The federal press and mass communications agency, Rospechat, claims sales lost to piracy in Russia add up to several billion roubles a year. Part of the problem, according to Rospechat, is that more than 100,000 titles are on offer through illegal downloading sites while only 60,000 titles are available from legal suppliers.

Outside of Apple, there are few handset manfacturers able to garner such stratospheric buzz for the release of a new smartphone. Part of it has to do with Android’s sheer volume of handsets (there’s almost a new one every week), but also no other company has mastered Apple’s art of building hype. Samsung, however, is on to something. While nearly every other Android device generated just a bit of Internet buzz, Samsung’s Galaxy S III stands to generate iPhone levels of excitement.

It’s a platform wherein users share their thoughts, news, information and jokes in 140 characters of text or less. Twitter makes global communication cheap and measurable. Profiles are (usually) public — anyone in the world can see what you write, unless you elect to make your profile private. Users “follow” each other in order to keep tabs on and converse with specific people.

Clare Dickens only wanted to share her story to help others. But in the process, she became a successful independent author — with the help of a local bookstore and its instant publishing machine.  Ms. Dickens wrote “A Dangerous Gift” with her son Titus, a memoir of their life dealing with his bipolar disorder. She completed the novel after he took his own life at the age of 25 in 2006.  Though Ms. Dickens found a publisher in Iceland to release the book in 2007, she still wanted a broader reach. The Espresso Book Machine at Politics and Prose in Washington enabled her to bring the memoir to local bookshelves and beyond.

The 18-year-old, who has helped curate an armoire full of three generations of her own family’s photos and documents, decided to see if there was a way to help gather photos and documents lost in the storms.  She contacted her local library to see if it would help, and much to her surprise and glee, library workers readily agreed.  Since then, the Lake Arlington Branch Library has collected more than 800 photos — and counting — strewn about by the April 3 tornadoes that destroyed or damaged roughly 1,300 homes and businesses, according to the state. About three-fourths of the photos have been claimed so far, said Debi Wood, library services manager.