Michael Lieberman

The Maine Event: Local pastors lose it when when they spot LGBTQ books in banned books display

Those of us living in the Northwest corner of the US have always had a quiet affinity with our brethren living in the Northeast corner. I think those days might be over. The unconscionable vote by Maine senator Susan Collins  to help put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court is a gamechanger. Then this story out of Rumford, Maine doesn't help either. It appears that local pastors got all bent out of shape by the LGBTQ books that were part of this display of banned books at the Rumford Public Library. So what do they want to do? They want to to ban...

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Looks like we found our new house wine

What do you get when you cross a  product design agency and a Italian winery?  The answer: Librottiglia, a newly designed set of wines featuring short stories built into their labels.  The name is derived from the Italian translations of the words book (libro) and bottle (bottiglia). The stories are printed on textured paper and are held closed by  a single piece of twine. The series kicks off with three stories, each conceptually assigned to its proper bottle. Cheers! via designboom

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Bringing Books to the Homeless Kids: One Suitcase at a Time

Credit: Photo by Christian Hansen for The New York Times Each week for the past eight years, with a suitcase stuffed with books, librarian Colbert Nembhard leaves the Morrisania Branch Library in the Bronx for a 10 minute walk to the Crotona Inn homeless shelter. Once there he turns "the shelter’s day care room or its dimly lighted office into an intimate library" and the magic begins. Mr. Nembhard goal is to encourage children to have a lifelong relationship with libraries and its' working. His program has served as the model for a citywide initiative to place small libraries at shelters for...

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A Tale of Two Cities: Amazon opens a bookstore while Indiebound adds a ‘Buy Now’ button

Photo: Sam Machkovech Here comes the next tremor in the book universe. Amazon.com, the world's largest online bookseller, has opened it's first physical bookshop! Amazon Books has opened in Seattle's University District just a few miles from Amazon headquarters. It's 5,000 square feet with a majority of the space dedicated to the almighty book. By combining new display tactics (all books are face out!),  a largely crowdsourced inventory, and a seamless ebook purchase option Amazon Books is open for business. After all the years Amazon was paving the way to sell books online, completely upending the bookselling and publishing fields in...

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