This has been a rough month for Amazon.com and its dominant position in the e-book market following a series of recent setbacks involving the company’s e-reader, the Kindle, and its tablet, the Kindle Fire. The e-reader, which more than any other device sparked the long anticipated digital revolution in the world of publishing, is no longer going to be stocked in any of Target’s stores across the nation. Although a New York Times’ article, “Target, Unhappy With Being an Amazon Showroom, Will Stop Selling Kindles” (Stephanie Clifford and Julie Bosman, 2 May 2012) speculated that the move is going to be little more than a minor irritation for Amazon, it means that the device is going to be pulled from the shelves of almost 2,000 brick and mortar locations.

Quite often when I read mainstream American social science, especially of the “quantoid” variety, I’m reminded of much I appreciate literature. While acknowledging the importance of objective data collection and analysis in distinguishing social facts from all-too-fallible everyday perceptions, I also can’t help thinking that deeper, perhaps more significant meaning goes missing in the process.

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012).

A master dies, and everyone musters to analyse his contribution to children’s literature. Probably, it can be summed up by the way in which he tapped into childhood memories, dreams, dramas – awake and asleep; this ability makes Sendak’s work so influential. I don’t recall his most famous book, Where The Wild Things Are (1963) nearly so much as I remember the imprint of the much criticized In The Night Kitchen (1970) on my childhood recollections of reading.

Max, the hero of Wild Things, was just a naughty boy. I did not relate to him in the way that I found the intimidating and surreal landscape of Mickey’s adventures in the Night Kitchen more impactful. So, what that says about me I’m not sure! (Paging Dr. Freud!)

Though I remember happily leafing through Chicken Soup with Rice as a kid, and I certainly owned my fair share of Where the Wild Things Are editions, my favorite Maurice Sendak memory is ultimately of someone else’s reading experience.

From an author’s perspective, I must have been a pretty easy conquest of a child—a natural bookworm who’d throw herself at anything with pages, an eager student. I was easy to engage. But the amazing thing about Sendak is that he got to the reluctant students, too—the ones who were angry about rules and their moms and the sorry state of the real world. At least, he spoke to one of my students like that.

NEW YORK — It started with a story for a magazine. In 2008, during a trip to Japan, New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear decided to write about cellphone novels, a phenomenon — involving young women writing largely for young women, posting fiction from their phones to media-sharing websites — that was then shaking up Japanese publishing.

“It seemed like a great way to explore the literary culture,” she remembers, although by the time she got home, the parameters had shifted, with the effects of the global economic crisis rippling through the American book industry. “I began to wonder whether this might offer a sliver of hope for American publishers, although more interesting was the notion that these young women were creating an independent literary community. What would the features of an American version be? What would that have been like for me?”