Apparently Jeff announced that Amazon will be launching Pay-Per-View streaming service next week. I wonder what that entails and if it will work as well as my Tivo 3/Unbox connection right now? Will I also be able to access music subscriptions?

Ouch. Silicon Alley Insider (via Clusterstock) doesn't seem to believe Borders is better off "going it alone" and running their own website.

Quoted: Borders hopes that taking its site in-house will compensate for its sputtering bricks-and-mortar store business. Unfortunately, it's more likely Borders will now be able to fail at two businesses instead of one.

Quoted: Seth Godin's riffs on marketing, respect, and the ways ideas spread.

A collection of literary tattoo photos. Very nice! Personally, I'm a fan of the text tattoos since they honor the originals.

Quoted: Adventures in middlebrow.

Philip K. Dick's Ubik may be brought to the big-screen.

Quoted: Philip K Dick's paranoid novels have spawned a ton of action movies from Blade Runner to Paycheck but they've only recently started to be seen as fodder for art films like Scanner Darkly. And now one of Dick's weirdest books, Ubik, has just been optioned by Celluloid Dreams, a European company better known for producing or distributing movies like Son Of Rambow, Persepolis and I'm Not There. Dick's daughter, Isa Dick-Hackett, will co-produce the movie and says that Celluloid Dreams' vision is close to her own.

A list of 1,001 books to read before you die.

100 Best First Lines from Novels. A ton of great stuff here, including Thomas Pynchon at #3!

A Financial Times writer says that Salman Rushdie's novel is good, so good in fact, that he may have to try it with curry.

Quoted: For Rushdie, as for the artists he writes about, the pen is a magician’s wand. There is more magic than realism in this latest novel. But it is, I think, one of his best. If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.