According to Avery Hartmans from Business Insider, Amazon is making a major change to its Prime Video platform amid the coronavirus pandemic: it’s now offering many children’s TV shows and movies for free…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free!

Beginning Monday, Amazon is offering shows like “Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood” and movies like “Shrek Forever After” for free for anyone with an Amazon account, whether or not they have Prime.

Amazon will have over 40 free children’s shows via Prime Video, and another 80 movies through IMDb TV, which Amazon owns. The offerings will vary by country — users in Europe, for example, will be able to stream “Peppa Pig,” but it’s not available for free in the US, according to The Verge.

Amazon is one of several streaming services that has made changes to its platform as more people stay in due to the coronavirus. SlingTV is offering free children’s programming along with free access to news platforms like ABC News Live, PBS made Ken Burns’ latest documentary free on its site, and Disney Plus moved up the release of “Frozen 2.” Sports streaming sites like NFL Game Pass and NBA League Pass now offer free content as well.

The audiobook platform has said that, for as long as schools are closed, anyone can listen to a vast selection of its titles, according to Thomas Lin from RadioTimes…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Good news for those stuck at home in isolation: Audible is making hundreds of titles available for free during the coronavirus pandemic.

Simply visit stories.audible.com from any web browser to get started. No log-ins, credit card or passwords needed.

The mix of education, entertainment, and general-interest titles available include Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (narrated by Newton), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (narrated by Stephens), The Return of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle and many children’s titles from Winnie The Pooh to Peter Rabbit.

You can also sign up for a free 30-day trial on Audible and explore even more titles.

Read full post on RadioTimes

New research suggests there might be a connection between reading YA books and increased empathy and integrity, according to Kelly Jensen from BookRiot… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

A new study from University of Oklahoma researchers Jessica E. Black and Jennifer L. Barnes published in Psychology of Popular Media suggests that young people who read YA books may be more empathetic than peers who do not.

Black and Barnes developed a two-part research study to deepen the exploration of earlier research on reading and its impact on morality. The study sought to make connections between reading different types of books—YA fiction, adult fiction, and nonfiction—and the impact each may have on empathy, moral identity, and moral agency.

“Moral self is the salience of morality in people’s sense of identity (Blasi, 1980),” according to the research methodology, “and integrity refers to the preference for consistency between moral principles and actions (Blasi, 1983).” These two definitions have been standardized enough in research to have tools making them quantifiable for researchers. The third, moral agency, is defined as “the ability to do what one believes to be right and to avoid doing what one believes to be wrong (Bandura, 2006).”

Familiarity with authors involved the use of a survey deployed in previous research on reading, but because Black and Barnes wished to explore YA authors specifically, they developed a separate recognition test. A YA list expert helped compile the list of YA authors, all of whom needed to have published at least three young adult books or had one bestseller, and none of them published an adult title. There were a total of 108 YA authors, interspersed with 40 fake names.

Read full post on BookRiot

A self-quarantine is as good a time as any to start that Great American Novel, according to Josh Kurp at Uproxx.com…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

George R.R. Martin is being productive, and waiting out the coronavirus pandemic by writing and hopefully finishing The Winds of Winter, the long-awaited sixth novel in the A Song of Ice and Fire series.

“For those of you who may be concerned for me personally… yes, I am aware that I am very much in the most vulnerable population, given my age and physical condition. But I feel fine at the moment, and we are taking all sensible precautions,” the Game of Thrones creator wrote on his Not a Blog. “I am off by myself in a remote isolated location, attended by one of my staff, and I’m not going in to town or seeing anyone. Truth be told, I am spending more time in Westeros than in the real world, writing every day. Things are pretty grim in the Seven Kingdoms… but maybe not as grim as they may become here.”

Here is where I’d usually make a joke about Martin being slow to finish The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring, but not today, not with everything going on in the world.

Stay safe, George, and good luck writing.Read full post on Uproxx.com

 

BookScan recognizes the growing influence of women authors at the heart of the U.S. book industry, according to PR Newswire… Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

According to global information company The NPD Group, 67 percent of unit sales in the top 100 literary fiction books in 2019 came from books written by female authors. The top fiction title of the year was “Where the Crawdad’s Sing,” by Delia Owens, selling more than 1.2 million print copies.

“March is Women’s History Month, which makes it the perfect time to review the many contributions of women authors to the U.S. publishing industry,” said Kristen McLean, books industry analyst for NPD. “Women have increased their share of bestsellers in the last decade, particularly when it comes to fiction.”

Women authors were responsible for 42 percent of unit sales for the top 100 books in the overall print book market in 2019—up from 30 percent in 2010. Last year 39 of the top 100 bestselling authors were women, up from 33 in 2010. In fact, over the 16 years NPD BookScan has been tracking the U.S. publishing market, the bestselling author is a woman. Total sales of all of J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series exceeded 55 million copies, across more than 300 editions of her many titles for children and adults.

Read full post on Yahoo.com

According to Cedric Voets from Cracked.com, the very best feature of any video game is the in-game books…  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

What if you could use your Twitch reading skills to thwart not just fictional villains, but real-life ones as well? For that, you need to check out some very controversial books in Minecraft.

Put away your suspicious stew and disable All Caps in chat as you enter Minecraft’s Uncensored Library. The library was commissioned by Reporters Without Borders to give the game’s young player base access to real-life censored journalism without tipping off the technological troglodytes of their totalitarian governments. Inside the virtual building, the works of dozens of journalists from countries at the bottom of the Press Freedom Index have been carefully transcribed into hundreds of in-game books, available to peruse by any truthseekers who download v1.14.4 of Minecraft and hop their blocky bods into the library’s server.

Read full post on Cracked.com

These fiction and non-fiction selections show how women are affected by climate change and how they’re fighting back….  Support our news coverage by subscribing to our Kindle Nation Daily Digest. Joining is free right now!

Wilding: Returning Nature to Our Farm
by Isabella Tree

Kindle price: $12.99

An inspiring story about what happens when 3,500 acres of land, farmed for centuries, is left to return to the wild, and about the wilder, richer future a natural landscape can bring.

For years Charlie Burrell and his wife, Isabella Tree, farmed Knepp Castle Estate and struggled to turn a profit. By 2000, with the farm facing bankruptcy, they decided to try something radical. They would restore Knepp’s 3,500 acres to the wild. Using herds of free-roaming animals to mimic the actions of the megafauna of the past, they hoped to bring nature back to their depleted land. But what would the neighbors say, in the manicured countryside of modern England where a blade of grass out of place is considered an affront?

In the face of considerable opposition the couple persisted with their experiment and soon witnessed an extraordinary change. New life flooded into Knepp, now a breeding hotspot for rare and threatened species like turtle doves, peregrine falcons, and purple emperor butterflies.

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The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis
by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac

Kindle price: $12.99

Climate change: it is arguably the most urgent and consequential issue humankind has ever faced. How we address it in the next thirty years will determine the kind of world we will live in and will bequeath to our children and to theirs.

In The Future We Choose, Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac–who led negotiations for the United Nations during the historic Paris Agreement of 2015–have written a cautionary but optimistic book about the world’s changing climate and the fate of humanity.
The authors outline two possible scenarios for our planet. In one, they describe what life on Earth will be like by 2050 if we fail to meet the Paris climate targets. In the other, they lay out what it will be like to live in a carbon neutral, regenerative world. They argue for confronting the climate crisis head-on, with determination and optimism. The Future We Choose presents our options and tells us what governments, corporations, and each of us can and must do to fend off disaster.

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After the Flood: A Novel
by Kassandra Montag

Kindle price: $12.99

An inventive and riveting epic saga, After the Flood signals the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.

A little more than a century from now, our world has been utterly transformed. After years of slowly overtaking the continent, rising floodwaters have obliterated America’s great coastal cities and then its heartland, leaving nothing but an archipelago of mountaintop colonies surrounded by a deep expanse of open water.

Stubbornly independent Myra and her precocious seven-year-old daughter, Pearl, fish from their small boat, the Bird, visiting dry land only to trade for supplies and information in the few remaining outposts of civilization. For seven years, Myra has grieved the loss of her oldest daughter, Row, who was stolen by her father after a monstrous deluge overtook their home in Nebraska. Then, in a violent confrontation with a stranger, Myra suddenly discovers that Row was last seen in a far-off encampment near the Arctic Circle. Throwing aside her usual caution, Myra and Pearl embark on a perilous voyage into the icy northern seas, hoping against hope that Row will still be there.

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Erosion: Essays of Undoing
by Terry Tempest Williams

Kindle price: $13.99

Fierce, timely, and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist

Terry Tempest Williams’s fierce, spirited, and magnificent essays are a howl in the desert. She sizes up the continuing assaults on America’s public lands and the erosion of our commitment to the open space of democracy. She asks: “How do we find the strength to not look away from all that is breaking our hearts?”

We know the elements of erosion: wind, water, and time. They have shaped the spectacular physical landscape of our nation. Here, Williams bravely and brilliantly explores the many forms of erosion we face: of democracy, science, compassion, and trust. She examines the dire cultural and environmental implications of the gutting of Bear Ears National Monument—sacred lands to Native Peoples of the American Southwest; of the undermining of the Endangered Species Act; of the relentless press by the fossil fuel industry that has led to a panorama in which “oil rigs light up the horizon.” And she testifies that the climate crisis is not an abstraction, offering as evidence the drought outside her door and, at times, within herself.

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No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference
by Greta Thunberg

Kindle price: $7.99

The groundbreaking speeches of Greta Thunberg, the young climate activist who has become the voice of a generation, including her historic address to the United Nations

In August 2018 a fifteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, decided not to go to school one day in order to protest the climate crisis. Her actions sparked a global movement, inspiring millions of students to go on strike for our planet, forcing governments to listen, and earning her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.

No One Is Too Small to Make A Difference brings you Greta in her own words, for the first time. Collecting her speeches that have made history across the globe, from the United Nations to Capitol Hill and mass street protests, her book is a rallying cry for why we must all wake up and fight to protect the living planet, no matter how powerless we feel. Our future depends upon it.

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Ecowomanism: African American Women and Earth-Honoring Faiths
by Melanie L. Harris

Kindle price: $12.99

Scholarship on African American history and culture has often neglected the tradition of African American women who engage in theological and religious reflection on their ethical and moral responsibility to care for the earth. Melanie Harris argues that African American women make distinctive contributions to the environmental justice movement in the ways that they theologize, theorize, practice spiritual activism, and come into religious understandings about our relationship with the earth. Incorporating ele­ments of her family history to set the stage for her argument, Harris intersperses her academic reflections with her own personal stories and anecdotes.

This unique text stands at the intersection of several academic disciplines: womanist theology, ecotheology, spirituality, and theological aesthetics.

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The End of the Ocean: A Novel
by Maja Lunde

Kindle price: $12.99

From the author of the number-one international bestseller The History of Bees, a captivating story of the power of nature and the human spirit that explores the threat of a devastating worldwide drought, witnessed through the lives of a father, a daughter, and a woman who will risk her life to save the future.

In 2019, seventy-year-old Signe sets sail alone on a hazardous voyage across the ocean in a sailboat. On board, a cargo that can change lives. Signe is haunted by memories of the love of her life, whom she’ll meet again soon.

In 2041, David and his young daughter, Lou, flee from a drought-stricken Southern Europe that has been ravaged by thirst and war. Separated from the rest of their family and desperate to find them, they discover an ancient sailboat in a dried-out garden, miles away from the nearest shore. Signe’s sailboat.

As David and Lou discover Signe’s personal effects, her long ago journey becomes inexorably linked to their own.

An evocative tale of the search for love and connection, The End of the Ocean is a profoundly moving father daughter story of survival and a clarion call for climate action.

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