“Maintain The Balance of Your Knowledge!” by Denis OhForget functionality this is a bookshelf with some interactive potential. Put this one up in your living room and invite your friends over or simply enjoy a book balancing evening alone.What you put on it determines how it will look.Think of all the possibilities?How many books of poetry would it take to balance out War and Peace?The book you are currently reading on one side with your e-reader and the e-book version on the other.Your 5 favorite books vs. your 5 least favorite.It could turn into a long night.Thanks to the Bookshelf...
Books as a War Casualty
"I wouldn’t be telling you anything new by declaring that wars create many casualties. Wars kill and amputate humans. This is a vérité de la palice. But there are other casualties: books stand first in line among them." Mai Ghoussoub in the introduction to her play "Texterminators"She goes on:Literature is inseparable today from the books that carry their stories. If we want to save literature we have to save the rectangular objects that carry and spread their words. We have to respect the book for what it is: an art object that we should defend, defend against censors, narrow-minded educators...
Fantastical Change and Ray Kurzweil
"The fact that we already have virtual robots standing in for retail clerks, and cell phones that read out loud, is evidence that the world is about to chance in even more fantastical ways"- From Gary Wolf's illuminating piece on futurist and singularity guru Ray Kurzweil in the April 2008 issue of Wired.How does Kurzweil fit into the book world? He is basically the godfather of digitization; his inventions include the first omni-font optical character recognition (a computer program capable of recognizing text printed in any normal font), the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first flat-bed scanner,...
Vendor Satisfaction and Online Bookselling
Last week Which?, a Consumer Reports type organization in the United Kingdom, released the results of a survey focusing on customer satisfaction as it relates to online shopping for entertainment products.Abebooks UK lead the field with a rating of "89% for overall satisfaction and were praised for how easy it was to find products on their site." The sample size for AbeBooks was pretty slight at 89 respondents where Amazon UK had 2812 and, the other company that shared the top spot with AbeBooks, Play.com had 416 respondents. Categories included Price, Availability, Delivery and Returns.I would love to see someone...
The Annoying Bookstore Contingent
Over at Bookgasm Rod Lott has posted his list of "The 9 Most Annoying People I Always See at the Bookstore.""I think the real reason behind the booksellers' declining fortunes is due to the people who crap in their public bathrooms. And who sit on the floor in the sci-fi section. And who go there to "study." says Lott.The 9 offenders are:Coffee DrinkersDumpersOverly Eager EmployeesFirst-TimersAisle SittersCouch SittersStudy GroupsHalitosis Checkout GuyOl' WhistlenoseLott deals with each of these in depth.I would add a few others:The Cell Phoners- People who have no clue that their private life is of little interest to fellow...