Upcoming Alex Reader: Cleverly Solves Problem of Reading Internet Text

There’s something very unique about the Alex Reader.  It has a regular black and white display like the Kindle, but also has a fully functional ,color, touch sensitive computer at the bottom (think of the iphone or ipod touch).  You can run applications to play music or surf the web, but once you find a webpage you want to read, say the New York Times, Wikipedia or any of the millions of titles from Google Books or Gutenberg.org, you simply click a button and the text and graphics from that webpage are sent to the black and white display for comfortable reading.  There’s no price or release date, but this is easily the coolest reader I’ve seen thus.   Watch Video

Amazon’s Best 100 Books of 2009

Amazon.com Book Editors Announce Their Favorite 100 Books of 2009, as Well as Top 100 Customer Favorites, the Majority of Which Are Available on Kindle. Top 100 of 2009

Group Files Suit to Burn Library Book

Found on Drudge.com:

“After fighting for the removal of the book Baby Be-Bop from a West Bend, Wisc., library, the Christian Civil Liberties Union and three other plaintiffs have sued over the book, seeking “the right to publicly burn or destroy by another means” the book and asking for $120,000 in damages because they were exposed to it in a library display.”   Story From Timesonline

Catcher in the Rye Sequel Draws J.D. Salinger Suit

From NY Times:

“Compiled by DAVE ITZKOFF

In “The Catcher in the Rye,” the narrator Holden Caulfield warns his readers to beware of phonies, and his creator, J. D. Salinger, evidently still believes in that caution. On Monday Mr. Salinger, the reclusive author, filed suit against the writer and the publisher of a planned book cast as a sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye,” Reuters reported. In an interview in The Telegraph, the author, John David California, said that his novel, “60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye,” would feature a 76-year-old character called Mr. C, who wanders the streets of New York after he escapes his nursing home, in a manner similar to Holden Caulfield’s escape from an elite prep school. In The Telegraph, Mr. California said that Mr. Salinger was “a great writer who influenced the entire world with the words he made up” and that his novel was “a tribute the way Holden would have said it.” In the suit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan, lawyers for Mr. Salinger said, “The sequel is not a parody and it does not comment upon or criticize the original. It is a rip-off pure and simple,” according to Reuters.”

How well do you know Modern Library’s list of 100 best novels?

Can you name the 100 best novels according to Modern Library (1900 to 1998)?

• Enter a novel in the box
• Correctly named novels will show up in the table below
• Answers do not have to be guessed in order
• you have 14 minutes – or you can give up at anytime to see the answers

Test yourself  now

Fmr Librarian, Top Amazon Reviewer

At 54, Klausner, a former librarian from Georgia, has posted more book reviews on Amazon.com than any other user—12,896, as of this writing, almost twice as many as her nearest competitor. That’s a book a day for 35 years.    Full Story

Seems the lowest review she gives a book is 4 stars out of 5.  No wonder publishers send her 50 free books a week. – Ed.

New Tolkien Book 36 Yrs After Death

“Truly, J.R.R. Tolkien is the Tupac Shakur of the literary world. His son Christopher has once again raided the fell barrow where his corpse resides and found still another unpublished manuscript there, entitled The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. It goes on sale today…The new book is definitely a legitimate, heretofore unpublished work by J.R.R. Tolkien, consisting of two long narrative poems written in a traditional Norse meter.”     Story

Most Challenged Books of 2008

 

ALA has released its list of the most challenged books and authors of 2008.  Check it out here

More Crichton Novels Coming

“The Harper-Collins publishing house said a completed novel called “Pirate Latitudes,” an adventure story set in Jamaica in 1665, was discovered in Crichton’s files after this death and will be published this November…The second book, to be published in late 2010, is a technological thriller “which explores the outer edges of new science and technology.”    Full Story

Top 10 Books People Say They’ve Read…But Haven’t

“George Orwell’s 1984 tops the list of books that people pretend they have read, in a survey carried out for World Book Day 2009 to uncover the nation’s guilty reading secrets. Of the 65% who claimed to have read a book which in truth they haven’t 42% admit to having said they had read modern classic 1984.”

Top 10 books people have lied about having read:

1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)”

http://www.spread-the-word.org.uk/