As reported in the San Francisco Appeal, a literary agent, Jillian Manus, paid $47,000 for the privilege of naming a Sumatran tiger cub at San Francisco Zoo "Jillian" -- "presumably after herself." The naming rights were sold off as part of the zoo's ZooFest fundraiser. Before jumping to conclusions about how much money Jillian Manus makes out of her authors, who include Newt Gingrich and Jerry Rice, it's only fair to point out that the fee for that tiger's name might have come out of the pocket of her husband, venture capitalist Alan Salzman. (You can read more about their lifestyle...

By Christina Jones Rumors are swirling that Yahoo is in talks to acquire Tumblr. Apparently Ken Goldman, Yahoo’s CFO, explained the Internet giant’s concern for its aging users. In an attempt to appeal to the 18-24 year-old-demographic, they’re seriously considering bring Tumblr on board. “One of our challenges is we have an aging demographic,” explained Goldman at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference. “Part of it is going to be just visibility again in making ourselves cool, which we got away from for a couple of years.” Tumblr is certainly gaining momentum in popularity, traffic and revenue. Just last month, comScore reported the...

I guess I'd forgotten. Now that all the the publishing players have settled, abandoning agency pricing and returning to the wholesale slums, the DOJ/e-book antitrust case, which popped up again in everyone's news feeds this week, feels a little anticlimactic. The DOJ, perhaps simply because it's what it found, or perhaps because there's no one left to pick on, is framing the last defendant standing, Apple, as the "ringmaster" in the price-fixing suit, according the New York Times. With the case set to go to trial June 3 in New York (and what a fine note on which to end BEA), I find myself wondering: At...

My life on the borderland between text and tech started in adolescence as a sci-fi nerd, dreaming of a future that started to come true around the release of the first Star Wars film, and has since been outstripping most fancies from that era year on year, hand over fist. As a writer and editor, though, I only got into electronic text by chance when I took a job editing and localizing entries for the first generation of Microsoft's Encarta CD-ROM encyclopedia in the mid-1990s, when multimedia, never mind the Internet, was only just getting going. I spent the next five...

India's OMICS Publishing Group threatens scholarly critic with $1 billion lawsuit, jail time (Boing Boing) OMICS Publishing Group, an Indian scholarly publisher has threatened to sue one of its critics, Metadata librarian Jeffrey Beall, for $1 billion, and has threatened him with prison time over posts he made to his prominent Scholarly Open Access site. Changes at The New York Times Book Review (New York Observer) The New York Times Book Review is modernizing under the editorship of Pamela Paul, who was appointed to the position in early April. The Astoria Bookshop to Open This August on 31st Street (We Heart Astoria) I’ll just let that title sink in...

DBW featured a press release for BookLikes, a new social reading platform that is supposed to combine the features of Tumblr and Goodreads. I consider one of my roles here is to involve trying things out, and potentially wasting my time so you don't have to waste your. And my reaction to this site? Don't even bother. (Click here to see what TeleRead's Susan Lulgjuraj has to say about BookLikes.) Everyone seems to be wanting to get into the social reading space today, and honestly, I don't think we need yet another one. Especially not one that acts so much like Goodreads....

I’m an all-day note-taker—my day's or week’s itinerary, messages to give to someone else, story ideas, ramblings, etc. Unfortunately I’m also a bit of a messy ... well, unorganized person, I admit. And as you may guess, those two personality traits usually add up, for me, to lots of unorganized, folded pieces of paper in my pockets or around my house and office, and also a library of notebooks of compiled thoughts and ideas with real order. So needless to say, I’m anticipating Sony’s A4-sized (8.3-inches x 11.7-inches) digital paper slate to be rather beneficial in my life. Unveiled last week,...

The best thing about portable digital devices like smartphones and tablets is how they provide such information right at our fingertips. While they excel in cities and urban areas, they don’t always perform the best in extreme outdoor situations. Designed with the outdoor enthusiast in mind, the creator of Earl has engineered a tablet that’s meant to work where normal smartphones and tablets won’t. A laminated solar panel provides up to 20 hours of uptime. The 3000mAh battery charges in five hours in direct sunlight using high efficiency 18 percent mono crystalline solar cells. Style meets efficiency with intuitive design, fusing Android 4.1...

As soon as I published the post about Astrid being bought by Yahoo and mentioned I was looking for a new app, my in-box started chiming with suggestions. Wunderlist was one of the more interesting ones, and I’ve been checking it out this week. It has some interesting features that make it worth downloading. It’s usable across multiple devices. I currently have it downloaded on my computer, installed on my iPhone and Nexus 7, and there’s even a Web-based interface if I should need it. It mostly looks and acts the same across all devices, so there’s little learning curve as you move from one...

Digital Public Library Raises Questions of Ownership, Permanence, Access (Media Shift) Why would anyone want to attend a party to celebrate the opening of a virtual repository of metadata? A better question might be — what is a virtual repository of metadata? --- The Web Giants Are Rising Above Humans and Their Petty Rules, and that Worries Me (GigaOM) The titans of the web are rebels, playing by their own rules. That is to be applauded at times, but we should also be thinking about the wider, long-term implications for society and fair competition. --- Report: Kids Tend to Read More Digital Than Print (Good e-Reader) The...

Since the middle of 2011, the London Evening Standard has been focused on increasing literacy in the UK with their "Get London Reading" initiative. To date, they've raised £1 million (about $1.5 million) and helped more than 2,000 children. Now Barnes & Noble and Nook Media have joined the campaign, along with several large UK publishers (Hachette UK, HarperCollins, Penguin and Random House). Last month, Barnes & Noble donated 100 Nook Simple Touch readers to the program, which has allowed volunteer reading helpers to use the e-readers during their work. [caption id="attachment_85168" align="alignright" width="300"] Photo credit: London Evening Standard[/caption] I just checked out...

UK press, politicians and public all seem heated up about Amazon’s tax bills in the UK—or lack thereof. Seems those deceitful corporations have been daring to incorporate and structure across jurisdictions, rather than standing meekly inside good honest British borders and reaching their hands into their pockets whenever that nice Mr. Osborne tells them to. Whisper it not, but rumor has it that some of them even have profit motives. Scandalous, I know. Politicians eager for scapegoats to fling before an electorate grumbling under the weight of misgovernment have seized on Amazon, Google, et al, as a Godsend. Watching them posture...