Students are starting to contact me asking about books. I will have the course websites up in a week or two, but for now, here are the textbooks. LA101 “Seminar in Thinking and Writing” From Inquiry to Academic Writing: A Text and Reader, Second Edition (ISBN 978-0-312-60141-6) The SF Writer, Fifth Edition (ISBN 978-0-205-75197-6) EL200…
Winnie the Pooh is the very first book that Apple bundled with the iPad. It was a bold choice, and a reminder of what the iPad had that ebooks at the time did not–the ability to share those same charming illustrations that are now imprinted on our collective consciousness. The image of Winnie the Pooh…
Great example of how a reporter can take a press release and turn it into human story by adding an anecdotal example that demonstrates why the reader should care. David J. Loehr, a playwright who lives in southern Indiana, was taking his car to the dealership when a story on the radio gave him an…
Borders, which employs about 10,700 people, scrapped a bankruptcy-court auction scheduled for Tuesday amid the dearth of bids. –via Borders to Shut Down – WSJ.com. Similar:You're Doing It for the Exposure!! The Oatmeal on working for “exposure…Business'We're back': Bushy Run's 2023 battle reenactment will be heldI’m glad to know that this recent contro…CultureHow to Get…
It’s good to see some activity in this area. I liked holding onto my college textbooks, in part for the notes. (A few weeks ago, I passed two of my college physics textbooks to my science-geek son.) Â It’s nice that Amazon stores your notes for you in the cloud, but it appears you have to…
In recent years, the tech-savvy 18-to-24 crowd has discovering audiobooks via digital downloads – a potential threat to the traditional audiobook industry, though CD audiobooks remain the backbone of the industry, partly because of massive sales to libraries. An estimated 10,000 audiobook titles appeared last year (compared with 316,480 traditional print titles), and sales totaled…
A collaborative, open-source writing guide. The writing sprint is over, and Web Writing Style Guide Version 1.0 is now available. While written for undergraduate writing students, Web Writing Style Guide could be useful to anyone wanting to learn how to write for the web. Topics in this lengthy guide include–but are not limited to– strategies…
Spam has hit the Kindle, clogging the online bookstore of the top-selling eReader with material that is far from being book worthy and threatening to undermine Amazon.com Inc’s publishing foray. —Spam clogging Amazon’s Kindle self-publishing – The Globe and Mail. Similar:Kids Today: A Response to Mark Bauerlein (from "Dean Dad")Mark Bauerlein’s essay “What’s the Point…Academiaxkcd:…
Editing is the most important part of my job as an author. Before I gave up my day job to write full-time I was myself an editor, first at Penguin, then at Headline, which is partly why I’m so passionate about the process. And yet I cannot tell you how much I hate it. It…
During my research into the inspirations for and the writing of Charlotte’s Web, which took me back to White’s early childhood, I was intrigued by many aspects of his personality: his anxieties and hypochondria, his passionate defense of free speech and civil liberties, his one-man campaign for world government. But nothing else about him caught…
An interesting snapshot of what books some profs are teaching in thier lit classes, and why. I freely admit that the literary canon could still use some work, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate the progress that’s already been made. For this project, I e-mailed a litany of professors in both English and some…
Because the headline gets the name of the school wrong, it’s a little hard for me to assess this objectively. I’m glad Katie got so much space to share her experiences, and very glad this story mentions the importance of training and tech support. The story of my students reading Emerson’s Nature is a little…
Below is a screen shot, showing that the spam blog literacyintheclassroom.com has reproduced the entire content of my recent blog entry, in which I complain that literacyintheclassroom.com is a spam blog that reproduces the entire content of my site. Similar:â–¶ Taylor Mali on "What Teachers Make"I find that re-watching this every year …CultureGoogle Autocomplete…
According to preterite, Looks like your site is being scraped by someone associated with Hillel Cooperman and the Jackson Fish Market in Seattle, who themselves are associated with the Children’s Book Council and the iPad-oriented company A Story Before Bed. Seems like a pretty rotten thing to do by a company that trumpets its positive…
A few weeks ago, I bought an audio recording of Great Expectations from thebestaudiobooks.com. I bought it from a handheld iOS device, and so I when I received the download link by email, I didn’t download it right away. The next time I was sitting at my laptop and remembered the link, it had expired.…
I just got an email from Amazon saying that typos and omissions in my Kindle edition of The Lord of the Rings have been corrected, and I can opt to receive the updated edition for free. However, like a certain similarly magical gift that I’m sure we’re all thinking of right now, this boon comes…
The key point here is that all sellers now get a 30% commission and Apple now wants a 30% fee, which is all of our gross margin and then some. The six largest publishers have now all adopted the agency model. These publishers account for nearly 90% of all ebooks sold. Random House was the…
Disappointed because I haven’t found a news writing textbook available for Kindle or iBooks. There are some textbooks about broadcasting, and some out-of-copyright classics. This journalist blogger reports on a recent study involving the Kindle DX: College textbooks are a holy grail for the electronic book industry, but apparently they still have a ways to…
From a “realistic” standpoint it makes sense; it would indeed be impossible for a nigh-omnipotent being ideologically aligned with America to intercede against injustice beyond American borders without creating enormous political fallout for the U.S. government.While this wouldnt be this first time a profoundly American comic book icon disassociated himself from his national identity —…
I’m really looking forward to this. I hope Amazon doesn’t find some way to make it suck. Amazon said on Wednesday that it will roll out a Kindle Lending Library later this year, which will allow users of the popular e-reader to borrow books from more than 11,000 libraries throughout the United States. While there…