The Problem With Enhanced E-Books "You can't really pay much attention to anything else while you're reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you're enjoying what you're reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you're not engaged by the story, they aren't enough on their own to win you over." Salon 02/02/12

email this story | Posted 02/02/12@11:56PM

Writer Paulo Coelho: Please Pirate My Books! "The more often we hear a song on the radio, the keener we are to buy the CD. It's the same with literature. The more people 'pirate' a book, the better. If they like the beginning, they'll buy the whole book the next day, because there's nothing more tiring than reading long screeds of text on a computer screen." The Guardian (UK) 02/01/12

email this story | Posted 02/02/12@08:31AM

After 50 Years, Dictionary Of American Regional English Is Finished "From whoopensocker to upscuddle, strubbly to swivet, 50 years after it was first conceived the Dictionary of American Regional English is finally about to reach the end of the alphabet. The fifth volume of the dictionary, covering 'slab' to 'zydeco', is out in March." The Guardian (UK) 01/31/12

email this story | Posted 02/02/12@12:03AM

Barnes & Noble Says It Won't Carry Amazon Books "Barnes & Noble has made a decision not to stock Amazon published titles in our store showrooms. Our decision is based on Amazon's continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent." The New York Times 02/01/12

email this story | Posted 02/01/12@06:45AM

NBC Jumps Into Publishing "NBC Publishing's current plan is to release its first e-book in February and 30 over the course of the year. This will include both multimedia and E Ink books -- and in some cases, print copies, too, probably in partnership with another publisher." Wired 01/31/12

email this story | Posted 02/01/12@05:18AM

Is It Time To Relax Grammar Rules In Digital Communication? "Seventy-two percent of adult cell phone users send and receive regular text messages, according to the Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project. The numbers rise to 87 percent for teens, who average 50 text messages a day. We're not speaking into a microphone, but we're certainly recording our thoughts in ways that make them both public and possibly eternal. So how careful should we be about our grammar?" Chicago Tribune 01/31/12

email this story | Posted 02/01/12@04:21AM

Chicago Mayor Asks City's Libraries To Help Students "In the summer months, our children, not just in the city of Chicago but across the country, lose about six months of their educational standards from one grade to the next," Rahm Emanuel said at a City Hall news conference. "And one of the things I asked him to take on was to find that mission in the summer, how the Chicago Public Library can step into that void." Chicago Tribune 01/31/12

email this story | Posted 02/01/12@04:08AM

The Puritan Work Ethic And American Attitudes Toward Fiction Laura Miller writes that there's a deep-seated prejudice in the collective American mind - especially with respect to educating children - against enjoying fiction purely for pleasure: one should always be able to find in a story some lesson or moral; the goal should always be some sort of self-improvement. Salon 01/31/12

email this story | Posted 02/01/12@12:04AM

Texting As Poetry? Rubbish, Says Oxford Professor "Texting is like the old ticker tape: highly dramatic and intense if it's reporting the Wall Street Crash or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, not through any inherent virtue of the machine. Is the breaking news which runs at the foot of the screen on the BBC news channel condensed and consequently poetic? I fail to see how anyone could rationally claim that it is. Again texting is linear only. Poetry is lines in depth designed to be seen in relation or in deliberate disrelation to lines above and below." The Guardian (UK) 01/30/12

email this story | Posted 01/31/12@05:19AM

A New Prize For Critics' Hatchet Jobs "'A good hatchet job draws as much excited attention as a good book any day.' That's the late, great critic Wilfrid Sheed ... On Feb. 7, The Omnivore, a British Web site that aggregates cultural criticism, will announce the winner of its first annual Hatchet Job of the Year Award for book reviews." The New York Times 01/30/12

email this story | Posted 01/30/12@11:55PM

Are We In An E-Publishing Bubble? "The internet is full of ironies. I, for one, could never have guessed that writing about the end of books would generate more income for me than actually publishing the damn things. I've been on an End of Books reading tour since August and it turns out that what the internet gurus say about consumers being more willing to pay for events, speeches and gigs, rather than buying cultural objects, is now becoming true." The Guardian (UK) 01/29/12

email this story | Posted 01/30/12@06:44AM

Jonathan Franzen Versus The EBook "Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I'm handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing - that's reassuring." The Telegraph (UK) 01/30/12

email this story | Posted 01/30/12@06:38AM

Male/Female - NPR's Book Review Problem "NPR and WBUR talked about male writers about 70 percent of the time. Of the roughly 60 works of fiction discussed on NPR, only about 20 were written by women. Of the six novelists featured on more than one program, all but Amy Waldman, author of The Submission, were men. Of the three novelists interviewed on more than one program, all were men. Terry Gross interviewed twice as many male as female novelists, and Morning Edition apparently dedicated no coverage at all to women fiction writers." Boston Phoenix 01/27/12

email this story | Posted 01/30/12@05:58AM

After 'The Death of Klinghoffer,' Alice Goodman's Career Was Over - Does She Regret It? "The controversy silenced her creatively for decades, depriving us of the talents of one of opera's most poetic librettist. WH Auden said the most important thing the librettist does is inspire the composer. Goodman did that and more: her two libretti stood on their own as works of art. 'I would have liked to have written more than two operas,' says Goodman. 'But I'm glad those were the ones I wrote.'" The Guardian 01/29/12

email this story | Posted 01/29/12@08:51PM

How To Succeed In E-books? Sell Sex, Of Course At least in Canada, erotic e-books bring in the money. "Customers are starting to discover them and finding that they can read certain books that they do not want other people to see and in privacy," says the woman who runs eXtasy Books. CBC 01/28/12

email this story | Posted 01/29/12@08:29PM

Taking A Second Look At Gertrude Stein - And Finding A Lot To Like "Not every 'genius' is equally suffocated by the label. Readers know the extraordinary reputations of Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, but some prefer 'Richard III' to 'Richard II,' or 'Mrs. Dalloway' to 'Orlando.' They feel at liberty to discriminate. Fewer readers imagine they can create their own Stein; many feel she is beyond their capacity to understand." The New York Times 01/29/12

email this story | Posted 01/29/12@08:43AM

How Madeleine L'Engle Proved Science Fiction Isn't Just For Guys When "A Wrinkle in Time" came out in 1962, girls mostly didn't read science fiction - and it wasn't written for them. But L'Engle's first book defied the norms. "Though a major crossover success with boys as well (with more than 10 million copies sold to date), the book has especially won over young girls. And it usually reaches them at a particularly pivotal moment of pre-adolescence when they are actively seeking to define themselves, their ambitions and place in the world." The New York Times 01/29/12

email this story | Posted 01/29/12@08:13AM

Why Book Festivals Are Important "The great juggle for a festival organiser is not so much personal safety versus freedom of speech. It's: What is your relationship with any government, because the act of writing is essentially dissident. That's what distinguishes literature, and the public act of a literary festival, from buying a Guggenheim museum or a symphony orchestra: it's not just something rich people do. It's a place for extending the conversation, and you have to subscribe to the idea that people can contradict you." The Telegraph (UK) 01/27/12

email this story | Posted 01/27/12@06:55AM

The iTextbook Revolution - But Will We Learn Better? "As learning is the ultimate purpose, the question remains: Will kids really learn more and better on tablets than existing media? That's far from clear now, and the reality may prove less revolutionary than the hardware." Wired 01/27/12

email this story | Posted 01/27/12@06:43AM

The Interactive Textbook - Science Directly To You "The first interactive marine science textbook for the iPad is called Cachalot (French for "sperm whale"). It's a free, app-based book that covers the latest science of marine megafauna like whales, dolphins and seals with expert-contributed text, images and open-access studies. Through a digital publication system called FLOW, the book also offers students note-taking tools, Twitter integration, Wolfram|Alpha search and even National Geographic "critter cam" videos." Wired 01/27/12

email this story | Posted 01/27/12@06:40AM

Why The Jaipur Literature Festival Disinvited Salman Rushdie Festival co-director William Dalrymple writes of how he had to balance upholding the right to freedom of expression and exchange of ideas with the very real possibility of a riot in the middle of his event. The Guardian (UK) 01/26/12

email this story | Posted 01/26/12@11:59PM

Vladimir Putin Suggests Canon Of Russian Literature In a lengthy essay in Nezavisimaya Gazeta, the Russian leader writes that "the Russian people and Russian culture are the linchpin, the glue that binds together this unique civilization ... this kind of civilizational identity is based on preserving the dominance of Russian culture." He then argues that a list of 100 great Russian books be compiled and assigned to every student. New York Daily News 01/25/12

email this story | Posted 01/26/12@11:50PM

Publisher To Black Out Mein Kampf Text After German Court Ruling "Extracts from Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf will go on sale in kiosks in Germany on Thursday, but with the text blacked out after a court ruled that reprinting the Nazi manifesto broke copyright laws." Expatica (AFP) 01/25/12

email this story | Posted 01/25/12@11:57PM

The Mysteries Of Editing Poetry "Often seen as the most personal and mysterious of literary forms - and therefore least likely to be guided by an outside hand - poetry is, in fact, strikingly indebted to invisible creators. What, we might ask, are the effects and risks of this little-understood practice on the nation's verse?" The Telegraph (UK) 01/23/12

email this story | Posted 01/25/12@11:50PM

Nothing Entertains Quite So Much As A Literary Dust Up Here are five fun book prize judging controversies... The Telegraph (UK) 01/25/12

email this story | Posted 01/25/12@06:00AM

Andrew Miller's Pure Wins £30K Costa Book Award "A vividly told story of life in pre-revolutionary Paris on Tuesday won the 2011 Costa book award in what turned out to be a bitterly fought two-way tussle between fact and fiction. Andrew Miller was given one of the UK's most prestigious literary prizes - and a £30,000 cheque - at a ceremony in London for his sixth novel, Pure." The Guardian (UK) 01/24/12

email this story | Posted 01/24/12@11:58PM

Publishers' Amazon Problem Publishers have a problem when it comes to discussing Amazon: They may fear its power, but they are also dependent on it, because like it or not, Amazon sells a lot of books. But lately, the grumbling about Amazon has been growing louder, with some in the book industry openly describing Amazon's tactics as "predatory." NPR 01/23/12

email this story | Posted 01/24/12@09:27AM

Fighting The Taliban With Poetry The Taliban's secular-nationalist opponents are fighting back using some of the very arts that religious fundamentalists seeks to destroy--poems adapted to traditional Pashto music." Boston Review 01/23/12

email this story | Posted 01/24/12@08:41AM

Meet India's Best-Selling English-Language Novelist Chetan Bhagat, a former Goldman Sachs banker, has published five books, all romances and all selling more than a million copies. Bhagat concedes to his many critics that his works aren't great literature, but argues that they encourage social mobility. The Economist 01/23/11

email this story | Posted 01/23/12@11:48PM

Number Of E-Book Owners Doubled Over Holidays "The share of adults in the United States who own tablet computers nearly doubled from 10% to 19% between mid-December and early January and the same surge in growth also applied to e-book readers, which also jumped from 10% to 19% over the same time period." Pew Internet 01/23/12

email this story | Posted 01/23/12@01:19PM

The Economics Of iTextbook Publishing "Textbooks are big, heavy and expensive. iPads are compact, light and very expensive. However, if you set aside the question that the vast majority of students won't be able to afford the $500-plus price of an iPad, Apple's business model for selling textbook is pretty appealing from an economic standpoint." AtlanticWire 01/20/12

email this story | Posted 01/23/12@08:55AM

Who's The Dark Horse In The National Book Critics' Circle Awards? (It's Not Jeffrey Eugenides) "Great reviews do not guarantee an NBCC nomination. Some of the year's best-received books were among the missing, including Chad Harbach's 'The Art of Fielding,' Karen Russell's 'Swamplandia' and Christopher Hitchens' 'Arguably.'" Washington Post (AP) 01/22/12

email this story | Posted 01/22/12@10:16PM

Apple, That's No Revolution (And The Magic's Gone, Too) "See, you can't really say that you're going to 'change everything' when it comes to textbooks and announce that your partners are the 3 companies who already control 90% of the textbook market. You can't say that you're going to disrupt the textbook industry by going digital when Pearson -- one of those big 3 and, indeed, the largest educational company in the world -- made over $3 billion from digital content last year alone." Hack Education 01/19/12

email this story | Posted 01/22/12@09:49AM

What Was She Thinking? Margaret Atwood And The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood: "People - not only women - have sent me photographs of their bodies with phrases from The Handmaid's Tale tattooed on them, 'Nolite te bastardes carborundorum' and 'Are there any questions?' being the most frequent." The Guardian (UK) 01/20/12

email this story | Posted 01/22/12@09:11AM

Why Apple Says Its E-Textbooks Will Be Better "The iPad's primary differentiator from a dedicated e-reader is going to be its ability to display full-color, interactive, multimedia content. With textbooks, that means not just audio and video, but also three-dimensional diagrams that can be touched, rotated, explored." Wired 01/20/12

email this story | Posted 01/20/12@05:53AM

Jaipur Literature Festival Grows Into One Of World's Largest The annual fete "began with 'a few readings' on the edge of a small arts event ... This year, with Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra, Jamaica Kincaid, Lionel Shriver and Richard Dawkins among its lineup, organizers expect as many as 100,000 attendees to turn up in this arid Indian city." The Wall Street Journal 01/18/12

email this story | Posted 01/19/12@11:51PM

Sorry, Lit Geeks, Books Aren't Really Our Friends "Dickens refers to 'the friendships we form with books', while Charles Lamb regarded books as 'the best company'." The problem, of course, is that however much we care about books, books don't care about us. The Guardian (UK) 01/17/12

email this story | Posted 01/19/12@11:43PM

How Apple Will Kill Traditional Textbook Publishing "Apple's product is big on promise and will, in the end, kill the sale of paper textbooks. Of that I'm certain. How long it takes is the million dollar question today, but knowing the speed at which Apple forces the paradigm to shift, I doubt the textbook publishers will survive much longer just selling dead tree product." TechCrunch 01/19/12

email this story | Posted 01/19/12@07:30AM

British Plan For King James Bible In Schools Hits Snag "A plan by the education secretary, Michael Gove, to send a copy of the King James Bible to every school in the country - each including a personal inscription from him - has run into trouble after government sources reported he has been told to find private funding for the project." The Guardian (UK) 01/17/12

email this story | Posted 01/18/12@11:50PM

Afghan Calligrapher Produces World's Largest Koran "An Afghan calligrapher has worked for five years to create the world's biggest Koran, a bid to show the world that Afghanistan's rich cultural heritage and traditions have been damaged but not destroyed by 30 years of war." Reuters 01/17/12

email this story | Posted 01/18/12@11:49PM