A team from theUniversity of Twente, in the Netherlands, has developed a new ‘Dyslexie’ typeface, designed to help dyslexic people read more easily. It’s based on the notion that of the 26 letters in the standard Latin-based alphabet, as used in English, many of the letters look similar – such as v/w, i/j and m/n – thus people with dyslexia often confuse these letters. So by creating a new typeface where the differences in these letters are emphasized, it was found that dyslexic people made fewer errors....

Stocks. Finance. Banking. Hedge funds. The very words could make a person’s head spin, and that’s because the financial industry is a purposefully complicated one, designed so that the rich get richer and plebeians stay put. But not even the financial industry can remain untouched by the social web’s golden claw as companies likeZecco, Schwab, andScottradehave all built online communities for active and casual investors to share information with one another....

Was there a Kindle or iPad under your Christmas tree? Statistics point to yes! Publisher’s Weeklyis reporting preliminary estimates from theAssociation of American Publishersthat e-book sales from 16 reporting companies jumped 115.8% this January, totaling $69.9 million in the U.S. And it’s bad news for paperback book publishers. Paperbacks were down 30.9% from the reporting companies, falling to $39.0 million, $30 million below the sales of e-books. Hardcover sales fell 11....

London-basedBloomsbury Publishing, the company behind the Harry Potter series of novels, has reported a massive surge in e-book sales in 2010 and the early part of 2011. The publisher’s e-book sales netted the company £79,000 in 2009, but by the end of 2010 this figure had risen to £1.5m. And Q1 sales in 2011 were strong too, having drawn £1.1m in digital books sales between January and March. This news is in keeping with the overall trend elsewhere, with Amazon....

A senior Chinese industrial official claims that China’s e-commerce industry will grow quickly in the next five years and its transactions are expected to quadruple last year’s figure by 2015. “The sales volume of China’s e-commerce will annually grow at least 32 percent year-on-year from 2011 to 2015. We estimate a transaction volume of 18 trillion yuan ($2.8 trillion) in 2015. The amount in 2010 was 4.5 trillion yuan.” The official, determined to encourage the industry’s development and provide more favorable policies to support its sound expansion, said the sales volume of online shopping is expected to account for more than 9 percent of the country’s total retail sales of daily necessities and consumer goods in 2015, from the current 3....