An app for Chaucer with an assist from Monty Python’s Terry Jones February 4, 2020 – Posted in: Books and Technology, Content, Libraries

An international team led by the University of Saskatchewan’s Peter Robinson has created the first web and mobile phone app of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. It features an audio performance of the General Prologue along with the digitized version of the original manuscript. While listening to the reading you can access supporting content such as a translation in modern English, commentary, notes and vocabulary explaining Middle English words used by Chaucer. “We have become convinced,…

Bookseller Revolt: Independents Vacate Abebooks in Solidarity November 6, 2018 – Posted in: Books and Technology, Bookselling / Collecting, bookshops, Content

Banned Booksellers Week has begun with a bang. David Streitfeld’s piece in the New York Times has kicked off what some hope will be a defining moment in the history of online bookselling. For the week of November 5 to 11, 2018, booksellers around the world will remove their inventory from Abebooks, an Amazon company, in a show of support for their brethren in South Korea, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Russia who were told they…

Robot Poetry October 25, 2018 – Posted in: Books and Technology, Content

The sun is shining The wind moves Naked trees You dance The poem above was written by a robot. The kicker is not that a robot created the poem but that it was constructed based on the image! That’s right. Auto-generated poetry based on an image. It’s one of the latest discoveries to come out of Microsoft Research Asia where a pair of Microsoft researches teamed up with a pair of professors at…

A Font to Remember October 8, 2018 – Posted in: Books and Technology

It is called Sans Forgetica. Developed by a group of psychology and design researchers at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia Sans Forgetica has one goal in mind – to help you remember what you read. It is “believed to be the world’s first typeface specifically designed to help people retain more information and remember more of typed study notes.” The cleverly named font is based on the theory called “desirable difficulty,” which suggests that people remember…

A Tale of Two Cities: Amazon opens a bookstore while Indiebound adds a ‘Buy Now’ button November 4, 2015 – Posted in: books, Books and Technology, Bookselling / Collecting, bookshops, Content

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…

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