Welcome to Book Patrol's inaugural Book App Review. Here we will sample and review apps created exclusively for books or book-related themes.We kick off the series with a look at T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land for the iPad, a joint production of Faber & Faber and Touch Press.What is arguably the greatest poem of the 20th Century is now infused with the bells and whistles of what will or already has become one of the greatest technologies of the young 21st Century.Think of it as a Wikipedia entry on interactive steroids and then some. Not only do you get the...
Computer Art meets Book Art
There are some books that just stay with you.The latest book to positively haunt me ever since we acquired it is Valerie Hollister's Seven Computer Landscapes. Published in 1993 the book "combines contemporary graphic art drawn on a computer with traditional letterpress printing.""In deliberate anachronism, the nineteenth-century process that has been used to print Seven Computer Landscapes gives each image deep, velvety blacks,...and a slight tactile impression on the page."The resulting almost dot matrix vibe of the drawings transform them into an almost woodcut-like appearance. And how did Hollister, who at the time was doing larger scale realistic paintings, get...
The "Non-Traditional" Book Takes Center Stage
Today Amazon alerted the world that for the first time the sale of Kindle books has surpassed the sale of all printed books. In less than four years the electronic newcomer has taken a strong hold. The rise in e-books has "resulted in the fastest year-over-year growth rate for Amazon's U.S. books business" in over 10 years and even caught CEO Jeff Bezos by surprise who said "We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly." The announcement comes right on the heels of R. R. Bowker's release of their annual report...
We’re Off to Illustrate the Wizard; The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
Zoe Andreas Blank Pages, an arm of the London based design agency Fridge Creative, would like you to help illustrate L. Frank Baum's classic 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz', How it Works:The entire text of the book has been uploaded with blank pages interspersed throughout. When you happen upon a blank white page it is need of an illustration. Draw it up and send it off, if the editors like it you're in.Blank Pages, whose mantra is to "Give old classics a new lease of life," plans on releasing other childhood favorites into the wild to be illustrated by the...
Andy Rooney on e-books
In 2007 Andy Rooney did a segment on 60 Minutes on his visit to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. In it he reminded us that books are one of the greatest inventions of all time.Now, nearly 4 years later, Rooney weighs in on e-books and e-readers and as you might expect he isn't too impressed."I'm not interested in having my books on an electronic device. I want them in books. I want my words in books" says Rooney.Full text of segment hereAnd for those in the New York area the 2011 book fair is currently under way.