Apparently getting kids excited about books isn’t worth funding. It’s better to focus on the “mechanics” of reading because, you know, that will definitely instill the next generation with a passion for it. **head explodes**
Via NPR:
The show’s [26-year] run is ending, Grant explains, because no one — not the station, not PBS, not the [...]

An agent once told me that if I wanted to support my fellow writers, I should never buy used books, because the author gets no royalties on re-sold copies. And while that is certainly true, this editorial in the Guardian makes an eloquent argument for why secondhand bookshops are important:
[T]he best have stock that is [...]

I don’t generally read personal blogs, partly out of an allergy to the twee self-consciousness that so easily results from self-chronicling. But when I stumbled across Mimi Smartypants’s diary a few years ago, I found that I was looking at something different from the typical navel-gazing blog. Rather, what I experience sometimes when I read her diary is that strange phenomenon that first brought me to fiction as a child, and has kept me here all these years: the eerie way in which another human’s mind can reach across all gaps of time and distance and stranger-dom into your own mind and stir a feeling that had never been stirred there before. That sense of seeing something described that you had never seen put into words, that you would have assumed could never be put into words, yet finding that seemingly singular and resistant thing rendered perfectly specific and clear, even sonorous, and, maybe even funny.

Three Percent, a site dedicated mostly to international lit, recently featured two must-read posts — “Predatory Pricing Practices” (which includes a clip from the Colbert Report featuring Douglas Rushkoff) and “Anti-Fixed Book Price Essay” — about the predatory pricing practices that stores like WalMart are using to drive down book prices. In short, they’re [...]

To answer the personal question “Do I love books, or do I love reading?” — and the larger question “In which format(s) is the book most likely to endure?” — author Ann Kirschner (Sala’s Gift) tried Dickens’s Little Dorrit in four formats: paperback, audio, iPhone, and Kindle. She discusses her impressions of each in this [...]

This nearly week-old David Brooks op-ed is infuriating for many reasons (such as its writer’s blatant scoffing at and outright denial of–despite the current economic disaster–the notion that to run a truly successful company or country, a leader should have the prescience to realize that the world around him or her is always changing, the [...]

I do not fear for literature, which has endured purges of all kinds, the death of the novel, the irrelevance of poetry, centuries without general literacy, and every other threat that has been hurled its way. Enough people hold it dear, and it is intrinsic enough to the human identity, for it to survive whatever problems plague it now. But I do fear for those young writers whose primary teaching in their craft is market-centered rather than literature-centered.

There have been scads of articles about the evils of high-stakes gambling by book publishers–the doling out of huge advances to one or two would-be-blockbusters while investing little in the rest of the list. The logic behind this impulse isn’t hard to understand: when a Big Book hits the jackpot, the publisher does, too–and in [...]

At first, I didn’t care too much about the economic troubles of Wall Streeters, or people living off their investments, or people with things called “401ks.” Let them give up their limos and learn how to take the bus; let them eat at the table next to me at Ali Baba’s Kebab House. But then the publishing world followed. Has the prospect of getting a literary novel published plunged from very unlikely to totally unlikely to absolutely-forget-about-it-impossible with each drop of the Dow Jones average? Or is there hope?

In the latest The Quarterly Conversation, William Patrick Wend’s “Intro to E-Lit: How Electronic Literature Makes Printed Literature Richer” discusses N. Katherine Hayles’ book Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary and defends e-publishing.
Slate’s Farhad Manjoo loves the Kindle but fears it’s bad news for the current publishing industry.
Booksquare argues that the text-to-speech verdict, supposedly [...]