我們需要什麼樣的書

提高英語的水平往往可以看一些英語的新聞和閱讀，還有英語的電視劇和電影，這樣可以很快的提高我們的英語口語，接下來小編給大家帶來英語新聞，需要的同學們可以看一看。

　　英語課外閱讀1

Reading anything long on a cell phone has never been very appealing. There are options -- Instapaper will save magazine articles for you to read offline, Kindle and iBooks have adequatemobile apps -- but in general, none looks great. Whatever the exact reasons, trying to tackle asubstantial work on a micro-screen is wearying. Reading a book on a Kindle, Nook, iPad, orany other tablet, meanwhile, affords a larger screen and often, well, more breathing room.

長時間在手機上閱讀可不是一件愜意的事。雖然掌上閱讀的途徑很多：Instapaper可以離線閱讀電子雜誌;Kindle和iBooks也有對應的移動端應用，但總的來說，沒有一個完美的。究其原因，在狹小的屏幕上處理一大堆事情是非常惱人的。Kindle、Nook、iPad或平板電腦等大屏幕設備的閱讀體驗要好很多，但讀者也需要更多的閱讀空間。

Oyster, backed by Peter Thiel of Founders Fund, Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon, and others, maybe a temporary panacea: It offers the most aesthetically pleasing smartphone readingexperience to date. The app provides a channel to more than 100,000 books on your phone. For $9.95, you get unlimited access to books and can add or drop any at any time (the appsaves the last 10 you've opened for offline reading). In theory, the service could be a godsendto avid readers: a turbo-charged, 24-hour mobile library -- personalized. Of course, Google (GOOG) and Amazon (AMZN) loom large as giants that could, it would seem, make Oysterobsolete with great ease (particularly Amazon with its formidable e-library). But ignoring thebusiness implications for a moment, I wanted to evaluate Oyster simply on a user experiencebasis, as someone who reads a couple novels each week and usually prefers to do it on dead-tree material.

在Founders Fund的皮特•泰爾、Hunch聯合創始人克里斯•迪克遜等多位風投大佬的資助下，手機閱讀軟件Oyster橫空出世，向用戶展示了堪稱迄今爲止最爲優雅的智能手機閱讀體驗。Oyster擁有超過10萬本圖書的移動書庫。只需每月9.95美元，用戶就能閱讀Oyster的所有書籍，還能隨時把它們加入書庫或從中刪除(這款應用記錄了用戶最近打開的10本書以供離線閱讀)。對於如飢似渴的書蟲們，Oyster可謂天降大禮：它就像一個擁有海量藏書的全天候可定製移動圖書館。當然，如果和谷歌(Google)或亞馬遜(Amazon)這樣的老大哥相比，Oyster簡直不值一提(尤其是考慮到亞馬遜那令人生畏的電子書數量。)不過，咱們暫且不提商業影響，作爲一個每週都會閱讀好幾本小說，而且通常是看紙質書的讀者，我想從用戶體驗的角度來點評下Oyster。

The only clunky trait of the app is in the setup: It is currently invite-only; you request aninvite by mobile or online at its website, and once you're in (my wait was two days), it'll emailyou to download the app and set up an account. Only once you've paid your $10 -- there is nofree test-drive option, but you can cancel membership at any time -- will it ask you to choosefive books to start with.

Oyster唯一的不足是應用安裝流程。目前它仍採用邀請制，用戶必須通過手機或網站請求邀請，一旦通過(我用了兩天時間)，Oyster會用郵件通知用戶下載應用及創建賬號。首先你必須支付10美元會費，沒有任何免費體驗選項可供選擇，不過你可以隨時取消會員資格。支付會費後，Oyster就會提示你選擇5本書開始閱讀。

"Unlimited books" is Oyster's motto, but for now, the library, as large as it is, feels limited. Ifirst searched for This Bright River by Patrick Somerville, but Oyster didn't have it. I searchedfor the novels Lolito by Ben Brooks, Duplex by Kathryn Davis, We Were the Mulvaneys by JoyceCarol Oates, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, Leaving the Atocha Station by Ben Lerner, AllThat Is by James Salter, Watergate by Thomas Mallon, and The Box Man by Kobo Abe. Oysterhad none, so I tried some nonfiction I'd been meaning to read: the crime mystery Lost Girls byRobert Kolker and the animal behavior book Wild Ones by Jon Mooalem; no luck. Oyster hadnone of the first 10 books I searched for. (It had only one John Irving novel, also a travesty.) Unsurprisingly, pop best sellers are better represented. A "popular on Oyster" menu suggests, for example, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz's book Onward.

Oyster的口號是“無限的圖書”，不過至少目前爲止，它的書籍容量是有限的。我首先搜索了帕特里克•薩默維爾的《明亮的河》(This Bright River )，Oyster沒有。我又搜索了一些小說：本•布魯克斯的《洛麗塔》(Lolito )、凱瑟琳•戴維斯的《雙層公寓 》(Duplex )、喬伊斯•卡羅爾•奧茨的《我們是馬爾瓦尼》(WeWere the Mulvaneys )、簡•斯邁利的《一千英畝》(A Thousand Acres)、本•勒納的《離開阿託查火車站》(Leaving the Atocha Station)，詹姆斯•索爾特的《一切萬有》(All That Is)、托馬斯•馬龍的《水門事件》(Watergate )以及科博•亞伯的《拳擊手》(The Box Man )還是一本都不找到。我並沒有灰心，轉而嘗試紀實書籍：羅伯特•考克爾的犯罪推理小說《失蹤的女孩》(Lost Girls)和喬恩•穆斯理的動物紀實小說《野生動物》(Wild Ones)。真是不走運，我要的10本書一本都沒有。(Oyster只有一本約翰•艾文的小說，這也有些說不過去。)不過，Oyster在暢銷書方面表現不錯，在“Oyster最受歡迎書籍”列表中，薩拉•格倫的《大象之水》(Water for Elephants)、蓋斯•斯泰因的《雨中賽車的技術》(The Art ofRacing in the Rain)以及星巴克(Starbucks)首席執行官霍華德•舒爾茨的《向前進》(Onward)均榜上有名。

It may be unfair to knock the app for some missing titles at the outset; the company says ittakes 90-120 days to get a new release. (Of those first 10 that I sought out, four were indeednew releases.) Selection is an issue for Hulu and Netflix, too. For those looking to discover abook spontaneously, Oyster will do just fine. On the mobile home screen, under your currentbooks, the app offers a "spotlight" of curated, themed collections like, "the end of summer" and "around the world." These encourage discovery. What Oyster cannot yet be, it is clear, is atotal replacement for the library or bookstore for those who like to read new fiction.

Oyster剛剛誕生，缺少一些書籍也情有可原。這家公司表示，添加新上市書籍的週期爲3到4個月。(在我搜索的10本書中，有4本的確是剛剛出版。)向用戶推薦書籍是個難題，Hulu和Netflix也有類似的問題。對於那些想找找有什麼書可以看的人，Oyster的推薦系統還是不錯的。在軟件主頁你所閱讀的書的下方，Oyster展示了一系列閱讀主題，例如“夏末之約”和“環球之旅”等，以鼓勵讀者發掘書籍。很明顯，Oyster目前還無法徹底取代那些提供小說新作的圖書館和書店。

There is, inevitably, a social element too, Oyster's attempt to double as a recommendationengine: Your profile shows which books you're reading and have read, and your ratings if youchoose to rate books. (You can, however, choose to "read privately.") Friends that have Oystercan follow you and recommend titles to you, and the app will also recommend based on whatyou've read in the past.

社交是當下的熱門，Oyster自然不想放過，它希望能在推薦方面有所作爲。個人信息頁面會展示你目前正在閱讀和已經讀過的書，你還可以給書評分。(當然，你也可以選擇“私密閱讀”。)你在Oyster上的好友能關注你，還可以給你推薦書籍，Oyster自身也會利用用戶的歷史閱讀數據來薦書。

What really matters: The reading experience is clean and visually unobtrusive. Print size andfont are easily, instantly adjustable. In contrast to the horizontal leanings of the functions ona tablet, the Oyster design is suited to the tall, thin iPhone: you turn the page not by swipingleft, but by moving your thumb up, and the progress meter is vertical, on the right side, nothorizontal along the bottom. Another smart, subtle design detail: At the bottom right, whereyou can see how many pages are left in the chapter, it also gives an estimate of how long it'lltake ("23 minutes, 37 pages left"), just as Longreads and other sites post articles with theaverage reading time attached. (Some Kindle models also show remaining time.)

真正重要的是，Oyster閱讀體驗簡約低調。調節頁面大小和字體都十分便捷。與平板電腦上功能操作多是水平方向不同，Oyster的設計適合iPhone的豎條形屏幕：翻頁不是靠手指向左滑動，而是靠向上滑動，而且進度表也是位於屏幕右側的豎條，而不是位於底部的橫條。另一個很巧妙的細節設計是：在右下方不僅會顯示當前章節還剩下多少頁，還會估算出看完當前章節大概還需要多長時間(比如說“剩餘37頁，需時23分鐘”)。長篇內容閱讀網站Longreads等站點所發佈的文章也會附上平均閱讀時間。(有些型號的Kindle電子書也會顯示剩餘時間。)

What you cannot do is highlight a passage you like or take a note. In that regard Oysterdoesn't stack up to iBooks or Kindle, both of which allow you to highlight a line and write anote for export later. (Then again, you could always screenshot.)

不過，用戶不能標記精彩段落，也無法做筆記。在這方面，Oyster比不上iBooks和Kindle，後兩者都有標記和筆記功能，而且之後還能導出相關內容。(不過，反正可以進行屏幕截圖嘛。)

other readers -- will ever read a great number of books on a phone. I'd plunge into a novel thatway only if it's one I'm dying to devour, and because of my affinity for brand new books, Oyster won't usually have the ones I want to read. But in a pinch, it's a lovely-looking option. For now, it exists only for iPhone, but an iPad version is coming in the fall and will boast, "evenmore personalized features," an Oyster spokesperson says.

要我看，我自己以及其他好些讀者可能不會在手機上閱讀大量書籍。就我而言，除非某部小說真是引人入勝，讓人慾罷不能，否則我不會選擇用手機來閱讀。而且，由於我喜歡看最新的作品，所以Oyster上往往沒有我想看的書。不過，在必要時，Oyster是個很不錯的選擇。目前，這款應用僅推出了iPhone版。不過iPad版即將於秋季推出，而且據該公司發言人稱，iPad版將有“更多個性化的功能”。

Oyster is easily worth the reasonable $10 per month even if just for the ability to have booksto read when you've got nothing on hand but your phone. But it still handles just one reading-related need: book supply on mobile. There are other needs that other apps and sites haveattempted to handle, but remain unfulfilled. One: a review site or app that collects not justsubjective, often-amateurish user reviews (the way Goodreads, a sort of Yelp for books, does, giving them an aggregate out of five stars) and not just high-level reviews from the Times andother critical outlets, but all reviews in a more binary, Rotten Tomatoes-style system (i.e. plain and simple, 78% of people liked this book). Another need: a reading app that makes iteasier to jot a note or underline a passage and instantly save it somewhere other than insidethat app. Another: a reading app that isn't just for books, or magazines, or one-off articlessaved from the web, but all of the above.

有了Oyster，當你手頭除了手機什麼都沒有的時候，也能有書可看。哪怕就衝這一點，它每月10美元的會員費也不算貴。不過，它還是隻處理了一個與閱讀相關的需求，即在手機上看書。還有別的與閱讀相關的需求，已經有其他應用程序和網站試圖來滿足，但都未能成功。比如說：現在有書籍點評網站Goodreads。它的用戶往往是非專業人士，網站通過聚合用戶的主觀評論，對書籍評定星級，最高爲5星。但是，還沒有點評類網站或應用能將這樣的用戶生成內容與來自《泰晤士報》(Times )等重要媒體的高水平書評結合起來，建立一個電影及電子遊戲評論網站爛番茄(Rotten Tomatoes)那樣更爲二元的體系(比如說，就直接給出“78%的人喜歡這本書”)。再比如說：還沒有哪款閱讀應用，能使用戶在做筆記或標記某個段落後，能即時將相關內容導出並保存。還比如說：目前還沒有哪款閱讀應用，能兼顧書籍、雜誌以及保存下來的網絡文章的閱讀。

What tech-savvy literary folks need, still -- and Oyster may or may not fill this gap eventually -- is an all-in-one app, available across all phones and tablets, that allows for reading of anymaterials -- books, poetry, comic books, magazines, articles you've flagged from the web -- with easy, seamless exporting of passages or notes, social sharing, and quick, do-you-recommend-it-or-not rating ability that would translate to a more useful database for anyoneseeking their next free-reading choice. Think of it like a Facebook or Google focused squarelyand solely on reading. All of it is doable already -- let's see how long it takes someone.

而精通技術的文藝青年們需要的則是這樣一款一體化應用：它能用於所有手機和平板電腦，能閱讀任何格式的內容，不論是書籍、詩歌、漫畫、雜誌，還是你從網上保存下來的文章，而且能輕鬆導出段落或筆記，在社交媒體上進行共享，並帶有“你是否推薦該內容”的排名功能。Oyster最終不一定能填補這個市場空白。排名功能將形成一個更有用的數據庫，爲那些正在尋找自由閱讀材料的人士提供參考。它更像是僅僅專注於閱讀的Facebook或谷歌(Google)。所有這一切在技術上都已經可行，且看這樣的產品什麼時候纔會出現吧。