The Lawrence (Kansas) Public Library found an innovative way to celebrate Banned Book Week last fall when it produced art trading cards. Lawrence Library picked seven books to put on its trading cards from 46 submissions. Books included 1984 (pictured), Animal Farm, and Little Red Riding Hood. The cards gained national attention, and they’re still receiving more. Lawrence Library became one of eight libraries to win a 2013 John Cotton Dana Award, which comes with a $10,000 award, the Lawrence Journal World reported. Locals got free packs, but the library sold others online and sent packs around the world, including to England, Canada and...

Penguin Books, along with its seriously talented team of graphic designers, is making great play of its latest rebooting of the George Orwell franchise. Coverage from the Huffington Post to the Creative Review lauds Penguin’s brave and high-minded initiative to relaunch Orwell’s works with bold cover designs that recall the original Penguin editions—only, in the case of Nineteen Eighty-Four, with the title erased to signify censorship. Penguin Classics’ own website states: "In recognition of one of Britain’s greatest and most influential writers, Penguin Books, the Orwell Estate and The Orwell Prize are launching the inaugural ‘Orwell Day’ on 21st January with new editions of...

What if Amazon wiped out all your Kindle books and refused to let you open another account? I don’t know what if any sins a customer committed, but such an Orwellian scenario is said to have actually happened. No, I’m not just talking about the remote deletion of 1984, but rather the mysterious zapping of the customer’s entire Kindle library. The most likely scenario here, as guessed at by BoingBoing, is that the Norwegian customer simply lived outside of the territories for authorized purchases. While I love content providers—I’m one myself—Amazon’s latest action shows why the Digital Public Library of America or another nonprofit needs to get into...

If you've never read a book specifically in celebration of Banned Books Week, you might want to consider rectifying that situation this Sunday, September 30, when the 30th anniversary of the proud literary tradition officially kicks off. I can still remember (more or less) when I first learned about Banned Books Week: I was probably 11 or 12—Isaac Asimov and the Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature were my big obsessions at the time. A Banned Books Week poster was hanging on the wall outside my elementary school's library, and next to it was a glass case with shelves inside, and stacked on the...

There was an interesting overview of reader privacy issues in this week's Guardian. I wonder if most e-book readers have given any thought to the issue. I bet it hasn't even crossed their minds that the customer profile Amazon or Kobo or Sony might have on them—detailing what they've purchased, and when—would be valuable to someone. And if they did see the value (I myself find Amazon's recommendations engine both useful and surprisingly accurate), I wonder if it's crossed their minds that this information could potentially be shared once Amazon has it. As the article points out: "Retailers and search engines, most notably Amazon...

Back in 2010 I mentioned the blog Letters of Note.  It's a blog that publishes letters, postcards, telegrams faxes and memos.  Now they have a fascinating letter from Aldous Huxley to Oeorge Orwell.  Here's what they say: In October of 1949, a few months after the release of George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he received a fascinating letter from fellow author Aldous Huxley — a man who, 17 years previous, had seen his own nightmarish vision of society published, in the form of Brave New World. What begins as a letter of praise soon becomes a brief comparison of the two...

I do realize this is an e-book blog, not a video gaming blog, but digital media do share a lot of commonalities—and Valve just keeps doing things that prompt me to draw direct comparisons to things e-book stores and publishers should be doing, but aren’t. Our sister blog Gamertell, which is a video gaming blog, has the details. Over the last two weeks, Valve’s game distribution platform Steam’s anti-cheating system mistakenly banned about 12,000 Steam accounts from playing Modern Warfare 2, for cheating. Steam’s system is simplistic, usually accurate, and there is no appeal—the only way to start playing a...

Wired’s “Gadget Lab” writer Brian X. Chen has posted a call for transparency in the app store, in which he uses the recent rejection and subsequent approval of Mark Fiore’s political cartoon app to remind us that Apple still hasn’t come out with clear guidelines over what is and is not permissible in the app store. Until it does, Chen notes, journalists are always going to have a Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads, never being quite sure whether the next thing they write is going to bring it down on them. ...

Steven Levy at Wired talks about the experience of finding a typo on the title page of a Kindle book. A book entitled I, Sniper opened up on his Kindle as I, Snipper. Levy emailed a friend of his who worked at the publisher about it, and his friend told him that the book was being corrected both for people who had and had not already purchased it. However, Levy found that it hadn’t been corrected for him—and when he contacted Amazon about it, the Amazon representative told him that Amazon had a policy of not correcting works...