Throughout April, anyone can submit a line to the poem which starts with the lines ‘Tell me what you’re thinking, tell me what you miss/Tell me what you’re dreaming, tell me what you wish’. The result will be a poem that represents and unites a diverse global literary community, speaking for children across the world who want to belong to the world of words and reading.

To add a line to the poem, visit the LitWorld website - and go here to read the poem so far.

Describing itself as a “pioneering crowd-funding portal for book publishing”, the website launched at the Hay festival in May and has already successfully published a number of books from well-known authors such as Terry Jones and Kate Mosse, as well as newcomers like Jennifer Pickup.

The authors post an extract from their book and a video pitch of their idea on the site in a bid to get financial support from enthusiastic readers. So instead of waiting for their work to be published, users get to listen to writers’ ideas before they’ve even started.  If you like the idea, you can pledge a certain amount of money to support it, and once a target number of supporters has been reached, the writer can start writing (if this isn’t met, pledges can be refunded or switched to another project).

The higher you pledge, the greater recognition you receive in the finished project – from your name in the back of the book, to lunch with the author. Another incentive to pledge is the resulting access to the author’s ‘shed’, with exclusive interviews, progress updates, draft chapters and much more.

Finally, the book is written, designed, edited, printed, and sent to you either in e-book form, or as a beautifully bound limited edition hardback. The founders of Unbound claim they are ‘bringing authors and readers together’, allowing an interactive dialogue to help shape the writing and reading process.

Current projects include academic psychologist and writer Charles Fernyhough’s A Box of Birds, a pacy thriller set in a near-future world of experimental brain research. Fernyhough uses neuroscientific ideas in his work and will be hosting discussions with neuroscientists and fellow writers about some of the themes that emerge from the story as he completes it, which he hopes his Unbound pledgers will join in with.

He has 89 days to get 533 supporters, so why not read an excerpt and watch the video pitch here, and decide if you want to help bring a book to life…

As if to answer our pleas, along comes Anobii. Established in 2006 but revamped and relaunched in December, Anobii is a social network and ‘book discovery platform’ for readers the whole world over. It works very much like an endless virtual bookshelf and a huge online reading group combined, allowing users to compile and keep track of what they’ve read in the past or are reading now with a few clicks.

A major feature of the site is its focus on allowing users to discover a new book and find reading inspiration from others; having books recommended by a personal seal of approval and word-of-mouth (or should that be: word-of-mouse) rather than by computer-generated suggestions. Users can follow readers who have similar literary tastes to their own, browse topic lists of books for their next read – amongst those currently featured are ‘Books for the commute’; ‘Books That Are Better Than The Film’ and - rather intriguingly - ’Guilty Pleasures’ – or create their own lists. It may feature technology that is the latest in-thing (you’re also able to access Anobii through iPhone and Android apps) but its methods are all about getting back to basics – connecting people with books and with one another on a really quite personal level, which is something we’re always keen to advocate.

By the way, if the name has left you scratching your head (as it did with me), then you should know that ‘anobii’ is Latin for ‘bookworm’ – another tip of the hat to something altogether traditional.

American researchers have discovered that television can be a distraction not just for kids but for adults too, whether it is being actively watched or is featuring mainly as background noise. In particular the presence of the turned-on television has a considerable negative impact upon the flow of interaction between parent and child, which in turn has stark consequences for the development of children’s speech. Amongst a study of over 300 children aged between two months and four years, parents were found to have spoken significantly less to their children while the television was on; every hour of TV exposure translating to a loss of 500-1,000 words. Children who watched increasing amounts of television also said less and had fewer conversations with their parents – having an alarming impact on the progress of speech and social skills.

Conversely, regular reading sessions at home have been proven to have quite the opposite effect on child development as well as parent-child communication. In a separate study at Ohio State University it was found that while more time spent watching TV links with a decreased amount of communication between mother and child, mothers who read together with their children converse more and do so in a particularly distinctive way. When reading aloud to their children, mothers were found to use an active and engaging communication style which encouraged responsiveness from children, thereby stimulating greater amounts of conversation. Parents who read aloud also help to expand their children’s vocabulary by introducing them to words that may not be typically heard by children in everyday speech. One of the researchers leading the study, Eric Rasmussen said:

“Mothers who are responsive to their infant’s communication promote a positive self-perception for the child as well as fostering trust in the parent. Positive responses help the child learn that they can affect their environment.”

Yet more evidence that shared reading really does make a difference in a number of ways – and the earlier it begins the better…! Although, you may want to start with physical, pliable books before involving the Kindle or iPad, given that personal contact is privileged over excessive technological stimulation in the early years…

But, aside from the sadness I felt about a sizeable proportion of children missing out on the wonderful reading adventures I had as a child, perhaps I’m being a bit too harsh on texting. The medium has had its fair share of unnecessarily bad press, especially of late, and surely any starting point on the road to reading for children, no matter how seemingly rudimentary, is a good one. Last week a very important person in the world of poetry – the Poet Laureate, no less – stepped forward to defend the literary credentials of the text message, tweet or Facebook status.

Launching Anthologise, a new initiative in secondary schools which invites pupils to put together their own poetry anthologies and is designed to get them engaging with and reading more poetry, Carol Ann Duffy said that diverse and adapted ways of using language, such as is evident in text messages and on Twitter, can contribute greatly to poetic feeling, imbuing the various methods of technology with a greater depth than may previously have been considered. As well as that, the frequent composition of texts may even go on to encourage young people to become part of the next generation of trendsetting poets. Calling poems ‘the original text’, Duffy said about poetry:

“It’s a perfecting of a feeling in language – it’s a way of saying more with less, just as texting is. We’ve got to realise that the Facebook generation is the future – and, oddly enough, poetry is the perfect form for them. It’s a kind of time capsule – it allows feelings and ideas to travel big distances in a very condensed form.” 

So, far from being something to despair about, perhaps the proliferation of text messages is positive, sparking off creativity and encouraging an appetite for and greater comprehension of poetry amongst children and young people. Or maybe that’s jumping to an opposing set of conclusions…? We’re always happy to hear about any methods that will get the younger generation engaged with reading – the more inventive, the better – but we’d still hope that at least every now and then, texts will be swapped for Tennyson, SMS for sonnets and Facebook for Frost.

However, as technology progresses and we are offered new and innovative forms of reading, what does this mean for the publishing industry? As  intriguing and exciting as Ryu Murakami’s deal with Apple is, he has left his publisher in the dust and gone straight to the technology giant to get his new book to readers. Not so bad if it’s just him, perhaps, but what if there are many authors that follow hot on his heels (and I think there will probably be a fair few)? It’s a worrying thought but, just maybe, we’ll see the world of reading develop more fully from a beleif that only one form of publishing can exist to realising that there are different markets and that both eBooks (especially those that are complemented by audio and visual elements) and proper books (if I dare call them that) can exist together, each offering different things: we’ll have eBooks and paper books, not one or the other; the sphere of reading may open up, particularly if technology is able to engage with different readers and bring them to the world of literature by new means. I don’t think that my desire to read A Singing Whale will in any way change the fact that I love to read a good novel with pages.

Maybe this won’t signal the beginning of the end but rather the beginning of a new beginning for reading, one that encompasses technology and tradition, and alongside that, if we can continue to encourage more people to be sharing their reading in groups, the reading revolution may be kicking off very differently. Or maybe I’m just hoping for the best of both worlds and in reality, that’s just not possible. Time will tell. And during that time, what will I really spend more time on, reading books or thinking of ways in which I can make money to buy an iPad? One guess.

Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He’s also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He’s the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.

Watch this space…

Phil and I discussed the likelihood of the end of the world before breakfast on Wednesday morning. What if the CERN scientists were wrong and the collider bang did cause a new cosmos to burst out of the ruins of our old one? And what if that kept happening over and over again in a weird 14 billion year loop? We get this far and they say nothing much’ll happen and then they collide the particles and BANG! Up we go again. 

I waited around until 8.00am (when Phil assured me it had happened ‘and everything seems ok.’) Then I set off for The Reader Organisation office, listening, en route, to the Today programme on Radio 4 where (after we heard of the Cabinet having been to Birmingham: wonders, wonders, signs and wonders) we got Andrew Marr in the Control Room at CERN. It was a magnificent piece of radio. Everything seemed so very tentative yet also mildly possible, like the early days of Tim Henman’s Wimbledon career. Something just might be about to happen: something for which we have been waiting for thirty years. We were all cheering. But we realised, too, in our hearts, that maybe it wouldn’t happen. But then perhaps it might. Let’s cheer. Let’s hope it will. Let’s hope. The scientists (as they each spoke they turned out to be a wonderful mix of Ulster, Welsh, English and French) might just manage to bring off what was being billed as the most important scientific experiment since the early Apollo programme.

Which was what it reminded me of as I sat in my traffic jam and listened. Did I really sit on a parquet floor in a primary school assembly hall with 200 other under-11’s and watch ‘one small step for man…?’  I think I did but it is all so long ago… Life is long. And very short. I listened to what Marr called ‘the atmosphere so tense you could it with a … laser beam’ and I could see the grainy black and white pictures, and hear my grandfather mocking ‘It’s all in a studio! The Yanks have mocked it up! It’s anti-Communist propaganda!’

Later Andrew Marr wondered if Big Bang day would get kids fired up about physics. I think, despite my grandfather’s perfectly reasonable doubts, that it was the Apollo programme that got me interested in Science Fiction. I couldn’t get interested in real science because of the maths or rather my paralysing fearful innumeracy but I did read John Wyndham aged about 11, finishing The Day of the Triffids by torchlight way into the night because I simply could not stop reading and then it went on: Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A. Heinlein, Robert Silverberg. Until at some point I got bored. Later, Joanna Russ and Ursula K. le Guin resurrected my old SF interest when, in my early twenties I went through a period of reading only women but after that I forgot all about my early love, until Doris Lessing introduced me (via ‘Some Remarks’ at the beginning of Shikasta) to the biggest daddy of all Sci Fi books: Last and First Men, by Olaf Stapledon. 

For Big Bang Day, Big Bang Week, Big Bang Year, this is the man to read. He is the biggest. Cosmology? Infinity?  He’s got it by the billion squared. He tells our human story from the primordial soup days to the way past the end of the our universe, and many other universes.

But he doesn’t think of it as Science Fiction, just fiction. In the Preface to the 1930 edition, Stapledon writes:

This is a work of fiction. I have tried to invent a story which may seem a possible, or at least not wholly impossible, account of the future of man; and I have tried to make that story relevant to the change that is taking place today in man’s outlook.

To romance of the future may seem to be indulgence in ungoverned speculation for the sake of the marvellous. Yet controlled imagination in this sphere can be a very valuable exercise for minds bewildered about the present and its potentialities. Today we should welcome, and even study, every serious attempt to envisage the future of our race; not merely in order to grasp the very diverse and often tragic possibilities that confront us, but also that we may familiarize ourselves with the certainty that many of our most cherished ideals would seem puerile to more developed minds. To romance of the far future, then, is to attempt to see the human race in its cosmic setting, and to mould our hearts to entertain new values.

…The activity that we are undertaking is not science, but art; and the effect that it should have on the reader is the effect that art should have.

‘The human race in its cosmic setting.’ I loved that – the enormous size of it.  

It was an amazingly lucky stroke for me as a young post-grad to discover that Olaf Stapledon–despite his exotic northern name–had been a lecturer in the Extension Studies programme at the University of Liverpool. Not only that, but all his papers had been donated to our very own Sydney Jones Library. Not only that, but they had not (I’m talking 1983) yet been catalogued. Not only that, but when I arrived breathless with excitement in SJL Special Collections, some of them hadn’t even been lifted out of the original, dusty, old cardboard boxes Olaf himself (probably) packed them into before carrying up to his attic. Some of the boxes had string round them. I undid it, thinking: he tied this careful knot.

Reading through that stuff (almost all of it totally unrelated to my PhD thesis) was an experience of immense magnitude. It was like getting involved with a ghost. There he was–everywhere and in all sorts of ways–but I couldn’t see him or touch him, though I could sense him, feel him and hear him but then I couldn’t quite feel him or hear him. Yet he was in my mind. I knew him. 

One day I found a letter, hand typed on one of those old sit up and beg typewriters, from H. G. Wells, and there was H. G. Wells’ signature in heavy ink, and (as I remember it) it was a kind letter, praising (was it? My memory isn’t too good) Last and First Men but not praising it with huge generosity and, I think, a little egotistically drawing Stapledon’s attention to something Wells had himself recently published or written. I remember it as being on hotel notepaper. It was a wonderful moment, holding it, with the box in front of me, and no one telling me not to touch it. Two great giants of Sci Fi seemed before my eyes. Yes, I think I saw them. Both dead, they were in some sense present. 

There’s an awful lot we can’t see. Think of all that dark matter: we don’t even know what it is, only that it is most of what’s here. Three cheers for the particle colliders then and for more people taking ‘A-level’ physics. They are going bring a little more of that darkness into the light.

Posted by Jane Davis

But what about readers? There’s a lot of gnashing of teeth at the moment about the future of the book and the future of reading. On Sunday The Observer ran a feature on the rise of e-readers such as the iRex iLiad, Sony Reader, and the Kindle. More heat and noise is being generated by people worrying about ‘Reader’s Block’, roughly defined as a condition of buying more books than you read. On that definition I have always suffered from the complaint and so I suspect have most habitual readers, but recently I’ve noticed a definite change in my reading pattern. It’s not that I’m reading less, but I am reading differently. Books are no longer my go-to technology for stories; there isn’t one of those any more. I’m reading online, I’m listening to audio books, I’m reading more magazines, and for a few years now I’ve been reading eBooks, first on a Palm PDA and now on my iPod Touch. I read far fewer physical books, but I’m reading more than ever.

The book, as every one of these edgy articles about the coming barbarian techno-hordes points out, is a clever piece of technology. It’s portable, tough, and needs no power. Unless you want to read in the dark, that is, which I often do. But the physical book has become much more than a technology for text delivery. It is inextricably tied up with education, culture, and class. People make judgements about one another based on the books on their bookshelves, or on their choice of reading for the commute. Physical books are a mark of status. As Lynne Truss points out in the Observer‘s feature, with eBooks you can’t see what people are reading. She says it as if that’s a bad thing, but it’s not, it’s a liberating thing. I don’t want people like Lynne Truss making instant judgements about me on the basis of what I’m reading, but for the record, while it may look as if I’m ruining my hearing listening to thrash metal on my iPod, in fact I’m probably listening to short stories from the New Yorker. If you see me staring out of the train window with headphones on, Lynne, ask me what I’m reading.

In any case, these new ways of reading entail engaging with other readers in ways that Gutenberg could not possibly have imagined. In a typically facetious comment on Twitter, Merlin Mann, aka hotdogsladies wrote: “Re “Why I left Books”: Margin notes [are not the same as] anonymous comments. I cannot self-link to my Blogspot site from a margin note.” The New York Times backs this up in an article on how reading is changing:

Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”

The kinds of skills Zachary has developed — locating information quickly and accurately, corroborating findings on multiple sites — may seem obvious to heavy Web users. But the skills can be cognitively demanding.

Something is happening to the way we read and it’s happening very quickly, but the possibilities are opening up, not closing down. Why fetishise the physical book when we can read aloud, or be read to, read online, on our phones, or on our ebook reading devices (NB. you need a better name for those, chaps)? The books won’t stop working just because we start using other technologies and in fact as demand for physical books declines the quality of them as objects may well improve–apocalyptic booksniffers rejoice! Naomi Alderman in her piece in the Observer even suggests that new reading technologies will lead to new literary forms. I think she’s right about that, even if, for the time being, the technology is still as clunky as my tape player in 1985.

Posted by Chris Routledge