In 2008, we reported on a UK program called Bookstart, through which United Kingdom residents could send text messages to get free storybooks for their children. David Rothman compared the program to the American program Reading Is Fundamental, which was imperiled by budget cutbacks. It has been no secret that funding for libraries and similar programs has been under siege in the UK as well as the US during the last year or so, and just now Neil Gaiman retweeted this unpleasant news from the website of Booktrust, the foundation behind Bookstart: Booktrust had...

The British Library has embarked on a project to map accents and pronunciation of words by English-speakers worldwide, as part of its Evolving English exhibit. To that end, they have asked any English-speaker world-wide to record themselves reading aloud the children’s book Mr. Tickle for the benefit of their collection. The idea is that reading prose aloud tends to be more natural and conversational than simply reading lists of words, and also Mr. Tickle includes some words that have interesting variant pronunciations, like “mischievous” or “extraordinary”. Readers can take part in the project at the British Library...

Cory Doctorow has an interesting column in the Guardian looking at what little can be determined from the few sales figures that Rupert Murdoch’s paywalled London Times/Sunday Times representative has deigned to release. The paper has said that the Times had “200,000 paid users, 100,000 of whom were digital-only customers”. Doctorow reads between the lines as best he can and comes up with some interesting suppositions. Doctorow writes: Fundamentally, the question News Corp is trying to answer is: "Will the Times make more money with a paywall?" And the figures we've just seen do...

The UK bookseller Waterstone’s has started selling Hachette e-books again, The Bookseller reports. Waterstone’s had previously stopped selling them two months ago over uncertainty surrounding UK publishers’ switch to agency pricing terms. Waterstone’s is now on agency terms with HarperCollins and Hachette, but has yet to reach them with Penguin. Waterstones has stopped offering points on its membership card program for any e-book purchases, given that this would conflict with publishers’ agency control. W H Smith started selling Penguin and Hachette books on agency pricing last week, and Amazon has been selling them already. However, some prices are still...

Some news from the UK: Orange and T-Mobile may start offering the 3G iPad for less than its standard retail price if purchasers sign up for data contracts at the same time. The Telegraph states that their parent company, Everything Everywhere, has said that purchasers could get the iPad for £200 ($318) instead of the standard £429 ($681) cost when they sign up for an 18-month or 2-year data package for £15 ($24) per month. The plans would be available before Christmas. What the article doesn’t say is whether this deal is going to be offered in the USA...

As the biggest digital outlet for a medium that used to be sold solely physically, Valve’s Steam game distribution, multiplayer-matchmaking, and instant-messaging portal is often useful for drawing parallels to other e-media distribution schemes, such as e-books. But sometimes the differences stand out more. Many games that are integrated with Steam, such as Call of Duty, Fallout, Left 4 Dead, and so on, are still sold in physical disc-in-box form in brick-and-mortar stores. Today MCV reports that two unnamed major British retail outlets are threatening to stop carrying Steam-enabled games unless the publishers remove Steam functionality from them. The...

Back in September, I mentioned FutureBook’s Nick Harkaway’s interview with a former official of the UK branch of the Pirate Party. Despite the name, the Pirate Party is not a bunch of wild-eyed file-sharing anarchists who think that information ought to be free because it “wants to be”. Rather, it is an organized political party whose platform is based on the idea that copyright has become excessive and needs to be brought back toward a fairer balance. Now Harkaway has held another brief e-mail interview with the current leader of the Pirate Party, Loz Kaye. This interview focuses on...

In a time when the progress of copyright law seems not simply stuck but actually going backward, it’s nice to see at least one country trying to move ahead. Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has announced a six-month review of UK copyright law to try to make it “fit for the Internet age.” In particular, Cameron has an eye on the United States’s doctrine of fair use, which permits limited types of unauthorized use of copyrighted material, which he believes is helpful to allow companies to innovate and produce new kinds of goods and services. At present, the...

The Bookseller has another piece on the Publishers Association and the importance of territorial sales controls. (A couple of days ago, I covered the Publishers Association’s decree that libraries should stop lending e-books remotely due to territorial transgressions, and also Waterstone’s ending overseas e-book sales.) This time, the target is Amazon, which a Bookseller investigation revealed to have relatively lax territorial enforcement. Richard Mollett, PA chief executive, spoke out against online retailers with weak territorial controls for e-books. Mollet stressed the “great importance” of the controls. He said: “Undermining territoriality goes against our copyright...

A FutureBook survey shows some interesting responses, the Bookseller reports. 76% of those who answered thought that e-books should be priced at the same level as the least expensive discounted print version of the paper book. 60% thought that the publisher was in the best position to set that price. 43% supported agency pricing, though 75% did not think it would last for more than five years. The article goes on to quote a few comments that poll-takers left, some of them quite amusing. When asked how long agency agreements would remain in place,...

My copy of Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain is, shamefully, still residing on my shelf.  I've been distracted by Heidegger, Hubert Dreyfus (to help me understand Heidegger), Graham Harman and Bernard Stiegler (to confuse me about Heidegger again), and I've basically neglected my reading on the neuropsychology of reading to pursue the phenomenology of technology.  I got linked to Dehaene's interview with Scientific American, however, and my interest has been sparked all over again.  In the interview the following exchange takes place: SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: [I]f the brain of a dyslexic is organized differently, does that suggest that...