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The Aesthetics of Reading

Rob Walker—author of Buying In, one of the best marketing/business books of the past few years—just found a listing on Etsy for a hardcover copy of Buying In that “has been sealed and cut by hand to fit Amazon’s Kindle 6” Wireless Reading Device.” Seriously. Here’s the full ...

E-Readers: The Good, Bad, and Flexible

Today’s Publishing Perspectives piece is a great editorial by editor Ed Nawotka on e-books, specifically in relation to kids books: My daughter loves to read. “Book, ook, ook,” she’ll say, trying to form the right word that will get my attention to plop onto a beanbag chair, pull her into my lap, and read to ...

Fail, Fail Again

Just when you thought the Times had figured out how to correctly pair writers with appropriate topics . . . Kidding—the Times will never get that straight. Here’s some clips from today’s review of Lost‘s season finale: [. . .] the producers of “Lost,” who have devoted the show’s fourth and ...

For Everyone in Ann Arbor . . .

The “Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age” conference taking place at the University of Michigan on Friday, May 15th looks pretty amazing. There are two main panels: one on “New Reading Practices and Literacies in a Digital Age” and one on “New Institutions for the Digital ...

Indpendents and What the Kids Are Reading

In the Guardian, Hirsh Sawhney has a piece about how independent publishers of the world are going to save literature: Could literary culture really be breathing its last? Should readers and writers be running for cover? Of course not. But what, then, will save literature from economic disaster? Simple: independent ...

The Future of Reading is Fine, Move Along, Nothing to See Here

The Guardian—which has self-admittedly entered the season of the “crap survey”—has an article today about a recent study on what reading material most attracts the other sex. A survey commissioned by the National Year of Reading has found the top 10 reads to impress a woman. Top of the list is ...

Centre for Future Storytelling

Robert McCrum can be pretty bitingly funny: According to the Times, some clever people at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are setting up a $25m ‘laboratory’ to ‘save the story’. You could hardly make it up. The Centre for Future Storytelling declares it is going to ask ‘the big ...