Cosmic professor

He has scripted major films and Coronation Street, won acclaim for his children's novels, and is now helping with the Olympics. For his next trick, he'll be the UK's first professor of reading. Martin Wainwright talks to Frank Cottrell Boyce

Academic publishing: The essential checklist for ebook authors

Ebooks can make an important contribution to knowledge but quality remains an issue for the academic community. Sophie Tergeist lists five ways to ensure your ebook is up to scratch

Poetry should be subversive

Simon Armitage: If Michael Gove's plan for English means reciting Tennyson in posh accents, it's nothing to celebrate

A plea to restore Kensal Rise library to us

Maggie Gee: Land was donated in 1900 with a proviso it be used for a library – the council's 2am raid is a shameful attempt to break the deal

BlackBerry cupcakes and Googling: new study of UK children’s language

OUP's 31m-word analysis of writing by British children finds influx of US words alongside influence of Potter and Pullman

Student feedback enriches my poetry

Gillian Clarke: Joe Simpson's twitter spat with students studying his book is at odds with my own highly rewarding email contact with GCSE pupils

Virginia Woolf’s play exposes the silly side of the Bloomsbury group

Aoife Monks: Performing Freshwater in the writer's former home revealed a different side to the serious intellectuals who frequented 46 Gordon Square

Text mining: what do publishers have against this hi-tech research tool?

Researchers push for end to publishers' default ban on computer scanning of tens of thousands of papers to find links between genes and diseases

Amazon v newspaper: which is the more valuable review?

Lloyd Shepherd: Academics have charted reviews on social media sites and broadsheet books desks, and ranked their impact on novel sales. The results make for interesting reading

Why I want all our children to read the King James Bible

Richard Dawkins: The good book should be read as a great work of literature – but it is not a guide to morality, as the education secretary Michael Gove would have us believe

Richard Dawkins the arch-atheist backs Michael Gove’s free Bible plan

Author of The God Delusion says providing free Bibles to state schools is justified by its impact on the English language

Michael Gove’s King James Bible plan rescued by millionaire Tory donors

Education secretary will send a copy of the Bible to every state school after donors club together to save £370,000 initiative

Culture coach: the week’s essential arts stories

Charlotte Higgins: It was the week that Maurice Sendak died and Bianca Jagger had a fight at the opera. Here are the past seven days' biggest arts stories from around the web

Why shouldn’t paganism have a place in RE lessons?

Liz Williams: Cornish schools won't be 'teaching witchcraft and druidry', less still black mass – religious education doesn't equal indoctrination

Student publishes a new Shakespeare text

We're not talking First Folio, mind. This is the world of 2b r nt 2b - but with the highest of motives