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In 1993 Douglas Adams, the world-renowned author of The Hitchhikers Guide of the Galaxy, recorded a short piece of audio for his US publisher of the time – Bob Stein of Voyager Expanded Books. Who would know how prophetic his words would sound nearly twenty years later, and how accurate his sense of the evolution of the book was.
In this short recording, Douglas Adams charts the evolution of the book from the ‘hardware problems’ of writing on rocks, to scrolls, to the bound book and finally the silicon chip. The animation to go along with it was created as part of the International Douglas Adams Animation Competition.
From
The Literary Platform
Our friends at AbeBooks.com are giving book collectors (or anyone with the slightest interest in book collecting) a chance to win a signed copy of Collected Books: The Guide to Identification and Values by Allen & Patricia Ahearn.
The book, now in it's fourth edition, is a fantastic reference for over 20,000 titles explaining publication dates, issue points, print runs, number of volumes and other vital bibliographic data.
AbeBooks is giving away one signed copy of the 2011 edition Collected Books. If you want to enter simply email [email protected] and tell them about the most prized first edition in your book collection. In the entry explain why the book is so special and describe its condition. AbeBooks say they may use this information in a feature highlighting first editions.
As usual don′t forget to include your name, hometown and state or province in the email, and include "First editions" in the subject line. It appears the contest is only open to US and Canadian residents and ends August 31, 2011. The winner will be selected in a random draw (the odds of being drawn are dependent upon the number of eligible entries received) and will have to answer a skill-testing question.
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By: Scott Laming,
on 5/26/2011
Blog:
Bookfinder.com Journal
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Apparently the future is now and it's library is the University of Chicago’s new Joe and Rika Mansueto Library. You enter into a 8,000 square foot dome called the Grand Reading Room, which is nicely lit and contains a vast number of tables with chairs and computer terminals. The thing you won't find in this dome are bookshelves.
The books themselves are housed in an underground storage facility located directly beneath the dome, and when you want to pull one of the 3.5 million books you just make a request on your computer terminal and a computer activated robotic crane pulls the book and sends it up to the circulation desk. The whole process apparently takes about five minutes, which should give you enough time to get up and walk to the circulation desk. The same crane system re-shelves the book when you are finished with it too.
There are a few more details as well as a neat video showing some of the underground storage in this article from Singularity Hub
When it's a BookBook. Hide your laptop inside this bookish carrying case. Be the envy of the next book fair.
They look REALLY cool, but they're not cheap. I'm betting you could make one of these out of an old tattered hardback without too much trouble, which would also be good if you have a PC laptop.
I had someone point me towards this on the Fast Company blog today...
or at least this one is (Via BookNinja)
Check out this great photo tour of some of the worlds most visually appealing bookstores. I think my favorite might be the El Ateneo in Buenos Aires, which was converted from a Theater. (via. Quilblog)
[Now reading: The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett]
I’m pretty interested in German used and rare bookselling market. It has one of the most developed ecosystem outside of the Anglophone market, and looking at what’s happening offers a great set of data points to understand where our industry’s at. I was excited to came across a number of great stories covering the space in boersenblatt.net, a German book trade magazine. Here are some of the pieces I found.
(All of these articles are in German. To translate them, use Google’s handy 1-click translate bookmarklet. For English, you can drag this link to your browser toolbar —> View in English. Then click the button whenever you want to see a page in English.)
Year in review:
ZVAB:
AbeBooks:
eBay:
Smaller marketplaces and services:
Law:
I used to be a big fan of Holt Uncensored, an email newsletter on publishing and independent bookselling written by former San Francisco Chronicle book editor Pat Holt. For years, she was one of the very few voices really telling it like it is. After a long gap, I’m happy to see Holt Uncensored return in blog form.
[Now Reading: Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow]
I just heard about the arrest of three Ohio thieves who stole two rare books from the Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library, including a copy of the rare Maxwell’s Code, the first major legal code for the Northwest Territory:
“McCarty and Bays visited the library on June 27 and asked to see the Laws of the Territory of the United States North West of the Ohio, also known as the Maxwell Code…McCarty eventually was seen leaving the women’s restroom with the books and was confronted by a staff member. The couple left and the employee recovered what he thought were both books. It wasn’t until early September that staff members discovered that the Freeman Code, a 32-page pamphlet, had been removed from its cover…On Aug. 25, Scranton visited the library and asked to see the Maxwell Code. He was unable to provide identification, but he agreed to turn over his backpack as collateral. When library staffers were distracted by other business, Scranton fled with the book. The backpack was found to be stuffed with paper towels…Investigators said McCarty sold the Freeman Code to a collector in England for $35,000 through a rare-book dealer in Philadelphia. He told the dealer he also had a copy of the Maxwell Code.”
Yecch. McCarty was apparently also convicted for forging a check stolen from Textbooksrus.com. Apparently it’s not clear whether the books have been recovered.
Read the whole story.
Just came across this—a nearby library system is setting up the Library-A-Go-Go, an automated library book lending system at the Pittsburg/Bay Point BART train station.
“A vending-like machine located at the station will hold some 400 books that can be checked out for free by anyone with a valid Contra Costa County library card. A patron will insert the card, get access to the available titles and check out up to three books. A robotic arm will retrieve the books. They must be returned to the book-lending machine within three weeks. The public will have access to the machine during BART’s normal hours of operation. The stock will include both fiction and nonfiction titles.” (BART press release)
More details from the Contra Costa Times…
I just finished reading local graphic novelist Jason Shiga’s Bookhunter, a noirish 1970s library action-detective story loosely based on an actual high-profile 1996 rare book theft. While Bookhunter works best in print, Shiga also makes it available to read online, either via a page-at-a-time interface, or as a single long page (best for high-bandwidth users).
The Stranger book editor Paul Constant writes about a somewhat less interesting brand of book thief in his article “Flying Off the Shelves: The Pleasures and Perils of Chasing Book Thieves”, based on his encounters with book thieves while working in Seattle independent bookstores:
“In my eight years working at an independent bookstore, I lost count of how many shoplifters I chased through the streets of Seattle while shouting ‘Drop the book!’ I chased them down crowded pedestrian plazas in the afternoon, I chased them through alleys at night, I even chased one into a train tunnel. I chased a book thief to the waterfront, where he shouted, ‘Here are your fucking books!’ and threw a half-dozen paperbacks, including Bomb the Suburbs and A People’s History of the United States, into Puget Sound, preferring to watch them slowly sink into the muck rather than hand them back to the bookseller they were stolen from. He had that ferocious, orgasmic gleam in his eye of somebody who was living in the climax of his own movie: I suppose he felt like he was liberating them somehow.”
Chris over at Book Hunter’s Holiday recently put together an interesting, chatty, series of blog posts on “Introducing Antiquarian Books to the Newcomer,” addressing several interrelated topics:
[Now reading Sarai Reader 05: Bare Acts published by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies’ Sarai Media Lab]
BuzzFeed is running a roundup of stories about innovative bookshelf design.
I’ve been keeping an eye on alternashelves ever since a friend bought a love seat with book storage built in (sort of like this); it was a minor revelation that shelving didn’t always need to look like, well, shelving.
Maybe they’re not as exciting as the flexitubes or the brace case, but I’m mostly lusting after more-efficient-than-pretty solutions like ceiling bookshelves, or maybe a couple of Sapien bookcases I can use to clean up those piles of books around the house.
So little space, so many books…
I just ran across an amazing Ask MetaFilter thread, where hundreds of users answer the question “What single book is the best introduction to your field for lay people?”
Respondents answer with solid introductory reading recommendation on a wide variety of topics, including firefighting, typography, law, biology, journalism, parenting, crime investigation, homebrewing, graphic design, lexicography, and more. Very highly recommended.
Most online booksellers go way beyond the call of duty to provide great customer service. But once in a while, that’s just not enough.
Steve Weber’s got a great blog post about some of his most frustrating customer experiences; readers offer a dozen more anonymously-contributed stories in the comments, some cringe-inducing, others laugh-out-loud funny.
I’d have guessed I was the only Indian-American bibliophile named Chatterjee living in Berkeley, California, haunting libraries and bookstores, reading voraciously, eschewing parties for the love of good books, and going online to meet new people. Apparently I was wrong.
I just discovered “The Boy Who Was Better Than Books”,
a fun piece on bibliophile love in last Sunday’s San Francisco Chronicle, by a local writer named Pia Chatterjee (no relation):
“I was 16 when I discovered that in most instances, I preferred books to boys. My epiphany occurred at a teenagers’ party at the local country club, where the area around the pool had been decorated to resemble a disco. Silver balloons floated around the ceiling and the music system played ‘Red, Red Wine.’ My friend was out there on the blue tiles, having fun. Why couldn’t I? ‘I wish I were home with The Mill on the Floss,’ I thought, and was appalled at my lack of coolness.” [more]
(Pia sounds like my female twin. If you’re reading this, drop me a line — I’d love to meet up sometime.)
[Now Reading: The Point of Return by Siddhartha Deb]
I was at a Michael Chabon reading this weekend, and got to talking to the guy ahead of me in line about the ups and downs of author inscriptions. (It turned out that he was a collector, and a 9-year BookFinder.com user.)
Charlie pointed me to a MetaFilter post about inscriptions this morning. Interesting reading, particularly the authors’ stories.
Also via MetaFilter…
I’m been enjoying the Judge a Book by its Cover weblog, devoted to the relentlessly mocking of bad book covers. It often goes for easy targets (mass market paperback genre fiction), but the results had me laughing out loud in the BookFinder.com office.
A MetaFilter thread on stuff found in books, from bacon to love letters…
[Now reading Theatre of the Streets: The Jane Natya Manch Experience by Sudhanva Deshpande (ed.)]
In the news:
From the blogs:
Websites of interest:
From the extended family:
The Los Angeles Times recently ran an article on the state of independent booksellers in the San Francisco Bay Area, “Bookshops’ latest sad plot twist”. The dispiriting story hits on all the high-profile low points: the closure of Cody’s Berkeley, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books, and Wessex Books, and the financial pressures on Black Oak Books (another local fave of mine). Reading “Save The Bookstore, Save The Community” at Booksquare left me further depressed.
I was at the AbeBooks Seller Summit on Monday, where I met Alan Beatts, founder of Borderlands Books, one of the trio of local San Francisco Bay Area science fiction bookstores. (Myself, I pledge allegiance to The Other Change of Hobbit, right across the street from BookFinder.com’s office.) Alan’s on the board of the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association; as we talked about the local bookselling scene, he kept mentioning details that surprised me. For example, reading the LA Times article on high profile local closures, I wouldn’t have expected that the NCIBA would be seeing new bookstores opening faster than those closing, for a net increase in independent Bay Area bookstores over the past year. I wouldn’t call Alan an optimist (check out the dire predictions he made in an interview last year), but it’s interesting seeing a more measured take in the midst of all the doom and gloom.
I don’t follow the independent brick and mortar bookstore market very closely (except as a customer). Anecdotes aside, what’s really going on out there?
I’m still enjoying Joyce Godsey’s Literary Stamps weblog. Some recent new entries:
[Now reading The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins]
On independent bookselling in the US:
Bookseller blogs I’ve been reading:
[Now reading Getting There by Manjula Padmanabhan]
I’m always fascinated by the criteria people use to decide how to obtain a book. (Buy or borrow? If buying, then new or used? Locally or online? From chains or indies?)
Scot McKnight, an American Christian author associated with the Emerging church movement, posts about this question on his blog, Jesus Creed. He buys most of his books new, both locally and online, but has no compunctions about buying used online (other than not buying advance reading copies).
His readers offer some interesting commentary:
- buying used is resource-conscious
- one reader buys Christian authors new, non-Christian and anti-Christian authors used
- another experiments with used books, buys books from known authors new
- authors may receive some royalties on remaindered books
They also debate the ethics of proofs and ARCs, suggesting that stamping “not for sale” on a book is counter to the right of first sale and analogous to software DRM, while discussing the role of the collectors’ market.
Read the full discussion…
[Now reading The In-Between World of Vikram Lall by M. G. Vassanji]
