The BBC reports that the UK government’s Department for Education is launching a reading contest for 7 to 12 year olds. (Press release.) The idea is to get kids hooked on reading for pleasure—a good intention to be sure. [Schools Minister Nick] Gibb said: "Children should always have a book on the go. The difference in achievement between children who read for half an hour a day in their spare time and those who do not is huge - as much as a year's education by the time they are 15." (It’s worth...

The Sun has an op-ed by “chick-lit writer” Adele Parks—another one of those conversion stories about e-book doubters who become e-book evangelists. In Parks’s case, she became curious enough to buy a Kindle after learning she was selling a huge number of e-books. After buying the Kindle, she discovered she liked it so much she has used it it constantly ever since—though mostly for travel and commuting, where a slim device that can replace a ton of books is most useful. She will “always choose a ‘proper’ book” for reading at home. Parks does not have an...

I came across a rather interesting pair of posts on BookRiot today. Cassandra Neace opined that there’s no point in reading “the classics” anymore, because they are essentially boring—no four-letter words or sex and violence (because those classic writers were far too couth to include any such things), and too many dead white males. (Ah, how Roger Mifflin would cringe.) Amanda Nelson wrote a longer and amusing rebuttal, pointing out that a lot of classics became classics because they pushed the boundaries of couth for their day. (Indeed, some of them, such as Huckleberry Finn, continue to be controversial...

On UpstartHR.com, which appears to be a blog dedicated to the theory and practice of human resources, a blogger identified only as “Ben” has written an interesting post about how and why he reads at least one book per week. Ben believes that reading books is extremely helpful to anyone with an HR career (and, indeed, anyone in general). He explains that books can help improve you in every aspect of your life by allowing you to learn from the mistakes of others without having to make them yourself. (He also links to a site called Personal MBA, which is...

Here’s a clever use of technology to promote reading among kids—taking a cue from speed dating to create “Extreme Speed Booking”. The idea is that kids are given two minutes with each book—they can do whatever they like: examine the cover, read the first chapter, skip to the last page—and then rate how interested they would be in reading more (as well as copy down the author and title of those that do interest them). And the great thing about the e-book age is that this sort of thing is easier than ever without needing to have physical copies...

On Gizmodo, Jamie Condliffe has a report on a 74-slide presentation by Andrew Rushbass, CEO of The Economist Group. The Economist is one of few newspapers that has successfully implemented a paywall, and in the presentation Rushbass talks about how and why the company was able to do it. What’s more, Rushbass explains that tablet owners are reading more news than before, but reading it in different ways. He calls this the “Lean Back 2.0” paradigm (following the first “Lean Back,” which was paper books, then “Lean Forward”, which was the World Wide Web), and suggests that e-readers...

On FutureBook, Steve Richards (managing director of social media agency Yomego) has a brief piece looking at the rising popularity of online worlds (such as Pottermore and Scholastic’s Horrible Histories World) as ways to market books to kids. He offers a number of suggestions for how the runners of those virtual worlds can make them more attractive and user-friendly to their target audience. Online environments don’t signal the death of reading – far from it. They can actively promote books to children, and pique their interest in new characters and stories. But just as a child...

This is just to interesting to let go by and it may have some impact on the debate over whether reading a book or reading on a screen is different.  From the Georgetown University press release: Skilled readers can recognize words at lightning fast speed when they read because the word has been placed in a visual dictionary of sorts, say Georgetown University Medical Center (GUMC) neuroscientists. The visual dictionary idea rebuts the theory that our brain “sounds out” words each time we see them. This finding, reported at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience,...

Have you ever read on the toilet? I know I have. Indeed, the one-handed form factor of the iPod Touch means it’s perfectly suited for me to read with my right while I wipe with my left. And indeed, people have been reading on the toilet in real life and literary works for decades or even centuries. But have you considered whether it’s a sanitary habit? The Guardian’s books blog reports that one pediatric gastroenterologist was curious enough about the practice to issue a survey on the matter. Some doctors point out that the process can lead to...

The book is on fire, a period of hot speculation and rapid innovation. If this period is a book burning we cannot say that it is censorship. After all, the e-book is just a new format of the book. The content is still right there, see? Does format matter?  From the view of physics nothing is lost in a fire. Energy is not created or destroyed; it is transferred from one form to another. Small consolation to the person whose house has burned down. Transition always entails loss to those invested in the old way. A way of life was...

A survey from Harris Interactive turns up some very interesting facts about current e-book usage. The survey notes that 15%, or about 1 out of every 6 people, own an e-book reader (up from only about half that last year), and another 15% consider themselves likely to buy one within the next six months. It also finds people who own e-readers both read more and buy more books than non-owners, and suggests the devices are by and large good for the book market in general. One of the criticisms of e-Readers is that people who...

Last week, Slate had a piece by Jack Shafer that I only just got around to reading about a comparison between the print and on-line versions of the New York Times. Based on his own experiences, and on a paper recently presented at a journalism education association meeting, the article posits that newspaper readers read more news and retain it better when they read from print than when they read from on-line sources. The researchers found that the print folks "remember significantly more news stories than online news readers"; that print readers "remembered significantly more topics...