Somewhat controversial news from Britain where McDonald's is in the process of giving away 9 million books with Happy Meals.

The six titles which are being given away (along with a finger puppet and a voucher for a heavily discounted additional book) are all from Michael Morpurgo's Mudpuddle Farm series, published by Harper Collins. Technically speaking, this will make McDonald's the nation's largest bookseller for the four week period (and the charity Farms for City Children considerably better off, as Morpurgo intends to donate all his royalties to them).

Stunning as it may seem, while eight out of ten British children visit McDonald's at least once a year, one in three doesn't own even a single book (the stats in the USA probably aren't all that different). Because of this, the promotion has been endorsed by at least two leading book related charities:

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Nancy Pearl, the closest thing American libraries have to a celebrity, unleashed something of a shockwave through the book industry yesterday with the announcement that she is publishing a series of books with Amazon.

Apparently the NPR commentator and doyenne of public libraries and independent bookstores (who even has an action figure modeled on her) plans to publish about six books a year with Amazon, branded as Book Lust Rediscoveries. The titles will be Pearl's favorite out-of-print books from 1960-2000. It is to be assumed that all or most of the titles will be ones that she has recommended in her Book Lust recommended reading series of books - books that many would say were made popular by huge word of mouth enthusiasm from librarians and independent bookstores, who saw Pearl as one of their own.

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Did you know...

1. Amazon's $34 billion annual revenues are larger than the GDPs of half the countries in the world.
2. Amazon's web sales are five times the combined web sales of Walmart, Target and Buy.com.
3. Amazon serves 137 million customers a week, 33% more than voted in the 2010 USA elections. That's 19.5 million customers daily - equal to the population of Beijing, or the number of Americans who live on less than $6000 a year.
4. The average amount brought in by one of Amazon's unique users is $189. That's almost five times as valuable as Ebay's average ($39).
5. Amazon owns 1/10th of North America's e-commerce pie.
6. If Amazon's active users were a country, their population would be twice that of Canada.
7. With 50,000 preorders, Kindle Fire is set to double the launch of the iPad.
8. Amazon's current cloud platform could store 82 books for each person on the earth.
9. Amazon's warehouse space has grown from a 400 square foot garage in 1995 to 25 million square feet - equivalent to more than 700 Madison Square Gardens.

Thanks to FrugalDad.com for these stats and the elegant infographic below that charts the rise, and rise, of Amazon...

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Congratulations to Alan Hollinghurst for his UK National Book Award win. The Stranger's Child, which was controversially omitted from this year's Man Booker shortlist, won him the Author of the Year Award at last Friday's Galaxy National Book Awards.

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The author Neil Gaiman is a prominent backer of libraries and literacy, and he has a great idea for a new Halloween tradition. He thinks we should all give scary books as gifts on Halloween. He's calling it All Hallow's Read.  As a fan of Gaiman's work, books in general, and scary things – I think this sounds like fun.

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This week marks the USA's 30th annual Banned Books Week (sponsored by half a dozen American library, bookseller, journalist and publisher associations; and endorsed by about half a dozen more.) During Banned Books Week, bookstores and libraries across the USA celebrate (for want of a better word) the books that have been challenged or outright banned from libraries with in store displays, readings and so forth.

A challenge is defined as a formal, written complaint, filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness. Over the past ten years, the American Library Association has recorded 4660 challenges - which they estimate represents about one in four or five of the actual number of challenges, as most go unreported. Of these reported, about 30% of challenges are due to "sexually explicit" material, about a quarter due to "offensive language", about one in five due to material deemed "unsuited to age group", about 10% due to "violence", and 8% due to homosexuality.

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The slow-mo implosion of Borders has created an enormous amount of commentary, but perhaps none as visceral as the poster spotted in a Borders in Santa Rosa, California.

Things We Never Told You. Ode To A Bookstore Death

• We hate it when a book becomes popular simply because it was turned into a movie.
• It confused us when we were asked where the non-fiction section is.
• Nicholas Sparks is not a good writer. If you like him, fine, but facts are facts.
• We greatly dislike the phrase "QUICK QUESTION".  It's never true. And everyone seems to have one.
• Your summer reading list was our summer reading NIGHTMARE. Also, it's called summer reading, not "three days before school starts" reading.
• It's true that we lean to the left and think Glenn Beck is an idiot.
• We always knew when you were intently reading Better Homes and Gardens, it was really a hidden Playboy.

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The Booker Prize shortlist has been announced with the usual mix of criticism and praise from various quarters. Indeed, the controversy over each year's list is as much a tradition as the Prize itself. For example, Ron Sharp, arts correspondent for The Independent criticized the omission of Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child from the shortlist; while Boyd Tonkin, literary editor for the Independent opines that:

"the process seems to have lost much of its focus. It now delivers a curiously mixed bag of worthwhile novels. So what? No longer does the Man Booker seem to want to test the year's output against the highest standards of literary ambition and artistry...many accomplished authors who failed to make the long-list will be wondering what the Booker is precisely for these days."

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Much has been said about the reasons for the demise of Borders, but Raymond Rose's article in last week's Publishers Weekly really hit the nail on the head for me. He writes,

"My sorrow isn't for the death of this company but for its employees. They're the real victims here. In my store, we had an amazing group. There was the elementary school teacher who worked every weekend and made the most magical children's recommendations; the young woman who could guide both newbies and skilled knitters alike through the needlecraft books; the tattooed graduate student who could talk your ear off about Thomas Hobbes... or Batman, your choice; and the spitfire supervisor who could hunt down the perfect mystery novel. That's just five people in my store. Imagine the number of original, talented people in the other 600-plus stores that have closed or will close later this year...

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Millions of people live in shantytowns across the world, many in corrugated-iron-roofed shacks with no windows. This leaves the residents with the choice of living in complete darkness or running expensive electric bulbs (if electricity is even available to them).

Liter of Light has a solution which is so mind-bogglingly simple that it is pure brilliance:

Step 1: Take an old soda bottle and fill it with water, add a couple of drops of bleach to prevent algae and screw the lid back on.

Step 2: Snuggly fit bottle into custom-cut hole in roof and the plastic bottle will refract the sun's rays into the room below, delivering about 55 watts of light per bottle for up to 5 years!

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