Book Patrol is pleased to publish this review written by fellow bookseller Lynn Wienck of The Chisholm Trail BookstoreDarkNet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation by J. D. Lasica is an analysis of the blur in copyright laws as they pertain to media and the intrusion and influence of World Wide Web. The author's focus is principally on film; however, he leaps freely from movies to books and music and back again. Musicians, film makers, writers use a mix of many works, most of which are subject to copyright laws. The discussion covers what is black, white, gray, what is...
Books To Be Desired: Penelope Umbrico’s Private Residence
How many unsolicited home improvement magazines arrive in your mailbox?I would guess these companies have figured out how many one home should receive to maintain the cultural desire needed for them to succeed; just enough to keep you thinking that your lacking something or in need of something.In Private Residence Umbirico re-photographs selected details of the images contained in these magazines to explore the "fictional narratives found in the images of idealized rooms," she is interested in "how corporations construct publicly accessible “private” spaces in media - and how this works to produce desire, and the illusion of control, agency...
The Libraries of Power
"Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power" says Harriet Rubin in her New York Times piece C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success.Some article highlights:-Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist extraordinaire, whose wife calls him "the Imelda Marcos of books."-Nike's Phil Knight's mysterious library which exists in "a room behind his formal office" and one that few people have access to.-Apple's Steve Jobs fancied William Blake.-Dee Hock, the man who founded Visa, has a 2000 square foot library in his home and who has "on his library table for daily consulting, Omar Khayyam’s Rubáiyát the Persian poem that warns of...
The Interior Designer and the Bookseller
There was a short post yesterday in the Good Questions section of the Apartment Therapy New York website titled How To Start a Book Collection?The post was from an interior designer whose client has a new apartment with a lot of bookshelves and no books. There were already over 100 comments to the article when I came upon it and most were less than the kind.Their goal: A book collection that is "based on his taste, but also be a great collection of classics and aesthetically as pleasing as the work that's gone into the rest of the apartment."A fair...
Another Amazon Outgrowth: The Penny Pinchers
It is no secret that Amazon and has single-handedly corrupted the entire bookselling industry.We have lost 50% of our open bookshops since the birth of online booksellingand it almost impossible for the 50% who are left to be price competitive.Interestingly enough, while the number of open bookshops have been cut in half the amount of people calling themselves booksellers has skyrocketed.Within this tornado little cottage industries have popped up trying to capitalize on the Amazon effect.There is the whole Scoutpal culture where a PDA device and the Amazon database combine to remove much of human element from handling and pricing...