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Perfect Weekend Kris Kristofferson and Sammi Hanratty in ‘The Greening of Whitney Brown.’

“The Greening of Whitney Brown” started as a screenplay of a very different story. What it became was a wholesome, entertaining movie about the misadventures of Whitney Brown, a privileged and popular Philadelphia teenager whose world is upended when her parents experience sudden economic problems that necessitate a family move to Whitney’s grandparents’ old farm in the country. There, far from her dizzying world of shallow girlfriends,...

This morning, at the Frankfurt Book Fair--an industry event populated with digital rights handlers from the traditional publishing world--Google formalized its plans to launch an online store to deliver e-books to any kind of gadget that has a browser. After being in the works for several years, Google Editions, as it's called, will open for business in the first quarter of 2010.

It's a provocation to Amazon, whose Kindle e-reader dominates the market. "We're not focused on a dedicated e-reader or device of any kind," said Tom Turvey, head of Google Book Search's publisher partnership program. The store will initially offer about a half-million books. Google spokesperson Jennie Johnson says their target audience is Google users, and their goal is to make information in books integrated in your search results: "You shouldn't have to know the answer you're looking for is in a book," she explains, adding, "We're open to working with anyone,...