viaNow that Amazon has swallowed up Goodreads it's safe to say most roads from the book social network universe now end in Seattle. With the exception of LibraryThing the rest are now wholly owned subsidiaries of the e-commerce giant.The only road left not ending in the Emerald City goes through Portland, Maine. Though Amazon, through their acquisition of ABE books in 2008, owns a minority interest, there is still plenty of independent light emanating from Tim Spalding and the LibraryThing crew.It was late in 2007 when I first started covering the then emerging book social network field. Being a bookseller, living in...
A book without trees: Introducing "Straw Editions" from Canopy
Alert - There were no trees used in the making of this bookRepeat - There were no trees used in the making of this book.Canopy is a Canadian non-profit environmental group with a vital mission: protecting the world’s forests, species and climate.As they remind us:Much of the forests logged in North America wind up in paper, so in 1999 we started out with a focus on the world’s biggest paper buyers. Today we work with hundreds of the forest industry’s consumers to help shape their purchasing policies for a variety of forest products, and provide them with the knowledge they need...
The Robo-Librarian
Trust the machine - Samantha WeberSeattle's Evening Magazine visited the King County Public Library distribution center to profile the "Tin Man," the largest book-sorting machine in the country and the humans that feed it.The monster is half the size of a football field and processes between 38-45,000 books a day.Its job is to Sort-Scan-Plop, Sort-Scan-Plop all day long.Interesting tidbit - aside from the King County Library system having the largest book-sorting operation for physical books they also lend more ebooks than any other library system in the country!And as an...
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Search Lights
Filament Mind is the brilliant installation that graces the new Teton County Library in Wyoming.It is a real-time visual rendering of the "collective curiosities and questions of Wyoming library patrons". It is composed of over 5 miles of fiber optic cables and has 44 LED illuminators that connect the visual data to 904 text labels with each fiber optic cable corresponding to a Dewey Decimal call number! The 1,000 categories represented by the Dewey Decimal call numbers are displayed on the north and south walls.Here's how it works:When a search is performed by a library patron, the Dewey Decimal call numbers of...