notes.husk.org. tagged books.

“ ‘Hopkins,’ I wrote of the middle-aged lecturer who is the hero, ‘Hopkins was never without a book. It wasn’t that he was particularly fond of reading; he just liked to have somewhere to look. A book makes you safe. Shows you’re not out to pick anybody up. Try it on. With a book you’re harmless. Though Hopkins was harmless without a book.’ ”

Alan Bennett, quoting his own work in Baffled at a Bookcase in the London Review of Books.

2012-01-27

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photo 20:06:05

Twelve 506 page volumes printed-on-demand, representing a scale model of our solar systemfrom the Sun to Pluto, by UK-based artist Mishka Henner.

It’s worth clicking through to see the interior pages, too. (via slavin).

2012-01-24

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quote 19:51:06

“ A library is not simply the books and the computers and the resources, but it’s actually a place where there aren’t four or five conversations going on. It’s a place where children can read and be on their own, and that’s invaluable. But they want to turn our library into some sort of retail outlet. ”

Alan Bennett, quoted in the Paris Review: Alan Bennett on ‘Smut’, by Jonathan Gharraie.

2011-07-26

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Tenby, by Russell Davies.

2011-07-25

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quote 19:13:45

“ One knows that designers seldom read, but they don’t have much knowledge of Inca civilisation either or the Puritan settlement of New England and yet they seem to cope perfectly well reproducing them. An agglomeration of books as illustrating the character of their owner seems to defeat them. ”

Alan Bennett in a piece for the LRB: Baffled at a Bookcase.

2011-05-27

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photo 03:05:06

A crane for book fetching at the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library, University of Chicago. (via Robots, Not Humans, Retrieve Your Books at $81 Million “Library of the Future” at Singularity Hub, via dv at the Daily Chump).

2010-12-07

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quote 20:52:07

“ This is literature as sustenance. And it is commonplace in San Francisco, where the average annual per capita expenditure on books is perennially among the highest in the nation. Same goes for booze — according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, San Francisco is the only city that ranks in the top three for both (New York is ninth by both measures). ”

Gregory Dicum in a post on San Francisco’s Bookstores and Readings Reflect a Lively Literary Scene for the New York Times (via).

2010-12-03

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quote 18:29:04

“ When publishers appear to love their own books so little, when they’re apparently happy to pass off a print-on-demand photocopy of a book as a full-price volume, it’s hard for the reader in turn to feel much love for these gradually disappearing objects. I want to love books, but if the publisher treats them merely as interchangeable units, where the details don’t matter so long as the bits, the “content”, is conveyed as cheaply as possible, then we may be falling out of love. ”

Falling out of love on Phil Gyford’s website (as also quoted by adactio)

2010-09-17

Kindles and bookshelves

text 00:20:00

This should probably form part of a Five Things post, but Marco’s just written about how cheap the Kindle is:

Amazon is selling a lot of these. And at that price, it’s no wonder: $140 is barely more than many iPad cases.

(It’s £110 in the UK.) Seeing that, I thought it was worth relaying this thought (I think) Chris Heathcote mentioned in passing last week:

A Kindle is cheaper than a bookshelf.

Admittedly, that’s not true if your bookshelves are the Ikea Billy (as low as £29!), but if you’re comparing it with something from, say, John Lewis? It’s about right. And forget those fancy designer shelves. That’s nearly into iPad territory.

2010-08-03

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quote 17:30:46

“ As the Kindle and Nook march on, people’s reading choices will increasingly be hidden from view. We’ll go into people’s houses or squeeze next to them on the subway, and we’ll no longer be able to know them, or judge them, or love them, or reject them, based on the books they carry. ”

Mark Oppenheimer, in Slate Magazine, in a piece titled “Judging a Girl by Her Cover”, subtitled “Why I’ll miss a world where books make the first move.”

Sure, technology hides the name of a book, but it could also bring it back. In one of his books Cory Doctorow talks about a system where cars swap tracks wirelessly; similarly (and with less worrying for old-fashioned copyright) there’s no reason why you couldn’t have a system where iPhones advertised what book a person was reading.

Of course, it’d be possible to lie, but it’s possible to do that already: if you really get ashamed of reading Dan Brown, you can wrap it in a Stephen Hawking dustjacket.

He goes on: “Worse, they will no longer be that perfect lending object.” Well, with luck, they’ll be even better: an object you can give away, maybe even using something like Phil Gyford’s proposal for pay-per-point or Lee Maguire’s threshold pledge system.

Remember: for everything we lose when we move from physical to digital, there’s something we can gain, if we just think it through.

older

notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

2012-03-16

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