Hold on a second.PW’s Shelftalker blogger responds to Meghan Cox Gurdon’s controversial “Darkness Too Visible” essay in the Wall Street Journal.
In Defense. Novelist Janice Harayda offers a defense of Gurdon’s controversial attack on dark, grim Young Adult fiction.
Raising kids; reading books. Novelist and dad Christopher John Farley looks at the Gurdon controversy and his own young son’s reading.
Steve Jobs 2.0. A forthcoming Jobs biography shoots up the list on Amazon’s business book preorders.
Have I got a book for you. Despite a tough economy and e-books, Books & Books, Mitchell Kaplan’s 7-store Florida chain, just keeps growing.
A brand new bundle. As part of its reboot/digital strategy, DC Comics announces bundling of print and digitial comics ($4.99) and new pricing strategy (digital price drops after 4 weeks).
The Upside of Ugly Fonts: At Salon, Laura Miller examines the benefits in terms of reading comprehension of ugly fonts.
Father & Son: Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez are collaborating on a memoir to be pub’d by Free Press in time for Father’s Day. From USA Today.
Look at Vook: The WSJ takes a look at the poineering video-book app developer.
E-Books At Any Length: A new startup venture plans to bring short NF pieces to digital readers near you. From Fast Company.
No Comment: That’s what Simon & Schuster is asking writers to say if asked whether they wrote the anonymous Obama novel, though not everyone is complying. From the NYT.
Winnie the Cute: Watch an adorable French girl recount the plot of a Winnie the Pooh story. From HuffPo.
Disney must be happy about Apple. According to TUAW, Disney has delivered over 1 million e-book apps on Apple’s iOS platform (iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad). That’s a lot of copies of Toy Story Read-Along and Disney Epic Mickey Digicomics.
Sesame Street’s classic kids’ book, The Monster at the End of This Book, has been released as an iPad app. For a mere $.99, you can join Grover as he tries to prevent you, the reader, from turning page after page and nearing the book’s conclusion, where a monster is rumored to lurk. This iPad release is part of a celebration of the book’s 40th anniversary in 2011. It’s Sesame Street’s best-selling trade book.
If you’ve ever been or had a kid, you already know and love this excellently self-conscious book with adorable drawings. The iPad version adds sound effects and Grover’s cute little voice.
Sesame Workshop teamed up with Callaway Digital Arts to create this iPad app.
You probably saw the video below sometime in the last couple of days: it’s the one with the cute 3-year-old seated on the floor amongst freshly unwrapped Christmas booty–a Nintendo Wii towers beside him–as he ravenously unwraps yet another package only to find beneath the paper, much to his dismay, books! Watch as he throws aside one book after another in the hopes of finding–what? A Nintendo DS or iPad cleverly hidden between the terrible tomes? Of course, he’s adorable, and incredibly articulate for a 3-year-old. And once he gets his little performance going–he stands up and delivers his lines (“I don’t get books for Cwistsmas!…I hate it!”) with all the panache of a seasoned stand-up.
So here’s today’s question: is this video a nightmare in which short-attention-span culture has triumphed over education? Have these parents does some horrible mis-educating of their poor son, somehow training him to believe that books and fun live far apart, on opposite islands, separated by an ocean of work? Or is this totally harmless and just a really cute (and articulate, mind you) kid showing us just how fun YouTube can be? Tell us your thoughts in the comments below.
Oceanhouse media, the developer responsible for the Dr. Seuss iOS e-book apps, has a new partner, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Today, Oceanhouse brings two of HMH’s Tacky the Penguin books to iPhone and iPad. The two titles are Tacky the Penguin and Tacky’s Christmas by Helen Lester, both of which cost $2.99. Both books feature Tacky, an unusual penguin whose way of life is repeatedly threatened by penguin hunters.
Oceanhouse Media’s platform, which features simple but meaningful enhancements, seems to appeal strongly to children’s publishers who want to preserve the basic book reading experience while also taking advantage of what iOS has to offer.
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