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Happy Small Press Month! And more book news

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My goodness, it’s been Small Press Month celebrating independent publishers for 3 1/2 weeks, and we haven’t yet joined the party. If you want to celebrate like Sherman Alexie, this year’s poster guy (above), there’s an opportunity in Brooklyn tonight at the Earshot reading series, with Amy Lemmon from Santa Monica’s Red Hen Press. And a few more events elsewhere as the month draws to a close.

A low-profile Swiss company has sued Apple for patent infringement because its iPhone can now display books. CNET explains that the company, Monec, claims it has patented a ‘’lightweight’ electronic device with a ‘touch-screen’ LCD display having the ‘dimensions such that ... approximately one page of a book can be illustrated at normal size, this display being integrated in a flat, frame-like housing.’’ Most ‘normal size’ book pages around here are bigger than my iPhone. Are books are a lot tinier in Switzerland?

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High-profile Nigerian author Ben Okri, who won the Booker Prize in 1991 for his novel ‘The Famished Road,’ started posting a poem on Twitter this week. But so far, only a title and three lines: not exactly paced for the Internet.

Director Spike Jonze tells New York Magazine that he’s been working for four years and not much dough on the film adaptation of ‘Where the Wild Things Are’ by Maurice Sendak, whom he calls ‘awesome and amazing.’ I think the trailer lives up to those words. If you haven’t already seen it, it’s after the jump. And heck, if you have seen it, you might, like me, want to watch it again.

-- Carolyn Kellogg

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