I’m a neuroscientist with four children, and I wondered whether children might be losing more than just the pleasure of listening to books read aloud. In particular, I wondered whether it affected their empathy and creativity. - The Conversation
The book section you really wanted to get your hands on was the Washington Post Book World. To put it bluntly, you read the Times Book Review because you had to, but you read Book World because you wanted to. - LitHub
Since my own fandom has grown, I’ve noticed, at least anecdotally, many more friends and acquaintances talking about their love for audiobooks, not just as a passing interest but as something verging on obsession. Is this a trend? - Washington Post
That’s the dilemma that faced Simon & Schuster last fall, when right-wing media star Charlie Kirk was assassinated not long before the scheduled publication of Rebecca Novack’s satirical novel Murder Bimbo. - The New York Times
“The answer is that festivals in India are only partly about books. They are a ‘spectacle’ offering music, dance, handicraft sales and food. Even the T.rex of them all, the Jaipur literature festival (which attracted 400,000 visitors last month according to its marketing team), would almost certainly attract fewer people without these extras.” - The Guardian
How, against all odds, has City Lights managed to remain a vital symbol of literary dissent and free speech? How, after more than seventy years, has City Lights survived economic and industry changes? How, decade after decade, has it managed to respond to the forces that threaten to silence us? - LitHub
If most middle-class homes are devoid of book-- if you can sit in an airport departure lounge or train all day and not see anyone reading--then why, come winter, do more than 100 literature festivals bloom every year, even in the smallest and unlikeliest of towns? - The Guardian
The tech platform is launching Page Match, a tool that will allow readers to scan a page of a printed or e-book using their phone and continue listening to the audiobook version where they left off. - The Hollywood Reporter
In a sense, the decline of book reviews, like the decline of newspapers themselves, is a story about disaggregation. Newspapers used to bundle several functions together in a way that made them both useful and profitable. - The Atlantic
Well, at least they bought those books? “This program raised red flags for some inside Anthropic, who knew that tearing books apart to feed into an AI model was rather literally bringing the critiques of these companies to life.” - LitHub
The typewriter, from its birth, has been tied to a set of assumptions about gender and skill. These assumptions persist to the present and color our cultural understanding of typists’ labor. - Public Domain Review
Instead of Venice and Cyprus, Shakespeare’s setting for “Othello,” the Shanghai version takes place on an island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, where an American has been hired to help fight the Taiping rebellion, a bloody revolt in the 19th century. - The New York Times
First introduced in the 1930s, mass-market books (once called “pulps”) sold in huge quantities for decades. Yet sales have been slowly-but-steadily sinking since the 1990s, displaced by ebooks and (more expensive) trade paperbacks, and the wire racks filled with the inexpensive titles in supermarkets, drugstores, and the like have almost disappeared. - The New York Times
