A new kind of book has been created in Holland, where its sold over 1m copies since it came out in 2009. Now finding its way to England, called the "flipback", the pages are super thin Bible paper with a special lay-flat spine and small format, making it suitable for reading with one hand, thumb page-flips, and shirt pocket storage.
posted by stbalbach
on Mar 21, 2011 -
63 comments
Take a stand for permanent paper. "Eight years ago we started to notice the shift in buying patterns from free-sheet Permanent Paper to groundwood paper for hardcover books. Groundwood is the type of paper used in newspapers and mass market paperbacks, and its production is such that it is much lower-quality and degrades more quickly than traditional book publishing paper."
What makes a book permanent? [more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Jun 1, 2010 -
56 comments
Harvard University finished in 1986 construction of the
Harvard Depository, a mysterious storage facility in a publicly undisclosed location 30 miles from campus where large tracts of land are less expensive than in Cambridge. While the facility was originally intended to store Harvard's least-used volumes, it is now home to 45 percent of Harvard's collections. David Lamberth, chair of the Library Implementation Work Group, calls it a "precise warehouse" for which the term "library" would prove inaccurate.
posted by stbalbach
on Apr 2, 2010 -
45 comments
The Worlds Best Books (1909),
One Hundred Best Books (1916),
One Thousand Books for a Village Library (1895),
The Book Lover, a Guide to the Best Reading (1889),
The Choice of Books (1905),
A Thousand of the Best Novels (1919),
Comfort Found in Good Old Books (1911),
A Guide to the Best Historical Novels (1911),
A Guide to Historical Fiction (1914), and
lots more..
posted by stbalbach
on Jul 13, 2008 -
15 comments
Salman Rushdie is now
officially the Booker Prize's best-author. Rushdie's 1981 novel
Midnight's Children was
named Thursday as the greatest-ever winner of Britain's most prestigious literary award, in celebration of the prizes 40th anniversary. The only other time this award was given, on the 25th anniversary in 1993,
Midnight's Children also won.
posted by stbalbach
on Jul 10, 2008 -
33 comments
"For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but everyone agrees that most books weren't renewed. If true, that means that
the majority of U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963 are freely usable." How do you know? The renewal copyright records have traditionally been scattered and hard to access, but Google - with the help of Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly typed in every word - has just released a single database as a
freely downloadable XML file.
posted by stbalbach
on Jun 25, 2008 -
54 comments
Borders and Lulu.com have teamed up to create
Border's Lifestyle, a new service allowing anyone to design and publish their own book and have it distributed through Borders stores, even including your own book tour and in-store readings. Is it, according to Ben Vershbow of
if:book, "bringing vanity publishing to a whole new level of fantasy role-playing,"
1 or a real innovation in book distribution, bypassing the professional gatekeepers?
[more inside]
posted by stbalbach
on Feb 21, 2008 -
35 comments
Book Scavenging. Hundreds of homeless people eke out a living scavenging books from dumpsters and sidewalk trash in Manhattan.
Sidewalk is a book about the subculture of sidewalk book scavengers and vendors.
posted by stbalbach
on Jan 20, 2008 -
52 comments
An obscure 1911 British law requires a copy of every published book, journal, newspaper, patent, sound recording, magazine etc.. to be permanently archived in at least one of five libraries around the country. The British Library has the most complete collection and is currently adding about 12.5km of new shelf space a year of mostly unheard of and unwanted stuff. A
new state-of-the-art warehouse is being constructed with 262 linear kilometers of high-density, fully automated storage in a low-oxygen temperature controlled environment. It is not a library, it is a warehouse for "things that no one wants." BLDG Blog
ponders on what it all means.
posted by stbalbach
on Dec 4, 2007 -
60 comments
Google Books has an interesting new feature called
"Popular Passages" which shows how many future books have quoted passages from the present book - it's billed as a way to follow
literary memes but would be equally helpful in sleuthing for
old literary crimes. They've also added
"Share and Enjoy" for clipping quotes from public domain books into a blog or notebook.
posted by stbalbach
on Sep 6, 2007 -
17 comments
It's a
sad old story but the reading of literature continues to decline.
Prospero's Books - a Kansas-city used bookstore - is so desperate to thin out its collection it has started to burn books. Co-owner Tom Wayne says he is unable to sell many of his
thousands of books, or even to give them away to libraries and thrift stores, so he started a pyre in protest.
posted by stbalbach
on May 29, 2007 -
66 comments
Dead Plagiarists Society. Using Google Books to uncover old (and recent) literary crimes. "Given the popularity of plagiarism-seeking software services for academics, it may be only a matter of time before some enterprising scholar yokes Google Book Search and plagiarism-detection software together into a massive literary dragnet, scooping out hundreds of years' worth of plagiarists—giants and forgotten hacks alike—who have all escaped detection until now."
posted by stbalbach
on Dec 24, 2006 -
43 comments
Conventional wisdom says that new media -- Internet, cable television, satellite radio, videogames -- is competing with books, putting them at long-term risk if not decline. "The conventional wisdom is wrong".
Special report from Forbes.
posted by stbalbach
on Dec 1, 2006 -
38 comments
The Espresso Book Machine. A
photocopier-size machine that can print and bind a paperback in a few minutes. This is the first fully-automatic book printer designed for retail locations, it is envisioned to be a kiosk. Current beta tests
in DC and New York Public Library, also in talks with the Internet Archive and others to support the growing world of online scanned books. Further out, Kinkos, Starbucks, etc.. could become major book sellers and the practice of overstocking (and discounted books) could be reduced. Machine will probably be about $100,000.
posted by stbalbach
on Sep 30, 2006 -
36 comments
