A terrible, if practical solution to the problem of book storage: A company called 1Dollarscan will scan all your books and send you the PDFs for a dollar per hundred digitized pages. The books, tragically, are then pulped in accordance with American copyright law.
Free public bookshelves are popping up all over Germany.
Jeff Sharlet’s Occupy Writers petition has gotten more than three hundred signatories, including Salman Rushdie, Judith Butler, and Jennifer Egan. “I was holding out hope for George Will,” Sharlet joked to the Observer. “He wrote me a long nice e-mail saying he’d been sleeping in the park but he’s just not there yet.”
Stay away from recreational drugs: a 62-year-old Stephen King offers his 16-year-old self a belated bit of advice.
A chain of elaborate responses to the Reddit comment, “What if a unit of current U.S. Marines are suddenly transported back to ancient Rome and forced to do battle with the Roman legions?” has landed user James Erwin a Warner Brothers movie deal.
E-book sales doubled in July, but it was still the smallest increase in digital sales all year.
“I was a sophomore in college, and my voice on the page sounded like that of a 60-year-old Sorbonne professor, badly translated from the French,” writes Steven Johnson in an essay on the pleasures and hazards of studying semiotics.
