Coffeespoons

Over the years, there's been a lot of talk about the Future of the Book. But depending on who talks about it,  "the future of the book" actually takes on different meanings. For instance, when publishers talk about it, what they really mean is "the future of publishing." Last Monday and Tuesday, I was fortunate enough to attend   The Future of the Book conference , organized by the  National Book Development Board , the  Book Development Association of the Philippines , the  Filipinas Heritage Library , and  Vibal Foundation . The seminar was held to help publishers deal with all of the challenges to publishing these days, brought about by new technologies and new modes of reading. Of course, I speak about the perennial and almost trite question: Do ebooks spell the end of books? I made it a point to be there, as a writer and editor for one of the publishing houses, but more importantly, as a reader, consumer, and book enthusiast. The semina...

A couple of Saturdays ago, I attended a Literacy Forum sponsored by the Reading Association of the Philippines at the National Library. The two guest speakers were board members of the International Reading Association . Now, I am a self-declared reading advocate. When I used to teach in a school, I enjoyed coming up with various projects to encourage students and fellow teachers to read. I even spent my own money on most of them. So, research about reading habits of children or people in general interest me. For this Literacy Forum, one thing really struck me, and that was the assertion from one of the reading experts that boys prefer reading nonfiction, and girls prefer fiction . And this supposedly explains a couple of things: why many boys are reluctant readers at school and why a lot of students have difficulty with higher level reading material. How so? Well, majority of English or reading teachers are female. Now, since females prefer reading fiction, this prefere...

Finally. After a whole day of tinkering around with the blog, and trying my hand at html, I've put enough stuff into the new blog so that I can announce it to the world. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present... BOOK WATCH! What is it? Well, it's the blog version of this newsletter I started last year in my workplace. I teach high school English, and getting our kids to read was always an issue. So, we figured that maybe, if we make good enough examples of ourselves as readers, the kids would take to it more. It seemed that we spent a lot of time thinking of good reading programs for the students, but in a school with 120+ teachers, it just seemed appropriate that we also target the faculty and staff for some of these reading programs. Anyway, so I thought of starting this newsletter called Book Watch . For the first issue, I chose three books, then I surfed for short reviews of the books. I laid out the text and graphics (the book covers) using Microsoft Publishe...

I know this isn't really about books, but I'm an educator, and I couldn't help but post it where I can find it easily and where I know people I know are more likely to view it. I just saw this immensely inspiring and provocative video today. Robinson is a fantastic speaker; but more than that, he poses interesting questions and ideas about educational systems. I know it's long (20 mins, approximately), but I hope you stick around for the entire speech. It really is mind-blowing.