ReadWriteWeb

Book-sharing service Goodreads announced today that they have purchased the book recommendation engine Discovereads. According to Goodreads CEO Otis Chandler, the acquisition addresses a frequently-requested feature.

"With their deep algorithmic book recommendation technology, we're going to be able plumb our database of 100 million book ratings from 4.6 million users to find general patterns of the kinds of books people read and to generate high-quality personalized recommendations."

You can now preview the entirety of Up and Running with Node.js by Tom Hughes-Croucher. O'Reilly Media is making the book available as part of its Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS) while Hughes-Croucher finishes the book. "I'm going to be updating it every two weeks with the first update slated for next week," he says. Readers are encouraged to leave comments and feedback. The book is a general introduction to Node.js, from installation to building applications.

We've written a lot this year about the boom in e-readers and the benefits that e-books have over print. And often, discussions surrounding the move to digital texts involves our enhanced ability to read and store our libraries, particularly via mobile devices.

But a new project available in Google Labs today - Books Ngram Viewer - highlights some of the other benefits of digitizing texts beyond better reading and storage. So let me invoke my former life as a literature PhD student here to say, "This is incredibly farking cool."

Yahoo! developer Tom Hughes-Croucher has released a free preview of his forthcoming O'Reilly Media book Up and Running With Node.js. The preview consists of the first approximately 20 pages of the book in PDF form.

Worldreader, the non-profit that distributes e-readers to developing countries to improve literacy, is on something of a roll. Although the organization is not a proof-of-concept by design, it is by example.

Last month, the group penned an agreement with Amazon and African publishers to bring African lit to kids in Ghana, as well as support African writers and publishers. Now Random House has signed on for Worldreader's iREAD advanced pilot project in Ghana.

It was National Banned Books Week here in the United States earlier this month and the organizations behind it put together a Google Map of bans and challenges to books around the country over the last three years. It's worth a good look.

Banned Books Week has been running for 28 years now and is backed by some very reputable organizations, but the campaign's Web presence is very simple. It's great that Google Maps makes it so easy for anyone to display sets of information on a map like you'll see below. As more and more content becomes available online, how will that impact banning of and access to literature?

Writer and illustrator Tony DiTerlizzi is the author of several young adult fantasy novels, including the popular series The Spiderwick Chronicles. Earlier this week, his latest book, The Search for WondLa hit bookshelves in U.S., and within it featured an interactive augmented reality experience readers could unlock using their Web browsers. The book, published by Simon & Schuster, is one of the first of its kind and could be a glimpse into how kids will enjoy reading in the future.

Amazon announced today that its sales of e-books for its Kindle reader have passed those of hard cover books.

Over the past three months, according to Amazon, it has sold 143 Kindle books for every 100 hardbacks; over the past month the ratio is 1.8:1. Unfortunately, the company did not provide overall figures for those time periods.

Though augmented reality (AR) as a technology has existed for roughly two decades, it has only just begun to break into the mainstream by way of immersive desktop and mobile experiences. Much of what has been seen so far has been either in the entertainment, marketing and location-based sectors, but one area that is sure to benefit from AR is education. One of the most obvious ways AR will impact education is by enhancing learning materials for students, and a new demo from a Bangkok-based organization shows just that.

As technology becomes more a part of our day-to-day lives, some are worried that it is stunting the education of children by taking away time from activities like reading. A startling discovery from the London-based National Literacy Trust finds that children are more likely these days to own a cell phone than they are a book. The study, which NLT will publish next week, ties cell phone penetration to the presence of books in a child's home, but are these conclusions fair to draw?