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As life hurtles on the fast lane, the publishing industry is opening up new, cost-effective and easier reading formats for literature buffs.

The traditional space-eating bookshelves and libraries at home and in public spaces will soon be replaced by audio books, mobile telephone books, e-books and video clips of famous novels, which are available either at the click of a mouse or a dial tone away with the mobile telephony provider - thanks to the new age tech-savvy publishing wizkids.

The concept, already a rage across Europe, is making its maiden inroads into India, which boasts of one of the biggest publishing industry in terms of turnover (over US$11 billion).

And Indian authors figure high on the list of publishers of alternative books.

According to industry representatives, audio books, which are yet to be retailed in Indian music and book stores, can be downloaded from e-vendors like Britain-based Waterstones, Amazon and HMV.

This week, Britain-based Heavy Entertainment, one of the country’s largest manufacturers and producers of audio books, will launch an abridged audio edition of Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’ - a six-volume CD novel, spanning over eight hours, with voiceover by Lyndam Gregory, a veteran British Broadcasting Corporation radio drama performer.

The book, priced at 15.99 pounds sterling, can be heard over any MP3 device.

In October, the company collaborated with the Britain-based John Murray and Hachette Publishers, which has just set up its India arm, to produce Amitav Ghose’s global best-seller, ‘Sea of Poppies’, as an audio novel. It is a four-CD book, spread over five hours, with Lyndam as the story teller.

The audio novel, www.Seaofpoppies.com, which is available across stores in Europe, is priced at 15.99 pounds in shops and at 7.99 pounds on the net.

Last month, Heavy Entertainment unveiled the audio format of Booker prize winning novel ‘White Tiger’, by Arvind Adiga, across Europe.

‘The novel, which has five CDs has a voiceover by Kerry Shale, a veteran presenter, who enacts all the characters in the novel like Lyndam did for the last two Indian best-sellers,’ Davy Nougarede, director of Heavy Entertainment, told IANS at the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival.

The producer of alternative books is in India as part of a contingent of young publishers to explore the opportunities of alternative publishing. This is part of an Indo-British cultural exchange to promote creative entrepreneurs.

The industry for alternative books - both audio and e-books - said Davy, has grown by 800 percent in Europe in the last six months since it was officially launched in Britain 14 months ago.

‘It was a trial. A collection of 100 classics written over the last 75 years and an e-book reading device was offered to readers at 199 pounds. An e-book reading device is a B-format paperback size computer where the screen serves as a page, operating through touch. One can store at least 2,000 books on the device instead of having four to five books in your bag. The device, developed by Sony, is known as Kindle,’ Davy explained.

The market for audio books, however, is more brisk. It is growing at a rate of 20 percent every month. ‘That is because of the comfort factor. Many people find it difficult to read and easy to hear the stories being read out by someone else. The first lot of audio books were published in Britain and the US 20 years ago,’ Davy said.

The best-selling audio novel in the West now is ‘Barack Obama: Dream From My Father’ which sold 25,000 copies since it was launched four months ago.

The alternative book formats are price-wise because they do not involve printing costs and incur minimal distribution costs.

Davy, who released 50-80 audio novel titles in his country every year, now produces around 350 titles annually. In India, Davy works with Shoda Tales, an audio publisher based in Chennai, to manufacture audio books of short stories and poetry for students of the English language across the country.

Peter Collingridge, the young founder of Apt Studio, another British firm that specialises in innovative publishing formats, is ready with his first three mobile books - The Barack Obama biography, a novel, ‘The Death of Bunny Murro’ by rockstar Nick Cave and ‘Homicide’ by David Simon, which was made into a popular tele-serial in Britain. The mobile version of the Obama biography, in collaboration with Apple, will hit the telephony market in May.

‘I would love to transcribe Chetan Bhagat’s ‘Five Point Someone’ into a mobile telephone novel. The book has such a vast scope and is so inspiring,’ Collingridge told IANS. India, with six million mobile phone subscribers, is a challenging market, he said.

Another round of cold temperatures and winter snow showers greeted those in the East early Monday, while rain was in store for the Southeast and clear skies dawned over the West.

Several areas of low pressure will produce a mix of rain and snow showers across the Great Lakes, Northeast and the mid-Atlantic.

Beginning in the North, an area of low pressure located over the Great Lakes will advance eastward into the Northeast by the afternoon. As the system progresses, it will pull cold northern air across the warmer lake waters to produce moderate lake-effect snow bands across areas of northwestern Indiana, Michigan and the lower Great Lakes.

To the east of this system, another area of low pressure will produce significant snow shower activity across New England. This winter storm system is expected to produce up to 5 inches of snow as it moves over eastern Maine.

A third low pressure system was expected to produce mixed precipitation across the Ohio Valley and mid-Atlantic. Light rain showers will develop along an associated cold front as it sweeps through the Southeast.

The West was expected to remain dry due to a strong high pressure system, producing fair conditions with above normal temperatures across California and the Southwest.

Temperatures in the Lower 48 states on Sunday ranged from a low of minus 30 degrees at Caribou, Maine, to a high of 87 degrees at Santee, Calif.

A new research has determined that rocks on Mars are on the move, rolling into the wind and forming organized patterns.

Images taken by the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit show small rocks regularly spaced about 5 to 7 centimeters apart on the intercrater plains between Lahontan Crater and the Columbia Hills.

The new finding counters the previous explanation of the evenly spaced arrangement of small rocks on Mars.

That explanation suggested that the rocks were picked up and carried downwind by extreme high-speed winds thought to occur on Mars in the past.

Although Mars is a windy planet, it would be difficult for the wind to carry the small rocks, which range in size from a quarter to a softball, according to Jon D. Pelletier, associate professor of geosciences at The University of Arizona in Tucson.

Pelletier and his colleagues suggest that wind blows sand away from the front of the rock, creating a pit, and then deposits that sand behind the rock, creating a hill. The rock then rolls forward into the pit, moving into the wind.

As long as the wind continues to blow, the process is repeated and the rocks move forward.

“You get this happening five, 10, 20 times then you start to really move these things around,” said Pelletier. “They can move many times their diameter,” he added.

The process is nearly the same with a cluster of rocks.

However, with a cluster of rocks, those in the front of the group shield those in the middle or on the edges from the wind, according to Pelletier.

Because the middle and outer rocks are not directly hit by the wind, the wind creates pits to the sides of those rocks.

Therefore, they roll to the side, not directly into the wind, and the cluster begins to spread out.

To investigate the regular patterns of the rocks on Mars, Pelletier combined three standard numerical computer models.

The first modeled air flow, the second modeled erosion and deposition of sand and the third modeled the rocks’ movement.

He also conducted what is known as a Monte Carlo simulation, which applies his combination numerical model over and over to a random pattern of rocks to see how the rocks ultimately end up.

Pelletier ran the simulation 1,000 times. The rocks ended up into a regular pattern 90 percent of the time.

As an independent verification, he also compared the pattern predicted by the numerical model to the distances between each rock and its nearest neighbor in the Mars images.

The patterns of the Martian rocks matched what the model predicted.

Scientists have uncovered in an Armenian cave what may be the oldest preserved human brain from an ancient society, which dates back to 6,000 years.

The cave overlooks southeastern Armenia’s Arpa River, just across the border from Iran.

The researchers found a trio of Copper Age human skulls, each buried in a separate niche inside the three-chambered, 600-square–meter cave.

The skulls belonged to 12- to 14-year-old girls, according to anatomical analyses conducted independently by three biological anthropologists.

Fractures identified on two skulls indicate that the girls were killed by blows from a club of some sort, probably in a ritual ceremony, according to Gregory Areshian of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Remarkably, one skull contained a shriveled but well-preserved brain. “This is the oldest known human brain from the Old World,” Areshian said.

The Old World comprises Europe, Asia, Africa and surrounding islands.

Scientists now studying the brain have noted preserved blood vessels on its surface. Surviving red blood cells have been extracted from those hardy vessels for analysis.

The cave has also offered surprising new insights into the origins of modern civilizations, such as evidence of a winemaking enterprise and an array of culturally diverse pottery.

Excavations in and just outside of Areni-1 cave during 2007 and 2008 yielded an extensive array of Copper Age artifacts dating to between 6,200 and 5,900 years ago, according to Areshian.

The finds show that major cultural developments occurred during the Copper Age in areas outside southern Iraq, which is traditionally regarded as the cradle of civilization, Areshian noted.

The new cave discoveries move cultural activity in what’s now Armenia back by about 800 years.

“This is exciting work,” said Rana Ozbal of Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey.

According to Areshian, whoever they were, these people participated in trade networks that ran throughout the Near East.

Additional discoveries at the site include metal knives, seeds from more than 30 types of fruit, remains of dozens of cereal species, rope, cloth, straw, grass, reeds and dried grapes and prunes