CLOUD UNBOUND

The main emphasis here is hardly on gloom. It is on the prodigious research and love of trivia that inform Mr. Brown’s stories, the ease with which he sets them in motion, the nifty tricks (Dante’s plaster death mask is pilfered from its museum setting, then toted through the secret passageways of Florence in a Ziploc bag), and the cliffhangers.

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Janet Maslin’s mostly positive New York Times review of Dan Brown’s just-published Inferno, available in Cloud.

As a dual heritage woman, I will say this: if all teenagers have to read is books about white people, should we be surprised if it becomes their default? After all, that’s why I feel different, isn’t it? So if almost every book, and film and television show, is told from the point of view of someone white, then aren’t we being told that normal is white? And not just white, but straight, able-bodied and cisgendered? And that anything other than that is strange?

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YA novelist Tanya Byrne writing in The Independent about the lack of diversity in YA publishing. I must say I couldn’t agree with her more, but the rise of indie presses like Lee & Low Books gives me hope.

Now I must track down Malorie Blackman’s Noughts & Crosses.

Create. Inform. Engage. | Journalism training, media news & how to’s

This is a great overview of how The New York Times, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Atlantic, and other publications have used the ebook format to extend their brands and expand their authority in the face of social media and swarm reporting. Read it!

Key graph:

“We think [ebooks] are ideally suited to the rhythms of a newspaper, where we are writing the first draft of history every day,” Vince Bzdek, deputy national political editor and lead for ebooks at The Washington Post, said in an email. “Ebooks are like the second draft, so [it] feels like a natural fit for us.”

And, yes, I just might be chatting up the good people at Byliner.

Statistics released by the Texas Education Agency for the 2010-2011 school year show that there were approximately 2,480,000 Hispanic students enrolled in the Texas public school system, which represented 50.2 percent of the total of 4,933,617 students enrolled in the state.

This is the first time on record that Hispanics have become the majority in Texas schools.

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Ross DuBois in Texas Monthly News. If you think this will change the look of collections, I’d agree. 

As I learned at the London Book Fair from one of Spain’s Big Three, the United States has the second largest Spanish-speaking population in the world after Mexico. Spain is No. 3.