We are all well aware by now of how the internet and online bookselling has forever altered the trade. For many of the new players the book has become the latest commodity with all its cultural and material attributes having been stripped away. We are left with a torrent of cheap books.One of leaders in this new space is Thrift Books, an online only bookseller based in Auburn, Washington which, ironically enough, is in Amazon's backyard. They claim to be the "nation’s largest online seller of used books."Thrift Books has just issued a press release celebrating the selling of their...
Book Flipping Scanning
No, this not a new Olympic sport for librarians. It is the latest prototype from the lab of Masatoshi Ishikawa, a professor at the University of Tokyo.They're calling the process 'book flipping scanning'. It allows one to scan a book by simply flipping its pages in front of a a high-speed camera. Currently, it can digitize a 200-page book in a minute.Here's the details, courtesy of the robotics blog of IEEE Spectrum:The camera operates at 500 frames per second, with a resolution of 1280 by 1024 pixels. For each frame, the system alternates between two capture modes. First it shines...
Hello, my name is…Help for the linguistically challenged
Aleksandr Isayevich SolzhenitsynGrowing up in Brooklyn in the 1960's has had its advantages for sure but one of the major side effects are the linguistic challenges one faces as they head into the world with a Brooklyn accent. There remain some author's names to this day I have trouble pronouncing.Enter TeachingBooks.com's Author Pronunciation Guide.Here you can can listen to brief recordings of authors and illustrators introducing themselves. Each begins with "Hello my name is..." There are hundreds of author's and illustrators in the database.In addition to learning "correct pronunciations of hard-to-pronounce names" one also gets to hear the authors reveal...
Is the Rare Book World Ready For a Fully Interactive Catalog on CD? Part Two
Yesterday, I discussed the severe limitations of digital catalogs as PDF files integrating Flash animation. What might a fully interactive digital rare book catalog look like?Insert a new model digital catalog CD into your lap or desktop machine, click on the icon and open it. First thing you’ll notice is that it is full-screen with no wasted real estate surrounding it, content sized to a screen, not shoe-horned to fit onto a standard-sized 8 x 11 leaf of paper. You can read the text without need to zoom in.Click the mouse to move pages forward or backward. Click fast or...
Is the Rare Book World Ready For a Fully Interactive Digital Catalog?
Early last year I received a rare book catalog on a CD. I thought: This is it, someone has finally taken full advantage of the technical and design possibilities, broken with the past and stepped into the future.Alas, it was the dealer’s print catalog mounted as a PDF. PDF files are monstrously heavy to send via email attachment and can take time to download. Hence, its snail-mail delivery on disk.Last week, one our colleagues in the trade, Chris Lowenstein of Book Hunter’s Holiday, issued her first print catalog. It is a handsome, lovingly produced and designed work, and everyone who...