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10 myths about Afghanistan

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Jonathan Steele - Sep. 28 (Special Report) - In 1988, the Soviet army left Afghanistan after a concerted campaign by the western-backed mujahideen. But since then, many enduring myths have grown up about the war-torn country. In his new book, Jonathan Steele sorts the fact from the fiction 1. Afghans have always beaten foreign armies, from Alexander the Great to modern times Afghan history is certainly littered with occasions when foreign invaders were humiliated. But there have also been many cases when foreign armies penetrated the country and inflicted major defeats. In 330BC, Alexander the Great marched through the area of central Asia that is now Afghanistan, meeting little opposition. More than a millennium later, the Mongol leader Genghis Khan also brushed resistance aside. Since Afghanistan emerged as a modern state, there have been three wars with Britain. The British invasion of 1839 produced initial victory for the intruders followed by stunning defeat followed by a second victory. In 1878, the British invaded again. ...

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Amazon's Kindle Fire just nuked the tablet market: Winners and losers

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ZDNet - By Larry Dignan - Sep. 28 (News Report) - Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took the stage Wednesday to unveil an arsenal of devices that are going to disrupt rivals like Barnes & Noble as well as Android tablet makers.

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Black leaders give 'The Help' a hand in marketing

Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Nicole Sperling - Aug. 09 (News Report) - The chairwoman of the NAACP is among those spreading the word about the DreamWorks film, which focuses on relationships between white Southern women and their maids during the civil rights era. When Roslyn Brock, chairwoman of the NAACP, first heard about "The Help," a new film based on a novel about the volatile relationships between Southern white women and their black maids at the dawn of the civil rights movement, she was skeptical.

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Small bookstores thrive amid change

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Arizona Republic - By Max Jarman - Aug. 03 (News) - The rise of online bookstores and digital-reading devices such as Kindles and iPads is indirectly fostering a resurgence of independent bookstores.

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Sidestepping Apple: Companies rethink app strategies

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

CNN - By Tim Carmody - Jul. 26 (News Report) - We all knew that once Apple starting enforcing new rules for in-app purchases, it would change how media companies do business on the iPhone and iPad. Now, we're beginning to see just what that looks like for companies trying to avoid giving a 30% cut to Cupertino. Amazon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble all removed the stores from their iOS applications on Monday, as well as any hyperlinks to or mentions of their online stores.

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Federal judge rejects Google digital book settlement

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By David Sarno - Mar. 23 (News Report) - He rules that Google's agreement with publishers and authors to share and sell the millions of books it has scanned would give it a major advantage over competitors.

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Google E-Book Venture to Launch Monday

Mon, 06 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg, Amir Efrati - Dec. 06 (News Report) - Google said it would launch on Monday its long-anticipated digital bookselling enterprise, Google eBooks, competing for a slice of the almost $1 billion digital books business.

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Next Big Thing: Literary Scholars Turn to Science

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Patricia Cohen - Apr. 01 (Special Report) - Some scholars are turning to M.R.I.’s and evolutionary theory to explore how and why people read fiction.

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Publishing: The Revolutionary Future

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

The New York Review of Books - By Jason Epstein - Mar. 01 (Special Report) - The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good. The crisis of confidence reflects these intersecting shocks, an overspecialized marketplace dominated by high-risk ephemera and a technological shift orders of magnitude greater than the momentous evolution from monkish scriptoria to movable type launched in Gutenberg's German city of Mainz six centuries ago.

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Math of Publishing Meets the E-Book

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Motoko Rich - Mar. 01 (News Report) - E-books are cheaper to produce than print volumes, but consumers may not realize that expenses like overhead and royalties are still in effect, publishers say.

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Decade that didn't leave its name

Sat, 26 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Michael S. Rosenwald - Dec. 26 (Special Report) - Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary, cannot escape the question: What should we call this decade? We have the '80s, the '90s, and . . . the "twenty hundreds"? Sheidlower has faced the query, often posed in panicky tones, at cocktail parties, in letters to the editor, and in phone calls to his word-saturated office. The anxiety began in the mid-'90s, then stretched into the early whatchamacallits -- Aughts? -- and has now reached fever pitch as the decade winds to a close.

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Sarah Palin's Going Rogue going great guns at the tills

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The Guardian - By Alison Flood - Nov. 23 (Other) - Former vice-presidential candidate?s memoir racks up 300,000 sales on its first day in shops Sarah Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, has become one of the bestselling non-fiction books in history after it sold 300,000 copies in its first day on sale. Palin's publisher HarperCollins told American press that Going Rogue has proved so popular it has been forced to print an extra 300,000 books after an initial print run of 1.5m, with about 300,000 sold on 17 November – its day of publication – alone. Going Rogue is currently sitting at the top of Amazon.com?s bestseller list, ahead of Stephenie Meyer, Dan Brown and Stephen King. Palin's first-day sales are behind Bill Clinton?s, whose 2004 memoir My Life sold 400,000 in its first 24 hours, but ahead of Hillary Clinton's, whose autobiography Living History broke records when it was published in 2003, selling 200,000 copies on publication day. The figures are nonetheless a long way behind fiction sales

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CongressDaily - Atonement

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

National Journal - By George C. Wilson - Oct. 26 (News Report) - A conscience-stricken member of the House Armed Services Committee is writing a book called "My Daddy's Not Dead Yet" in hopes it will atone for what he now considers his sinful vote to empower former President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003

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Is the Google Books Settlement Evil?

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Vanity Fair - By Jennifer Massoni - Aug. 29 (Special Report) - “I think very few authors have any real idea what to do,” says novelist (and former lawyer) Meg Waite Clayton. “I’m resentful that I have to wade through forms to protect my rights. Unless I get a written notice from Random House, I think I’m contractually bound to opt out,” she says. Not so, says Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild: “Publishers were not cutting a deal that would put their in-print authors in violation of their contracts.” So which is it? For a third opinion, you can ask the settlement administrator, a Minneapolis-based consulting group, at www.googlebooksettlement.com.

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Earliest Wodehouse satires found

Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Vanessa Thorpe - Jul. 26 (News Report) - The discovery of four satirical "playlets" by PG Wodehouse, seen by the public for the first time in 100 years this weekend, prove that the humorist - who is often viewed as apolitical - had a strong interest in public affairs from his youth. Wodehouse is best known as the creator of the all-knowing Jeeves and his egregious boss, Bertie Wooster. However, the four sketches, written between 1904 and 1907 - and complete with lampooning songs - show he was closely engaged with British politics and happy to function somewhat as the Have I Got News For You of his day.

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'Big Brother' move for Kindle users

Sat, 18 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Bobbie Johnson - Jul. 18 (News Report) - Owners of Amazon?s Kindle electronic book reader have received a nasty surprise, after discovering that copies of books by George Orwell had been deleted from their gadgets without their knowledge. The books - downloaded from Amazon.com by American Kindle users - were remotely deleted after what the US company says was a request by the publisher, MobileReference.com. Amazon refunded the cost of the books, but told affected customers they could no longer read the books and that the titles were "no longer available for purchase". "Although a rarity, publishers can decide to pull their content from the Kindle store," a customer service representative said. In an ironic twist, one of the titles in question was Orwell?s classic dystopian ...

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Some E-Books Are More Equal Than Others

Fri, 17 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By David Pogure - Jul. 17 (News Report) - This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned. But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price. This is ugly for all kinds of reasons. Amazon says that this sort of thing is “rare,” but that it can happen at all is unsettling; we’ve been taught to believe that e-books are, you know, just like books, only better. Already, we’ve learned that they’re not really like books, in that once we’re finished reading them, we can’t resell or even donate them. But now we learn that all sales may not even be final. As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table. You want to know the best part? The juicy, plump, dripping irony? The author who was the victim of this Big Brotherish plot was none other than George Orwell. And the books were “1984” and “Animal Farm.

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Business Brisk at Area Libraries

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Annie Gowen - Feb. 02 (Special Report) - Cultural soothsayers once thought libraries would become obsolete in the Internet age. Not so. They have modernized, digitized, virtualized.

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Google & the Future of Books

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

The New York Review of Books - By Robert Darnton - Jan. 28 (Special Report) - How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?

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Library use jumps in Seattle area; economy likely reason

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Seattle Times - By Mary Ann Gwinn - Jan. 15 (Special Report) - A library card has become a hot property in the Seattle region — area public libraries are experiencing a surge in circulation. While busy libraries in one of the nation's most literate cities are nothing new, some librarians credit (or blame) the recession for a dramatic upswing in business. The Seattle area's two library systems, the King County Library System (KCLS) and Seattle Public Library (SPL), each loaned more than a million more items in 2008 than in 2007.

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1 in 7 U.S. adults are unable to read this story

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

USA Today - By Greg Toppo - Jan. 09 (News Report) - A long-awaited federal study finds that an estimated 32 million adults in the USA — about one in seven — are saddled with such low literacy skills that it would be tough for them to read anything more challenging than a children's picture book or to understand a medication's side effects listed on a pill bottle.

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Young Muslims Build a Subculture on an Underground Book

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By Christopher Maag - Dec. 23 (Special Report) - For many young American Muslims, stigmatized by their peers after the Sept. 11 attacks but repelled by both the Bush administration’s reaction to the attacks and the rigid conservatism of many Muslim leaders, the novel became a blueprint for their lives.

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Michael Crichton, Author of Thrillers, Dies at 66

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

New York Times - By William Grimes - Nov. 05 (Breaking News) - Michael Crichton, whose technological thrillers like “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park” dominated best-seller lists for decades and were translated into Hollywood megahits, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 66 and lived in Santa Monica, Calif. A statement released by his family gave the cause as cancer, but provided no other details.

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China wields a little red pen

Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Sydney Morning Herald - By Susan Wyndham - Jul. 31 (News Report) - THE Chinese Government is stopping local production of Australian books that refer to the China-Tibet border, the Dalai Lama and other subjects that "infringe its sovereignty".

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From literacy to digiracy

Fri, 16 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - May. 16 (Special Report) - The printed word has fought a rear-guard action against not only computers and television, but also a whole horde of digital upstarts from DVDs and video games to mobile phones, iPods, YouTube and now the mobile internet. Meanwhile, newspapers, magazines and books have faded to shadows of their former selves, as a post-literate generation finds its facts and fun elsewhere.

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