Inside Jacket

Where do your books go when you die?

Virgin America will add e-books to its in-flight entertainment system.

“Electricity, security and the economy”: on the challenges of owning a bookstore in Iraq.

Robert McCrum on the threat of digitization and free books: “Words that get written for money are likely to be superior to words spun out for nothing, on a whim.”

The chief executive of the British Library asks, “Should a world-class library preserve Stephen Fry’s tweets?”

The Huffington Post’s list of the best iPhone apps for “word junkies.”

The museum described in the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s novel “The Museum of Innocence” has been made into a real institution in Istanbul.

The key to good note-taking? A pen that records sounds as you write.

Nicholas Sparks on tearjerkers, North Carolina, and why he doesn’t write about adultery.

Is Danica McKellar sending teen-age girls the wrong message with her “smart and sexy” math books?

Extending the olive branch. The AP reports that Oprah Winfrey will chose Jonathan Franzen’s “Freedom” as her sixty-fourth Book Club pick.

A new study shows that children can understand irony from the age of four.

Two Seattle non-profits will host a collaborative novel-writing marathon, “The Novel: Live!”, featuring thirty-six authors writing a novel over the course of six days.

“Just ourselves and a flask of Italian wine”: A cache of Oscar Wilde’s love letters have been discovered.

“Webisode,” “TTYL,” and “Zombie bank” are among the latest entries in the Oxford English Dictionary.

David Sedaris reads an excerpt from his new book, “Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary.”

Tom Wolfe will receive the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

“Changing the world, one tweet at a time”: Neil Gaiman auctions off Twitter follows for charity.

The one-hundred-and-fifty-six-year-old Danish book magazine BogMarkedet will close unless a buyer can be found.

R.L. Stein’s “Goosebumps” series will be adapted as a feature film from Columbia Pictures.

No one threw eggs this time, but Tony Blair faced taunts of “liar” while discussing his memoir with Katie Couric at the 92nd Street Y Tuesday night.

Forget Amazon: author Jon Papernick is peddling his newest book via pushcart in Boston, New York, and Portland, Maine.

Ottawa’s oldest independent bookstore will close its doors at the end of the month.

Laura Miller looks to Richard Hofstadter’s 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” to shed light on the current “anti-Muslim panic” over the Park51 Islamic culture center.

The British Library has acquired a collection of Ted Hughes’s unpublished poems and letters.

On a mission to fight wrongful murder convictions, John Grisham praises North Carolina’s Innocence Commission.

Songs on iTunes go for ninety-nine cents each. Should essays be sold the same way?

Philip Womack tells President Obama to “leave the prose to the pros.”

Barack Obama will publish a children’s book, “Of Thee I Sing: A Letter to My Daughters,” on November 16th.

Joshua Wolf Shenk on the new science of collaborative creativity.

Brain suck: A conference in Cambridge, England, investigates how vampire books are altering teen-age minds.

Philip Glass’s opera “In the Penal Colony,” based on Kafka’s story, opens in London.

Jane Yolen publishes her three-hundredth book, but wishes she could “type faster.”

In conversation with Paul Auster at the Brooklyn Book Festival, John Ashbery described an early job at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Down with creative writing: Elif Batuman thinks that you should get a real degree.

The author Barbara Holland, defender of bacon, naps, orchards, martinis and swearing, has died at the age of seventy-seven.

Coming soon: Freakonomics Radio, a joint production of American Public Media, New York Public Radio, and “Freakonomics” co-author Stephen J. Dubner.

Why used-book stores are thriving in Vietnam.

Earlier news that the six-year-old author Leo Hunter signed a twenty-three-book deal appears to be a hoax invented by his mother.

On Thursday, Oxford University Press will release an English-Chinese dictionary with over two thousand pages and three hundred thousand entries.

Not just the “King”: Victoria Brynner, daughter of Yul Brynner and author of the new book “Yul Brynner: A Photographic Journey,” says her father was “not a character. He was a real man.”

At the Brooklyn Book Festival, Salman Rushdie spoke in support of the proposed Islamic cultural center near Ground Zero and against Florida pastor Terry Jones’s threat to burn the Koran.

The Vatican Library will re-open Monday after a twelve-million-dollar renovation that began in July 2007.

Read an excerpt from Kwame Anthony Appiah’s “The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.”