Washington State

Need an imagination? There’s an app for that. Or soon will be. Among the wackier wheezes worked up lately to improve on plain old Mark One printed text is a patent application filed by Bill Gates, Nathan Myhrvold, and a bunch of other Washington State dreamers to autoconvert text to video. The application covers: “A system [...]

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Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com, and his wife, MacKenzie, have agreed to donate $2.5 million to help pass a same-sex marriage referendum in Washington State, instantly becoming among the largest financial backers of gay marriage rights in the country. With the gift, the couple have doubled the money available to the proponents of Referendum 74, which would legalize same-sex marriage in the state by affirming a law that passed the Legislature this year. Courts or lawmakers have declared gay marriage legal in six other states, but backers of such measures have never succeeded at the ballot box.

Ace Books, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA), today announced the signing of a new urban fantasy series by a writer discovered on Bookcountry.com, Penguin's nine-month-old genre fiction workshopping community. The two-book deal marks the first acquisition from the site since the Book Country community launched in May of 2011.