Monday’s Link Roundup.

In this Monday’s Link Roundup, if you want 6 minutes of unadulterated pleasure, watch Language by Stephen Fry.  And keeping with this lighter vein, I encourage you to visit Freerice.com where you can improve your vocabulary with a fun quiz while at the same time doing some good in the world. Of course there are some serious articles as well.  Take a look at When Hard Books Disappear and what one man is doing about it.

• Understanding Book Terminology. “…the top terms you need to understand if you want to carry on a conversation with a book professional about the design and layout of your book.”

• Guide to 27 Commonly Misused Words. “We know by now that great copy and content often purposefully break the rules of grammar. It’s only when you break the rules by mistake that you look dumb.”

• A discovery engine for narrative nonfiction. “It’s a nonfiction nerd’s fantasy: a database of nearly 30,000 feature stories, meticulously organized, sleekly presented, and fully searchable — by author, by publication, by topic. Byliner.com, which launches today, wants to be the Pandora of narrative nonfiction.”

• The British Library and Google to make 250,000 books available. “This project will digitise a huge range of printed books, pamphlets and periodicals dated 1700 to 1870, the period that saw the French and Industrial Revolutions, The Battle of Trafalgar and the Crimean War, the invention of rail travel and of the telegraph, the beginning of UK income tax, and the end of slavery. It will include material in a variety of major European languages, and will focus on books that are not yet freely available in digital form online.”

• Language by Stephen Fry. “Using the wonderful words of acclaimed writer, actor and all round know it all (I mean that in the best of ways) Stephen Fry I have created this kinetic typography animation. If you like what you hear you can download the rest of the audio file from Mr. Fry’s website.” [Thanks to Pat McNees of Writers and Editors for alerting me to this item.]

• Freerice.com .  This site is absolutely addictive and fun. Not only do you improve your vocabulary but you do some good in the world. For each answer you get right, Freerice donates 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program to help end hunger.

• When Hard Books Disappear. “A prudent society keeps at least one specimen of all it makes, forever. It still amazes me that after 20 years the only publicly available back up of the internet is the privately funded Internet Archive. The only broad archive of television and radio broadcasts is the same organization. They are now backing up the backups of books. Someday we’ll realize the precocious wisdom of it all and Brewster Kahle will be seen as a hero.”

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