E Books

'Wine Simplified' e-book As the publishing industry heads toward more e-books, a few genres may benefit from the shift. Drink education books are a good example because of their multimedia features and easily updated content. That's especially true when, as with Wine Simplified (Betterbook), a project benefits from the clear-palate advice of an expert like local sommelier Marnie Old, who partnered with Anthony Giglio. Available on iPad and iPhone, Wine Simplified is essentially a textbook with far more information than it first appears, from the basics of tasting and different grapes, to advice on reading labels and ordering in a restaurant (including recordings of Old pronouncing the grapes)

Even as gossipers were busy writing Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore 's matrimonial obituary, the couple were spotted together Friday at a Kabbalah service in Los Angeles, says X17Online. (That would be the New Age take on Kabbalah, the venerable tradition of Jewish mysticism.) Dashton's public show of spiritual togetherness seems to imply their marriage is as strong as ever. Or it doesn't.   Sean Penn in Cairo Filmmaker Sean Penn was in Cairo, Egypt, on Friday to lend support to protesters who demand that the military relinquish control and let a civilian government take over the nation.

How much would you pay for a book? Not for a rare book, a Shakespeare folio or a Gutenberg Bible to keep under glass, but for a volume simply to grace your bookshelves or your coffee table. Would $199 be too much? Sports artist Dick Perez hopes that 5,000 people are willing to put out that amount for The Immortals , a collection of his portraits of Baseball Hall of Famers. What about $461.62? That's what online bookseller Amazon is asking for Microsoft executive-turned-chef Nathan Myhrvold 's new, six-volume culinary compendium Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking . How about $15,000, the publisher's list price for the "Champ's Edition" of GOAT: A Tribute to Muhammad Ali (Greatest of All Time )

Franklin Electronic Publishers, Burlington, N.J., has joined a coalition of companies trying to develop a single set of standards for publishing electronic books. If the effort succeeds, people using various types of devices to read "e-books" will be able to download the text in the same format. Electronic books are just digital versions of printed books. The text can be downloaded from the Internet and read on a personal computer or on a portable reading device. The two dominant e-book readers are NuvoMedia's Rocket eBook, which is distributed by Franklin Electronics, and the SoftBook from SoftBook Press Inc. Because they use different standards, the devices cannot share text.

Are you a mature adult curious about those newfangled digital reading tablets? The Free Library of Philadelphia has a deal for you. Nook e-readers preloaded with best sellers and classics are available for two-week loans to library-card holders age 50 and up who owe no fines and can produce a photo ID that matches the name and address on their library card. Better yet, the library will teach you how to use the device - or any Kindle, iPad, Android or Sony e-reader you own or receive as a holiday present.

Digital publishing was barely on the horizon when Lauren Grodstein earned a master of fine arts degree from Columbia University a decade ago. But the publishing world has transformed so rapidly, said Grodstein, director of the M.F.A. program at Rutgers University's Camden campus, that she was beginning to feel uncomfortable offering only traditional writing and literature classes. Now, a new Rutgers program that merges disciplines for an innovative academic collaboration has eight M.F.A.

Here's what's happening on the plugged-in side of the digital divide: an extraordinarily swift change in how people are reading books and other media, driven by the rapid acceptance of tablets and e-readers. More than one in five Americans say they have read a book in electronic form during the last 12 months, according to study to be published Thursday by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Nearly 3 in 10 adult Americans now own at least one device designed for electronic reading - either an e-reader such as the Amazon Kindle or a tablet such as Apple's iPad.

Now that everyone's an expert on fast facts, I wonder what has become of those Free Library of Philadelphia treasures known as the Know-It-Alls. When I last visited these general-information specialists, in 1991, business was brisk. Surrounded by a wall of books and directories, they fielded 50 phone calls an hour from Philadelphians wondering how to spell Tiananmen Square, what glasnost is, how far to Fargo? The rotating staff of 14 librarians - each with a master's in science - was in such demand that each caller was limited to three questions.

It wasn't all that long ago that the name Borders meant "wow. " The national chain was so hot in 2002, for example, that a man calling himself Philadelphia's poet laureate tucked slips of his own verse into books resting on shelves at the too-cool-for-school Borders near Rittenhouse Square. These days, Borders' Center City location has a less-swanky address on the east side of South Broad Street; some others have vanished entirely. And last week, news emerged showing how truly far the onetime envy of behemoth bookselling has fallen.

THINKING OF starting a small business in 2013? About 500,000 businesses get started in the U.S. every year, and not all are good ideas. In fact, some are downright bad. American Express' Open Forum recently tapped the 13 worst businesses to start now: * 1. A distribution business. Most products are a commodity, and almost anything can be purchased directly - and online - from a manufacturer, making distributors a dying breed. The middleman is on the way out. * 2. A "deal-a-day" website.