Category: words

“According to the survey, 48 percent of UK adults who use e-readers say the technology gets them to read more. In addition to that, 41 percent of respondents reported that being able to look up words they don’t know makes reading easier, and over half say that being able to change the size and appearance of text helps as well.”

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial disaster, the city was forced to cut 20% from the Free Library system’s budget, and all the branches ended Saturday operations. Mayor Michael Nutter’s next budget aims to restore Saturday hours to all 39 branches.

“On March 13, author Teju Cole published ‘A Piece Of The Wall’ entirely on Twitter, a first-of-its-kind essay on Arizona and immigration comprised of approximately 250 tweets that were tweeted out over the span of seven hours.” In a Q-&-A, Cole explains what he was up to and how he pulled it off.

Sports journalist Stefan Fatsis reports on Hasbro’s public tournament – complete with a Sweet-16 bracket – to pick a new word to be added to the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.

“Do any of Shakespeare’s lovers actually, you know, talk to each other? If Romeo and Juliet don’t, what hope do the rest of them have?”

“The potential impact of technology on less confident readers is tremendous,” especially when the people in charge of helping adults learning to read (or learning English) commission short books from actual writers.

“You could read this as being the lesbian love between Tove and Vivicka. They have their secret love in this suitcase, and when they open the suitcase and show it to the whole of Moominvalley it is also a picture of how they show their love to the world. It’s a really beautiful story.”

“Where are the future white personnel managers going to get their ideas of people of color? Where are the future white loan officers and future white politicians going to get their knowledge of people of color? Where are black children going to get a sense of who they are and what they can be?”

“My ideal bookshop would have no sections, just alphabetical, and not just fiction, but all the books next to each other. You would discover things.”

“Library bureaucrats aren’t books. A single author isn’t the written word. We in the book business are paid poorly for our work, so we tend to inflate the importance of our jobs to the point where any negativity aimed at us becomes an assault on the worthy cause to which we’ve fed large and juicy chunks of our lives: literature, and books, and ideas.”