Friday, June 17, 2011

In the News This Week

Fridays on the SCBWI blog, I share snippets of and links to some of the publishing/media-related news I've read during the last week that I found interesting, helpful, and/or fun. Click titles to get to the full articles.

This week's tidbits include news J.K.'s mysterious website, tips for staying offline, a YA author (and SCBWI success story) in Entertainment Weekly, James Joyce on Twitter, thoughts on Apple's cloud, advice for creating a good Twitter bio, 6th graders with iPads and more.


J.K. Rowling's latest trick: the mysterious website Pottermore (LA Times)
J.K. Rowling isn't writing another Harry Potter book--is she? The mysterious website Pottermore, launched Thursday, seems to bear her signature. And the words "Pottermore," "coming soon" and two owls. Wait -- owls are messengers from Hogwarts, aren't they?

The Games We (Don’t) Play: How Authors Stay Offline (ShelfTalker)
If you’re reading this, you’re online — and quite possibly procrastinating. No judgment here; I’m the Internet version of the If You Give a Mouse a Cookie mouse, roaming from one tidbit to the next, from email to Google Maps to Google Earth to some new article about a space discovery to an audio clip of sounds from the stratosphere to the new David Cook single to—whoops, have I said too much?
 
Why teen-suicide novel 'Thirteen Reasons Why' is saving lives: An interview with Jay Asher (EW's Shelf Life)
Jay Asher‘s YA novel Thirteen Reasons Why, which comes out in paperback tomorrow, has grown into a major phenomenon over the last four years. In this week’s issue of Entertainment Weekly we caught up with the author and got the story behind the book that some readers credit with changing—and even saving—their lives. You can read the story below.

James Joyce Fans Tweet Entire 700+ Page Ulysses For 24 Hours, 140 Characters At A Time (AllTwitter)
In perhaps one of the most ambitious literary projects Twitter has seen, 71 fans of the classic “Ulysses” are spending today tweeting out this 700+ page tome in an attempt to bridge old and new media and share this literary staple with the tweeting generation.

Reading in the Cloud (NYR Blog)
Last week, when Apple’s Steve Jobs took to the stage during the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference and grandly announced its new iCloud service, he was putting the Apple logo on something most internet users have relied on eclectically for years. Gmail, Dropbox, Netflix, Hotmail, Flickr, Box.net, and Spotify, to name a few popular services, all rely on cloud computing, where data—documents, music, photos, and movies—are stored on shared servers in large data centers, rather than on your puny, personal hard drive. The benefits of cloud computing are obvious: one is not limited by the size of that drive, nor restricted to viewing that material on a single device. Once it is in “the cloud,” the only thing standing between you and your stuff is a (fast) internet connection.

Private School in Massachusetts Issues iPads to its 6th Grade Students (eBookNewser)
The Cambridge Friends School in Massachusetts has given iPads to both its 6th grade teachers and each of its sixth-grade students. This is an expansion of the pilot program that the teachers, Sandra Rojas and Brooke Chandler, had been running since February.

3 Key Items You Can’t Afford To Leave Out Of Your Twitter Bio  (AllTwitter)
When people sign up for Twitter, the first thing on their mind is usually not their bio. They leave it blank, or hammer out a sentence or two about their love of their two dogs, and move on to the good stuff: tweeting, following, discovering what influence means, learning how to retweet. But if you leave your bio only half finished, you’re not optimizing your Twitter presence. Here are three things you can’t afford to leave out of your Twitter bio if you want to target the right audience, grow your follower count, and network with interesting people.

Best & Worst Book Trailers of the Year (GalleyCat)
A crew of book trailer fans gathered at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn last night for the second annual Moby Awards. This GalleyCat editor helped judge the annual prizes, celebrating the best and worst book trailers of the year. Follow this link to watch all the finalists. We’ve listed all the winners below…

1 comment:

Susan B James said...

Thnaks Alice. That certainly led me to some interesting sites (and kept me away from my revision) I got an ipad for Mothers day. Awesome gift. For me, as a writer, it enabled me to read my manuscript as a reader. I turned it into an epub with the free converter and put it in my ipad library. It put some brakes on my internal editor.