AT&T will sell Amazon's Kindle 3G in its
company-owned retail stores beginning March 6. Customers will be able to
test drive the e-reader, which connects over wi-fi as well as
AT&T's mobile broadband network. 
"As
the first dedicated e-reader offered in our stores, we are confident
the Kindle will be an attractive addition to our in store connected
devices lineup," said Glenn Lurie, president, emerging devices,
AT&T.
"Unlike with smart phones or tablet computers, people
can buy the Kindle from AT&T without having to commit to a monthly
data subscription," BusinessWeek
reported. "Once people buy the Kindle, they can surf the Web and
download books as much as they want, with Amazon swallowing the cost of
monthly data fees."
Cnet News
noted that AT&T's decision "makes for a rather interesting dynamic
in its stores. Soon, the Kindle will be sitting next to the
iBooks-equipped iPad in AT&T stores, enabling those looking for an
e-reader to try out both devices before they make their choice."
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Baker & Taylor and De Marque, a distributor of e-books from Quebec and Francophone Canada, are teaming up to distribute French-language Canadian e-books around the world on Blio, the e-reader app.
"We are very pleased to work with De Marque, a highly regarded digital asset manager and distributor, to increase the supply of e-books to international markets," Linda Gagnon, senior v-p of B&T's Digital Media Group, said. "Our partnership allows De Marque to open up access to new outlets for French Canadian publishers."
"Blio offers an unparalleled digital e-reader solution for preserving the original page layouts of illustrated publications, which had been ignored by manufacturers of e-book devices and e-readers," Marc Boutet, president of De Marque, said. "This software is especially interesting, because it is available for free on the computers that most people already have."
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Cool idea of the day: Edmonds Bookshop, Edmonds, Wash., is hosting the Rock 'n' Read Marathon, a 55-hour reading marathon that starts this Friday and is sponsored by a local high school, according to the Edmonds Patch.
Students at two high schools are signing up "to read books, magazines and, in a nod to the digital age, the Kindle, for 30-minute intervals in the store's window," the Patch wrote. "Using the store's rocking chair is optional."
The event is part of National Education Association's Read Across America Month, which helps promote the love of reading and also celebrates Dr. Seuss. Tomorrow, Theodor Geisel's birthday, is Read Across America Day.
The event includes a children's book drive: students are collecting used and new books for the food bank at Edmonds United Methodist Church.
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Book trailer of the day: Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice by Ivan Brunetti (Yale University Press), "a classroom in a book" that includes 15 lessons on the art of cartooning.
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Micawber's Books, St. Paul, Minn., celebrates National Pig Day with an event tonight featuring Low Down and Coming On: A Feast of Delicious and Dangerous Poems About Pigs (Red Dragonfly Press). James P. Lenfestey, who edited the anthology, and contributors Naomi Cohn, Susan Thurston and Cary Waterman will be on hand to ham it up a bit.
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Nook Color as car stereo option: Considerations for driver
safety and B&N's original vision were put aside by one creative
DIYer, whose Nook Color was "hacked, or 'rooted,' with custom firmware
that opens up the tablet to run Android apps. What's interesting to note
about the demo is that at one point you see Google Maps up on the
screen, which has people theorizing that you could turn the Nook Color
into a GPS navigation device if you could pair it via Bluetooth with a
cell phone and share its GPS," Cnet News reported.
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In showcasing 12 of the best new novelists in the U.K., the Guardian's John Mullan wrote that he was asked by BBC2's The Culture Show
to chair a panel of five judges "in an effort to identify promising
debut novelists. Publishers submitted their outstanding first novels of
the past couple of years, and we had to choose the 12 "best." What we
got were examples of what we have come to call "literary fiction." We
found our dozen, and in the course of reading 57 novels I got a picture
of the state of British literary fiction."
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"You are not your grades," suggested the Daily What in response to an inspirational literary quote from Fight Club
by Chuck Palahniuk, found in an unexpected place--a high school hallway
in Vancouver. Tyler Durden's sage advice: "The things that you own end
up owning you."
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In
1995, Ralph Casperson, owner of used and rare bookstore A. Casperson
Books, Niles, Mich., told his son Al that he wasn't worried about a new
Barnes & Noble store opening locally because "I don't offer what
they're going to offer. Barnes & Noble will be carrying my future
inventory."
The South Bend Tribune
reported that, likewise, "the upcoming closing of the Mishawaka Borders
does not affect him. Competitors like Barnes & Noble don't keep him
awake at night. Internet book sales, either. And e-readers?"
Ralph is still unfazed: "Maybe someone reads Treasure Island
or another piece of literature on their e-reader and they really like
the author or subject. They come to me, the old bookshop downtown. I
think e-books will heighten people's curiosity. This is where I see the
value for old, used and rare book shops."