October 2003

Very young children who live in homes where the television is on most of the time may have more trouble learning how to read than other kids their age, according to a study of media habits of children up to 6 years old.

“Watching TV is far inferior to playing with toys, being read to or playing with adults or talking with parents,” said Dr. Henry Shapiro, chairman of developmental and behavior pediatrics at the American Academy of Pediatrics. “Watching TV without a parent is a junk experience, especially for young children.”

The Full Story from the Star-Tribune

[thanks Robin]

A New York Times profile of Peggy Yu, who is looking to make Dangdang.com, China’s biggest online bookseller, the Amazon.com of China.

While Ms. Yu’s business has grown quickly, analysts and publishing executives are still skeptical that her company will thrive soon in a country where the Internet and the exchange of free information remain subject to the whims of China’s authorities, and where people are still reluctant to order online.
In a country where only 8 million out of 68 million Internet users have ever shopped online, Ms. Yu says that the learning curve has been steep.

Bibliofuture writes “Slate has an interesting article, “The Best Search Idea Since Google: How Amazon can make money from books you already own.”

The author mentions how Amazon’s new “Search Inside” feature can be used to search not only books one might consider buying, but also those one already owns.
The full story.

Is your current OPAC so lousey that you find yourself at amazon.com to find correct titles for books?
Would you consider turning to amazon.com to see the contents of a book before looking on shelf for a patron?

The Village Voice reports that The Paris Review will continue depite the recent death of its editor and one of its founders, George Plimpton.

Last week’s Plimpton tribute, a celebrity-studded gala at Cipriani on 42nd Street, raised $500,000 for the Paris Review Foundation, bringing the foundation’s endowment to about $1 million. Now literary insiders are buzzing about how what used to be a for-profit magazine that lost money every year has turned into a bustling nonprofit with a shot at long-term profitability. Meanwhile, the search for a new editor has begun.

A New York Observer article about the lack of marketing – and thus ordering by Barnes & Noble – for Julie Hecht’s The Unprofessionals.

To sell a book without Barnes and Noble is like trying to make bouillabaisse without fish: The retailer is a basic and noticeable ingredient. And it’s hard to believe that Random House “forgot” to approach the Barnes and Noble buyers.

Today’s New York Times Business section featured a brief item about Google’s plans to partner with publishers, providing some level of in-text search of their books:

“Google’s move coincides with a recent effort by Amazon.com to court Internet users looking for information by enabling them to search for words or phrases in its own database of the contents of thousands of books.”

[UPDATE: NYT cites Publisher’s Weekly’s online newsletter as a source, but I was unable to find it on their site this morning. An Anonymous Patron tracked it down for me. The article is entitled “The Amazoning of Google? Search Firm Goes the Other Way; Looks for Book
Content” by Steven Zeitchik. Odd that a search for “google amazon” on the PW site doesn’t produce this item.]

Gary Deane sent us a link to a list of web resources recommended by the New York Times. It’s quite a collection of links, including sections for Net Search, Journalism, Politics, Sports, and Miscellany.

Charles Davis writes: “from
Yahoo UK:

These, along with circus tickets, newspaper clippings
chronicling the great events of the century and letters and notes
from some of the biggest names in art, literature and music of
the time are on show at a just-opened exhibit at the Picasso
Museum, entitled “We Are What We Keep” that runs until
January 1″

A. Nonny Mouse tells us: “According to Newsmax, a California fire that swept through Simi Valley scorching some 80,000 acres just missed the Reagan Library.”

Picked up from BoingBoing:

The robots.txt file for the White House website keeps search engines from crawling a bunch of directories which include the word “iraq” in their names. Most of the directories don’t exist (the names were created by adding /iraq to a real directory), but “this robots.txt file does exclude external search engine robots from some 75 directories that actually exist on whitehouse.gov.”

For instance, a Google search of whitehouse.gov for the phrase “david kay” doesn’t pull up this page, titled “Statement by David Kay.” (An internal search of whitehouse.gov doesn’t pull it up, either, but at least gets a page that links to it.)