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Edition 1 - June 2011 



From Sunday

Youth v Age - authors have their say.

Jon McGregor, young novelist -  Youth is a very fashionable thing in the arts and there are lots of new, young writers around, which is very valid. But think of people like Alice Munroe and Philip Roth. They have just got better with time, without changing their themes or style. The key is practice: writing is a really hard thing to do and hard to do well. I hope my work will get better over time.  I don’t think age should come across in writing, and it doesn’t always. Younger writers tend to try lots of new ideas and styles. But people such as Peter Hobbs and Sarah Hall seem older than they are because of the pace and restraint of their writing.

Charlie Higson, middle-aged children’s author - You don’t need to be young to write for children; in fact it’s better to be slightly older. You can look at childhood from a distance and know what was important.  It’s about a middle ground. Very old authors tend to lose contact with reality over time. These grand old men of letters can’t speak to young people. But you do need experience to find matter for books. You can tell if it’s someone who hasn’t lived very much as their writing contains stuff they’re read elsewhere, or seen on the television. What do kids who go to university and then do a masters in creative writing have to say? Many writer reading his or her earlier books wants to rewrite them. But at the time it was right. As I’ve got older I’ve learned more, but you can lose a directness.

Elaine Feinstein, senior poet - Young writers are very fresh, but the measured, mature voice of the older writer with several books behind them is what I turn to first. I like thoughtful writing and older writers write more slowly and using the vocabulary I am accustomed to. The author’s generation is immediately obvious from their language. Older writers do sometimes try to mime the voice of younger writers by using colloquial language, which can make it harder to tell. I’m fortunate as a writer. I’ve developed as a poet more in the last 15 years than the 15 preceding. Why? Because of pain and an attempt at sorting myself out.

Automated Book Production

The Professional Book Solution automates book production via batch, barcode, and scanning processes. Users can streamline their workflow from order entry through shipping and delivery using JDF/JMF commands, 2D barcodes, and production-management tools.

Canon is leading the way in printing - click here to read full article

 

What Makes This Man Tick?

Amazon.com's founder, Jeff Bezos, is a study in contradictions. Analytical and intuitive, careful and audacious, playful and determined. What really makes this remarkable entrepreneur tick?  click here to read the full article

Google Unveils Wallet

Google Wallet field trials have been run and the results will be official out this summer. As expected, it will be using NFC technology. By 2014, Tilenius notes that 50 percent of smartphones will have NFC built into them — that’s 150 million devices.

With Wallet, you’ll be able to add your existing credit cards (though only Citi-backed Mastercards are a partner right now of the major card companies). And it’s a wallet you can lock, Tilenius notes. There are multiple levels of security. There’s the phone lock, a required Google pin, credit card information encryption, and your credit card number is never fully displayed.

Right off the bat, Google Wallet will work with Mastercard Paypass. This means right now 300,000 merchants around the world and 120,000 in the U.S. are technically ready (though it’s not rolling out everywhere yet). It will initially work with “Gcard” a Google pre-paid card set up by Mastercard.

Kodak is seeing business opportunities
in book manufacturing with the growth of on-demand publishing. At The New York Public Library, the  photo production giant recently sponsored a forum on the future of publishing, focusing on digital technologies. As reported by the Global Print Monitor blog, accomplished book publishing strategists along with production and technology pros offered opinions such as: High-speed inkjet printing will greatly impact book manufacturing; Print-on-demand book production minimizes book returns and their associated costs (one of the banes of the publishing business)
 

And... Children typically prefer the printed book to reading on electronic devices.

Click to
Check out the Global Print Monitor Blog - Kodak Hosts Discussion on the future of book publishing  [read the article and watch the video]


Writer's Festival
The link below will take you to a great site to find dates and details about Australia and New Zealand's vibrant Literary Festivals.

http://www.literaryfestivals.com.au/

 

Best Books of the Decade

2000-2009, the first decade of the new millennium. Of the thousands of books published in the 2000s, which were the ones you absolutely should read?
Here are the best books of the decade, 10 books that are highly recommended and that should withstand the test of time.

(Wondering which books, good and bad, were the most popular of the decade? click to view the  People's Choice Top 10 Books of the Decade).

# 4. 'The Kite Runner'
by Khaled Hosseini

  This book helped millions around the world to understand the Afghan people. Released in 2003, Hosseini's book was a gift in a decade when a coalition of troops from around the world spent much of the decade fighting a war in this country. The Kite Runner is a page turner with complex characters and situations that will make you think hard about friendship, good and evil, betrayal, and redemption. It is intense and contains some graphic scenes; however, it is not gratuitous. A great book by many measures. 

READ A REVIEW OF The Kite Runner

Bibliotastic.com

Bibliotastic publishes free ebooks by independent authors. Books can be browsed online but please create a new account and log in to download Kindle, EPUB and PDF formats, and make comments.  It's easy! Just create a new account and upload your book. The Bibliotastic team will turn it into a great eBook in a number of formats for easy download. This is an excellent way for new and evolving authors to develop an online profile and to build reader awareness. Many established authors began by given their eBooks away free and then went on to sell their work when they had built a reputation as an author.  Authors do not pay to have their work published and readers have free access the the eBooks once they have been published.


Want to know more about the Amazon Kindle?

The Amazon Kindle is an e-book reader developed by Amazon.com subsidiary Lab126 which uses wireless connectivity to enable users to shop for, download, browse, and read e-books, newspapers, magazines, blogs, and other digital media.  The Kindle hardware devices use an E Ink electronic paper display that shows up to 16 shades of gray, minimizes power use and simulates reading on paper.

Several hardware devices support this platform, including a main "Kindle" line and a parallel "Kindle DX" line. The most recent Kindle device is the third incarnation of the main line, officially named "Kindle", but usually referred to as "Kindle 3".  Kindle 3 was released on August 27, 2010.  User reports indicate that the new display on the Kindle 3, with E Ink Pearl technology, is noticeably superior to that of prior generations.



 Twelve of the best new novelists
click to read what the UK Guardian has to say


Australian Authors
Australians are prolific storytellers, authors and illustrators.
They write in every genre, producing material for every level and purpose. Many have international reputations and recognition.


click here to visit the Aussie Educator
A great site for information about Australian authors - for children and in fiction & non-fiction. Well known illustrators are included as many are authors.
In addition, there is information  about Australian Awards and Prizes from the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards to Children’s Book Council Awards and beyond.
International Awards & Prizes are found on this page. Australian authors have been short-listed and/or won several of these.

For information on where to get an Australian author’s books, type Australian Booksellers or Publishers into your search engine browser.

Amazon.com's founder is a study in contradictions -- analytical and intuitive, careful and audacious, playful and determined. What really makes this remarkable entrepreneur tick?

Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos  It's tempting, but too facile, to dismiss Bezos as a guy enjoying a charmed life. His boundless optimism is matched only by his outrageous good luck. The hopper accident was just the latest hairy episode he has survived in nine years as founder and chief executive officer of Amazon. Back in 1997, when the book barons at Barnes & Noble launched their rival Web site, Forrester Research chief George Colony famously predicted that Bezos's little venture was "Amazon.toast." A lot of people in the press and on Wall Street -- and inside the company as well -- thought the critic was correct. But Bezos flourished. Later, when the collective delusion of the 1990s finally ended, Amazon's shares fell from $100 to $6. Bezos remained sanguine. "Jeff irrepressibly casts every challenge as an opportunity," says his longtime friend Linda Stone, a former executive at Apple and Microsoft.
Has he been lucky? "Extraordinarily," he says. It couldn't have happened without "planetary alignment," he explains. But luck isn't all. Bezos's success also springs from his ideas about running companies and creating innovation. His thinking is farsighted and intuitive. But it's all too easy to be distracted by his quirky, hyperbolic personality and not see what he's really up to. 

click here to read the full article     cllick 

Mem Fox is also known as Merrion Frances Fox and Merrion Frances Partridge.

She was born in Melbourne, Australia on March 5, 1946.

She grew up in Africa because her father was a missionary there. Her mother was a writer.

She studied drama in England and returned to Adelaide, Australia in 1970. She still lives there with her husband, Malcolm Fox, and daughter, Chloe Catienne.

She worked as an Associate Professor of Literacy Studies in the School of Education at Flinders University, South Australia for twenty-four years and is now an international literacy consultant.

click here to visit Mem Fox's website

 

Mem Fox - her Life story

I was born in Melbourne, Australia, in March 1946, but left at the age of six months to go to Africa with my parents, who were missionaries. The mission we lived on, Hope Fountain, was a few miles from the city of Bulawayo, in Zimbabwe, which used to be called Rhodesia. In my first year at the mission school I was the only white child so all my close friends were black. We learned to write by drawing our letters in the red earth. Later, we graduated to writing squeakily on slates. Now, of course, I use a computer, but I still use a pencil and paper whenever I have a writing problem to solve. My brain loves it when I write in pencil.

My father’s name—Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge—is also the title of my second book. Miss Nancy, in the same book, is my mother; the rest of Miss Nancy’s name comes from the names of my two sisters, both of whom are younger than I am: Jan Delacourt (who used to be Jan Delacourt Cooper) and Alison Partridge. Jan lives in Italy and Alison lives north of Sydney.

In the mid-sixties, totally unsophisticated, I went to drama school in London and spent three happy years changing my Rhodesian accent, speaking Shakespeare, singing Beatles’ songs, wearing miniskirts, and dyeing my hair—a habit I haven’t grown out of. It’s been red for years, and will remain so until I die. Being a red-head has become my brand, my recognizable logo.

I took a great risk in 1969 and married an Englishman—a highly gifted teacher of French and drama, who is now a gorgeous retired drama lecturer. Malcolm and I have lived happily ever after and have now been married for 40 years (as of 02:01:2009) Our daughter, Chloë, to whom Possum Magic is dedicated, was born in 1971. She was a journalist for seven years in Adelaide and Paris; then a high school teacher of French and English at Loreto, a Catholic girls’ school in Adelaide; and now she is a politician: a Labor Party Member of Parliament for the state seat of Bright in South Australia, which she won in the March 2006 elections. In 2009 she was promoted to the position of Parliamentary Secretary to the Premier, Mike Rann. (The term ’secretary’ in politics has no relation to being a secretary in business!)

Back to me—after all, this is all about me!—as a mature age university student in my early thirties, I studied children’s literature at Flinders University. This set me, totally unawares, on the road to some fame and even fortune since it was during that course that I wrote the first draft of my first book: Possum Magic. It was rejected nine times over five years but went on to become (and continues to be, to this day) the best-selling children’s book in Australia, with over three and half million copies sold. In 2004 its 21st birthday was celebrated with parties and events in thousands of schools and other places around Australia, and a new re-designed edition was launched. The colours of the original film of the illustrations were fading because it had been reprinted so many times! They now look gorgeous again.

Since Possum Magic I have written over 30 books for children: 33, I think, at the last count. Around half of these have become bestsellers which just goes to show that occasionally I write great books as well as pathetic ones. Some of my books have different titles and different illustrators in the USA but essentially they are the same inside.

One of the best moves I ever made was to re-train, in 1981, out of drama into literacy studies, to find out how children best learn to read and write. Literacy has become the great focus of my life—it’s my passion, my battle, my mission and my exhaustion. If you’re the parent of a child aged from 0-7 I hope you will enjoy my bestselling books for parents: Reading Magic: how your child can learn to read before school and other read aloud miracles. If you are a teacher I hope you will be challenged but also thrilled by my book Radical Reflections, about the teaching of reading and writing.

Writing is my second love. My first is teaching, to which I admit an addiction so powerful that I’m surprised I had the courage to retire early (in 1996, aged 50) from my position as Associate Professor, Literacy Studies, in the School of Education at Flinders University, South Australia. I taught there with great satisfaction and happiness, full time, for twenty four years. I cried three times in my last class, so sad was I to leave.

I now spend most of my time writing presentations urging parents, teachers, and others to read aloud to children aged between 0-5, and I travel the world doing it. I have travelled a great deal as an influential international literacy consultant to places as diverse as Bahrain, East Timor, Guam, Tanzania, China, and of course to the USA which I have visited over 100 times. I have spoken at hundreds and hundreds of conventions in the States. I also travel—I mean I work like a tired old dog!—extensively around Australia, which I particularly adore since this is my beloved homeland. And I continue to write picture books when the spirit moves me, so if you’re still reading this, and if you like my books, and keep buying them, I promise to continue to write picture books for children even though it’s the hardest job in the world and much more of a grind that most people realize. I have at least four new books in the pipeline, currently being illustrated. They will appear over the next five years.

My most recent book Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes has been a big hit in the USA in particular, where it’s still on and off the New York Times bestseller lists. It has been there for 17 weeks so far between October 08 and May 09. 17 weeks! Incredibly exciting! The sales are due, in large part, to the utterly endearing illustrations in the book, divinely painted by Helen Oxenbury whose feet I kiss. I have made up a sort of lullaby to Ten Little Fingers which will be on YouTube by mid-May 2009, I hope. Unfortunately, I sing it myself and I’m 63 and asthmatic, and each verse starts an octave lower than the verse that precedes it. (I exaggerate, but only a little.) At least there’s enough of a recognisable tune for parents to be able to learn it and sing it to their own children beautifully. The song by itself, without any visuals and sung with more care, will be on this website by mid-May 2009.

In June 2009, a newly designed and presented, small hardback edition of Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge will appear in Australia to celebrate its 25th year of publication. I absolutely adore this book even though I shouldn’t say such things about my own work. It is one of my classics, so if you have found me through more recent books like Where Is The Green Sheep? you might like to make Wilfrid’s acquaintance. It’s for older children, somewhere between a sophisticated three year old up to a child of seven, or a grandparent of 87.

Two board book editions are coming out in mid-2009: Where Is The Green Sheep?in the USA; and Ten Little Fingers in Australia.

And finally, a new book of mine appears in the USA on May 5th, 2009, and in Australia on June 1st 2009: it’s called Hello Baby!. I hope parents and babies will adore it.

Until I grow even older, that’s my life story for now… 

Google Unveils Wallet
Google is working on a mobile payments platform with credit card and financial companies such as Citigroup and MasterCard. Source: AAP
GOOGLE is expected to disclose details about how consumers will be able to make store purchases, redeem coupons, and get loyalty points by waving smartphones in front of a small reader at the checkout counter, said people familiar with the matter.

For Google, the system could help boost its digital advertising business. The planned payment system would allow Google to offer retailers more data about their customers and help the retailers target ads and discount offers to mobile-device users near their stores, these people said. Google, which hopes to sell ads and discount offers to the local merchants, isn't expected to get a cut of the transaction fees.

read the full Wall Street Journal

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MASTERCLASS 1
 

Ideas and Inspiration
by acclaimed Scottish writer Keith Gray
Part 1 of a 5 part series. Enjoy!
MASTERCLASS Creative Writing - Characters

Check out this UFO Tree House!

If you were jogging in the forest one day, and you looked up and saw this huge football shaped object hovering there, what would you think?

If you were thinking that you just saw a UFO, then you would be partially correct. This is a tree house in the shape of a UFO. I’m not certain whether or not this was designed for small children or adults, but it has a dinning area, bedroom, living room, and bathroom.

    Seriously, it has a bathroom. I have no idea if the plumbing goes up the tree trunk or what, but unless it is some sort of outhouse, I want to live here. Then again, I don’t know how tall the ceilings are, but they look pretty low.

  This robot does windows, and runs on water

  
There’s nothing I like more than reporting on robots on this blog, and this one has is certainly has something unusual on two fronts. First, it is can climb up walls, provided they are made of glass. It has suction cups, and they could take away all window washing jobs permanently. No more of those guys hanging off the sides of tall buildings.  Unfortunately, the suction cups won’t keep the robot affixed to the side of a glass building, not by themselves anyway. Here’s where it gets interesting. This robot has a vacuum suction that is generated by water. Yes, this robot can run on water. Not only that, the excess water is squirted out, which will help wash the windows. Talk about killing two birds with one stone! Another thing that makes this robot nifty is that it is modeled after a gecko. Too bad it does require a flexible pipe in order to work, but the water tank is only so large, really.

 Well, this water-powered robo gecko is under development from researchers at Zhejiang University in China, and there is no word if this will ever go past the experimental stage. So if you work on the top of a tall building, and you see a robotic gecko washing your window, do not be alarmed.

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