Readability is a wonderful bookmarklet that strips away all the surrounding cruft on a page so you can focus on the content.
posted by jragon
on Mar 3, 2009 -
35 comments
People of the Screen : "Digital literacy’s advocates increasingly speak of replacing, rather than supplementing, print literacy. What is “reading” anyway, they ask, in a multimedia world like ours? We are increasingly distractible, impatient, and convenience-obsessed—and the paper book just can’t keep up. Shouldn’t we simply acknowledge that we are becoming
people of the screen, not people of the book?"
posted by dhruva
on Jan 16, 2009 -
31 comments
Something for a kid you know, or your own inner child.
Speakaboos offers online stories with the written word below the illustrations, as if read from a book: fables, nursery rhymes, fairy tales, folk tales, lullabies. You can watch the stories without registering. You will have to sign-up (for free) for the future function of recording your own "that will allow kids and parents to record their own voices reading (or singing!) their favorite story, song, or nursery rhyme."
Christmas stories.
[more inside]
posted by nickyskye
on Dec 15, 2008 -
10 comments
Is Google Making Us Stupid? "My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."
[more inside]
posted by WCityMike
on Jun 10, 2008 -
85 comments
You may have heard that reading is in a slow decline (
previously). We now know that such reports were either exaggerated, or at least
statistically questionable. On the flip-side of all this is the fact that reading as an activity has never been
more accessible (or thrifty!) considering the number of reputable
book swap programs available on the internet. There's no excuse now!
[more inside]
posted by tybeet
on May 30, 2008 -
48 comments
100 Must-Read Books (for dudes) Men just have different ... needs ... than women, so apparently they need to read different books as well. However (as a chick myself) I tend to check this sort of thing out in a futile but ongoing attempt to figure out men. Hmmph. Men. Go figure ....
posted by kd
on May 14, 2008 -
89 comments
I know a man who once went to Sioux City, not one of the world’s leading destinations, precisely because he had never been there before. More than a decade later he still talks about the experience, from the Sergeant Floyd obelisk to the dog track of North Sioux and the meat packing plant converted to a shopping mall. The same impulse explains a non-specialist’s reading a history of Byzantine iconography or a survey of Australian wildlife. Both offer a break in daily life and an enlargement of our sense of wonder and possibility. That awareness can provide a sense of transcendence, and connection, or even the spark of divine discontent that leads people to change their lives.
Reading as Vacation, an essay by J. D. Smith and
Subway Reader, pictures of people who read while using public transportation.
posted by Kattullus
on Apr 6, 2008 -
17 comments
Are people reading less? Government survey says:
yes. Declines in how much and how well people read “are adversely affecting this country's culture, economy, and civic life as well as our children's educational achievement.” Also the cause of poor
test scores.
Steve Jobs agrees: Kindle DOA because nobody reads books anymore.
WaPo says 1 in 4 persons read no books in 2006. And children didn't keep reading after they got through Harry Potter,
either.
So literacy's in a long slow decline.
But wait.
[more inside]
posted by cogneuro
on Feb 21, 2008 -
122 comments
Comics writer Warren Ellis invited indie comics creators to
introduce their work (warning: image intensive page) in his new forum,
Whitechapel. With posts from 100+ writers/artists creating everything from free webcomics to traditional books, it's a great source for new reading material.
posted by nerdcore
on Jan 18, 2008 -
6 comments
Pages Unbound is a portal for serialized web novels, similar to web comic portals such as
Buzz Comix and
Top Web Comics, if not nearly as fancy. It is a new project by
Tales of MU author
Alexandra Erin. Note: Tales of MU and some of the novels found on Pages Unbound may be NSFW, as they contain explicit material of various sorts. MU, specifically, is concerned with LGBT issues and racism in a fantasy setting.
posted by Caduceus
on Dec 18, 2007 -
9 comments
It's a
sad old story but the reading of literature continues to decline.
Prospero's Books - a Kansas-city used bookstore - is so desperate to thin out its collection it has started to burn books. Co-owner Tom Wayne says he is unable to sell many of his
thousands of books, or even to give them away to libraries and thrift stores, so he started a pyre in protest.
posted by stbalbach
on May 29, 2007 -
66 comments
Poor, poor Wiley the dog. One Spring day, she got out of her yard and wandered aimlessly for a while. Wanting to help the lost animal find some direction, some vandals thoughtfully
spray-
painted her. Tragically, poor Wiley has since had to admit her painful secret to the world. She isn't
literate. Forced to admit her shameful problem, hopefully she'll get some
help.
posted by miss lynnster
on May 6, 2007 -
88 comments
New Notions 5 Reading Challenge "Not long ago, I was challenged to rethink some notions I had previously held near and dear to my heart. Wrestling with the issue and trying to make it fit within my worldview made me abandon some antiquated (for me) ideas and adopt new ones. It was that occurrence that led me to think up the New Notions 5 Reading Challenge."
posted by Amy NM
on May 5, 2007 -
30 comments
The cover of 'Reading Lolita in Tehran' symbolises the way anti-Iranian propaganda in the U.S. works: The original picture from which this cover is excised is lifted off a news report during the parliamentary election of February 2000 in Iran. In the original picture, the two young women are in fact reading the leading reformist newspaper Mosharekat. Azar Nafisi and her publisher may have thought that the world is not looking, and that they can distort the history of a people any way they wish. But the original picture from which this cover steals its idea speaks to the fact of this falsehood.
The cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran is an iconic burglary from the press, distorted and staged in a frame for an entirely different purpose than when it was taken. In its distorted form and framing, the picture is cropped so we no longer see the newspaper that the two young female students are holding in their hands, thus creating the illusion that they are "Reading Lolita"--with the scarves of the two teenagers doing the task of "in Tehran." In the original picture the two young students are obviously on a college campus, reading a newspaper that is reporting the latest results of a major parliamentary election in their country. Cropping the newspaper, their classmates behind them, and a perfectly visible photograph of President Khatami--the iconic representation of the reformist movement--out of the picture and suggesting that the two young women are reading "Lolita" strips them of their moral intelligence and their participation in the democratic aspirations of their homeland, ushering them into a colonial harem.
Read Hamid Dabashi's full essay '
Native informers and the making of the American empire.'
posted by hoder
on Feb 22, 2007 -
67 comments
"Welcome to the Archive of the Now. The Archive of the Now is an online and print repository of recordings, printed texts and manuscripts, focussing on innovative contemporary poetry being written or performed in Britain. It is part of the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing, at Brunel University in west London, UK. At present, the Archive consists of readings by 65 UK-based poets. This number will continue to grow, and includes newly commissioned, recently acquired and historical recordings."
posted by jayder
on Oct 22, 2006 -
5 comments
TV Turnoff Week starts today. Read a book, go outside. Sweeps week will be waiting on your TiVo when the week is over.
posted by mosch
on Apr 25, 2005 -
171 comments
In those days, he could do no wrong. In the Sixties, he was the man who published Catch-22, Portnoy's Complaint and Hemingway's A Moveable Feast; he put John Lennon's doodles into cold print, launched the careers of John Fowles and Gabriel García Márquez, looked after Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut and later, in the early 1980s, was the godfatherly mentor of Amis
fils, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie. He was equally adept at commissioning inspired non-fictions such as The Naked Ape, Desmond Morris's zoological inspection of human behaviour.
The Independent profiles Tom Maschler,
publisher, founder of the Booker Prize.
(via Bookslut)
posted by matteo
on Mar 17, 2005 -
7 comments
