This week’s “What We’re Reading” starts off with the news that Microsoft is shutting down its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects, after digitizing over 750,000 books. And speaking of the digital age, David Pogue writes about copyright issues and e-Publishing in an article for the New York Times. On the online resources front we link to EDSITEment’s new feature on “The Presidents,” where they pair up with PBS to examine recent presidencies. Then, read about the new DiRT wiki, get advice for your job interview at the AHA annual meeting, learn about the “crowdsourcing” of history, and read a summary of the recent Jefferson Lecture featuring John Updike.

• Microsoft Shuts Book-Digitizing Project
  The Chronicle’s Wired Campus blog reports that Microsoft will stop digitizing books (750,000 books have been digitized so far) and will shut down its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic sites.
• Can e-Publishing Overcome Copyright Concerns?
  David Pogue, who writes on technology issues for the New York Times, weighs in on his experiences with publishing in the digital age.
• The Presidents
  EDSITEment is featuring a section on their site on the recent presidencies of FDR, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George H. W. Bush. In this section you’ll find lesson plans and links to web sites that can be used in conjunction with PBS’s “The Presidents” series.
• Digging in the DiRT: Sneak Preview of the Digital Research Tools (DiRT) wiki
  Lisa Spiro highlights a nifty new wiki about Digital Research Tools (acronym: DiRT) at http://digitalresearchtools.pbwiki.com/
• Off the List
  “A professor and chairman in history who teaches at a university in the Northeast,” writing under the pseudonym of Allan Hoffman, dispenses advice to job candidates who interview at the AHA’s annual meeting in this Chronicle Careers article.
• Everyone’s a historian now
  Steven Mihn, from the University of Georgia, offers an upbeat (or more accurately, an uncritical) portrayal of the "crowdsourcing" of history in this article from the Boston Globe.
• In Jefferson Lecture, Updike Says American Art Is Known by Its Insecurity
  The Chronicle’s News Blog summarizes the 37th Jefferson Lecture, which featured John Updike this year.

Contributors: Debbie Ann Doyle, Elisabeth Grant, Vernon Horn, and Robert Townsend

This post first appeared on AHA Today.