• Toronto Star’s eReads series nominated for online media awards
• Dan Brown’s Inferno craze hits Toronto
• Self-published book shortlisted for Commonwealth book prize
• The real cost of self-publishing
• Brooklyn Library to create oral history project

As Little League season unfolds this spring, you can see the “He’s Just a Little Boy” poem by Chaplain Bob Fox tacked to fences at 1,500 baseball diamonds around the country. The photograph of one of those signs (embedded above) has already been viewed more than 55,000 times online.

Farmers Insurance Group agent Joel McKinnon helped spread the inspirational poem nationwide last year. Even though the poem was published more than 70 years ago, these signs will remind generations of kids and parents to support little kids as they learn a sport. Here’s more about how the poem traveled:

I took it upon my self to reach out to Ryon Harms, Director of Social Media forFarmers Insurance - I asked him to look at the activity that this post was getting – after a few attempts Ryon pulled it up – After seeing the viral affect this had he asked if he could post this on the Farmers Insurance corporate Facebook page - “sure I said” – within seconds there were thousands of likes, comments, & shares and a trend that had started on our page carried over … After some discussion Ryon presented me with the idea of having 500 of these signs made and distributed to local communities all over the US  … Farmers posted an application on their corporate page for “fans” to request a sign – More or less instantly the signs were “sold out” and we actually had received nearly 1,500 requests – Next thing you know our 500 sign project turned into 1,500 -

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Users on iOS devices can finally start using a Google app for Google Chats. 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.

Google took note of an important aspect about notifications when creating this app – you only get one alert per new item that’s synced across all of your devices. If your notifications get too noisy, you can turn them off and check back later. Perhaps the company has heard complaints about Google Plus notifications. continued…

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Now that Twitter Music has slowly slipped away from the collective consciousness, Google is introducing its own radio and music discovery program. It’s call All Access and it costs $9.99 per month. At first glimpse it seems revolutionary and comprehensive.

Google’s radio allows you to do what most other radio services don’t – easily change the order of songs, easily remove songs, and add songs to personal libraries. There’s a lot of customization built in, but the most important key to digital radio isn’t necessarily the usability of the service, but the quality of the music itself. All Access is launching today so I did a quick search for my favorite new album, Vampire Weekend’s Modern Vampires of the City and it wasn’t available. Sure, I have it in my personal library, but what’s the use of paying for a music service that doesn’t have the music I want to pay for? continued…

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How much did eBook prices change after five major publishers agreed to the agency pricing model?

The Department of Justice shared its “findings of fact and conclusions of law” (PDF link) in a long court document this week. The documents included a number of charts created by economics professor Richard Gilbert showing how eBook prices increased once major publishers began selling digital books at the same price across different marketplaces.

Above, you can see the price increases charted by publisher. The lengthy court document also contained emails from major publishing executives, Apple leaders and other people who helped craft the agency pricing model.

 

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Google announced Google Play for Education at the Google I/O conference this morning. This new section of the Android app store which sells apps aimed at schools and teachers.

Google Play will let teachers and schools buy multiple copies of an app in bulk. When a teacher buys an app it will automatically download on their own device, as well as onto the devices of all of their students. In addition, schools can make credit cards available to teachers, so that a teacher doesn’t have to use their personal credit card to buy an app for students.

Google will begin accepting K-12 app submissions for this educational category this summer. Follow this link to get details on how to submit your app for this category.

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Marvel has a new television show for fans of The Avengers film. The trailer for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. TV series has been released, bringing back actor Clark Gregg as Agent Phil Coulson.

In the past 24 hours, the #CoulsonLives hashtag has appeared in thousands of tweets. The trailer is embedded above–what do you think?

ABC plans to air the show on Tuesday nights starting in fall 2013. The Avengers director Joss Whedon helmed the first episode. Whedon wrote the script with Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen.

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During a keynote presentation at the Google I/O conference, Sundar Pichai, SVP of Android Chrome & Apps, revealed that there have been 900 million Android activations in total.

Hugo Barra, VP of product management at Android, revealed that Google Play has just crossed 48 billion app installs, including 2.5 billion installs in the last month. He also said that so far this year, Google has already paid out more money to developer in Google Play than in all of last year and he said that than that revenue per user is 2.5x what it was a year ago globally.

Google also revealed three new location APIs at the show. This includes a fused location provider which makes location faster to acquire, more accurate, and it takes less battery. Another new API is called geofencing, which lets developers set up a virtual fenced area around a location which are triggered when a user enters or exits these areas. The third new API is a new activity recognition feature that will let developers track physical data and automatically figure out walking, cycling and driving behavior without turning on the GPS.

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The US Department of Justice  has filed a new document in the Apple eBook antitrust lawsuit. The filing includes an email sent from Apple’s founder Steve Jobs to Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation, the owner of HarperCollins, one of the publishers named in the original complaint.

The Verge has the story: “In the email, Jobs told Murdoch he could either continue to have Amazon price ebooks at $9.99, or ‘throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.’”

While all of the five publishers in the eBook collusion have settled with the DOJ and agreed to terms that would prevent future collusion, Apple continues to fight the case.

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Assignmint is a new platform aimed at streamlining the process of pitching, writing and billing outlets for your writing.

Follow this link to sign up for a free author account. If you are a working freelance writer, you should explore the free service–they already have resources for keeping track of stories, creating invoices or adding up expenses. Check it out:

First, hit your Contacts dashboard to add your favorite outlets and editors. Be sure to search our directory outlet before you start typing addresses: We have more than 15,000 U.S. newspapers, magazines, websites and other publications already in the system. (Don’t see yours? Tip us off; we’ll add it.) Soon, you’ll be able to search this directory for new outlets that might want whatever it is you’re peddling. Then, put together some new ideas and send them via your Pitch dashboard. For your convenience, we’ve pre-installed dummy “pending” and “draft” pitches in your account to help you get started. Your editors can reply via email (as they normally would) or directly to your Assignmint account using our secure pitch lander pages. Once you get the job, it’s a snap to record assignment details, file copy, track expenses and send that all-important invoice. Soon, using our proprietary banking gateway, you’ll have the option to accept secure electronic payments directly from your employers.

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Our Publishers Launch Conference BEA, on Wednesday, May 29 aims to bypass the usual cross-section of digital fragments and aim straight at the issues on people's minds and of greatest strategic consequence right now. So we'll evaluate the coming Penguin Random House merger from a number of angles, along with…

One bestselling self-published author urged other writers to avoid reading reviews online. Do you agree?

Novelist Paige Weaver has spent five weeks on our Self-Published Bestsellers List with Promise Me Darkness, but she stopped reading reviews as her book spread online.  Here is her simple advice:

My policy is DO NOT READ YOUR REVIEWS. Good or bad. I’ve heard this from other authors so that is my new motto. The first few days after “Promise Me Darkness” was released, I read all the reviews and they were good but I knew that the bad ones were coming. Every book has had bad reviews. It is just human nature. We can’t all agree on everything … I do not read reviews on Goodreads, Amazon, or anywhere else. I’m too scared. I haven’t developed that thick skin so many authors told me I had to have in this business. My hubby and friends tell me what the good reviews say and sometimes they tell me what the bad reviews say if they think it might be helpful for my writing. Knowing there are some bad reviews does hurt, I’ll admit, but then I think of that childhood saying – “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.”

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There are plenty of apps that will let you scan the barcode of a consumer product good to find out details about that product and how to get a good deal. But now there is an app that applies the same technology to your social consciousness. Buycott lets you look up the ownership structure of any product and trace its roots back to the parent company that owns the app’s interactive family tree diagram.

The idea is to help consumers understand who owns the companies behind the products that they are buying and be able to boycott companies they don’t like and support companies whose policies they support. The scan brings up details about the product and its owners and helps users identify a cause they care about and support the companies on their side of the issue, while avoiding the opposition.

Forbes has more: “There are Buycott campaigns encouraging shoppers to support brands that have, say, openly backed LGBT rights. You can scan a bottle of Absolut vodka or a bag of Starbucks coffee beans and learn that both companies have come out for equal marriage.”

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Ambulant has created an ergonomic eReader case called the Wingo. They hope to raise $55,000 on Kickstarter to cover the costs of manufacturing the product.

We’ve embedded a video about the project above–what do you think? Here’s more about the project from Dr. Anthony D. Andre:

The Wingo is a simple but elegant solution to the growing dilemma of how to hold tablet devices without undue effort, strain or fatigue, especially when using only one hand. Its “wings” virtually hold onto the user’s hand, negating the need for the user to pinch the device and carry the burden of the weight with the finger tips. I think that it represents a valuable ergonomic option for frequent users of such devices.

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Clay Farr will join Basic Books as vp, associate publisher & marketing director later this month. He spent the past nine years at Perseus, most recently as vp, group marketing, and also served on Basic's editorial board. At Crown, Rachel Meier has been named managing editor for the Crown trade,…

Novelist and screenwriter Bret Easton Ellis hosted an Ask Me Anything interview on Reddit today, fielding questions about an American Psycho musical adaptation and talking about his work.

One reader asked Ellis why he bashed the work of David Foster Wallace, calling the late novelist “the most tedious, overrated, tortured, pretentious writer of my generation” on Twitter. Ellis had a longer explanation behind his controversial tweet.

There wasn’t a feud. David and I had never met. But I never responded to his work. Simple as that. I was reading the new bio and it was pissing me off–the kid gloves approach. And that I thought he had a literary fraudulence about him that manifested itself in his fiction. You could say the same about me. I was not surprised by the backlash to those tweets. There are a lot of little snowflakes who somehow really respond to this faux-earnestness of DFW that I just don’t think is realistic.

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Tech blog Mashable has introduced a new app for Google Glass called Mashable Velocity for Google Glass, which alerts users about that go viral.

When the app predicts that a story will go viral, the Google Glass user will get an alert. Users can decide to have Glass read a summary of the story to them aloud or share the story on their social networks.

Mashable created the Velocity tool, which predicts which stories will go viral before they go viral, back in December when they relaunched their website. Here is more about how it works from the site: “Velocity scours the social web, collecting lots and lots of data around how people are engaging with published articles. It then pulls all of that data back to Mashable, dumps it into our own predictive engine, and forecasts which articles are about to go viral.”

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The Department of Justice has organized and called attention to a raft of recently filed documents in connection with the pending June 3 trial in the ebook price fixing case, and the official court docket has still more documents -- hundreds of pages worth -- from Apple, Penguin, the States…

Bejeweled Blitz has returned to the top free Android app this week at No. 7, according to research from Google Play. The puzzle game from  PopCap lets players match and detonate gems to beat layers.

Below, we’ve listed the top free Android apps of the week. The list links to Google Play’s research about the individual apps, including user reviews.

As part of Mediabistro’s Media App Summit which took place last year, we spotlight the top free apps every week–helping our readers discover, enjoy and analyze successful content. continued…

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