August 11, 2011
A brief report on today’s Morning Edition program on NPR discusses the pending legal battle over the pricing of eBooks in this rapidly growing market, and the game-changing impact of the expanding selection of competing brands of eReaders that is successfully chipping away at Kindle’s market share. Barbara L.
August 11, 2011
Usually we concentrate on the opening lines to great books, however, this collection of titles shows off their last lines. See how many you can guess and compare their impact on their respective novels. This is presented as a group of covers that are interactive- scroll over the cover and the start of the line […]
August 10, 2011
Bruce Norris’ s 2011 Pulitzer Prize- winning drama Clybourne Park will have its Chicago premiere this fall, opening the Steppenwolf season from September 8 through October 6. Set in a Chicago bungalow, the first act takes place in 1959 and flashes forward to 2009 in Act 2. The Pulitzer Prize committee’s citation described Norris’ play […]
August 9, 2011
This October, Philip Levine will become the 18th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, succeeding W. S. Merwin. In the words of Dr. James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, Mr. Levine “is one of America’s great narrative poets. His plainspoken lyricism has, for half a century, championed the art of telling […]
August 7, 2011
Prof. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. just published a companion book to the DVD shown on PBS this spring called Black in Latin America. According to the article, only a small fraction of Africans (from the slave trade) ended up in the United States, with many more living permanently in other countries. Judging by the enormous […]
August 6, 2011
Today, August 6th, marks the 20th anniversary of the World Wide Web. Its beginnings were far from what we know as the Internet today, but you have to start somewhere. According to Cnet, It began when scientist Tim Berners-Lee posted a summary of a project for organizing information on a computer network using a “web” […]
August 5, 2011
In the wake of the major theft of historical documents this summer from the Maryland Historical Society, this PW blog turned up a short list of most stolen books from bookstores. According to various sources, the 5 most stolen books are: anything by Charles Bukowski and William Burroughs, On the Road by Kerouac, The New […]
August 5, 2011
This rebroadcast of a very enjoyable interview about the production of the original King Kong caught my attention. Music, Kong himself, and Fay Wray’s high-pitched screams are all covered. Compared to seeing today’s fantastic effects, it was fun to remember watching this much simpler film years ago and being suitably impressed (and scared). A visit […]
August 4, 2011
Prime Suspect follows the adventures of Jane Tennison, an intelligent, tough Detective Chief Inspector in Scotland Yard. As described by Dame Helen Mirren, her character is “… extremely directed, ambitious, talented and very uncompromising. Therefore she is deeply frustrated by her job; the way her sex is a barrier. But she knows how to work […]
August 4, 2011
Aaron Gilbreath’s op/ed piece in today’s Chicago Tribune urges publishers of traditional books to fight the tidal wave of e-Reader marketing with their own clever campaigns. He argues for a well thought out marketing strategy in media that targets the general public as opposed to those that are already preaching to the choir (e.g., NY […]
