Can We Heal?2000Steel4.5 x 10 x 5 feetA 5 -page hinged steel book born out of Goldner's trip to Poland and the Ukraine to visit her grandparent's birthplace. The work contains the phrase "Can we heal from the wounds of our tortured history? Lithuanians, Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews, Everyone." in both Lithuanian and English. The piece lives in Europas Parkas an amazing outdoor sculpture museum in Lithuania.She also has a series of small scale steel books that "have pages that are hinged together and movable; the pages read independently--but also as an overall image when the book is closed."Also of...
Abebooks Goes Live With Deceptive Bookseller Rating System
Leave it to Abebooks to come up with yet another way to alienate the core group of booksellers that their company was built on.I blogged about this rating system and it's utter disregard for the integrity of bookselling while it was in beta mode.Here is a snippet:AbeBooks is working on a rating system for booksellers based on the star rating systems that appear at other online marketplaces. Unfortunately, this bookseller rating system has nothing to do with bookselling and everything to do with order fulfillment. The amount of stars you earn is based exclusively on your order fulfillment percentage. Nothing...
Handless Reading Contraption
"The new Levo Book Holder takes the stress and strain out of having to hold your book, creating a more comfortable and relaxing reading time...now anyone can enjoy reading hands-free with perfect posture while sitting or reclining." Levo Book Holder Features: Straps: The book straps firmly to the bookboard in less than a minute. Tilt: The bookboard tilts 360 degrees and can hold a book overhead while you read in bed. Yaw: Move your book closer or further while keeping it perpendicular to your line of vision. Telescope Raise your book as high as 51 inches or lower it to...
Iraqi State Library Under Siege. U.S. Forces Condone Takeover
Iraqi security forces have overtaken the state library. 20 Iraqi troops "seized the building at gunpoint yesterday, threatening staff and guards.""The reckless actions of the Iraqi forces and the US military, who appear to condone the operation, will put the staff and library and archival collections in real danger," said Saad Eskander who has run the library since 2003."They have turned our national archive into a military target...tomorrow or the day after, the extremists will attack the Iraqi forces there." says Eskander.The forces are occupying the building "to defend Shia worshippers heading to the shrine of Khadimiya, about 15 miles...
Textbook Trauma
It is arguably the biggest sin of the deeply flawed world of publishing. Year in and year out students are charged exorbitant prices for the textbooks that they have to have. With the average shelf life of a textbook being 2 years the publishers have a built in dependency that borders on criminal. The schools and universities are not, like the students, innocent victims. They are complicit in this madness.If the open access movement or the digitization crowd ever needed something to rally around the textbook trade would be the place to start.The advent of buying used books online has...