Everyday in America someone tries to ban a book. The American Library Association reports 326 challenges in 2011. A challenge is more than a person being annoyed with a book, it is a person telling the library they don’t want anyone else to read the book. That is censorship in its most basic form. …
Continue reading “Celebrate the freedom to read – Banned Books Week – Sep 30 – Oct 6”
It’s that subject no one wants to study in English class. It’s that aisle in the bookstore that’s always empty. It’s that stuff that star-crossed lovers spout at each other through open windows. Explains the author of this Tumblr, called SpeakCelebrity. Offering that poetry isn’t scary, “it’s exciting, and comforting, and new, and old, and …
I love that Amazon is rekindling the newspaper subscription through the e-reader. It invokes an image of reading the newspaper in the morning, with my coffee and family at the table. But replace the newspaper with a Kindle and does it still work? If you’re a digital geek of course. And the beauty of online …
A condensed version of the article, if this interests you read the full article. Lifehacker reader Gabriel Wyner was tasked with learning four languages in the past few years for his career as an opera singer, and in the process landed on “a pretty damn good method for language learning that you can do in …
Continue reading “Learn how to speak a new language in a few months – from Lifehacker”
Just a few of the photos culled from Joel Robinson’s Whimsical Photographic Abstractions.
When I first started blogging, Jason Kottke, of kottke.org, was a sort-of hero for what I wanted to do. His style of blogging is very similar to mine and so are his design aesthetics. As time has progressed, I’ve switched from the hero archetype to more of a hopeful-peer. My delusions of equality were boosted …
Continue reading “Blog Design – the ultra-minimalist brigade”
28% of Americans age 18 and older own at least one specialized device for e-book reading – either a tablet or an e-book reader. The holiday season saw a huge boost in ownership for both e-readers and tablets. Both jumped 9%, meaning that nearly one in ten Americans received a device over the holidays. The …
The kids’ e-book market is still nascent, with e-books making up just about three percent of children’s book sales. That could change now that Scholastic, the world’s largest children’s book publishers, is digitizing much of its list and releasing an e-reading app, “Storia,” that includes a large e-bookstore and lets kids read e-books based on …
Continue reading “Scholastic joins the e-book revolution – new app for children’s books”
Seven Reasons to Read A Dance to the Music of Time In the fall of 2009, I left the United States to spend a school year teaching English in China. There were many things to do before leaving, but one of the more pleasurable was choosing which books would see me through the year. When …
Seven Reasons to Read A Dance to the Music of Time In the fall of 2009, I left the United States to spend a school year teaching English in China. There were many things to do before leaving, but one of the more pleasurable was choosing which books would see me through the year. When …