Here’s a pretty distraction: a time-lapse video of Comet Lovejoy taken over South America’s Andes Mountains. As Kottke points out, it’s definitely worth watching through the last sequence.

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“When the rallies happened in Tahrir Square,” wrote an Egyptian army officer in his personal journal, recently written about by The Guardian, “we would all receive a large bonus.”

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Forget the Laundromat: these clothes need only sunshine to get clean.

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Mario Kart can save your life.

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We’ve been hearing a lot about the pointlessness of the Iowa caucus and its unsophisticated voters. One Iowa native blasts back. (Available in clean or saucy versions.)

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Why are movie theaters losing their charm? Roger Ebert posits a few of their problems. Price is one issue, of which he says: “No matter what your opinion is about 3D, the charm of paying a hefty surcharge has worn off for the hypothetical family of four.”

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A brief consideration of the meteoric rise of queer studies.

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“When Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type a half-millennium ago,” writes Nicholas Carr, “he also gave us immovable text.” According to him, e-books make literature both editable and collaborative—what amounts to the most drastic change to the book in centuries—for better or worse.

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There is something intrinsically different between people who know one or a handful of languages and those that know eleven. Have you ever met a hyperpolyglot?

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How a 1930s photographer turned writers into literary celebrities.

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More red tape: As of the first of the year, New Hampshire girls under age 18 have to notify a parent or guardian at least 48 hours before they have an abortion.

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Bellingham Review’s first online issue is now available.

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Newt Gingrich’s mission is no longer seeking the Republican presidential nomination; it’s destroying Mitt Romney.

Though some of us persist in our refusal to even enter into discussions regarding “the future of the book,” there’s no longer any point in denying that there are now all sorts of people who are positively gung ho about the possibilities of portable reading devices and electronic books. People are buying them in staggering numbers and you can already buy some knock-off version of a Kindle at the Pump N Munch. Print devotees may relish fantasies about these gadgets ultimately languishing in thrift stores, garage sales, and landfills—someday every Third World urchin will have an e-reader! How can that not be a good thing?—but for at least one more holiday cycle we’re all just going to have to play along with what is essentially an upscale Cabbage Patch Doll phenomenon that creates serious money for maybe a dozen already onerously wealthy people.

This week’s big news on the e-book front is Google’s launch of its eBookstore. One more pig has joined the pile! According to MobyLives, however, this pig might not be quite so piggish as the other pigs in the pile; through Google’s entry in the e-book biz, Nathan Ihara writes, “American Booksellers Association bookstores now have the opportunity to sell eBooks directly from their websites, offering them a first opportunity to take advantage of the rapid increase in the eBook market and to fight back against the corporate juggernauts of Amazon, Barnes and Noble, andApple.”

It’s obviously early, but the list of independent stores that are already hawking their e-book wares over at Google is modestly encouraging. Paul Constant, writing for the Seattle Stranger’s Slog blog (quoted in the MobyLives piece), says that before indies can hope to generate real online traffic and sales, they “need to figure out ways to make their websites into destinations that are just as interesting, appealing, and welcoming as their physical stores.”

The Google development is encouraging, in other words, but Constant reminds the little guys that they still have work to do:

Like it or not, your website is just as important as your physical store; the bookselling business is about to go through a change as dynamic as when Barnes & Noble and Borders first came on the scene, or when Amazon suddenly became the go-to bookseller for America. This time, indie booksellers have a shot at reclaiming some ground from the big boys; if you blow it, you'll go out of business. It's that simple.

Source: MobyLives, The Stranger 

Image by anitakhart, licensed under Creative Commons.

If anything, all the chatter over the Apple Tablet (I refuse to speak its name) only amplifies the question that has been haunting the publishing industry for a decade or more: What does the future hold for e-books? Canada’s Quill & Quire reports on some of the trends coming out of the industry—mostly models that resemble the iTunes or the surge in the movie industry of DVDs loaded with special features. Publishers such as HarperCollins and Penguin are revamping their backlist titles with features like web links and imbedded video and audio, hoping to target consumers who already own print titles and lure them to add a digital edition to get the enhanced features. 

A spokesperson for Random House of Canada says the company has “observed parallels between e-book and music downloading habits,” and thinks that in the same way music lovers purchase entire album collections when they discover a favorite new artist, e-books will encourage users to nab an author’s entire works with a single click. 

Another industry insider predicts that once e-books hit their zenith we’ll see an entirely new trend: She envisions some consumers purchasing what she calls “disposable reading”—titles you might buy at the airport before boarding a long flight—in digital format, and serious works—titles you might want to reread some day or pass along to your kids—in print editions. “In some respects, the book will go back to being an objet,” she hypothesizes, “[a] beautiful, expensive edition that people want to pay for [and keep], almost the way [books were treated] in the 16th and 17th centuries.” 

Which, in the end, leaves us right back where we started. 

Source: Quill & Quire (article not available online)

Image by timonoko, licensed under Creative Commons.