France celebrates 70th birthday of Little Prince. Le Petit Prince, a series of parables in which a boy prince recounts his adventures among the stars to a pilot on Earth whose plane is downed, was first published in New York in 1943, in English and French. Since then, more than 145 million copies have been sold worldwide, translated into 270 languages and dialects.
Saint-Exupéry was a pilot himself and he died mysteriously on a reconnaissance mission, at the age of 44, two years before the publication of his book in France in 1946. To mark the anniversary, a new biography by Virgil Tanase is being published while an earlier book Saint-Exupéry, Archangel and Writer by Nathalie des Vallieres is being reissued. Publisher Folio is issuing a limited edition with a booklet of 24 drawings by Saint-Exupéry, as well as a cartoon version. A CD of the popular 1954 recording of the book narrated by Gérard Philippe is also available. Fifty Shades of Grey surprise hit with sex-savvy French women - Report: France. Fifty Shades of Grey, about a young girl who falls in love with a handsome billionaire businessman with a penchant for sado-masochism, has sold 65 million copies worldwide. No one thought it would take off in France where it’s now sold two and half million copies.
After all the French already know all there is to know about sex, right ? Not so, says Fifty Shade's French publisher Isabelle Laffont. "Everybody was surprised because everybody thought that in France we were the best for sex and so this book wouldn’t do well, it’d already been done," she says. ... already been done by the likes of the Marquis de Sade, Anaïs Nin or Catherine Millet, key French literary alumni who’ve written explicitly about sex.
But they don’t speak to your average female, says Laffont. "Erotic literature in France is more sombre, very dark, with people who are submissive and very unhappy," she adds. Laffont admits Fifty Shades isn’t great literature and doesn’t pretend to be. But she declines to divulge any. Launch of the Directory of Open Access Books. Strata Week: Cracking a book's genetic code. Here are a few of the data stories that caught my eye this week. The Book Genome Project tries to unlock book DNA Recommendation engines for reading aren’t new. Amazon, for example, is more than happy to give you suggestions on what to read (or, rather, buy) next. But often these recommendations are based on the most popular titles. Even if you’re taking recommendations based on what your friends are reading — say, via sites like Goodreads — you’re still likely to see bestsellers rather than titles that match your particular taste or mood.
But BookLamp is working on building a better biblio-recommendation engine. All told, one book can produce 32,162 “genomic measurements,” according to BookLamp. Analyzing the entire Wikipedia data dump with WikiHadoop One of the largest free datasets on the Internet is, as Diederik van Liere points out, the full XML data dump from the English version of Wikipedia. On behalf of data geeks everywhere, thanks to the Wikimedia Summer of Research fellows! Booklamp.org Home.
Book Genome.