LeVar Burton

The 35th annual L.A. Times Book Prizes are announced today. There are five finalists in 10 categories, and two prize winners were revealed: The Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement will be presented to author T.C. Boyle, and LeVar Burton will be honored with the Innovators Award for inspiring generations of readers with Reading Rainbow. The awards will be presented Saturday, April 18, in conjunction with the L.A. Times Festival of Books April 18-19.

The Reading Rainbow Kickstarter has reached about $3.5 million, and the velocity of increase has slowed considerably. I still think it has the potential to make 10 if it does well over the course of the month, especially when it gets the end-of-Kickstarter boost. But even if it makes its $5 million stretch goal, that […]

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LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow Kickstarter is running up a fairly godlike funding tally. In case you’re wondering what his secret is, he reveals it in this “new version” of the Reading Rainbow theme via humor site Funny or Die. Reading Rainbow’s New Theme Song with LeVar Burton from LeVar Burton

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Take a look, it’s in a book. The Verge ran a story today that LeVar Burton has launched a $1 million Kickstarter with the goal of bringing Reading Rainbow to the web, to reach kids across the globe. It’s already available for Android and iPad, but not all kids or schools have access to those […]

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Book Business spent the last two days soaking up the publishing wisdom on display at the Digital Book World conference at the Hilton New York.

You can check out twitter, @bookbusinessmag, for the full play by play. Below are some highlights.

-Following the Children's Content in Context breakout session on Wednesday, we got to exchange a few quick words about our mutual love of the Android platform with none other than LeVar Burton, who was at the session to support Reading Rainbow CEO Asra Rasheed. "I'm a nerd," explaind Burton during the session with regard to his affinity for the Google mobile OS.

TechCrunch has an article and an 18-minute video segment about the new Reading Rainbow iPad app, launched by Reading Rainbow host LeVar Burton’s and producer James Wolfe’s startup RRKidz. The literacy-promoting show ended its 26-year run a couple of years ago, but Burton and Wolfe didn’t stand still. Looking at TV as the technology of the eighties, they asked themselves what Reading Rainbow would have been if it had been launched today, and proceeded to make that.