Some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
- The Kindle is under attack! California is ramping up its free digital textbook campaign, which does not involve the Kindle DX at any point. Ahnuld might want to check out NW Missouri State’s list of lessons learned vis a vis etextbooks (the entire article is posted in comments in that MobileRead thread). On a different front, Simon & Schuster are selling ebooks through Scribd, a move Jacket Copy thinks might be a direct threat to Amazon. NPR says Google is the most likely Kindle usurper, and Bezos got a bit snippy with Google this week. Finally, here’s an in-depth Kindle DX review at TeleRead. Doesn’t sound like an ideal PDF or textbook solution.
- Yesterday was Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Jacket Copy has some general info about Bloomsday, which will be helpful if you’re interested in taking the Guardian’s Bloomsday quiz. Boing Boing has a recording of Joyce reading. And finally, Galley Cat has a piece about a Ulysses-themed graphic novel.
- Some throwback news: The Guardian has a review of a new Italo Calvino book called The Complete Cosmicomics, which includes all the stories from Cosmicomics the original, plus a host of others, including several that haven’t appeared in English before. It sounds quite tempting. Also, the Sentences blog at Harper’s magazine has a scintillating post about Proust, memory, senses, and music. From Mark Athitakis’s blog, here’s a reprint of a terrific 1978 article about looking for Thomas Pynchon. Finally, and significantly less enjoyably, a Wisconsin group of old farts—Orwellianly calling themselves the Christian Civil Liberties Union—are suing for the right to enact their favorite scene from Fahrenheit 451 and burn a book they find offensive. What year is it again?
- Quick takes: interesting idea for a reading challenge from As Usual, I Need More Bookshelves; here’s how to apply to read audiobooks; Sony wants $150,000 per song illegally downloaded; much ado about textbooks: Seth Godin ranted this weekend, and Joe Wikert responded Monday; 20 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, the Guardian is publishing four stories from affected countries– here’s the first; and here’s an interesting piece in Ars Technica about digital TV and “piracy.”
- Random of the week: Is Big Papi, aka David Ortiz, aka David Arias, finally coming out of his slump? Let’s hope so, he’s making $13M in ’09, which should buy more than a .197 BA and .318 SLG. In the meantime, here are some “papi”-related links. First, the game PapiJump, which is better on an iPhone. Here’s Big Papi’s book Big Papi (searching for “papi” on Amazon yields different results). Here’s the video and lyrics of Britney Spears’s “Mmm Papi,” written not long after Ortiz’s career-high 54 homers in 2006. Here’s the IMDb page for the 2003 movie Chasing Papi, about “successful and handsome wolf executive of the cosmetic industry Thomas Fuentes.” Finally, here’s a story about creepy Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi making girls call him “Papi” at parties. Eesh, that’s a bad one to end on. OK, heere’s one more.
