Weekend Links

The big news on my Facebook wall this week involved Google Reader disappearing in a few months. Melissa Wiley, of Here in the Bonny Glen, has been covering this, but I am one of those people who can't access her site or blog right now. In  Why Did Google Reader Die? at Slate, Farhad Manjoo writes about whether or not we should be concerned about other free Google products just disappearing. This is a significant question for me, because I recently started using Google+. Manjoo believes Google+ is probably safe--but that I'm probably the only person there.

I just signed up for Feedly, another reader, about forty minutes ago. Seriously, it looks a hundred percent better than Google Reader ever did for me. I never saw what was so great about Google R and was surprised when I saw all the talk about users not knowing how they were going to live without it. Will Feedly make me feel that way? I'll let you know.

My Amazon Bestseller Made Me Nothing at Salon may interest some of you, since we were just talking about writer income this past Monday.

Earlier this month, Jen Robinson did a post on parents finding books for their children. She quoted an article in which the author said "there's a gap...in reaching parents..." I would argue that there's a gap in reaching all readers, but, yes, the gap between what's being published for children and parents interested in learning about/discovering (lots of talk of "discoverability" these days) what's being published is unique because parents aren't children. They want to learn about books that they wouldn't necessarily stumble upon in the course of their everyday grown-up lives. Jen did a follow-up post with suggestions.