Our most fearless and occasionally feckless contributing editor reports on an exciting cultural phenomenon.
From More Intelligent Life: Facts, Errors, and the Kindle. Nietzsche famously said that there are no such things as facts, only interpretations. Be that as it may, every writer knows that there are certainly such things as factual mistakes. Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word [...]
From the New York Times: The Future of Reading. The approach Ms. McNeill uses, in which students choose their own books, discuss them individually with their teacher and one another, and keep detailed journals about their reading, is part of a movement to revolutionize the way literature is taught in America’s schools. While there is [...]
From The Guardian: The joy of anti-social media. Social media have undeniably changed the way many of us talk about books, and encouraged us to do it more. Whereas in the physical world there may be only certain contexts in which you’d dive into a deconstruction of Dostoevsky’s metaphors, the virtual world provides round-the-clock opportunity [...]
From The Guardian: Book covers: the pictures that sell thousands of words. So the blurb must be short and punchy, and the cover must make a winning pitch. Ideally, it should display a strong, memorable image. Many of the titles in the AbeBooks selection fulfil this criterion. Associated with this data, from the Lost Book [...]
From Inside Higher Ed: The Reader. A willingness to incorporate the Kindle into my routines does not mean abandoning print, any more than giving up the habit of inscribing my name inside the cover of a book has made me any less bibliocentric. The patterns of engagement with text – the levels of concentration you [...]
From The Guardian: Down and out in Paris. We pushed our way through the crowded shop, Sylvia stopping every two seconds to answer a question or help a customer. The books are piled over two floors – the ground floor deep and open, stacked with new and in-print titles, the upper floor a warren of [...]
From Seattle’s The Stranger: More Than a Bookstore. But here’s the thing: Even as people downstairs were fearing for the future of Seattle’s bookstore industry, Ravenna Third Place Books was thriving upstairs. Customers browsed the stacks contentedly; a group that gathers monthly to discuss science-related topics was sitting in a semicircle; and the store’s newest [...]
From the New York Times: Amazon to Sell E-Books for Apple Devices. “A couple months ago a lot of people thought Amazon was slavishly imitating the Apple model,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of the consulting business GiantSteps Media Technology Strategies. “It turns out they have a different model than Apple. They are smarter than everyone [...]