Reading Copy Book Blog

The Guardian asks why do kids love Thomas the Tank Engine? This week the National Autistic Society (NAS) published a survey concluding that Thomas and his friends’ adventures are educationally valuable to autistic children – helping them distinguish emotions, as well as colours, numbers and words.

In another ‘if you can’t beat ‘em then join ‘em’ move, the Chicago Tribune has launched a book blog. It doesn’t compare to Dwight Garner’s Paper Cuts but it’s early days yet. By the way, Paper Cuts links to an interview with 88-year-old Alexander Solzhenitsyn.

Time magazine interviews Neil Gaiman. It starts like this…. Like all good fairy tales, this one starts with Claudia Schiffer. Once upon a time a fireplace fell on Schiffer’s foot. She was pregnant at the time. “When a marble fireplace falls on your foot,” Neil Gaiman explains, “and you’re 7½ months pregnant, you stop going [...]

Sorry that we’re late with blogging today. The US college textbook season is almost upon us and we’re preparing for our busiest time of the year. One of our tech folks informed me a few months ago that at the very peak of the Fall back-to-school season (last week of August), AbeBooks.com experiences 90 book [...]

The BBC reports on the death of Chris Whiting – a war thriller writer who penned more than 350 books under various names. He served as a 16-year-old in World War II, and became a university lecturer and then a journalist with The Times and Playboy magazine.

The Guardian blogs about commuter reading – probably the only redeeming aspect of commuting.

For no reason at all, the Wall Street Journal carries a tribute to science fiction writer Robert Heinlein – author of Starship Troopers and many other genre-defining books. Heinlein brought to his work a unique combination of technical savvy — based largely on the engineering training he’d received at the U.S. Naval Academy and a [...]

A shocking story from the Baltimore Sun that bookstores are cutting back on sofas and other comfy seating. It’s true – they are being replaced with…. more books.

Our British site, AbeBooks.co.uk, now has an excellent feature on collectible pirate books courtesy of our friends at Rare Book Review magazine.

Thomas Bloor, author of Worm in the Blood, lists his top 10 tales of metamorphosis in The Guardian. I loved reading Voyage of the Dawn Treader by CS Lewis as a child and Bloor’s reminded me about Jack London’s Call of the Wild – another book I could pick up right now and spend the [...]