Friday, January 18, 2013

Weekend Update!

Hugo nominations are now being accepted.  If you read something last year that you think deserves recognition, and if you're a member of the 2012, 2013, or 2014 World Science Fiction Convention, you can nominate things for the 2013 ballot.  LoneStarCon 3 is the venue of the World Science Fiction Convention, where the winners will be announced this coming August-September and you can find the rest of the details here.  I think Osama by Lavie Tidhar has my nomination this year.  What do you think?

Warner Bros. announced they're making a new Terminator movie.  What is this, number five or something?  I thought the franchise was adequately concluded with Terminator 2, and went along for Terminator 3 because nothing was better in theaters.  But I never saw Salvation and I have a hard time working up any sort of excitement for numero cinco.

DC has announced its expansion of digital lending to libraries.  That's quite the move and I'm sure one that parents and librarians are going to love (please note the sarcasm in my tone).  While you could make the argument that any reading is good, I beg to differ and suspect that reading at low levels or engaging in prurient fiction will not inspire children toward higher levels of maturity or intelligence.  I'll get off my soapbox now.  Because I love the idea of me.  I'm excited for the opportunity to get my comic fix without having to shell out five bucks an issue.  So go DC.

While I've been saying for a while that on-demand printing is the wave of the future, and with physical book sales dropping nationwide an average of 9%, Penguin finally got wise and has put much of its backlist up for on-demand printing using the Espresso Book Machine.  With the upcoming merger with Random House already in the works, this looks like a seismic shift in the way physical books are distributed and consumed.

And in an effort to improve recognition of great books, the National Book Award will include a longlist in 2013.  Like the Man Booker Award, the National Book Award will choose ten titles (but with a twist, it's ten per category of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and young people's literature) for the longlist and then shorten that to the appropriately titled shortlist, which will be announced five weeks later.

NASA got Leonard Nimoy to do the voice-over for a video detailing their Dawn mission, which intends to visit and study two asteroids, named Ceres and Vesta.  Leonord Nimoy, much like Morgan Freeman, could narrate the dictionary.  Check out the video below.


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