Michael Lieberman

The "Non-Traditional" Book Takes Center Stage

 Today Amazon alerted the world that for the first time the sale of Kindle books has surpassed the sale of all printed books. In less than four years the electronic newcomer has taken a strong hold. The rise in e-books has "resulted in the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon's U.S. books business" in over 10 years and even caught CEO Jeff Bezos by surprise who said "We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly." The announcement  comes right on the heels of  R. R. Bowker's release of their annual report...

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British Library set to leave this world

It's Sci-Fi time at the British Library. The long-awaited, and destined to be a classic, exhibit Out of this World: Science Fiction but not as you know it, opens on Friday."This new exhibition will invite visitors to enter the world of the future, alien worlds, parallel worlds and virtual worlds, and speculate on how our universe might change. These imaginings can provoke hopes and dreams, exhilaration or fear – and shed light on the time and place in which they were created. We hope to encourage visitors' questions such as: 'Is there such a thing as a perfect world?' 'When...

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The Beauty of Folded Corners: "Dog Ear" by Erica Baum

 For the book collector a dog-ear has a nasty bite, its presence as Kenneth Goldsmith points out in his introductory essay "even when smoothed out and returned to its upright position, scars the page forever."But for Erica Baum the dog-ear opens up new possibilities for engaging with the text. For the Dog Ear series Baum carefully dog-eared pages of mass market paperbacks and then photographed them. The diagonal line becomes not only the chosen method of saving one's place but also the jumping off point. The line begets new lines and ultimately new meaning. Published by Ugly Duckling Presse Dog...

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