Book Light. A Shining Example from Grathio Labs December 7, 2013 – Posted in: Books and Technology, books in design

Here’s some DIY magic from Grathio Labs. Now you too can learn how to turn a old book into a bedside lamp. “It turns off when its closed and gives off a variable amount of light depending on how far you open it, up to about a 40W light equivalent. It gives a nice warm, soft light and it looks right at home on my bedside table.” says Steve Hoefer, the man behind Garthio Labs. The…

A Headboard for Bibliophiles: DIY October 31, 2012

Now this is a project that might get me to buy a hammer! A step by step visual guide to building your very own book headboard. Thanks to Design Every Day one can now accomplish this in 9 easy steps. Man, just think of the possibilities. A smaller version for the kids with covers of Dr. Seuss books or a headboard with only illustrations. And the visual poets will have a field day. Hmm, perhaps a contest for the…

The ‘Little Library’ in the Big Picture June 1, 2012

OK everyone, put on your long read hat and settle in. Shannon Mattern has a must read essay on the Design Observer blog Places titled Marginalia: Little Libraries in the Urban Margins. In it she looks at the recent rise of the mini, pop-up, guerrilla and ad-hoc library and tries “to figure out where they’re coming from, how they relate to existing institutions that perform similar roles, and what impact they’re having on their communities.” “Nowadays…

That Didn’t Take Long: The DIY iPad Book Cover April 15, 2010

Looking for an inexpensive book-friendly way to hide and protect you new iPad? Welcome to the iBook. For $10 and a little time you can learn to cover your iPad with a book. Here are the reasons that propelled the creator of iBook: – Didn’t want to drop $40 for Apple’s iPad case – iPad back scratches easily, I hate to rest it naked on the table – I feel like a pretentious bastard using…

Book Flipping Scanning March 17, 2010

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…