Moderator: This is one man's opinion. Try BookGlutton yourself---maybe do a comment in Treasure Island?---and share your thoughts! - D.R. I didn't review the BookGlutton immediately after trying this community annotations service on Treasure Island. Probably I was delaying because it's always easier to review or talk about something that you love or hate. Easier to get exercised and visceral when you want to damn things to perdition, or when you think we’ve arrived at A Moment of World-Historical Revolution. Perhaps unfortunately for Book Glutton, it strikes me as neither world-historical nor revolutionary. It is---in that...

Moderator: Might the Kindle take away money for gourmet dog food? I have no idea what this four-legged guy---not mentioned in Prof. Powers' post---is thinking. But maybe that's one possibility. Meanwhile check out Rob Preece's earlier thought on the topic, as well as the related discussion. - D.R. I admit I've been a little hesitant to buy a Kindle, not out of lack of interest or complete antipathy to e-books. Indeed, I'm kind of intrigued if not totally convinced. But the biggest thing stopping me has been the cost. Professors aren't as well off as people tend to think,...

"Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits," Albert Einstein said in a quotation I picked up from by jan on freedom. "Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking." Einstein lived in a different age from ours, that's for sure. I'm more worried that my students' lives are so frantic and busy---like mine---that they hardly have time to read and reflect. I have to schedule the time in my calendar. Reading as a...

Moderator's note: I mostly agree with Peter Powers, but for a different perspective on a somewhat related topic, read Sam J. Miller's essay Where the Readers Are, in The Quarterly Conversation. - D.R. Mark Bauerlein, blogging for the Chronicle of Higher Education, posed some interesting reflections on boys and reading this past week. He was reflecting on the iPulp Fiction Library, which is probably worth a blog in itself. The library, run by a friend of Bauerlein's, exists to promote reading, especially though not exclusively for boys, by reinvigorating the tradition of the dime novel by providing free online fiction....

One thing that always struck me as a bit odd in the Harry Potter movies is the moving illustrations of books and newspapers.  Odd because, set in the present, there's a sense in which the Internet is already a great deal more magical than that.  As things go, indeed, Harry Potter is a peculiarly a-chronic, living in the modern world as if he's never seen a computer. Still, those video books are, in some sense, a continuation and enhancement of the tradition of illuminated manuscript---great textual form of the world of Gothic witches and warlocks. The above video, e-mailed to me,...

Related: Radio Open Source's programs on Emerson, a link-rich Wikipedia entry and his writings in popular e-formats at Manybooks.net. - D.R. Because I've been teaching Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays, "The Poet" and "The American Scholar," I've been spending a good bit of time over at rwe.org, which describes itself as "The Internet's Complete Guide to the Life and Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson." The description is awfully modest for a site devoted to a thinker whom literary theorist Harold Bloom described as "God," but it is also awfully accurate. Indeed, every time I visit rwe.org, I find myself thinking wistfully, "What...

Prof. Powers is chair of Messiah College's English Department. We'll follow him as he befriends—or gives up on?—various forms of book-related technology. A colleague who is a librarian and shares a lot of my interests in writing and reading sent me the following from a friend's blog: "In a previous post my daughter blew me away with her use of eLocker to access her school files from home. Last night my son used MyAccess [link added] to write an essay online. Big whoop---right? Get this---it analyzed and graded it in an instant. Took about 3 seconds tops and he was looking...

Prof. Powers is chair of Messiah College's English Department. We'll follow him as he befriends---or gives up on?---various forms of book-related technology. His bio is at the end of this post. Welcome, Pete! - D.R. I still remember my shock and dismay a couple of years ago when I clicked on to the New York Times book page and found an advertisement of much a younger, more handsome and vaguely Mediterranean-looking young man who oozed sex appeal as he looked out at me from the screen with headphones on his ears. "Why Read?" asked the caption. Surely this was the...