Is Google Making Us Stupid? "Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. I can feel it, too. I think I know what’s going on. For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. I’m not the only one. Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings.
Getting past the easy reach As I’ve been working on writing my book and hitting these mental milestones (40,000 words felt like a lot, then it felt like a lot to rework my outline, then it felt like I’d hit a mountaintop at 55,000 words and counting), I’ve been thinking a lot about the way we talk about and promote books to readers. Then in today’s Shelf Awareness, I saw this about the “book grapevine.” Click through and read it because it isn’t long. In short, the book gets great promotion on the ground level, then it gets promotion from a big-name person in the field or industry, that word gets to a reader who then suggests the book to, in this case, a book seller (and you can swap book seller for librarian or teacher or any other reader advocate), who then reads the book and they themselves do ground-level promotion of the title, too. It gets the word about a particular book out there and does so fast. I blogged a few months ago about the value of and importance of good reader’s advisory. But book grapevine?
Midwest Book Review Detailed book reviews Crime Fiction / Mystery Owl's Cabinet of Wonders Share Book Recommendations With Your Friends, Join Book Clubs, Answer Trivia Stonewall Book Awards | Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Round Table (GLBTRT) The first and most enduring award for GLBT books is the Stonewall Book Awards, sponsored by the American Library Association's Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table. Since Isabel Miller's Patience and Sarah received the first award in 1971, many other books have been honored for exceptional merit relating to the gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender experience. The Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, the Stonewall Book Award-Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award and the Stonewall Book Award-Mike Morgan and Larry Romans Children’s and Young Adult Literature Award are presented to English language works published the year prior to the announcement date. The award is announced in January and presented to the winning authors or editors at the American Library Association Annual Conference in June or July. The award winners each receive a commemorative plaque and $1,000. Anyone may suggest a title to the Stonewall Book Awards Committee for consideration.
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