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4 minute podcast.  As always, NPR is great.

"Walk into any bookstore or library, and you'll find shelves and shelves of hugely popular novels and book series for kids. But research shows that as young readers get older, they are not moving to more complex books. High-schoolers are reading books written for younger kids, and teachers aren't assigning difficult classics as much as they once did."

This link doesn't work. Try: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2013/06/11/190669029/what-kids-are-reading-in-school-and-out

Read and listen to the article from National Public Radio.

Also from NPR: Libraries Leading Roles on Stage, On Screen and in Song http://www.npr.org/2013/08/07/207510092/libraries-leading-roles-on-stage-on-screen-and-in-song?utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=20130808&utm_source=books

"Algorithms choose which students sit together. Algorithms measure what the children know and how well they know it. They choose what problems the children should work on and provide teachers with the next lesson to teach. This combination of human capital and technology is called "blended learning."

what do we lose as we bid farewell to what may turn out to have been a brief period in which common people owned physical books?

Concise yet thorough pulse of ebooks and the evolution of writing. Reference to Japanese cell phone novels was good, and a trend worth watching.

Useful article for an overview of ereaders and their potential impact on reading and writing.

Gaiman discusses his own experiences with audio books and interviews others, including a representative from Audible.com and David Sedaris. You'll hear an affirmation of reading's impact on people, specifically the impact (and legitimacy) of audio books on people.

Text and audio from NPR reporting on a roundup of studies put together by Common Sense Media.

Includes Youtube video: Three Little Pigs Advert

"Peter Mendelsund estimates he's designed "somewhere between 600 and 1,000 book covers," ranging from Crime and Punishment to Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.... Now Mendelsund has designed the covers for two new books of his own. Cover is a collection of hundreds of his book covers, including many that were rejected, along with commentaries on his technique. What We See When We Read is about how words give rise to images in our minds." Article and podcast

The Book Girls are only partly real; like most heavily marketed-to demographics, they only sort of exist. Every Book Girl is something else, too - a sportsy girl, a scientist, a nail-art aficionado, a poet, a prodigy, a patient. But the force they are exerting is real. They have created a market for what they love, and they insist upon it. They have allies in boyfriends and boy friends, in parents and other adults, in librarians and book critics. The world of their books is much more complicated than just them, and they are more complicated than just their books.