Marion Cunningham, 90, author of cookbooks such as LEARNING TO COOK and THE FANNIE FARMER COOKBOOK, died Wednesday in an assisted-care home in Walnut Creek, CA from complications of Alzheimer’s Disease. Her longtime editor at Knopf Judith Jones said in a statement that Cunningham “epitomized good American food…She was someone who had an ability to take a dish, savor it in her mouth, and give it new life. At a time when Americans were embracing all kinds of foreign cuisine, Marion Cunningham’s love and respect for American food helped The Fannie Farmer Cookbook once again earn a place in kitchens […]
Children's
Briefs: Bardowl Audiobook Streaming Service Launches in Europe; Reading Rainbow iPad App; And More
A new audiobook subscription service, Bardowl, has launched in Europe and will provide unlimited access to audiobooks for £9.99 a month for those with iOS devices. Among the publishers who have signed on to provide audiobooks to Bardowl are Penguin, Macmillan, AudioGo, Wiley, and specialist audio publishers Summersdale and Creative Content. Release Months after announcing LeVar Burton and his company RRKidz announced their intention to revive Reading Rainbow, the long-running PBS children’s show that ended in 2009, as an iPad app, the service is now live in the iTunes store, available at an introductory price of $9.99 a month or […]
Sony Announces First Potter Product, Wonderbook: Book of Spells, Combining Reading and Gaming
Sony announced their first production collaboration with JK Rowling’s Pottermore, BOOK OF SPELLS, to run on their new PlayStation3 peripheral, called Wonderbook. The new product, releasing in November in Europe and December in North America, is called “the next step in reading and augmented reality gaming. Book of Spells will feature “new and original writing” from Rowling that lets player/readers cast spells with their PS motion controller, “which becomes your own magic wand.” Rowling says in the release, “Wonderbook: Book of Spells is the closest a Muggle can come to a real spellbook. I’ve loved working with Sony’s creative team […]
eNews: Target Confirms Kindle Removal; Coehlo’s 99-Cent Backlist Promotion; Bundled Nooks With HMH Textbooks; and More
Target confirmed on Wednesday the report we mentioned in Wednesday’s issue indicating that that 1,800-store chain will stop carrying Kindle devices. Company executives wrote to vendors in January to protest moves such as Amazon’s price check app: “What we aren’t willing to do is let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices.” Target was first big mass merchant to start stocking Kindle products in 2010. Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Staples are among the big retail chains that still sell Kindle products in their stores. Earlier this week Paulo Coehlo announced on […]
Ruckus Launches Own Reader App, Focused On Building Reading Skills
Ruckus Media Group is launching a Ruckus Reader app Monday through iTunes, in the vein of Scholastic’s Storia platform and PlayTales (originally Touchy Books). The focus of Ruckus Reader is on the acquisition of reading skills, and it includes learning assessment reports so that “parents can easily understand their child’s reading level and their progress week-to-week.” Focused on preschoolers through second graders, the Ruckus Reader has three different reading levels, for emergent, beginning, and independent readers. And it’s designed to “match age-appropriate standards determined by the Common Core State Standards. “Children practice early reading skills from letter sounds, word recognition, […]
Backlist eBooks by John Updike and Judy Blume Coming Soon From Random House
Random House will release a number of backlist ebook editions by two of the company’s flagship authors, John Updike and Judy Blume. With respect to Updike, who died in 2009, “the entire backlist” will appear soon in digital format, the majority for the first time. (You may recall that Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom tetralogy appeared briefly as ebooks under the Odyssey Editions banner, the fledgling ebook company launched in 2010 by the Wylie Agency, and the Random House took over ebook publication.) Meanwhile, Random House Children’s will release ebook editions in North America of 10 of Blume’s books for children and […]