It seems everywhere you turn library budgets are getting slashed. In some cases the budgetary reality it's so ugly that the management of public library services is being outsourced to private companies.But here in Seattle things are a bit different.The Seattle City Council has adopted a $2 million increase for The Seattle Public Library’s 2008 materials budget.They already know that libraries matter. In 1998 the citizens of Seattle voted overwhelmingly for the "Libraries for All" bond measure, a $196.4 million infusion to build new, and remodel existing, branches citywide. This is where the money for the Rem Koolhauss designed Central...
Another Amazon Innovation: Free Content For a Fee
As the media shower for Kindle enters its second day the blogosphere remains saturated with Kindle related posts.Forget the design, forget the compatibility issues, forget the price tag, the glaring day after issue is the potential copyright problems around the Kindle offering paid subscriptions to blogs that are otherwise available to all for free on the internet.I emailed Ron Hogan of GalleyCat fame after I realized that he was unaware that GalleyCat was available as a Kindle blog subscription for $1.99 a month. In a post yesterday he was relating author Seth Godin's experience with Amazon and Godin's decision not...
Roller Derby Hits the Books
Roller Derby is back and its packing a literary punch.My friend and fellow bookseller Charles Seluzicki took in a match in Portland last week and shares this:Anyone who has ever seen a women's flat track roller derby game knows the mixture of high camp theatricality and hypnotic sport. It is the last place you would think of in terms of literature and books. But scrolling through the on-line register of roller derby names reveals a recent trend in names that reference books and literature. These derby identities function as both acts of hommage and in-your-face persona of fun-loving menace.The following...
Kindlemania Begins, Some Expect a Short Run
Amazon has officially thrown it's hat in the e-book reader market with the release of Kindle, a $399 wi-fi enabled, keyboard equipped, design-needy, proprietary e-book reader.Will this be the device that catapults e-books into the mainstream?Some are not so sure.In his piece at Information Week Amazon Planning E-book Debacle Thomas Claburn flat out pans the Kindle calling the design "a thing of unsurpassed ugliness." and its "failure to learn any lessons from the iPhone will be its doom."David Rothman at TeleRead says the real problem is, and I agree, in the proprietary format or the "F word" as Rothman calls...
Shelf + Books =
The "Equation Bookshelf is a simple idea to divide things in priority order... put together the books that you need immediately or more important between(parentheses)! Set others between [square brackets] and {braces}."Created by the Brazilian design firm Estudio BrederThanks to Lu Terceiro for the lead