There aren’t enough pro-literacy campaigns any more if you ask me, but the literacy group Burning Through Pages seems likely to inspire a bunch. In fact, a new poster campaign by the group has gone viral, they report, leading to so many hits on the…
Tom Tivnan reports in The Bookseller that Worldreader — often called ‘the e-reader NGO’ — has just beta launched an app that will enable owners of ‘dumb’ phones to use them to read ebooks. The app is aimed at readers in developing countries, where…
Forty-five years ago Oxford University Press published the first edition of William H. McNeill’s survey, A World History. It’s still in print. Now in its fourth edition, the book has not had significant trade sales in the US for at least a decade, according to…
We’re familiar with the argument: the modern age is bankrupting our attention spans, we are all technology-addled morons clicking semi-consciously between browser screens, unable to complete the simplest of tasks: mesmerised, drooling, catatonic simpletons. They’re not Claire Tomalin‘s precise words, but let’s imagine that that’s…
This can’t be true: According to this year’s edition of the annual survey of American literacy from Central Connecticut State University, none other than Washington D.C. is, for the second year in a row, our nations “most literate city.” A USA Today story says the rankings…
Listen up all you lollygagging parents of toddlers out there. With all the cognitive research in, it’s time to start taking that bedtime story a little more seriously. Reading to the little rascals will actually help them later on. It’s a scientifically proven fact. And…
Word Up, the pop-up volunteer-run bookstore in Washington Heights, might be a more permanent fixture in the neighborhood if the shop’s creators are able to negotiate a new agreement with the landlord. Veronica Liu, an editor at Seven Stories Press, told DNA info that “This…
Ever eager to jump on board with a no-brainer of a free idea, public idiot and Mayor of London Boris Johnson has announced his support for book-sharing schemes to be launched on the city’s tube network in time for the 2012 Pointless, Expensive Disaster Olympic…
Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, has written a delightful list of the great works of literature he has not read: I have never got through Henry Green’s Living or Concluding, though neither one is a long book, and I have sometimes heard myself call Green my “favorite”…
A few years back, Bob Harris at The New York Times presented the Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing, with “compelling” being one of the Serious Offenders of the Written Word, and Lake Superior State University posted its 2011 list of “banished words” that includes “epic,” “viral,” and “man up.” We agree.…
