had in the agreement to publish a book – the printed book do not necessarily cover digital.”

Director of Auckland University Press Sam Elworthy is pleased with the initiative. “We did apply for a big list of AUP titles and were successful getting funding for some. We’re really excited about developing these and other titles into e-books – books from Apirana Ngata’s Nga Moteatea to Paul Millar’s No Fretful Sleeper – so that we can make them available to new readers here and overseas.”

Maggie Tarver, executive director of the New Zealand Society of Authors (which, with the Publishers Association, owns Digital Publishing NZ), is similarly satisfied with the scheme.

“We have been extremely active in promoting the conversion fund application process to our members as we felt it to be an excellent opportunity that would benefit authors,” Tarver says. “With the growing market in digital publishing overseas, it is great to see New Zealand authors being given an opportunity to have their work available in a digital format in a way that still ensures they have control and choices regarding the use of their content.”

As the e-book phenomenon grows more people are becoming receptive to the idea of reading from the screen rather than on paper. “Between five and 10% of everything that’s being bought is being bought in digital. But depending on what you read that number varies,” says Browning. “Also, the growth projections vary quite a bit. What they have found is a lot of people are buying both – they’ll buy a print book and the digital version.”

Although Browning concedes the expectations of e-book sales is “a dartboard number”, new readers will be exposed to New Zealand titles through greatnzebooks.co.nz.

“Having a strong body of New Zealand content available in e-book form should help stimulate other keys to a flourishing e-book market here – in particular, a variety of e-book retail sites and the spread of devices set up to read e-books, from smartphones to dedicated e-readers,” says Elworthy. “That’ll be great for New Zealand book publishers, authors and readers.”

An Italian book publisher has yanked copies of a book on Catholic Church teaching after a translation error implied the Vatican approved of contraception, officials said Tuesday.

The book “YouCat,” a Catholic catechism book for young people, is to be presented officially Wednesday at a Vatican press conference.

But on the eve of the presentation, officials confirmed that Nuova Citta, the Italian book publishers of “YouCat,” had pulled the Italian copies to fix the error, which concerned whether married couples could plan the size of their families.

The Vatican opposes artificial contraception, holding that life begins at conception. The church does, however, condone Natural Family Planning, in which married couples chart the changes in a woman’s menstrual cycle to determine when she might, or might not, conceive.

It’s the second time in a year that translation problems have muddied church teaching on contraception. In November, the Vatican’s own publishing house mistranslated the pope’s comments about condoms and AIDS, implying that condom use for prostitutes was justified in some cases.

The mistake made headlines since it indicated the church had softened its firm opposition to artificial contraception.

But the Vatican insisted Pope Benedict XVI was doing no such thing and was merely saying that a prostitute who uses a condom may be taking a first step in a more moral, responsible sexuality because he or she is looking out for the welfare of another.

“YouCat” makes clear that the Catholic Church still opposes condoms, the pill and other forms of artificial contraception.

But in the Italian copy of the book, which is set out as a series of questions and answers with commentary, the initial question is mistranslated. In the original German, the question concerns whether married couples can “regulate conception.”

The answer says yes, then goes onto explain that the church promotes Natural Family Planning.

In the Italian however, the original question wasn’t translated as “regulate conception” but rather whether married couples could “use contraceptive methods.” The answer remained the same, an affirmative yes, implying that the Church was sanctioning contraception.

“It’s an embarrassment,” but not a change in church teaching, said the Rev. Joseph Fessio, head of Ignatius Press, YouCat’s English-language book publisher.

He told The Associated Press that Nuova Citta had printed 45,000 Italian copies, 15,000-16,000 of which were already physically sold.

“The rest they’re going to have to pull them all,” he said.

English is definitely changing, but whether it’s declining or evolving depends on who — ahem, whom — you ask. Writer Robert Lane Greene recommends three books about what it means to speak and write “well” — when the definition of “well” is a moving target.

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