The Medium Is the Medium

By DAVID BROOKS  New York Times, July 8, 2010

"Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.

Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12...

From Publisher's Marketplace: Make eBooks Cheap, Or Grandpa Will Steal Them

In the recent issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik writes: “In American writing, there are three perfect books, which seem to speak to every reader and condition: “Huckleberry Finn,” “The Great Gatsby,” and “The Catcher in the Rye.” All three very good books, but what about the women?  We think Gopnik’s pantheon leaves out some equally wonderful American novels written by women. If we...

The Brookline Booksmith included a link to this video from HarperCollins Children's Books today in their newsletter and I couldn't help but pass it along.

Geoffrey Nunberg has a very interesting article in today's The Chronicle Review on how Google Book Search's metadata errors effect scholars.

Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars

By Geoffrey Nunberg

"...  But to pose those questions, you need reliable metadata about dates and categories, which is why it's so disappointing that the book search's metadata are a train wreck: a mishmash wrapped in a muddle wrapped in a mess.

Start with publication dates. To take Google's word for it, 1899 was a literary annus mirabilis, which saw the publication of Raymond Chandler's Killer in the Rain, The Portable Dorothy Parker, André Malraux's La Condition Humaine, Stephen King's Christine, The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Raymond Williams's Culture and Society 1780-1950, and Robert Shelton's biography of Bob Dylan,...

This has been going around and we just had to share it. The Regulator Bookshop in Durham, North Carolina has put out a great short video about why you should shop at your local bookstore instead of ordering from Amazon.

You can view the video by clicking here.

Today's Boston Globe discussed the familial response to Danzy Senna's new memoir WHERE DID YOU SLEEP LAST NIGHT? and quotes Wendy on the range of responses family memoirs can envoke.

"... Certainly the genre of memoir writing induces both wounds and healing. "It runs the gamut," says literary agent Wendy Strothman, "from embracing the book to suing people. It depends on the family and what's being revealed."...  "

For the rest of the article, click here.

Follow the Reader has a really interesting post up today about knowing the [book buying] customer--it has lots of really interesting statistics about who is buying books and where.

I was most  surprised to read that even though they have grown up online, "younger readers are big supporters of bricks and-mortar retail, while older buyers tend to buy online."

The post can be found here: http://followthereader.wordpress.com/2009/05/14/bowker-reveals-new-book-....

The New York Observer has a great recap of Debbie Stier's DailyLit.com digital publishing lunch. From HarperCollins Wants to Be Your Friend:

"... The central insight driving much of the outreach that publishers have undertaken online is that, if used with finesse and attention, social media platforms like Twitter can be used deliberately to generate that invaluable, heretofore elusive phenomenon known as word of mouth. To that end, Ms. Stier and her counterparts in digital marketing departments at other publishing houses have sought to integrate themselves and their authors into various online communities of readers, and to interact—meaningfully!—with the individuals who participate in them. While they make no attempt to conceal their affiliations, the publicists and marketing people who man their companies’ accounts on Facebook and Twitter aim to be seen not as corporate promoters, but as friends taking part in a conversation...