Lunch Break Interlude V

As I said in the last one, it never fails when you do an update or a recap something else comes along that is pretty cool and you have to share – such as the book to the right.

Now I am in a book buying ban, but I am not in a book ban 😀  When I went to get my haircut this past weekend there was a woman handing copies of Justin Cronin’s The Passage.  I assumed it was for World Book Night (a few days/weeks late), but when I asked she had no idea what I was talking about. She said these were giveaways to spread word about the next book in the series/trilogy released this coming October. I don’t know if this has been common in the past, but it feels like this might be where the book industry is heading. With the mass production of books and the rise of ebooks who knows.  It reminded me a little of Scholastic’s giving 525 copies of the Hunger Games trilogy to my work for our gala.  But hey, I’m not going to knock it – it did add another book to my to-be-read pile/list, but it didn’t cost me anything!

In somewhat related news Tom got me a used iPad. (Long story, but basically his boss sold it to him for cheap and I got it, whoohoo!) Well a few months ago when Jillian over at A Room of One’s Own got a Nook she named it Emerson from the cover and it made me smile.  If I were to do the same thing my iPad’s name would be Emily (or perhaps Brontë – as we all know my love for Anne) because of the gorgeous case I ordered to the left. It’s really nice and the only thing missing is a stand-type contraption but I’m okay with that  because of how COOL it is.  M-EDGE, where I ordered it, has a whole line of out-of-print book cover cases for electronics that was very tempting.  I seriously debated on the Pride and Prejudice cover for my kindle, but instead settled on this beautiful The New Yorker cover (to the right) of which they had quite a few options to choose from. I can’t wait for it to arrive! I love my Amazon Kindle case, but this one should be lighter, which is great when I’m lying in bed or lounging somewhere.

And tangentially related, through both books and iPads, to close out this seemingly random post, I encourage everyone to check out this piece titled, A Golden Age of Books? There Were Only 500 Real Bookstores in 1931, from The Atlantic.  My favorite line from the incredibly short piece is:

“It’s my contention–and I’ve made this point in other ways–that when people look at the sprawling mess of Internet publishing and decide that the quality of writing has declined, they are comparing apples to oranges.”

I found this article through the awesome iPad/iPhone app Flipboard – you should definitely check it out especially if you read your blogs through a feed! It’s been an amazing discovery (and has really got me reading local news more).