Sailing the Unknown

‘Sailing the Unknown,’ by Michael J. Rosen - NYTimes.com: " . . . In “Sailing the Unknown: Around the World With Captain Cook,” the poet Michael J. Rosen (“Chanukah Lights,” “The Hound Dog’s Haiku”) imagines the journal of the real-life 11-year-old Nicholas Young, the youngest sailor aboard Captain Cook’s Endeavour. We know very little of the real Young, a delinquent forced into service aboard the ship, where one of his jobs was to care for a milk goat. But we do know, tantalizingly, that he was the first on board to spot the coast of New Zealand and, nearly three years later, the first to spy the English coast on the way home. . . ."

Today in Tech: Why Amazon and Google will duke it out next year - Fortune Tech: ""The e-book market isn't growing at the caffeinated level it was," said Michael Norris, a Simba Information analyst who follows the publishing industry. "Even retailers like Amazon have to be wondering, how far can we go — or should we go — to make our prices lower than the other guys if it's not helping us with market share?""

Amazon Bans Authors From Writing Reviews - Forbes: "I think I can see why they’ve done this, banned authors from reviewing other books in the same genre they work in, but it does sound like a very bad decision by Amazon here. For the people who actually know whether a book is any good or not do tend to be those very same authors already working in the genre. Scores of authors in Britain and across the Atlantic have recently reported that their reviews have either mysteriously disappeared or were never published. Amazon has now admitted that it has introduced a ban on authors leaving reviews about other people’s books in the same genre because they may pose a “conflict of interest” and cannot be impartial about their rivals.". . .


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