Nielsen Book data suggests that 32% of children read books every day, and 60% every week. But these percentages are falling as digital entertainment rises.
Read the full story: Children’s reading shrinking due to apps, games and YouTube | Technology | theguardian.com.
Thanks to a donation from the Henson Foundation, on Tuesday, Miss Piggy, Kermit the Frog, and 19 other Muppets and well-loved characters gained their rightful place in history, entering into the collection of the Smithsonian Museum.
Read: 21 Muppets Find a Much-Deserved Home at the Smithsonian | Gizmodo.
On the face of it, punctuation is not the most electrifying of subjects. A comma is a comma, a period is a period, and a semicolon is an argument waiting to happen. Look past squabbles over grammar, however, and punctuation’s staid veneer peels back to reveal a seething, Darwinian struggle that has played out over two millennia of the written word.
Though the period can claim an unbroken lineage stretching back to ancient Greece, and the quotation mark may boast of its roots in the early days of printing, for every venerable survivor there are countless other symbols that did not make the grade. The road from the scrolls of the library of Alexandria to today’s books, blog entries, and tweets is littered with the corpses of fallen marks of punctuation.
Read: 8 Punctuation Marks That Are No Longer Used | Keith Houston | HuffPost.
This is a fun list. 20 steps for How to Act Annoying at a Library | wikiHow.
Travel writing is a glamorous but difficult genre. To a reader it’s an easy sell: you get to go to fantastic places and see unusual things without spending the money.
In this list, I’ve observed the following parameters: no recent blockbusters, like Eat, Pray, Love or Wild, as many of the world’s regions as one could possibly fit, and steering away from the older, 19th-century popular travel books unless there was something particularly remarkable about them.
See the list: 35 Great Travel Books That Will Take You Around the World Without a Plane Ticket | Flavorwire.
We’ve been featuring different websites for LIS job hunters for about six months now, and I thought it was time to share our list.
So, in alphabetical order, here are the websites we’ve featured since starting with INALJ on December 6, 2012.
See the list of links: Job Hunters’ Web Guide Guide | Hiring Librarians.
Teachers have a strong desire to teach reading for pleasure but feel frustrated by a restrictive curriculum, a lack of support from parents and a drop-off in school librarian numbers, according to publisher Egmont.
In the latest instalment of Egmont’s Reading Street study into children’s reading habits, the publisher’s consumer insight team surveyed 250 teachers about their pupils’ reading. The majority were classroom teachers, with 77% teaching children at primary stage and 66% having been in the profession for more than a decade.
Over half the teachers surveyed said there had been a decline in the number of children who read for pleasure over the course of their career, with the majority observing this trend over the past decade.
Read the full story: Teachers ‘frustrated’ over Reading for Pleasure | The Bookseller.
If you’re considering library school, if you’ve been accepted, and especially if you’re already there, I would strongly recommend getting hands-on experience as soon as possible. An internship or even just a bit of volunteering will help you to build a foundation of knowledge and skills as you pursue your degree.
Read Working, Volunteering, or Interning Before Library School | Hack Library School.
How about a Monday morning diversion?
At DragonCon last month, a couple of cosplayers decided to sidestep the usual fare of superheroes and cartoon characters in favor of dressing up as the carpet at the Marriott hotel where the con takes place. Yup, there was carpet-colored camo. That is a real thing that now exists. Naturally, other people wanted to emulate the design, but, alas, this psychedelic carpet army was not to be – because Courtisan Inc., the company that designed the original rug, issued a Cease and Desist soon after the design went up.
Volpin Props, the cosplay designer, posted on their facebook page about the incident and received almost 300 comments, ranging from serious discussion of copyright and intellectual property to expressions of surprise that anyone would admit to having designed such an ugly carpet. Still, Volpin Props has gracefully stated that they are “in complete agreement with [Courtisans] decision,” so it looks like anyone looking to blend in with the carpeting in the future will have to make their own costume. Or maybe they should try the wallpaper? Carpet controversy aside, I think that we all can rest easy knowing that this photo exists:
The moral of the story is A. Cosplayers are will always find new ways to be creative and awesome and B.You can’t sell carpets that don’t belong to you, no matter how ugly they are.
infophile 
