The Costa book awards shortlists have been announced and the one thing that dominates people’s first reactions has been the fact the fiction shortlist is made up entirely of women authors. Is the response…
Lessing: “intellectually uncompromising”.
Juan Martin/AAP
The writer and critic Margaret Drabble recently made an observation that I think is representative of the diverse and prolific career of the British author Doris Lessing, who died last night at 94: She…
Left: Girl Reading, by Franz Eybl. Oil on canvas, 1850. Right: Woman Reading, by Andrew Stevovich. Oil painting, 2011.
Flickr, Plum Leaves; Wiki Commons, Andr.V.S.
As a professional book designer, I’ve spent a decade observing electronic books from a cagey distance. A couple of years ago, I reluctantly recognised the need to engage with these alien book forms, both…
A print designer by trade, I resisted eBooks until a single publication won me over: an edition of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land designed for the iPad, jointly produced in 2011 by publisher Faber and Faber…
University textbooks are expensive for a reason.
Textbook image from www.shuttestock.com
Although student life at university is generally enjoyable, one aspect that blemishes the experience is the astronomical cost of textbooks. As many students head back to university this year, they can…
Reading, in particular printed books, aids in the development of concentration and the ability to focus.
Flickr/Denise Krebs
There is an old saying that anxiety is the enemy of concentration. One of the best pieces of sports journalism I ever read was by Gene Tunney, world heavyweight champion of the 1920s, writing about how…
Our digital era has seen the emergence of many reading technologies but students still prefer the printed book.
Flickr/Declan Flemming
The cultural transformation brought about by digital convergence and networked communication has been dizzying, and, for many, disorienting. None of the old certainties – political, corporate, economic…
The jury is still out over the environmental impacts of eReaders versus paper books.
Julie Falk
Bookshelves towering floor to ceiling filled with weighty tomes, or one book-sized device holding hundreds of “books” in electronic form: which one of these options for the voracious reader creates the…
Steve Jobs’ desire for an enduring memory of his work led him to engage a biographer. The book has become his obituary.
EPA/Britta Pedersen
Steve Jobs’ “official” biography was always going to be a bestseller, with its promise of a candid examination of the inner workings of the world’s most successful salesman and the company he twice built…
It’s fourth time lucky for Julian Barnes in the Booker Prize.
EPA/Alessandro Della Bella
Julian Barnes today won the Man Booker Prize for his novel about a childhood friendship and the fragility of memory, The Sense of an Ending. This is the fourth time he’s been nominated, and Barnes declared…
Last week’s Google Books ruling was a win for copyright protection.
AAP
The decision by a US Federal Court judge last week to reject a $US125 million settlement between Google Books and the publishing industry allows authors to protect their copyright and prevents Google from…