KACHARAGADLA

The service is great for 're-picking' your favourite titles that you might have lost touch with One of the memories from my childhood is about the library period we had in junior school. Every week, during a stipulated period lasting 40 minutes, we would discuss books we had read, or were tasked to read, that month. For me, the highlight used to be at the end of the period, when books were lent out, according to roll number. Since our roll numbers were alphabetically arranged according to our surnames, in a class of 35 boys, I would usually be the 30th one to pick a book, mostly stuff no one wanted to read. While I was disappointed with the rather limited choice, it did introduce (and re-introduce) me to certain authors - Mark Twain's writings outside of Tom Sawyer, Isaac Asimov (whom my teachers had the foresight to introduce at that stage), Arthur C Clarke and PG Wodehouse. This also led me to experiment with various genres right through my growing up years, cou

New research by Feng Zhu and colleagues reveals why sometimes it's better for fierce competitors like Apple and Amazon to work together L et's get one thing straight from the start: Apple and Amazon are not friends. If they were high school students, they'd be mean girls glaring at each other from opposite sides of the cafeteria, jealously forcing their friends to pick sides between Team Chloe and Team Madison. To put it into market terms, both companies would like nothing better than to have customers to themselves, wrapped up in their own seamless media universes: iTunes, iPad, and Apple TV on the one hand; and Kindle, Amazon Prime, and Fire TV on the other. So why would Amazon release a version of its Kindle Reader on Apple's iPad, allowing users to access its library of exclusive digital books? "Doesn't that diminish interest in the Kindle device?" asks Feng Zhu, an assistant professor in the Technology and Operations Management unit at Har