The Poetry Foundation's free poetry app, released for the iPhone last year, can now be installed on iPads and Android devices too. Here's more info from the press release: The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is pleased to announce that its POETRY app is now available for the first time for Android and iPad. The free app has been updated for all mobile devices, including the iPhone. The updated POETRY app now offers audio versions of many of the 1,700-plus poems included in its virtual poetry library, links to biographies of poets whose work is featured in the app, source...

The public domain is a great thing for literary appreciation. Any title older than 1923—which includes most of the great literary novels, the works of 19th-century poets, and so on—is immediately available to anyone who can download an e-book. But what happens when a lost work turns up—and then promptly vanishes into a private collection? This is the question posed by Michael Rosen on the Guardian’s Books blog. Rosen reminds us that the four year anniversary recently passed of the discovery of a lost poem by Percy Bysse Shelley, entitled “Poetical Essay”. The poem, self-published by...

Publishing Perspectives reports on a nonprofit poetry publisher, Ugly Duckling Presse, who wanted to try out e-books but weren’t comfortable with the idea of making complete books available for download. Instead they have gone with Issuu, a Flash-based platform that makes the books available in their entirety only on Ugly Duckling’s website. For now, they are using it for chapbooks rather than full-length novels, given that chapbooks are shorter and tend to stay out of print once available supplies are used up. The books are getting relatively few views (about 100-150 per month), but given that they were...

Travis Nichols has an article in the Huffington Post about how poetry is poorly formatted in ebooks. He mentions an AP article about poetry that quotes poet Billy Collins as saying that if the original line of poem is beyond a certain length the ebook will be formatted to add an extra word to flush left the screen. This will result in a three line stanza becoming a four line stanza and messing up the poem. He goes on to say: Obviously, the ideal situation would be for the e-book conversions to go smoothly and preserve the layout of the...

Here's another press release, this time something for you poetry fans: The Poetry Foundation, publisher of Poetry magazine, is pleased to announce the release of its new POETRY iPhone app (poetryfoundation.org/iphone), making available for the first time on a mobile device a virtual poetry library of more than 1,400 complete poems by classic and contemporary poets from William Shakespeare to César Vallejo to Heather McHugh. The unique POETRY app offers hundreds of well-known poems by contemporary and classic poets, including T.S. Eliot, Pablo Neruda, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, and many, many others; easy access to new poems from the pages of Poetry...

Most discussions of literature on computers and mobile devices have to do with prose, or else non-fiction such as textbooks. But Victor Keegan has a piece on The Literary Platform talking about e-poetry. Keegan, a poet and 47-year veteran of The Guardian, has released a couple of poetry-related iPhone applications that link poems (classic works and his own verse) to locations that inspired them. He writes here about the challenges inherent in marrying poetry to new advances in technology and social networking. For Keegan’s first two books of poetry, he tried different experiments in technology to promote...

From a press release I received from them: Do you have a poem pacing about in the confines of your computer or your mind? Is it wild? Gentle? Hilarious? Tragic? Insane? Serious? Abstract? Concrete? All of the above? Or is it something completely different? Submit it to Wattpad and you may get published! Be sure to include the tag poetrycontest. The winners will be determined by Frontenac House. Submissions must be original, in English, and may not have been previously published anywhere else. Contest deadline July 31, 2010. Winners will be announced on September 15, 2010. The year 2010 marks the 10th...

Here's another ereader. They are becoming commonplace! Notice that it does include EPUB. The ER600 is an e-book reader, made by China's Matsunichi. It is available for customization (Matsunichi will not sell these directly) - options include a 5" or 6" E Ink display, touchscreen, 3G/3.5G cellular modem, Wi-Fi and bluetooth. It includes an MP3, microphone and speaker out, 512Mb to 2Gb of memory and an SD card slot. The reader supports TXT, PDF, HTML, FB2, ePUB, PRC, MOBI, JPG, GIF and BMP file formats and includes an RSS reader and a web browser. From E-Ink_Info.com ...

A milestone of sorts was reached on my idiotprogrammer  blog recently. I noticed that wordpress has caught over 1,300,000 spam comments on my blog so far!  This merits an appreciatory post at least. I've been blogging since 2001, and I think I switched over to wordpress in 2003 (or was it 2004?). I think I started using akismet spam fighter in late 2005 or early 2006. Until  until then I was completely unprotected--and in a state of constant panic--always dreading the need to weed through the barrage of comments.  Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! Delete! (next page)....

The poet Norman Savage, whose autobiography Junk Sick I reviewed here, has begun posting poems on his blog. You don’t want to miss them. Some of these originally appeared in the countercultural magazine Changes, started by Susan Graham Mingus, wife of Charles Mingus. The poem “Sunday” came complete with pictures by Andy Warhol. (Unfortunately Savage is unable to upload them.) That’s all right. The poem speaks for itself. An excerpt: SUNDAY body repose, mind nomadic; constant flux even on the day of...