-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
I just came across this early interview with J.K. Rowling (probably from late 1998 or early 1999). She's sitting in the now famous Edinburgh House cafe in Edinburgh where she wrote the early Harry Potter books. She looks, frankly, exhausted, but hugely excited to have sold 30,000 copies of her first two books - especially as her agent told her, "there's not much money in children's books." She goes on to say that she's always wanted to write but "my realistic side had not allowed me to dream about half of what has happened to me," - this in reference to her agent selling the first two Harry Potter books to eight countries so, as she says with huge excitement, "it will be translated in France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Italy and Finland ... I love the idea of saying I'm big in Finland!"
Today, Google has finally opened its much talked about online bookstore with over 3 million titles available for free plus hundreds of thousands available for purchase.
Here's hoping that the Google eBookstore will somewhat level the playing field for indie bookstores. In fact, many independent bookstores are already signed up with Google's eBookstore, and early indications are that they're not wasting anytime getting up and running!
In a move that seems destined to put consumer and corporate noses out of joint WOWIO Inc, a provider of digital media content and eBooks (wowio.com) announced on Friday that they have received a Notice of Allowance from the US Patent and Trademark Office for a broad patent application, filed in 2006, covering a variety of methods for delivering ads in eBooks, including contextual ads based on the personal information or demographic criteria of the reader. A Notice of Allowance effectively means that the patent has been approved, and will be issued once the required fee has been paid.
Say "preacher's wife" and see if a picture doesn't come immediately to mind. If your mind is anything like my mind, the picture will be of a woman with big hair and eyelashes clotted with mascara and a smile that can win her a toothpaste commercial audition. A hand (nails long, lacquered) gestures upward, while on her lap rests a gently used Bible (full of highlighted passages that are already committed to memory) and at her feet a cluster of fresh-scrubbed children. The words "Minister's wife" conjure a completely different image: see the postmenopausal woman wearing sensible shoes and a beige outfit putting the finishing touches to the potluck in the fellowship hall?
I can guarantee, either way you say it, what is not going to come into your mind is: me. My hair doesn't tease well, for one thing, and I have the musical tendencies of a barnacle. I still have trouble memorizing Scripture, and I'm usually late for church. Despite all this, I am somewhat of a curiosity to the parishioners of the church where my husband is the minister.
It's the things that church members find worthy of discussing about me that I find interesting. What I wear is a perennial favorite (note to self: never wear bib overalls to a church function, no matter how casual). Also what I eat. One week the gossip centered around what had been on my plate at the Fourth of July church picnic. "She's not a real vegetarian if she's got a great big hamburger on her plate." You try defending yourself with the words "soy patty."
First published in 1992, Daniel Pennac's The Right's of the Reader was retranslated into English and republished in 2008, with an introduction and illustrations by Quentin Blake. Passionate and funny, but never didactic, Pennac explores why we read, and most importantly, why we don't. His premise is summed up in his opening sentence... "You can't make someone read. Just as you can't make them fall in love or dream..."
While stopped at a traffic light yesterday, I noticed a puttering station wagon next to me with a little old lady
in a floppy gardening hat behind the wheel. I could just make out her profile as she peered out her windshield patiently
waiting for the light to change.
My obstructed view was not due to her petite stature or an advanced stage of osteoporosis, mind you, but rather from the climbing stacks of old newspapers, rotting stuffed animals, cardboard boxes, blankets, and foils in differing states of decomposition; overall, a stockpile that threatened to bust out the windows and swallow her whole.
