【推荐1】An advance in electronic publishing could make the e-book you are reading seem as dated as a silent film. Publishers hope to explore the growing success of e-books by releasing versions with added soundtracks（电影配音）and musical accompaniments.

The noises in the first multimedia books — released in Britain on Friday - include rain hitting a window in a Sherlock Holmes tale. When the plot of a book reaches the most exciting part, background scores will create tension.

Supporters argue that sound effects are the next logical development for e-books and will add excitement for younger readers. Critics, however, will argue that the noise will ruin the simple pleasure of having the imagination stimulated by reading.

Caroline Michel, chief executive of the literary agency, said the new generation of computer- literate readers was used to multiple sensory input. She said, “Young people have split computer screens where they may be watching television and replying to an email at the same time. If that's what the market wants then we should respond to the market.”

Book track's sound effects work by estimating the user's reading speed. Each lime you turn a page, the software reassesses where you have reached in the text and times the sounds to switch on accordingly. If the soundtrack becomes out of synch （同步），a click on any word will reset it.

Some authors fear that a soundtrack could destroy the peace and quiet of libraries and ruin the pleasure, of reading. David Nicholls, author of Our Day, the bestseller now released as a film, said, “This sounds like the opposite of reading. I have enough trouble reading an e-book because I'm constantly distracted by emails.

Stuart MacBride, the crime writer whose novel Shatter the Bones was an e-book bestseller, sells 18% of his books as electronic downloads. He said, “If I'm reading, I will do the noise in my head. I don’t need someone to tell me what lea cups clinking sounds like. That would irritate （激怒）me.”

【推荐2】A second-grade education has not stopped garbage collector Jose Gutierrez from bringing the gift of reading to thousands of Colombian children. Gutierrez started rescuing books from the trash almost 20 years ago. He was driving a garbage truck at night through the country’s wealthier neighborhoods. The discarded (丢弃的) reading material slowly piled up. And now the ground floor of his small house is a makeshift (临时的) community library with about 20,000 books ranging from chemistry textbooks to children’s classics.

He says books are luxuries (奢侈品) for boys and girls in low-income neighborhoods such as his. New reading material at bookstores is too expensive. There are 19 public libraries in Bogota. It is a city of 8.5 million people. But the libraries tend to be located far away from poorer areas. “This should be in each corner of every neighborhood, in all the towns and all the rural areas,” says Gutierrez. “Books are the poor children’s lifesavers. And that is what Colombia needs.”

The 53-year-old Gutierrez has a love of reading that he says comes from his mother. She always read to him even though she was too poor to keep him in school. Up to now he has traveled to book fairs in Mexico and Chile to share his experience of starting a library with discarded reading material. And his fame as Colombia’s “Lord of the Books” has also brought him thousands of donated books.

Gutierrez is an enthusiastic reader of works by authors such as Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo and Mario Vargas Llosa. He says he does not reject technology that allows books to be read digitally. But he prefers to read the printed word on paper. “There is nothing more beautiful than having a book in your pocket, in your bag or inside your car.” he says.

【推荐3】It is not always easy to understand animal behavior, especially when it’s related to other species (物种). For decades, researchers have observed orca (虎鲸) attacking and even killing porpoises (鼠海豚) in the Pacific Northwest. But it confuses people that these expert hunters don’t eat them. So what’s going on here?

Southern Resident orcas are a different population of orcas that live in the Pacific Northwest. The lives of these orcas are closely tied to those of the salmon (鲑鱼). So if the salmon disappear, so too will the orca. But despite their preference for salmon, these whales are known to attack and kill other smaller marine mammals (海洋哺乳动物)without eating them.

To better understand this unusual behavior, an international team of researchers did a research and examined more than 60 years of recorded interactions between Southern Resident orcas and porpoises in the Salish Sea.

“Why don’t the Southern Residents just eat porpoises instead?” Deborah Giles of Wild Orca said. “It’s because fish-eating killer whales have a completely different ecology and culture from orcas that eat marine mammals. So we must conclude that their interactions with porpoises serve a different purpose, but this purpose has only been a guess until now.”

According to Giles and her colleagues’ work, the orca may be attacking the porpoise as a form of social play. It is possible these large animals may be attacking the smaller mammals as a way to build up social cohesion (凝聚力). Similarly, the behavior could represent hunting practice, by which the orcas are practising their teamwork and cooperation skills for hunting salmon. Finally, the behavior could be a way of “mismothering” where the orca see the smaller porpoises as weaker or ill and so in need of care.

This work highlights the need for the protection of salmon populations in the area as well as the orcas’ entire hunting range. The threat (威胁) to the salmon’s future is not just a threat to a single species, but an entire ecosystem.