The Fault in Our Stars author John Green delivered the commencement speech at the graduation ceremony for Butler University’s class of 2013. To read the entire speech, head to Green’s Tumblr page.

Watch the entire speech in the video embedded above (his talk begins at the 1:01:08 mark). Here’s an excerpt:

I would just note that the default assumption is that the point of human life is to be as successful as possible, to acquire lots of fame or glory or money as defined by quantifiable metrics: number of twitter followers, or facebook friends, or dollars in one’s 401k.

This is the hero’s journey, right? The hero starts out with no money and ends up with a lot of it, or starts out an ugly duckling and becomes a beautiful swan, or starts out an awkward girl and becomes a vampire mother, or grows up an orphan living under the staircase and then becomes the wizard who saves the world. We are taught that the hero’s journey is the journey from weakness to strength. But I am here today to tell you that those stories are wrong. The real hero’s journey is the journey from strength to weakness.

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The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 has “won” seven Golden Raspberry Awards (a.k.a. the Razzies). The film “emerged victorious” in the following categories:

Worst Picture – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
Worst Actress – Kristen Stewart for Snow White & the Huntsman and The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
Worst Supporting Actor – Taylor Lautner for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
Worst Screen Ensemble – the entire cast of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
Worst Director – Bill Condon for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
Worst Prequel, Ripoff, or Sequel – The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2
Worst Screen Couple – Mackenzie Foy & Taylor Lautner for The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2

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Readers around the globe have unwrapped new tablets and eReaders this holiday season. Below, we’ve included a long, long, long list of free and legal eBooks you can download right now for any device.

Explore our Project Gutenberg lists and click “read this eBook online” to sample the book without downloading anything.

If you have an iPad, iPad Mini, iPhone or iPod Touch, you can download the ePub edition. If you have a Kindle or a Kindle Fire, you need to download the Kindle edition. If you have a Nook, Sony eReader or a Kobo, you should download the ePub edition.

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The French publisher Lattes has sent “warning letters” to publishers it feels are infringing on the copyright of Fifty Shades of Grey.

The Telegraph had this quote from editorial director Laurent Laffont: ”Some of these titles, which pick up on elements of the book, are clearly parasitical … We would like those planning new releases next year to know that we are watching very closely to ensure they are not parasitical.”

Online authors should never forget that readers can travel backwards in Internet time and explore their earlier work. Author E L James scored a seven-figure book deal to publish the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy and a movie deal quickly followed.

This erotica bestseller began as a work of Twilight fan fiction called Master of the Universe, earning a massive fan fiction following years before the book deal. Most traces of this fan fiction history have been removed from the Internet. Using the Wayback Machine, we were able to take snapshots from James’ old work–getting a peek into the book’s previous incarnation as an X-rated version of the Twilight story.

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Breaking Dawn Part 2, the last installment of The Twilight Saga film franchise, has been released this week.

We’ve collected links to five free digital books that inspired Stephenie Meyer while she wrote the novels behind the movies. In an interview, Meyer (pictured, via) talked about her favorite authors. She explained:

I’ve been reading books for adults my entire life. Growing up I was an avid reader—the thicker the book, the better.  Pride and Prejudice, Gone with the Wind, The Sword of Shannara, Jane Eyre, Rebecca, etc.  I’m a huge fan of Orson Scott Card, and Jane Austen– I can’t go through a year without re-reading her stuff again.

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From The Hobbit to Harry Potter, Hollywood loves dividing popular novels into two separate films.

With the second adaptation of Stephenie Meyer‘s Breaking Dawn coming to theaters this weekend, we caught up with screenwriter Melissa Rosenberg to find out what it was like to break the novel into two pieces.

She explained in an email interview: “There was a very natural place at which to break the two books.  The second movie needed a little filling out, but the book itself offered many possibilities for that.  Because the book is all told from Bella’s point of view, things sometimes happen off the page and are related by Bella after the fact — for instance, when Jacob tells her father she’s a werewolf.  In the book, Bella finds out about this conversation after it happened, but in adapting the movie, I got to write the conversation itself.”

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A new trailer for The Host has been released. We’ve embedded the full trailer above–what do you think of the Stephenie Meyer adaptation?

Here’s more from Hollywood Crush: “In the trailer, we see the world of the future: where disembodied aliens came to Earth, overwrote everyone’s brains with their own parasitic consciousness and more or less turned the human race into a bunch of walking iPods made of meat.”

As for Meyer’s future, rumors have been swirling of more Twilight novels, a Twilight Saga film series reboot and a plethora of book projects including a sequel for The Host.

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Three publishers will drop the agency model that kept eBook prices the same across all marketplaces, and the eBook price wars have already commenced. PaidContent confirmed yesterday that HarperCollins prices have already started to change.

Last week, a federal judge approved a settlement between between Hachette Book Group, Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins and the Department of Justice. Soon eBook marketplaces can sell some digital books at a discount, reigniting the eBook price wars.

Prices on Hachette and Simon & Schuster digital books still contain the “This price was set by the publisher” tag on Amazon, but their price restrictions will also be lifted as part of the agreement. In the meantime, we took a look at the most expensive books from these publishers–a way to track the changes in agency model books.

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What happens if you read the lips of the main characters in the adaptation of Stephenie Meyer‘s Twilight?

The good folks at Bad Lip Reading have re-dubbed some scenes from the Twilight movies, replacing them with some surreal dialogue. The Twilight Saga seems like a whole different kind of romance if you read Bella and Edward’s lips instead of listening to the actual words.

Between Bella’s lip-biting and Edward’s noble frown, this funny video will get your morning off to an excellent start…

The teaser trailer for The Twilight Saga – Breaking Dawn, Part 2 has been released, giving a glimpse of Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart at the end of the vampire trilogy.

We’ve embedded the trailer above–what do you think? In five hours, the trailer has already earned 170,000 likes and more than 9,000 comments on Facebook. The film comes out November 16th.

Here’s more about the movie: “The epic love story between Bella Swan and Edward Cullen concludes in this final installment of Stephenie Meyer‘s best-selling series. DREAMGIRLS’ Bill Condon directs this second segment of the two-film adaptation.”