“The Dumbest Generation”? Depends whom you ask…

I’m at Book Expo America in LA this week, so here are a few random thoughts and links that I”ve stored on the shelf:
A thought-provoking piece appears in the current issue of Newsweek, called The Dumbest Generation? Don’t Be Dumb, discusses a new book by Mark Bauerlien of Emory University: The Dumbest Generation: How the [...]

Breaking up is hard to do… Borders and Amazon part company

Like Brad and Jennifer, Tom and Nicole, the rumors surrounding the breakup of Borders and Amazon’s seven year partnership are true. Today, Borders launched its own website, after it terminated an alliance with it had Amazon since 2001. The execs at Borders probably watched the film “Sleeping with the Enemy” and got nervous. Good coverage [...]

Score: Teen Fiction 1, Video games 0

An encouraging piece of news appeared in Newsweek’s web edition on May 19:
Generation R (R Is for Reader)

The book business may be flat, but there’s at least one bright spot: the booming sales of books for teens–and no, it’s not all Harry Potter. Contrary to the depressing proclamations that American teens aren’t reading, the [...]

Cracks in the Dam: Publishers dabble in digital tales

The following appeared in the May 22 edition of Canada’s Globe & Mail newspaper:
A pair of Canadian book publishers dipped their toes ever deeper into the online world this week by offering free digital downloads of entire books. House of Anansi Press and HarperCollins Canada have decided to make the full text of a single [...]

OLPC 2.0: The future of e-book readers?

Could the next generation of the OLPC be a “Kindle-Killer”? If Nicholas Negroponte’s predictions of the XO-2 are borne out, then children in third world countries may be surfing the web on a unit that has dual screens, and a foldable e-book form factor. “The next generation laptop should be a book,” Negroponte said.
The XO-2 [...]

E-Pub: It’s not a social network for beer drinkers; it’s a digital publishing standard

Last week I attended a conference in New York called Digital Book 2008, organized by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). The organizers might consider changing the name to the CIPNATA, for the Consortium for the Introduction and Proliferation of New and Arcane Technology Acronyms. Here, as Exhibit A, is an excerpt from the IDPF’s [...]

Stranger in a Strange Land (with apologies to Robert Heinlein)

I just returned from spending four days with approximately 18,000 reading teachers from around the world, who met in Atlanta, GA for the International Reading Association’s Annual Convention. There were many outstanding speakers throughout the conference, including Jamie Lee Curtis, Alice Walker, and David Baldacci. Yet perhaps the most inspirational speaker was not a famous [...]

The Future of Reading – A Play in Six Acts – Redux

Now that it’s been nearly six months since Amazon introduced the Kindle, it seems like a good time to revisit some of the dire predictions that were made about its prospects and the future of the book. A particularly foreboding scenario is painted (complete with Orwellian overtones) in the following post from DiveintoMark on November [...]