ComicsFilter (but bear with me): Frank Miller & Jim Lee will be the writer and artist, respectively, of
All-Star Batman and Robin, a new miniseries intended to make the characters simple, interesting, and easy to follow after decades of backstory. Grant Morrison & Frank Quitely were announced to be doing the same thing on
All-Star Superman, and any comics fan will tell you that these four guys are some of the best in the entire field. Between these two projects,
DC Comics most likely has the top-selling books in the tiny comics industry sewn up for most of 2005, which is reason enough to publish them.
But there's also a question for non-comics readers here at MeFi: DC are really doing this for you. They want new readers (best-selling comics are lucky to top 150,000 copies these days), and they think publishing accessible comic books linked to the release of large movies (The Christopher Nolan film
Batman Begins, based in part on Frank Miller's
Batman: Year One, will be released roughly alongside
All-Star Batman & Robin) is the way to do it. But is there a snowball's chance in hell you'd read something like this? Would your kids, if you have them, be interested, do you think? (Frank Miller, it bears noting, is also the creator and co-director of
Sin City, a film you might've seen a preview for recently -- truly insane cast.)
posted by logovisual
on Jan 5, 2005 -
69 comments
eScholarship Editions. Like ebooks? Want something free, nonfiction,"scholarly", publicly accessible, and more recent than
Gutenberg ? (Lately I'm on an Ancient History kick.) My problem with this "eScholarship" site is they try to make it hard to download a whole ebook to read offline. For one of those, for people who are interested in 20th-century political history-cum-theory that's never had much to do with any U.S. election, today I'm recommending
the Platform.
posted by davy
on Dec 27, 2004 -
12 comments
"This site contains more than 10,000 eBooks formatted for reading on your Palm, PocketPC, Zaurus, Rocketbook, eBookWise-1150, or Symbian cellphone." So if you have a PDA and especially if you're into
the classics, you no longer have to settle for lame
video games on your cell phone or inconvenient newspapers for your
downtime entertainment.
posted by Doohickie
on Dec 20, 2004 -
19 comments
"Libraries are rich, deep, resources for preserving cultural heritage and indispensable resources for the communities they serve.”
OCLC, a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization, has compiled a list of the
top 1000 titles owned or licensed by its 50,000+ member libraries. There are sublists by subject, a cross listing with a
banned books list, and some
fun facts, including the supremely annoying one that the highest listed living author is Jim Davis of Garfield fame (#18).
posted by donnagirl
on Nov 30, 2004 -
16 comments
Opening Hooks. You're in the bookstore, browsing the shelves for... something. You don't know what, exactly, you're looking for but you'll recognize it when you see it. Picking a book at random you open to the first page and begin to read. Two hours later you're home in bed with a mug of sweet tea, still reading.
posted by thebabelfish
on Aug 29, 2004 -
65 comments
Reading With the Enemy - "Inspired by
Supersize Me: What if you spent one month reading, listening to, and watching only right-wing media. No New York Times, no NPR, no network news, no CNN, no lefty blogs, no liberal novels. Nothing left-wing or centrist, and nothing ‘objective.’ Nothing that makes up the world you currently inhabit."
posted by Space Coyote
on May 12, 2004 -
58 comments
Why Books Will Always Be With Us... along with almost everything else.
Umberto Eco goes all encyclopedic on us (but in a nice way!) summing up (and reopening) the themes of a lifetime of reading, writing and watching. Though I'm sure what he says about the Web and electronic media will be picked to bits here, I'd say that would be a perfect vindication of this extraordinary exercise in common sense. [
Via Arts & Letters Daily.]
posted by MiguelCardoso
on Nov 26, 2003 -
14 comments
Starting today, every word (33 million) in ALL the books (270,000) sold at Amazon.com can now be searched
word for word.
File this under technologies used to implement more sales and better service to the end user aka
marketing at work for you.
posted by omidius
on Oct 23, 2003 -
95 comments
The IAAIS othersise known as "Radio Reading Services.
Policy Statement: Everyone with a visual impairment, physical disability or learning disability has a right to equal access to all forms of information available to the general public. IAAIS works actively to promote and protect this access. More inside.
posted by ashbury
on Sep 24, 2003 -
4 comments
Books Go To War Between 1943 and 1947, the Council on Books in Wartime published 1322 small-format
books (4 in. x 5.75 in. — designed to fit easily into the pockets of service uniforms) for distribution to United States service personnel. These books were
unabridged volumes spanning a variety of topics: popular fiction, humor, classic literature, music, psychology, war stories, etc. Because the books were distributed
only to overseas troops, and printed on cheap paper (intended to be read, passed around, and discarded), they've become hard-to-find, the subject of
museum exhibits and, in the case of the
rarer titles, the
object of
collectors' desire.
posted by jdroth
on Jul 25, 2003 -
7 comments
In 5... 4... 3... 2... 1... 1... 1... 1... "In this footage obtained exclusively by The Memory Hole, watch as the President of the United States sits and does nothing after learning that his country is under attack." Andrew Card whispers about plane #2, POTUS remains engrossed in book. (Warning: Quicktime, little kids reading slowly in unison for five long minutes.)
posted by emelenjr
on Jun 26, 2003 -
144 comments
Whichbook: a neat little flash app that permits you to select on a sliding scale up to four different features of a novel and then recommends a list of prospective reading to you. (Plain-text available
here). (via
sixdifferentways).
posted by Ufez Jones
on Jun 23, 2003 -
21 comments
Visual Relationships at Amazon.com - Here's an interesting visual implementation of the Amazon API. It's almost like flipping through books on the shelf. What's next? A 3D bookstore rendered on the Quake engine?
posted by Argyle
on Mar 3, 2003 -
2 comments
When the CIA Comes and Asks What You've Read In reaction to the Patriot Act, a Montpelier, VT bookstore has purged all customer purchase records so that it would be impossible to comply with
the government's demands to see such records.
Co-owner Michael Katzenberg told the Associated Press, "When the CIA
comes and asks what you've read because they're suspicious of you, we
can't tell them because we don't have it.
We may have lost our marketing potential by doing this, but at the moment that's the price we have to pay to safeguard people's privacy."
Much more information on the "resistance movement," including how to start your own grass-roots campaign, from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee
FightBack.
Also, what's going on with the people who lend 'em, not sell 'em, the American Library Association:
ALAPatriots.
posted by NorthernLite
on Feb 21, 2003 -
27 comments
Look and Read offers storylines, songs, video clips and my first introduction to
Wordy from this classic BBC School series. As someone who grew up on Sesame Street and
Schoolhouse Rock, I found it interesting to see the British equivalent. Plus, it's good campy
fun.
posted by snez
on Feb 5, 2003 -
4 comments
KidPub is an enchanting little website that I rediscovered after rediscovering a list of my circa-1995 bookmarks. (And it looks today almost exactly like it did then -- you can even see a bit of Siegel influence) KidPub is a place for children to post their stories, poems, etc. Most of the authors seem to be in the 9- to 12-year-old age range, and the stories have titles like "
The Mystery of the Circus Clown" and "
Crazy School". A cute site to remind you of the importance of reading and writing for children.
posted by oissubke
on Nov 11, 2002 -
9 comments
It is not a crime to look at bomb-making websites... or so says Lieutenant Jason Ciaschini, police spokesman in Punta Gorda, where a Briton who was using a computer to look at bomb-making websites is now being held at Charlotte County Jail on immigration violations.
Florida police had evacuated the library and arrested him after he looked at bomb-making websites, and found suspicious liquids in his backpack.
"
Looking up stuff on the Internet - everybody has freedom to do that," he also said.
posted by Blake
on Jul 30, 2002 -
6 comments
Readerville is a community of readers. The site is supported, probably not very extravagantly, by book sales. It describes itself as "The social life of the mind".
posted by theora55
on May 8, 2002 -
3 comments
Good Riddance to Oprah's Book Club, and Her Literary Amateurism Norah Vincent says Oprah's opinion in matters of literary taste is amateurish to say the least and she presumed where she should not have, and wouldn't want her sticker on his/hers book either.
Just for fun adds People who dislike Oprah's Book Club dislike it for the same reason that they dislike Barnes & Noble. The fact that the two do a brisk business isn't accidental, and the two represent the same pernicious homogenization of American life that makes existential despair all but unavoidable.
Pompous?
posted by Blake
on Apr 12, 2002 -
53 comments
"But at some point along the path to discovery, the reader confronts his or her
reading mortality. There's only so much time. And there are so many great books." I must come to grips with this myself, even as I anxiously await the inaugural
book club discussion. I must admit, though, that people like
this [NYT link] make me feel my own "reading mortality" more acutely. (I
wish I could read that much so quickly...)
posted by arco
on Dec 25, 2001 -
18 comments
A Society of Aliterates? Confused article in the Washington Post Style section indicts an aliterate society (one where people can read, but choose not to) for selling its soul at the going rate of 1 pic = 1000 words. Conflating "printed material" with "reading" and then with "quality", the author completely ignores what information people actually take away from different media (eg, doesn't notice that "reading" may be crappy s-f [hey, I had to give romance novels a break], while tv can be Frontline or 60 Minutes). Further, they throw in a brief screed against multimedia including highway signs. Bizarre and hypocritical, or maybe just illustrative, in that the writer completely forgoes logic and goes for scare tactics like:
You can walk through whole neighborhoods of houses in the country that do not contain books or magazines
in addition to the old stand-by of ignoring any real historical trend in reading. I want to say it's just some old crank, but can't quite, because the article was passed along by a friend earnestly worried about our aliterate society.
posted by claxton6
on May 14, 2001 -
36 comments
Culture as Culprit. Myron Magnet is the author of
The Dream and the Nightmare, which George W. Bush has called the most influential book -- aside from the Bible -- that he's ever read. Is poverty in American less an economic matter than a cultural one?
posted by techgnollogic
on Apr 6, 2001 -
9 comments
Tests show U.S. children lag behind A careful reading of this page reveals that for many of America's schools, children lag behind some 16 other countries in math and in science. However: not all states contributred data. But the important thing is that a few schools and areas were right up there with the best in the world.
Perhaps then we ought to study those that work instead of bashing our educational system in general.
posted by Postroad
on Apr 4, 2001 -
18 comments
Use MetaFilter to prevent Alzheimer's disease. It seems that a love of reading may help reduce the risk of getting Alzheimer's disease.
People with more education, in contrast, seem at lower risk of Alzheimer's. A study presented Sunday of Swedish twins where one twin had Alzheimer's and the other was healthy suggests a love of reading [metafilter.com], as a child and adult, might be protective.
posted by DragonBoy
on Jul 9, 2000 -
0 comments
Jeez,
these people need to get a clue. Children should be encouraged to read anything they want, and as much as they please. So what if Harry Potter books have wizards and witches in them? Even kids can tell fact from fiction...when are the adults going to figure that out?
posted by mathowie
on Oct 13, 1999 -
0 comments
