Dostoevsky, meet Dungeons & Dragons: Can video games promote reading?

In another installment in its series about the future of reading, the New York Times ran a piece this week about the tie ins between video games and books that some publishers and authors are beginning to explore. One author of a science fiction book for teens remarks:
“You can’t just make a book anymore,” [...]

E-books in education: One publisher’s perspective

The Association of Educational Publishers sponsors a blog called: Publishing for the Digital Future, which is a collection of essays, articles and opinion pieces that analyze the impact of the digital age on the field of educational publishing. In a recent post, the CEO of Evan Moor Educational Publishers offers up a number of questions [...]

NY Times asks: “R U Really Reading Online?”

Yesterday The Times ran an article on Page One that was the first of a series that will investigate how the internet and other technological and social forces are changing the way people read. The article features several families with children who prefer to read on the Web rather than with books, [...]

Does “Reading First” put reading last?

Several weeks ago the Senate Appropriations Committee voted to eliminate funding for the Reading First program, the groundbreaking but controversial Bush administration program that has given states $1 billion a year since 2002 to teach low-income elementary schoolers to read. A House committee also had voted to eliminate funding; if money is not restored [...]

Amazon E-Book Sales to Hit $2.5B in 2012?(Hear that Steve?)

Last month at Book Expo America, I heard Jeff Bezos say that Amazon had been selling e-books for nearly ten years and that they needed an electron microscope to find the sales figures. Well they may not need one much longer, if Pacific Crest analyst Steve Weinstein’s projections are valid. He estimates that global sales [...]

More Pleasure Reading Than We Suspected? – P.S. to Scholastic Report

More commentary on Scholastic’s Family Reading Report, released earlier this week, this time from Tim Shanahan, a widely recognized and published academic in the field of youth literacy and learning. Among his observations on the report are the following:
The major reason that they say they don’t read for pleasure is because they have other [...]

Scholastic 2008 Kids and Reading Report Results

This week marked the release of the bi-annual study of trends among kids and reading in the U.S. Some of the study’s findings are below:

After age eight, more children go online daily than read books for fun daily.
Two thirds of kids age 9-17 believe that within the next 10 years, most books which are read [...]

At your (21st Century) library now: “Super Smash Brothers Brawl”

Instead of encountering white-haired ladies telling patrons to “shhh!”, visitors to a modern library these days are more likely to find kids playing Wii or surfing the web. Rather than remain closed chambers of stacks of old books, libraries today are reinventing themselves to adapt to the needs of a wired generation born with digital [...]

The Kindle at BEA: “She moved through the fair…”

I just returned from Book Expo America, a confab of 25,000 book publishers, sellers and authors, which wrapped up Sunday in LA. One of the highlights was an address by Amazon’s chief, Jeff Bezos. If Bezos was to choose a song to describe the Kindle’s debut at BEA, he might adapt the lyrics of the traditional Irish [...]

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 [...]