From a New York Times article on e-books:

At Harlequin Enterprises, the Toronto-based publisher of bodice-ripping romances, Malle Vallik, director for digital content and interactivity, said she expected sales of digital versions of the company’s books someday to match or potentially outstrip sales in print.

Harlequin, which publishes 120 books a month, makes all of its new titles available digitally, and has even started publishing digital-only short stories that it sells for $2.99 each, including an erotica collection called Spice Briefs.

I started reading Daniel Levitin's new book, The World in Six Songs, but after 50 pages I had to give it up. I had read some mixed reviews, but I liked Levitin's previous book, This Is Your Brain On Music (though it was full of questionable ideas, it did have some decent science in it), and this one sounded interesting. That first book was about neurology, though, which is where Levitin's expertise lies; this one is about songs, and art, and metaphor, all subjects about which Levitin appears to know nothing at all. I should have been tipped off from the first by the bad jokes, almost always a sign that a writer is in over his head, but the first unmistakable red flag came when Levitin bragged that he has never known what "Hotel California" is about (that Don Henley, so sneaky and subtle with his metaphors). He has trouble with Steely Dan, too, which is a little more understandable, but still.

The killer, though, comes when he tries to illustrate how song lyrics are just like poetry (now why didn't anybody else think of that?). His example, which he obviously considers some sort of masterpiece, is Sting's "Russians". Think about that for a minute. Either Levitin doesn't realize, or doesn't care, that "Russians" is quite possibly the stupidest song ever written about global politics. Maybe he's just happy that he understands it (if there's anyone whose metaphors are more clumsily obvious than Don Henley's, it's Sting). If Levitin were writing only about music (though "Russians" is no great shakes in that department, either), his apparent lack of understanding of lyrics and metaphor might not matter. But he's writing about songs, and the six major lyrical themes that he believes have powered all songs throughout history and may even have helped to create human nature as we know it. Yet he can't even sort out the meaning of one of the Eagles' most obvious records and thinks Sting is some kind of lyrical genius. This isn't just bad taste, it's a total lack of understanding of the concept. How could anybody trust anything he says after that?