“Until recently, I was an ebook sceptic, see; one of those people who harrumphs about the ‘physical pleasure of turning actual pages’ and how ebook will ‘never replace the real thing’. Then I was given a Kindle as a present. That shut me up. Stock complaints about the inherent pleasure of ye olde format are bandied about whenever some new upstart invention comes along. Each moan is nothing more than a little foetus of nostalgia jerking in your gut. First they said CDs were no match for vinyl. Then they said MP3s were no match for CDs. Now they say streaming music services are no match for MP3s. They’re only happy looking in the rear-view mirror.”-Charlie Brooker
- Ebooks as Easy to Read as Print: A controversial new study has been released saying that people comprehend just as much when reading from an electronic source as when reading from paper. Read about the study and the debate it has caused in this article from Discovery News.
- Things that Happen When We Read: More than just a list, this article from the Open Education Database shows what happens in our brains as we read and also gives fun facts like “It only takes seven days for our brains to adapt to a new technology, like reading ebooks.”
- The Breakable/Unbreakable Rules of Grammar: The English language can be confusing. Is it okay to split an infinitive? Is it “It’s me” or It’s I?” This article from The Huffington Post doesn’t directly answer these questions, but it shed some light on to why some grammar “rules” are meant to be broken and others are law.
- 11 Words That Don’t Mean What They Sound Like: Words are fun, but they can sometimes be confusing, especially when they don’t mean what they sound like. Mental Floss has put together this list of confusing words. Do you have any that you’d add to the list?
- 100 Years of Bookmobiles: Remember getting excited when the Bookmobile was coming to your school? For some reason, even though there was a school library, there was something special about a moving, ever-changing, mini-library. Nowadays, bookmobiles are a rare commodity, but they’re making an interesting and artful comeback. The LA Times has put together this gallery of images detailing bookmobiles of the past and present.
“The greater part of the world’s troubles are due to questions of grammar.”-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays
