“”Beach reading” only bugs me because it makes reading in general sound like a chore, and because it drapes a fake aura of naughtiness over mass market books, which sell millions of copies anyway and don’t need the bad publicity. It’s like calling a hot fudge sundae “decadent.”

It’s not decadent: it’s a sundae.”

From Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic, here is a column that argues against the concept of “beach reading.”

Here is a summer reading list, courtesy of the readers of The Nation.

Bill Marx of PRI’s The World has posted a summer reading list of fiction and non-fiction in translation.

Faced with a growing collection of books and periodicals and a decreasing amount of space in which to store them, Stanford University’s Engineering Library has started to faze out print forms in favor of digitizing them, according to NPR.

For the moment, the Engineering Library is the only Stanford library that’s cutting back on books. But Keller says he can see what’s coming down the road by simply looking at the current crop of Stanford students.

“They write their papers online, and they read articles online, and many, many, many of them read chapters and books online,” he says. “I can see in this population of students behaviors that clearly indicate where this is all going.”

And while it’s still rare among American libraries to get rid of such a large amount of books, it’s clear that many are starting to lay the groundwork for a different future. According to a survey by the Association of Research Libraries, American libraries are spending more of their money on electronic resources and less on books.

Continue reading here.

This weekend’s episode of  On the Media talked about bookselling, eBooks, and the changing landscape for the publishing industry.  The full audio and transcript can be found here.

In her recent Salon.com article, Laura Miller discusses several studies that suggest just owning books has a tremendous effect on a child’s education.  One recent study found that having as few as 25 books in the house meant two extra years of schooling, as compared to children growing up in homes devoid of books.   She cites another study that found giving twelve books of their own choosing to low-income children helped to maintain their academic skills over the summer, preventing them from being surpassed academically by their higher-income peers.  It seems as simple as keeping more books in the house, but Miller points out how difficult this can be for parents who are not familiar with bookstores:

“I’ve never even set foot in a gun shop, but it’s equally hard for me to imagine venturing into one. The people who work and shop in such stores may not mean to be unwelcoming, but the same thing that makes these places so inviting to the initiated — the innate clubbishness of human nature — can scare away novices. As homey as a bookstore or local library branch might feel to you or me, they can make other people feel insecure, out-of-place and clueless.”

Keep reading here.

Kevin Hartnett of The Millions reflects on the rise of Kindle and the loss of bookshelves.

A chief virtue of digital books is said to be their economical size—they take up no space at all!—but even a megabyte seems bulky compared to what can be conveyed in the few cubic feet of a bookshelf.  What other vessel is able to hold with such precision, intricacy, and economy, all the facets of your life: that you bake bread, vacationed in China, fetishize Melville, aspire to read Shakespeare, have coped with loss, and still tote around a copy of The Missing Piece as a totem of your childhood.

On his blog The Millions, C. Max Magee has posted a conversation with a confessed book pirate — someone who uploads and downloads books illegally via the internet.  While some of the questions and answers seem to just skim the surface, the interview does offer some interesting insight into the mind of a person who obtains books illegally (as opposed to, say, borrowing them from the library for free).

This book list was compiled by Donald Barthelme for his students and later reproduced in The Believer.

Here are some more books to add to your reading list, courtesy of the New York Times Book Review.