Cory Doctorow wonders how Amazon can be so smart and so stupid at the same time regarding ebook sales and the Kindle.

I can't help but think of Jonathan Lethem's new story "The King of Sentences" in the New Yorker as an elaborate send-up of people who value the sentence over content in contemporary. Which is strange since Lethem can sometimes be one of the worst offenders in that department.

I don't care what this article says. I'm still not learning Esperanto. via Ed Champion. (I'm gonna miss saying that.)

In another round up I linked to an article which talked about Japanese people "writing" on mobile phones. I was under the mistaken impression that meant people actually writing on their phones, like Warren Ellis does on his Treo. Apparently, it actually meant writing for mobile phones. As in, a novel serialized in small bits sent out to mobile phones as text messages. Which is much cooler, actually.

I think both The Reading Experience and Conversational Reading miss the point about "disappearing readers". It's not that literary magazine's readers have disappeared, yes, it's true, they never existed in the first place. It's that short fiction's readers have disappeared, when they used to be plentiful and almost every magazine under sun ran short fiction and everybody read it. But short fiction's audience shriveled up with the ascendancy of film and television, though it still commands a larger audience in many other countries than it does here. That's the issue.

I kind of like the idea that this company is going with--distributing ebooks and comics for free, supported by advertising. I suppose. But their whole flash/queue/have-to-sign-in interface is just too annoying for words. Just give me the damn ebook already.

Anybody remember when we had a president who was highly literate and well-read?

This fan-fic Doctor Who comic is one of the best examples of its kind I think I've ever seen, and promises to be a lot better than the forthcoming officially licensed IDW comic which, judging by the art and IDW's track record alone, I don't have high hopes for.

Today's 1984 moment brought to you by Russian history text books. Be afraid.

And finally,

I really can't believe anyone is still taking those assholes at n+1 seriously. I mean, really.