I asked because I often do an informal VIDA-style count of the number of male and female authors represented in book catalogs. I do the same thing with magazines, whose tables of contents and contributors' lists I will often scan to get a sense of how near or far they are to a more or less even split.

This is often--I could say usually--an exercise in frustration. I don't insist on an absolute 50-50 split. But when the numbers are lopsided, as they too often are, it makes me wonder what's going on. It can be depressing as hell if you let it get to you. (Which you can't, honestly, because that will only get in the way of getting your work out there. But by all means get mad or, better still, get even by publishing everywhere you can.)

Why were there more men than women on this particular press's list of authors? In response to my question, the publicist said that the gender breakdown had been a topic of conversation around her office. Nobody seemed to know for sure. Then she raised a question: Do women just not write as many Big Idea books as men do?

The conversation moved on. But her question has been vexing me ever since. I don't believe that women don't have Big Ideas or that we don't write ambitious books. But are we publishing fewer of them than our male counterparts? Are we writing them in such a way that they don't get labeled Big? Or is this another gender-related blind spot in the publishing world? What makes a book a Big Idea book anyway? Is it a ridiculous category altogether? When I floated the Vexing Question on Twitter, I got some intriguing responses that suggested all of those possibilities.

Let me know what you think, and please share your favorite Big Idea books--however defined--by female authors.

For dictionary makers, going electronic opens up all kinds of possibilities. It's not just that digital dictionaries can be embedded in the operating systems of computers and e-readers so that they're always at hand. They can be updated far more easily and often than their print cousins, and they can incorporate material like audio pronunciations and thesauruses. Unsuccessful word "look-ups," or searches that don't produce satisfying results, can point lexicographers to terms that haven't yet made their way into a particular dictionary or whose definitions need to be amended or freshened. Online readers can click a button and contribute their own word lore, extending a tradition that dates back at least as far as the late 19th century, when James Murray and his team compiled the first Oxford English Dictionary with the help of thousands of word slips sent in by the public.

I had a lot of fun working on this story. I still have my enormous Webster's at home, though.

Here are the latest conflicting diagnoses:

The New York Times's Leslie Kaufman says that short stories are alive and kicking, souped up by digital delivery ("A Good Fit for Today's Little Screens: Short Stories," Feb. 15, 2013):

Story collections, an often underappreciated literary cousin of novels, are experiencing a resurgence, driven by a proliferation of digital options that offer not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well.

Not so fast, says Salon's Laura Miller ("Sorry, the short story boom is bogus," Feb. 20, 2013). She writes that a short-story boom

...would be good news -- if there were any reason at all to think it was true. Kaufman's only evidence for this imaginary renaissance is the success of George Saunders' story collection, "The Tenth of December," published earlier this year and currently hovering in the middle ranks of several prominent best-seller lists. Saunders' longtime fans (I count myself among them) have reason to celebrate this, but it really has nothing to do with "digital options." Saunders has built a devoted following over the past 17 years, hadn't published a book in a good while and -- most important of all -- was heralded in the headline of a long, radiant profile in the New York Times Magazine as producing "the best book you'll read this year." All of that could have happened 10, 20 or 30 years ago and produced the same result.

If you follow publishing trends, it's worth reading both essays and judging for yourself which one makes the better case. From a creative point of view, though, I'm not sure it really matters--or that it should matter.

The alive-or-dead debate does not help writers who like to write short stories (I'm one of them) and readers who like to read them (I'm one of those too). Unless you're writing strictly for the market--and we all need to make a living, yes we do--you can drive yourself crazy, and sap your will to work, if you pay too close attention to analyses of cultural and market trends.

Which are fascinating, yes. As I said, both the NYT and Salon articles are worth a read, especially for their attempts to get at how and where readers actually read now. (See Miller's comment about "interstitial reading," for instance.) Part of the writing life, though, is knowing when to look and when to look away.

"Innovate" as a transitive verb is bad enough. (The dictionary says it's okay, and I'm not going to argue with the dictionary.) But don't let's go verbing more perfectly good parts of speech that are happy the way they are. Coming up with fresh approaches to, say, publishing or higher education or whatever doesn't require abusing the language.

If you've come across other examples of egregious verbing, please share them. I want to know how fast this plague is spreading.

We also like to drop by the used-book sale the library has every month or so. It's not like we need more books in the house--except that we always need more books in the house. There's a certain SPCA impulse that kicks in, too: I can't leave this one behind because if I don't buy it nobody will! Also, hey, 50 cents or a buck's not much to spend, and it's for a good cause.

The library always has a couple of tables of kids' books set up at the sale. That's where I spotted a copy of The Illyrian Adventure by Lloyd Alexander. I didn't know the novel but I have been a Lloyd Alexander fan since I was my daughter's age. I loved The Book of Three and the rest of the Prydain Chronicles, and it has been one of parenting's great joys to re-read them with my kids, along with a lot of my other childhood favorites, like A Wizard of Earthsea.

The Illyrian Adventure came home with us from the library sale. It wound up in one of the random and ever-shifting stacks of books that punctuate the living room. I dug it out one idle night, opened it up, and found this on the title page:

Lloyd Alexander! He'd signed the book I was holding. He'd held it in his hands, however many years ago, and signed it with a flourish of ballpoint ink. I was thrilled. Alexander died in 2007, and I never had a chance to meet him. Discovering his signature in the book I'd rescued gave me a sense of personal proximity, a sense that I had bridged some distance between us.

I don't know who Toby is or why he let his signed copy of The Illyrian Adventure go. Maybe he died; maybe he grew up and left home and his books behind; maybe he just didn't much like the story. I hope it wasn't a bad parting. I am glad to give the book a new home, inscription and all.

When I showed the inscription to my husband, he said: "You can't do that with an ebook." What he meant was in e-format you can't get that sense of direct physical connection, of personality on the page, that an author's ink-on-paper signature creates. Likewise with digital marginalia: The words transfer eletcronically but the sense of handling does not, at least not yet. Handwriting conveys a sense of character that computer characters do not. At least not yet. Will they ever? (I write more about this in the Feb./March issue of Bookforum, in a review-essay on Philip Hensher's The Missing Ink: The Lost Art of Handwriting and Ian Sansom's Paper: An Elegy.)

Last summer I took a week-long course on "Born-Digital Materials" at Rare Book School at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. I learned there to appreciate the materiality of machines more. I began to see how hardware and software capture some of the essence of those who create on and with them. I don't hate e-books, and I think they will develop in ways I can't foresee. But I can't quite imagine, not yet anyway, the digital library sale of the future with virtual tables of e-books to flip through and the chance to discover "warmest greetings" from the author.

In a sense, though, every reader is always a solitary reader. A good book generates a force field that keeps the world out, whether you're on a park bench or in a library or in Grand Central Station. That's part of the fun, yes? At least it is for me. When I read, I don't feel alone, even if there's no-one else nearby. The book is with me; the author or narrator, the characters, the setting keep me company. It's hard to be lonely. And yet I am delightfully alone when I read, no matter where I am. It's a private world.

Enter social reading, enabled by online platforms like Social Book, created by the Institute for the Future of the Book. If I don't want to be alone when I read--if I want to share my thoughts and reactions with other readers--I can get online and talk to them around the text itself. In theory, anyway, readers can have company wherever we are, as long as we can get online. We don't have to be sharing a park bench to read together. We can find company in the margins--if we want to. More on that in a minute.

I recently wrote a column about a neat Social Book pilot project, the Open Utopia, which invites the world to comment on and even rewrite Thomas More's 16th-century classic ("With 'Social Reading,' Books Become Places to Meet," CHE, Nov. 26, 2012). I talked to professors who are experimenting with social reading in their classrooms, with some success. They say that social reading draws students into assigned reading and generates a lot of discussion--sometimes too much. As I say in the article, though, too much discussion is not really a bad problem to have. It's certainly better than the dull disengagement and the glassy-eyed stare of the bored student.

I expect to see social reading take off in classrooms. It seems like a natural there. Will it catch on with us solitary types reading on park benches, in train stations, in our living rooms? I'm not sure I want more company when I read. But I will try to make room on the bench.

If I go to P&P, I won't find a copy of what sounds like a charming new novel, Care of Wooden Floors by Will Wiles. The Post article says,

They don't want to promote what they see as a predatory publisher. "Care of Wooden Floors" was issued this month by New Harvest, a new collaboration between Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the arch-nemesis of brick-and-mortar bookstores: Amazon.

According to the article, Amazon and HMH signed a deal earlier this year to create New Harvest, an imprint (if that's the right word) that publishes books acquired, edited, and marketed by the big A and distributed by Houghton's sales force. "The partnership was an effort to woo bookstores into stocking Amazon-published books," reporter Nora Krug writes. "But many booksellers are balking."

Politics & Prose's chief buyer is frank about why: "We don't want to do anything that will support their publishing venture," he told Krug. "They pretty much want nothing more than our demise."

Some of the indie bookstores in the Post article, including P&P, say they will special-order Amazon books for customers. Some say they won't.

As someone who loves bookstores but doesn't hate Amazon, I don't quite know how to feel about this situation. I'm sympathetic to booksellers who feel that they're being squeezed out by an e-tailer with enormous reach and influence. I've also found Amazon very handy at times.

As a writer, I'm also sympathetic to an author who wants to publish his or her book and get it out there. (I hope to be in that position before too long, if I'm lucky and work hard.) As a reader, I hate the idea of having any bookseller make it harder for me to find a book I want to read. Do I have to pick sides here?

In the Post article, the head of the American Booksellers Association says she'd "think twice" before signing with Amazon if she were an author. That's a bit chilling. I don't know what other publishing options Will Wiles had, if any, for Care of Wooden Floors. Maybe he had lots; maybe he had none; maybe Amazon's New Harvest just made him a great offer. Whatever the circumstances, he's a working writer who presumably needs to make a living and wants to find an audience. It doesn't seem fair to make him choose between bookstores and a publisher.

The standoff between bookstores and Amazon leaves me worried and wondering about the fallout for writers and readers and ultimately for the bookstores too. Will a bookstore that refuses to sell Amazon's books be willing to host a writer who publishes with Amazon? Will readers be sympathetic to bookstores' position or irritated that they can't get the book(s) they want? As Amazon publishes more and more books, which it's bound to do, will not shelving those books come back to haunt bookstores?

Mark Athitakis and I had an exchange about this on Twitter earlier today, in which Mark suggested that bookstores "make a mistake in assuming people care a lot about their bookstore-ness," and that the acid test of the no-shelving policy will come if/when Amazon produces a gotta-read blockbuster. We'll see who says boo then--bookstores, authors, or readers.

There are only three principles necessary for a lyric writer, all of them familiar truisms. They were not immediately apparent to me when I started writing, but have come into focus via Oscar Hammerstein's tutoring, Strunk and White's huge little book "The Elements of Style" and my own sixty-some years of practicing the craft. I have not always been skilled or diligent enough to follow them as faithfully as I would like, but they underlie everything I've ever written. In no particular order, and to be written in stone:

without which nothing else matters.

The first two--"Content Dictates Form" and "Less Is More"--have been on my mind a lot lately. Last week I published a (yes, short) piece for The Chronicle arguing that more academics and publishers should consider shorter-form e-books as a sound vessel for scholarly arguments ("Ditch the Monograph," Oct. 14, 2012). Despite the headline, which I can't take credit for, I'm not saying we should do away with the traditional monograph. I am saying we should acknowledge that some projects and arguments don't require hundreds of pages to bring off.

Dan Cohen of George Mason University has called this "right-sizing scholarship," a phrase I like a lot. It doesn't forbid or even discourage long-form writing; it calls on authors (and publishers) to pick the form that best fits the content they want to share.

There's a naggingly persistent idea, inside and outside academe, that the longer a work is the more serious it must be. Disciplinary norms and tenure-and-promotion expectations pressure many authors to think long. (I've seen plenty of flabby trade-publishing books too, although sometimes the problem there is that there aren't enough good editors with enough time to help authors get manuscripts into shape.)

Some very long books earn their hundreds of pages. Many don't. In almost any field, you can find plenty of examples of baggy monsters that overstay their welcome and slim contenders that punch above their weight, intellectually and creatively. Many projects might land happily in the middle--longer than essays, shorter than the monographs traditionally prized in humanities disciplines.

In part because of the headline but also because others have been thinking along these lines, my "Ditch the Monograph" essay has attracted some attention. It got a lot of "hell yes!" reactions. It drew some fire, too. Andrew Piper called it "wrong on all counts" ("Is short the answer to scholarly publishing?"). On his blog he wrote, "The problem is when this becomes the only model or the leading model for academic publishing." But I never said that shorter e-books should be the only or leading model in the scholarly arena. I said they should be a respectable, intellectually sound option for scholarship. And soon, perhaps sooner than some are comfortable with, I predict they will be.

Piper calls for "diversity rather than brevity." I vote for diversity that includes brevity as a strong option. As Sondheim knows, sometimes less is more.

Note: Another story I published this week, a Hot Type column on digital art-history publishing, touched on the content/form question as well ("Art Publishers Look to Yale Press for Glimpse Into Their Digital Future," CHE, Oct. 15, subscription req'd--sorry). The University of Chicago Press's blog used that story and "Ditch the Monograph" as a jumping-off point for a discussion of the current digital/print zeitgeist and how publishing has always and forever been in flux.