Earlier this year, World Book Night launched in the UK with the aim of giving away one million books to light or non readers in a 24 hour period. It was a huge success and many other countries are expected to join in the fun in the coming years, starting with the USA on April 23, 2012.

The list of 30 books that will be offered on World Book Night USA has just been released. If you are a USA resident aged 16 or over and would like to give away books, go to http://www.us.worldbooknight.org and complete the form which asks, simply, which book you want to give away, where, to whom & why?

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The picture book market is in the doldrums.  Publishers report that sales are flat and disappointed booksellers must box up the brightly colored, lavishly illustrated volumes - unopened, unread, and most dispiriting of all, unloved - and send them back to the warehouses from whence they came.

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I just finished No Cheating, No Dying: I Had a Good Marriage. Then I Tried to Make It Better. (Scribner, Feb 2012) by Elizabeth Weil. It's a fun, easy read, but with depth.

I'm not a big fan of "self help" books, steering away from tomes that threaten to give me step by step improvement instructions. Instead I prefer to learn from other people's narratives (that is to say, other people's mistakes) - which is just what one can do from No Cheating, No Dying.

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What's the best Christmas present you've ever received? One lonely Christmas - stuck in New York City and unable to get home to Alabama to see her family - Harper Lee spent the holiday with friends... and received a Christmas gift that would end up being a present to the entire literary world. In the short story "Christmas to Me" (McCall's Magazine, 1961), Lee writes about her experience:

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The English language is a wonderful thing. For a whistle stop tour through it's 1500 year (or thereabouts) history, sit back and enjoy The History of English in 10 Minutes produced by Britain's Open University:

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Did you know...

1. Amazon's $34 billion annual revenues are larger than the GDPs of half the countries in the world.
2. Amazon's web sales are five times the combined web sales of Walmart, Target and Buy.com.
3. Amazon serves 137 million customers a week, 33% more than voted in the 2010 USA elections. That's 19.5 million customers daily - equal to the population of Beijing, or the number of Americans who live on less than $6000 a year.
4. The average amount brought in by one of Amazon's unique users is $189. That's almost five times as valuable as Ebay's average ($39).
5. Amazon owns 1/10th of North America's e-commerce pie.
6. If Amazon's active users were a country, their population would be twice that of Canada.
7. With 50,000 preorders, Kindle Fire is set to double the launch of the iPad.
8. Amazon's current cloud platform could store 82 books for each person on the earth.
9. Amazon's warehouse space has grown from a 400 square foot garage in 1995 to 25 million square feet - equivalent to more than 700 Madison Square Gardens.

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