Tony Grybowski has been appointed as the new CEO of the Australia Council for the Arts. Grybowski joined the Australia Council in 2007 and previously held the position of executive director of arts organisations. His background includes management positions at the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, Musica Viva Australia and the Australian Youth Orchestra, and

A monster crowd was on hand for the Ontario Library Association’s Forest of Reading festival at Toronto’s Harbourfront Centre. The two-day kidlit event featuring signings, readings, and workshops also included ceremonies for its signature prizes.

The winners are:

Blue Spruce Award
Kate & Pippin, Martin Springett; Isobel Springett, photog. (Puffin Canada)

Silver Birch Express Award
Margaret and the Moth Tree, Brit Trogen and Kari Trogen (Kids Can Press)

Silver Birch Fiction Award
Making Bombs for Hitler, Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch (Scholastic Canada)

Silver Birch Non-fiction Award
No Shelter Here: Making the World a Kinder Place for Dogs, Rob Laidlaw (Pajama Press)

Red Maple Fiction Award
The Vindico, Wesley King (Putnam/Penguin)

Red Maple Non-fiction Award
Real Justice: Fourteen and Sentenced to Death, Bill Swan (Lorimer)

White Pine Award
Dark Inside, Jeyn Roberts (Simon & Schuster)

Le Prix Tamarac
Le mystère des jumelles Barnes, Carole Tremblay (Bayard Canada)

Le Prix Tamarac Express
Billy Stuart: 1. Les Zintrépides, Alain M. Bergeron; Sampar, illus. (Éditions Michel Quintin)

Le Prix Peuplier
Le zoo de Yayaho, Geneviève Lemieux; Bruno St-Aubin, illus. (Bayard Canada)

Hollywood producer Neal Edelstein explored the boundaries between film and app with Haunting Melissa, a serialized “ghost story that was designed to be watched in the dark with headphones on.”

AppNewser interviewed the producer:

The film, which was written by Andrew Klavan, isn’t to be watched in one sitting like your usual movie. It’s also not your average series with multiple episodes. Instead app users can experience the story over a six-to-eight week period as different pieces of the story are revealed. As viewers progress, Edelstein’s Hooked Digital Media will add new content to the app that helps advance the story. When a new piece is added to the app, users will get a push notification. The schedule is a mystery, so don’t expect a new episode every Tuesday. It’s unpredictable, explained Edelstein. Clips are also not a standard length. For instance, one clip could be three minutes, another twenty, but each piece will push the story forward, explained Edelstein.

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The New Yorker has introduced a new online receptacle where sources can share documents and messages with the magazine anonymously. The tool is called Strongbox and it is accessible using the Tor network, a private and secure online network.

The publication will not record the I.P. address or any browsing information from people who share documents on Strongbox. It will also not try to access your computer or operating system, and they will not add cookies to your browser.

Here is more about Strongbox from The New Yorker‘s website:

It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own post, including Swartz’s role and his survivors’ feelings about the project. (They approve, something that was important for us here to know.) The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented. continued…

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• State attorney’s “straightforward case” against Penguin in ebook price-fixing case
• High-school students compete in national poetry contest
• Qantas releases books for airline travel
• Digital book signings help authors’ careers
• Obama’s memoirs earn big money

 

Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore will open a second shop called Terrace Books, “a (mostly) used bookstore in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn.”

The bookstore will replace the six year old Babbo’s Books, located 242 Prospect Park West, a couple blocks away from Prospect Park. Check it out:

A grand opening party is being planned for June. What to expect at Terrace Books? A considered selection of used books, a few new books, books to give as gifts (especially around the holidays), kids’ books, and more. Quick and easy delivery of new titles from Community Bookstore by bicycle. All the out-of-print books and vintage dust jackets you can handle. And for Babbo’s customers, we’ll honor your credits and gift certificates.

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Has your to-be-read pile grown out of control? There is a Japanese word for that!

Avid reader Wemedge had his daughter illustrate the word “Tsundoku,” a informal Japanese
word that describes our out of control book piles. Want to know more about the word itself? Wiktionary has more about the word:

tsumu, to pile up + doku, to read, punning on tsundeoku, to leave piled up) Noun  (informal) the act of leaving a book unread after buying it, typically piled up together with such other unread books

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When Hollywood producer Neal Edelstein set out to make Haunting Melissa, a horror film iPad app about a teenage girl that goes missing, he didn’t want it to be just another film. The first directorial production from the producer of Mulholland Drive and The Ring, the film was created the specifically for the iPad.

“The story was designed with the technology in mind,” Edelstein told AppNewser last week over coffee in New York. ”It’s a ghost story that was designed to be watched in the dark with headphones on.” continued…

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If you have an iPad or an iPhone, you can now host a video Google Hangout on your mobile device–connecting with your writing group, book club or editor in a face-to-face chat.

Simply download the free Hangouts app and sync with your Google+ contacts. Once your circles are loaded, you can quickly launch a hangout. AppNewser has more:

Users on iOS devices can finally start using Google’s new chat app, appropriately call Hangouts, allows you to do what you’ve always done with Gmail’s desktop experience: text friends, start videos, and share photos in seamless conversations across multiple devices. The best part about the new Hangout app is how easy it is to continue a video chat from a text chat in seconds. If that feature doesn’t impress you, Google’s also putting in 850 emojis for all of those emotions you can’t express.

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In this digital age, basic programming is one of the best gift you can give a kid.

The free Hopscotch HD app will help kids explore a simple programming language and create their own games. The brand new iOS app has already found a bustling community of users. Check it out:

So, we launched Hopscotch last week, and it’s been quite a ride since.  It’s been downloaded more than 20,000 times, we cracked the Top 10 iPad Education apps, and were featured in New and Noteworthy on the App Store.  After the initial press we got all sorts of other great coverage on various ed tech blogs. We’ve had folks volunteering to translate it into nine different languages. We’ve had some totally awesome projects sent to us by parents and kids. And perhaps most importantly, we’ve begun our process of refining our feature set based on real data and feedback.

continued…

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Criminal barrister Ruth Field, aka The Gr!t Doctor, offers tough talk, frank advice and expletives in her new book.    

You Tube personality and real world iPad Magician is helping to announce the latest update for Rovio’s Angry Birds on Android and iOS called Abra-Ca-Bacon.

The new update to Angry Birds Seasons includes Magic Portals, so the video and talent fit was a perfect match. The portals help to transport birds – just shoot them at a portal and they magically appear out of the same looking portal elsewhere on-screen. The portals are not limited to just bird-transport, bits of explosions also can travel through the space-warps.Click here to see the video announcements: continued…

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In addition to the 40 excerpts of highly anticipated titles, our Buzz Books 2013 fall/winter sampler includes an extensive preview of additional upcoming titles put together by editor Sarah Weinman. By itself it's a great overview important books and authors to look for at BEA and throughout the big fall…

The New York Public Library is hosting a special exhibition honoring Federico García Lorca at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. “Back Tomorrow: Federico García Lorca / Poet in New York” opened on April 5th and will run until July 20th.

This free program features the manuscript for Lorca’s Poet in New York, drawings, photographs, letters, and mementos. Fans of the Spanish poet can also attend various “Lorca in NY” lectures, workshops, and events. Here’s more about the exhibit:

In 1936, the poet left the manuscript of Poet in New York on the desk of his Madrid publisher with a note saying he would be ‘back tomorrow,’ probably to discuss final details. He never returned…The book was published posthumously in 1940, but the manuscript mysteriously disappeared, lost to scholars for decades. The Fundación Federico García Lorca in Madrid and The New York Public Library exhibit it now for the first time…

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Do you like reading movie scripts? Check out Script Lit, a new series of unproduced screenplays that have been adapted as eBook novellas.

Here is more from the site: “There are many wonderful scripts written that are never produced and therefore aren’t shown to the world. This process of adapting those ‘lost gems’ into eBook novellas gives the writer a chance to be heard and loved by a wide audience. We are SL eBooks and are proud to present Script Lit, the new literary genre.”

The debut title from the collection is Mom of the Year by Denise Pischinger and is available through various eBook stores for $2.99. The second title from the collection, a horror/thriller title called Ambrose Fountain by Brian Sieve will publish next month.

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The second Hay Budapest festival promises an eclectic mix of speakers against a vibrant intellectual background    

The Fault in Our Stars author John Green delivered the commencement speech at the graduation ceremony for Butler University’s class of 2013. To read the entire speech, head to Green’s Tumblr page.

Watch the entire speech in the video embedded above (his talk begins at the 1:01:08 mark). Here’s an excerpt:

I would just note that the default assumption is that the point of human life is to be as successful as possible, to acquire lots of fame or glory or money as defined by quantifiable metrics: number of twitter followers, or facebook friends, or dollars in one’s 401k.

This is the hero’s journey, right? The hero starts out with no money and ends up with a lot of it, or starts out an ugly duckling and becomes a beautiful swan, or starts out an awkward girl and becomes a vampire mother, or grows up an orphan living under the staircase and then becomes the wizard who saves the world. We are taught that the hero’s journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness.

continued…

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As the shutdown of Google Reader nears, one reader has created a simple and free tool to replace Google’s soon-to-be discontinued tool.

You can explore the demo online or visit the simple sign-up page. CommaFeed inclues an easy organizational structure and simple settings. The interface will be easy for most Google Reader users to pick up quickly.  Here’s more about the free app:

When Google announced Reader shutdown, I started to work on a clone. It is now available. It’s simple, bloat-free, and it’s open-source. Say hello to CommaFeed … CommaFeed is a bloat-free feed reader. It aims to replace Google Reader while keeping things simple.

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