Instead of a treehouse, one father with an avid young reader built his daughter a reading nook in a tree.

We’ve embedded his photograph above–would you love a treehouse reading nook this summer? The proud parent posted about his creation on Reddit:

It’s about 7 ft off the ground. All the weight is supported by the bolts in the main trunk and the thick branch opposite the platform. I boxed around that support branch so as to minimize strain as the tree inevitably grows. The steel cables are most definitely overkill backup support, but they don’t seem to be needed even at 3x her weight … She was away at a friends for most of it. I had the joists and half the decking done when she got home. It was fun to have her sit up on the finished part if the deck and space / position the boards before I secured each one. The whole process went surprisingly quickly.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Hachette Australia has partnered with Sydney creative agency Droga5 and Qantas to create a set of paperback books that are timed to be read during 10 of the airline’s main flying routes. The ‘Stories for Every Journey’ set includes 10 books by existing Hachette authors. Two of the books by Sean

Australian illustrators Ben Sanders and Tony Flowers have been shortlisted in the children’s book category of the UK-based Association of Illustrators (AOI) Illustration Awards. Sanders has been shortlisted for his book I’ve An Uncle Ivan (Thames & Hudson) and Flowers has been shortlisted for the cover and internal illustrations in Samantha-Ellen Bound’s What the

Booktopia CEO and founder Tony Nash has been nominated for the 2013 Australian Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. Nash, who founded Booktopia in 2004, is one of 18 nominees competing in the Eastern region category, which includes entrepreneurs from the ACT and NSW. A regional winner will be

Melbourne-based publisher Scribe will launch a new series of nonfiction books about contemporary media trends later this year. The ‘Media Chronicles’ series will launch with The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience by blogger Tim Dunlop in September, followed by Stop Press: The Last Days of

In the US, Bowker, parent company of Books+Publishing owner Thorpe-Bowker, has launched SelfPublishedAuthor.com, a website designed to help authors self-publish their work. The website, which says its aim is to ‘guide independent authors to success’, offers industry and marketing advice, checklists, FAQs, a calendar of events and pieces written by successful self-published authors. Bowker

In the US, the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) has appointed Skip Prichard as president and CEO, reports Publishers Weekly. Prichard will replace Jay Jordan, who retires on 30 June after 15 years at OCLC. Prichard was president and CEO of the Ingram Content Group from 2008 to 2012, and president and

At Melville House, Kelly Burdick has been promoted to associate publisher. Margaret Bail has joined Inklings Literary Agency, where she will continue to represent romance, thrillers, mystery, science fiction, fantasy, westerns, and historical fiction. Previously she was at the Andrea Hurst Agency. Royalty Share co-founder and chairman and ceo Bob…

As Oklahoma City residents reel from a major tornado, the Red Cross has a free app that tracks disaster shelter availability. The Safe and Well site will help you connect with loved ones.

While the shelter app is Apple only, you can download the Red Cross tornado app in Google Play for an Android tool to find shelter. Follow this link to download the iOS app:

Shelter data reflects all Red Cross managed disaster shelters across the United States. Information is updated at least daily, and more often during disasters, including location, capacity, current number of shelter residents, and the date and time of the last update for each activated shelter … The application uses data about open shelters from the American Red Cross National Shelter System (NSS). The NSS contains information about 60,000 potential disaster facilities and is used to track and report on shelter information during disasters. The NSS enables emergency managers and disaster relief workers to identify relevant information for all shelters in use and to develop effective response strategies before disasters strike.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

On Friday, Judge Denise Cote granted entry of final judgment, approving the federal government's settlement with Penguin in their ebook pricing case. That increases the likelihood that Penguin will move to "agency lite" pricing of their ebooks sometime soon. But we don't know that for sure. It took about two…

I love this word so much, I had it illustrated for us. Abibliophobia: the fear of running out of reading material. twitter.com/SmartBitches/s…

— Sarah Wendell (@SmartBitches) May 20, 2013

Do you suffer from abibliophobia? I know I do.

Over at Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, author Sarah Wendell posted an illustrated definition for the word that means “the fear of running out of reading material.”

Last week, we introduced you to the Japanese word “Tsundoku,” which is the “act of leaving a book unread after buying it.” Perhaps this is the dark side of abibliophobia, but I don’t want to be cured…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

With more than 700,000 apps available in Google Play’s Android app store, it can be difficult to find new apps that you like to use.

Appreciate aims to address this problem by giving you personalized recommendations on what Android apps you might like based on the apps that you are already using, as well as on what your Facebook friends use and what kinds of apps other app users like you are using.

The free Android app works like a search tool for app discovery. You can create a profile and identify which apps you like and it will match you up with other apps that you might like. The app has a live stream of apps recommended specifically for you, and you can do social searches to see which friends are using apps that you might be considering. You can also look for apps that are similar to apps that you use including alternatives that mega-users like the most.

 

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Online and app food ordering companies Seamless and GrubHub have agreed to merge their services. Combined, the organization will offer users access to more than 20,000 local restaurants in more than 500 cities across the U.S. In 2012, the two companies delivered about $875 million in gross food sales to local takeout restaurants, earning a combined revenue of more than $100 million.

“We have always shared the same goal – to bring more business to restaurants – and by working together, we will be able to bring even more innovation to customers across the U.S and U.K.,” wrote Jonathan Zabusky, CEO of Seamless on the Seamless blog. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Following days of rumors, Yahoo has acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion. The press release made the new relationship clear: “Per the agreement and our promise not to screw it up, Tumblr will be independently operated as a separate business.”

Tumblr has served as a source of countless book deals and many writers keep work on the site. If you want to know how to build a better page, read our Tumblr Tips for Writers post with writing advice from Tumblr literary outreach Rachel Fershleiser. Here’s more about the deal:

With more than 300 million monthly unique visitors and 120,000 signups every day, Tumblr is one of the fastest-growing media networks in the world. Tumblr sees 900 posts per second (!) and 24 billion minutes spent on site each month. On mobile, more than half of Tumblr’s users are using the mobile app and do an average of 7 sessions per day … The deal offers unique opportunities for both companies. Tumblr can deploy Yahoo!’s personalization technology and search infrastructure to help its users discover creators, bloggers, and content they’ll love. In turn, Tumblr brings 50 billion blog posts (and 75 million more arriving each day) to Yahoo!’s media network and search experiences. The two companies will also work together to create advertising opportunities that are seamless and enhance the user experience.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Our big Publishers Launch BEA Conference on Wednesday, May 29 is a little over a week away (and for many people, their BEA planning starts in earnest right about now). This time we're specifically trying to focus on things foremost on convention-goers minds, even though they can be tricky to…

The literary publisher and calligraphy expert Louis Strick has passed away. He was 87 years old, leaving behind a lifetime of books, art and writing scholarship.

Westport Now published an obituary about his long and varied career. Here is an excerpt:

In the late 1960s Strick began importing calligraphic art supplies, distributed through his Pentalic Company. By making special nibs, pens and instruction books widely available, Strick spearheaded a revival of the calligraphic movement in America;. He also established the Calligraphy Workshop, a school on lower Fifth Avenue. In the late 1970s, Strick purchased the Taplinger Publishing Company, bringing out works of literary fiction as well as volumes on modern art, reflecting two of his passions.

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The Doors co-founder and author Ray Manzarek has passed away. He was 74 years old.

We’ve created a Spotify playlist below, linking to his music, interviews and work with poets. The rock keyboardist wrote a few books, including The Poet in Exile: A Novel and his Light My Fire memoir. You can read Entertainment Weekly had this obituary for the rock star:

As a member of the legendary rock band that formed in 1965 in Los Angeles and effectively ended with the death of frontman Jim Morrison in 1971 … [he] wrote a best-selling memoir about his experiences, Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors, in 1998. The Doors sold more than 100 million albums worldwide on the strength of hits like ”Hello, I Love You,” “Riders on the Storm,” “Light My Fire,” and “Break On Through to the Other Side.”

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Doctors and nurses are continually turning to smart phones to help patients. This, time it’s the data that is alerting nurses to changes to patients’ daily habits through Gingeri.o’s behavioral health analytics.

Ginger.io taps into the continuous sensor data from your mobile phone and other devices to predict individual behavior changes and identify aggregate trends. Our research from MIT Media Lab demonstrated that location and communication sensors can be used to model individual symptoms and long term health outcomes.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

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

Legally Apple is being sued by the government, but procedurally the company continues to act as if the real battle is with Amazon. As we reported last Friday, Apple's proposed findings of fact filing indicates that Amazon sent a "White Paper" about agency ebook pricing to the Department of Justice…