Photo via mike.julianne on FlickrLast summer Congress passed the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA). While well intentioned, being primarily a result of the toys being made with in China with lead paint scare that swept the country, CPSIA has potential catastrophic consequences for the book world. What's the problem? Any book printed before 1986 becomes illegal in the hands of children.Author David Niall Wilson sums it up nicely in his post, Burning Books for Consumer Safety:Under this law...very strict testing is imposed on every children’s book published before 1985 (It really did start in 1984 Mr. Orwell…right...
Digital Revisionism
I found this gem while researching a recent acquisition.This scarce antiquarian book is included in our special Legacy Reprint Series. In the interest of creating a more extensive selection of rare historical book reprints, we have chosen to reproduce this title even though it may possibly have occasional imperfections such as missing and blurred pages, missing text, poor pictures, markings, dark backgrounds and other reproduction issues beyond our control. Because this work is culturally important, we have made it available as a part of our commitment to protecting, preserving and promoting the world's literatureForget the fact that the book in...
RIP: Travel Phrasebook
The beginning of another death toll for an entire genre of book: the travel/foreign language phrasebook.See also:RIP Encyclopedias.RIP Textbooks.RIP Travel Guides (and another).RIP OED.
The Hands of Google
Asher Moses has a piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Book scans reveal Google's handiwork, which introduces us to a new, undiscovered component of the digitization process; the hand scan."Digital bookworms reading titles like the 1855 issue of The Gentleman's Magazine and Plato's The Trial and Death of Socrates have been surprised to find large chunks of some pages blocked by manicured paws clad in pink finger condoms." Rob Shilkin, Google's Australia spokesman, tells us that "in the time since we initially began our scanning, we've vastly improved our scanning technology so that a random finger is automatically brought to...
Digitization and the Bookseller
BooksnapWelcome to the next disruptive technology for the book trade.The force of commerce and the march of technology are soon to meet again at the booksellers door. The door might not be open for long but if entered correctly it might become a new source of revenue for the bookseller.Once Google's romance with the libraries is over do you think Google will stop looking for other sources of information to feed the machine?I would guess within 5 years or so Google will have cycled through the library trade and determined who they will be playing with and they will know...