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 on Jul 13, 2008 - View this thread

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 on Jul 10, 2008 - View this thread

"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 on Jun 25, 2008 - View this thread

You're an Author? Me too! The trend of increasing authorship and decreasing readership.
posted on Apr 26, 2008 - View this thread

Bookmarks Magazine has long been one of my favorite book review periodicals because it aggregates and summarizes reviews from many sources, for example: The Children of Húrin. Recently they have opened up the back-issue archive to non-subscribers.
posted on Apr 20, 2008 - View this thread

I See Dead People's Books (wiki) is an impromptu project by LibraryThing members to catalog the libraries of famous dead people, from Tupac Shakur to Ernest Hemingway to John Adams. Many more in the works, anyone is able to create a dead library with all the attendant features of LT.
posted on Mar 14, 2008 - View this thread

Brief books are in style. "Fine, old-fashioned self-improving middlebrow literature."
posted on Mar 1, 2008 - View this thread

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?
posted on Feb 21, 2008 - View this thread

Philip M. Parker^[1][2] has written and published over 85,000 books on Amazon in the past few years, although by his own count the total published is over 200,000. He is like a writing machine - in fact, he has created a machine that churns out an original book about every 20 minutes. A few sample titles:
posted on Feb 8, 2008 - View this thread

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 on Jan 20, 2008 - View this thread

Chicago Center for Literature and Photography has some excellent book and film reviews, written by author and artist Jason Pettus. He mostly reviews contemporary fiction but has a few classics like The House of the Seven Gables, which is part of a two-year project to read 100 "classics" to see if they are really classic or not.
posted on Jan 18, 2008 - View this thread

15 Publishing Industry Trends to Watch in 2008
posted on Jan 9, 2008 - View this thread

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 on Dec 4, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Sep 6, 2007 - View this thread

BookTV.org is one the smartest shows on television. Scraping free content from author interviews at local bookstores and book fairs, its new re-designed website is long overdue, and now all content stays available in a permanent archive in case you miss the 48hr C-SPAN2 weekend marathons. Sample programs: The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, In Depth: Ray Kurzweil,"Blackwater: The Rise Of The World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army"
posted on Jul 9, 2007 - View this thread

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 on May 29, 2007 - View this thread

Stanford's new Copyright Renewal Database makes searchable the copyright renewal records of books published from 1923-1963, previously very difficult to do. Between those dates, a renewal registration was required to prevent the expiration of copyright, so books not renewed are now in the public domain. Publishing scanned books on Internet Archive.
posted on Apr 6, 2007 - View this thread

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 on Dec 24, 2006 - View this thread

The Iraq Study Group Report, annotated, an experimental project by The Institute for the Future of the Book.
posted on Dec 21, 2006 - View this thread

Microsoft releases Microsoft Live Search Books (beta), a third major project to scan public domain books behind Google books and the pioneering Archive.org. Content is pre-1927 editions of public domain works. Live Search blog has (slightly) more info and lots of general reactions pro and con.
posted on Dec 14, 2006 - View this thread

Kevin Kelly on the latest in personal book publishing advice.
posted on Dec 8, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Dec 1, 2006 - View this thread

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 on Sep 30, 2006 - View this thread

101 "Crackerjacks". The best sea books.
posted on Jul 1, 2006 - View this thread

What is the world reading? The UNESCO Index Translationum database has over 1.6 million bibliographical entries of translated works. Interesting stats such as: The worlds Top 50 translated authors. The Top 10 translated Norwegian authors (or other languages). Number of translations for any given book. Some surprising results, lots to explore, and an interesting lesson on what sells.
posted on Jun 21, 2006 - View this thread

What to read. A list of lists for book recommendations, includes a compiled "Great Books" Lists with a World Literature list and lots more.
posted on Mar 20, 2006 - View this thread

Have you ever thought "Bush should read this book". Anatomy of a meme.
posted on Feb 24, 2006 - View this thread

50 Books for Thinking About the Future Human Condition, a list by the RAND corporation.
posted on Jan 26, 2006 - View this thread

How to Read and Digest a Book.
posted on Feb 25, 2005 - View this thread