Microsoft launched their Live Search Books in beta yesterday, and, frankly, I think it's fantastic. Live Search Books includes Search Inside the Book functionality, so if I've selected Voltaire in His Letters, and I keyword search Chatelet, I'll get links to pages including mention of that keyword sorted in order of relevance. This isn't anything revolutionary, of course, but its relative lack of novelty doesn't nullify the convenience offered (I'm not jaded). People are reading more and more online, generally in snippets, excerpts, and on a per-document basis. Initiatives such as this and Google Book Search expand the possibilities of the book reader's experience beyond the paper format, though I imagine that most will opt to print out their downloads. Books for download in PDF are limited to noncopyrighted material scanned from books from the British Library, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, and there are plans to add books from the New York Public Library, Cornell University, and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine. (Read more.) Copyrighted material will be included at a future date. Navigating from the download page back to the search page is a bit difficult (perhaps, this is anecdotal), and it is taking Firefox on my Mac what seems eons to upload search results for Voltaire (this also may be anecdotal; IE on my PC had no problem loading the data). And a friend of mine noted that he can't locate any editions of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Oh well.
Microsoft launched their Live Search Books in beta yesterday, and, frankly, I think it's fantastic. Live Search Books includes Search Inside the Book functionality, so if I've selected Voltaire in His Letters, and I keyword search Chatelet, I'll get links to pages including mention of that keyword sorted in order of relevance. This isn't anything revolutionary, of course, but its relative lack of novelty doesn't nullify the convenience offered (I'm not jaded). People are reading more and more online, generally in snippets, excerpts, and on a per-document basis. Initiatives such as this and Google Book Search expand the possibilities of the book reader's experience beyond the paper format, though I imagine that most will opt to print out their downloads. Books for download in PDF are limited to noncopyrighted material scanned from books from the British Library, the University of California, and the University of Toronto, and there are plans to add books from the New York Public Library, Cornell University, and the American Museum of Veterinary Medicine. (Read more.) Copyrighted material will be included at a future date. Navigating from the download page back to the search page is a bit difficult (perhaps, this is anecdotal), and it is taking Firefox on my Mac what seems eons to upload search results for Voltaire (this also may be anecdotal; IE on my PC had no problem loading the data). And a friend of mine noted that he can't locate any editions of Gargantua and Pantagruel. Oh well.
From Matt: The scriptwriters made quite a few changes from the book, but they were all for the best - and booklover though I am I have to admit that its better to see magic than to read about it.
From Mina: I adore this film. Monsieur Hulot’s very modern sister and brother-in-law don’t know what to do with Tati’s charmingly untidy and bungling protagonist, who inhabits a world where meaning is still more important than appearances.
From Carey: A must see Hayao Miyazaki’s anime is Laputa: Castle in the Sky, originally released in 1986. A fantasy film that explores the altruistic and compassionate nature of humans, aspects lost through repeated exposure to power, technology, and the complexities brought by the combination of the two. 
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