2327 posts tagged with books.
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Existing printers are at or near capacity
"Colorado publishers have experienced double digit year-on-year rises in printing and delivery costs, with the sharpest increases in the past two years. This has been exacerbated by decreasing supply of printing options across Colorado. The state’s unique geography, with mountain passes closed over the winter, and distance from printers decrease the affordable options available to many publishers." A white paper on the future of printing from the Colorado Media Project. Previously. [more inside]
20 Places to Donate Used Books
"Books are an important part of our lives but many of us still struggle with what to do with old books. When we decide it’s time to part with them, we want to know they are going to a nice home where they can continue to enrich and improve other people’s lives." [more inside]
The Little Free Thread Library
Spending the last couple of weekends late spring cleaning required confronting the dozens of books I've held onto over the years, jammed on dusty shelves and closet boxes, with the oldest dating all the way back to summer reading favorites from grade school. Some of these I keep not so much because I love the story itself (I'm a big fan of ebooks and have most of my reading history digitized), but because the book as an object holds special meaning. Do you have any physical books you keep around more for the memento libri than for the text inside? Tell us about them (or anything else) in our weekly Free Thread!
"My 94-year-old grandmother has kept a list of every book she ever read"
Ben Myers posted to X last year about his grandmother's reading list, and followed it up a year later after her death. This My Modern Met article summarises the tweets.
How the internet revived the world's first work of interactive fiction
Life is not a continuous line from the cradle to the grave. Rather, it is many short lines, each ending in a choice, and branching right and left to other choices, like a bunch of seaweed or a genealogical table. No sooner is one problem solved than you face another growing out of the first. You are to decide the course of action of first Helen, then Jed, then Saunders, at each crisis in their lives. Give your first thought, without pausing to ponder.Consider the Consequences!, a 1930 gamebook co-written by author Doris Webster and crusading journalist Mary Alden Hopkins, is the earliest known example of a choose-your-own-adventure (CYOA) text, offering players a series of forking narratives for three interconnected characters with 43 distinct endings, fifty years before the format was popularized (and trademarked). Just a few years ago this pioneering work was at risk of falling into near-total obscurity. But thanks to the efforts of jjsonick on IntFiction.org, you can now read the book on the Internet Archive (complete with nifty graphs of all possible storylines), or -- courtesy of itch.io developer geetheriot -- play the game online in an interactive fiction format powered by the Twine engine. More in the mood for radio drama? Listen to Audio Adventure Radio Hour's 2018 dramatic reading of the book (based on listener suggestions), and wrap it up with a delightful retro-review by librarian pals Peter and Abby on the Choose Your Own Book Club podcast. [more inside]
“He was encouraging me to take a stand.”
His Book Was Repeatedly Banned. Fighting For It Shaped His Life. (Robert Cormier and The Chocolate War, NYT gift)
‘read and censure ... but buy it first ... whatever you do, buy.’
A Series of Headaches is a video from the London Review of Books following printer Nick Hand as he prints a page from the magazine using methods as close as he can get to those used to print the First Folio of Shakespeare plays. The page selected is an old LRB article about the First Folio by Michael Dobson [archive link]. The video is made in conjunction with Folio400, a website with lots of information about the First Folio, as well as a series of articles on it.
“Our enemy is the Precautionary Principle.”
“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” "It was 2017, and a YIMBY activist invited me to talk about my book Nixonland with his book club, which also happened to be Marc Andreessen’s book club." [more inside]
The Scientist of the Soul
The materialist world view is often associated with despair. In “Anna Karenina,” Konstantin Levin, the novel’s hero, stares into the night sky, reflects upon his brief, bubblelike existence in an infinite and indifferent universe, and contemplates suicide. For Dennett, however, materialism is spiritually satisfying. [...] “Darwin’s dangerous idea,” Dennett writes, is that Bach’s music, Christianity, human culture, the human mind, and Homo sapiens “all exist as fruits of a single tree, the Tree of Life,” which “created itself, not in a miraculous, instantaneous whoosh, but slowly, slowly.” He asks, “Is this Tree of Life a God one could worship? Pray to? Fear? Probably not.” But, he says, it is “greater than anything any of us will ever conceive of in detail worthy of its detail. . . . I could not pray to it, but I can stand in affirmation of its magnificence. This world is sacred.”Daniel C. Dennett, Widely Read and Fiercely Debated Philosopher, Dies at 82 [more inside]
I can think of at least one more
Librarians have never been a quiet bunch: Information, after all, is power. To mark National Library Week—typically celebrated the second full week of April—Atlas Obscura, fittingly, went into the archives to find our favorite stories of librarians who have fostered cultural movements, protected national secrets, and fought criminals. 6 Badass Librarians Who Changed History: How German Librarians Finally Caught an Elusive Book Thief 📚 The Librarian at the Nexus of the Harlem Renaissance 📚 The Radical Reference Librarians Who Use Info to Challenge Authority 📚 The Women Who Rode Miles on Horseback to Deliver Library Books 📚 A Day in the Life of a Rock ‘n’ Roll Librarian 📚 The Librarian Who Guarded the Manhattan Project’s Secrets
“The reading public is best served by diversity”
A detailed, yet accessible, take on the history of book distribution (mainly but not wholly by small presses), written by Julie Schaper in 2022.
Once Upon a Time, the World of Picture Books Came to Life
The End of the Road: John Barth dies at 93
John Barth, author of books like Sot-Weed Factor, Lost in the Funhouse, Letters and Tidewater Tales, has died in a Florida hospice facility. He was 93. [more inside]
Small Press Distribution (SPD) Shuts Down
Small Press Distribution, one of the last remaining independent book distributors in the United States, has closed. In an announcement made March 28, SPD executive director Kent Watson said that the closure is effective immediately, and that the staff is in the process of winding down the business. Founded in 1969, SPD was the only nonprofit literary distributor in the U.S. What the closure of SPD means for readers. [more inside]
When I think of genre awards
10 Major Awards for Fantasy Literature (2018) hits the SFF high points. There is, however, a long list of contenders for awards of varying sizes (2019). Another perspective (2016), from around the time of the last major Hugos fracas. If you haven't heard of them, maybe check out the Ignyte Awards, the Lambda Literary Award for Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror (or see the overall database of Lambda winners), or the Prix Jacques Brossard. For more information, visit the Science Fiction Awards Database. [more inside]
I am a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces.
Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer-prize winning debut novel The Sympathizer is now an HBO Max mini-series helmed by legendary director Park Chan Wook and executive-produced by Robert Downey, Jr., which will premiere April 14. [more inside]
The 3 Body Problem is out!
After a failed adaptation in 2017, Netflix has finally released the home-streaming adaptation of Cixin Liu's Three Body Problem trilogy. How will the slow build to epic scope that prevented some readers from finishing the book series fare in the hands of the same showrunners that brought you Game of Thrones? Binge ready for the weekend (trigger warning: starts with violence). [more inside]
An Anarchist’s Guide To Dune
A long time ago in a place called Olympia, Washington… The Transmetropolitan Review places Frank Herbert’s Dune within the anarchist history of the Pacific Northwest.
Significantly, they have the same dust jacket art
"The book club edition. You probably remember your first encounter with this indecent denizen of the book world. It wasn't pleasant, was it? Learning that your priceless first edition─the one you had considered selling so you could buy that NHL skybox─was...what? Worthless? Really? Why, you wondered, is this sneaky breed of book imposter allowed to trick and taunt the hapless collector? Why are book club editions even a thing?" [more inside]
escaping realtime
Vernor Vinge, author of many influential hard science fiction works, died March 20 at the age of 79.
"A strange Thing written upon a Glass Window in Queen Elizabeth's Time"
Madeleine Pelling (The Telegraph, 3/17/2024), "Seriously scandalous and surprisingly sexy: how the Georgians redefined graffiti" -- archived: "In October 1731, ... 'Hurlothrumbo' set out into the freezing streets of London. Armed only with a pencil and paper, he was on a most peculiar hunt. His quarry? The graffiti that lined the city's many surfaces, left behind by its inhabitants." The Merry-Thought: or the Glass-Window and Bog-House Miscellany, part 1 and 2, 3, & 4. The play Hurlothrumbo. Pelling on women archaeologists in the 1780s via the Open Digital Seminar in Eighteenth-Century Studies. Pelling's Writing on the Wall, reviewed (archived) and at Goodreads / StoryGraph. Pelling's podcast, most recently discussing St Patrick.
Happy World Book Day!
Changing lives through a love of books and reading What's your favourite source of legal and free ebooks ? [more inside]
Ten there were, dusty chronicles of forgotten lore…
Officer-Involved Book Banning
Sheriff Robert Norris is speaking into his body camera. “Today’s date is April 20, approximately 7 a.m. Just want to document my visit to the Hayden Library. My attorney and I are just curious and would like to document this visit to see what kind of materials are on display here.” Norris, the sheriff of Kootenai County, Idaho, meets up outside the library with Marianna Cochran, the founder of CleanBooks4Kids, a “grassroots group of North Idaho citizens alarmed at the abundance of books sexualizing, grooming, and indoctrinating kids in our local libraries at taxpayer expense,” to search for the book Identical, which Norris says he had “seen an image [of] floating on social media.” [...]404media: Police Bodycam Shows Sheriff Hunting for 'Obscene' Books at Library [more inside]
They walk into the library, and for the next 45 minutes search for “obscene” books in the Young Adult section while Norris’s camera is rolling in one of the most bizarre police body camera videos I’ve ever seen.
In hard times, the big booksellers squeezed out the small
Happy 50th birthday, more or less, to Dungeons & Dragons!
Tom Van Winkle (01/10/2024), "Fifty Years of Dungeons & Dragons": "Fifty years ago this month, the first 1000 copies of the original Dungeons & Dragons were printed and then boxed up at Gary Gygax's house. It's supposed to have been late in January of 1974, but we don't have a specific date. January 1974 is good enough for me. And what counts as the specific origin date, anyway? The final draft? The actual printing? The availability for sale? We're close enough. I'm saying it's been fifty years right now." [more inside]
Something something torment nexus
An Anti-Defense of Science Fiction. If we’re going to give science fiction credit for solar power and electric cars, then it’s only fair, unfortunately, to give science fiction credit for child slavery in the cobalt mines. If we want to claim that science fiction inspired reusable spacecraft or even the lowly Roomba, we must also reckon with the fact that it inspired the gun-wielding drones sniping hospital patients and staff in Gaza.
The soul of a library is something really complex
Here in the Manuscripts Room, the space itself looks the same, but it does not sound the same; depopulated, it is oddly quiet. Loudly quiet! This quiet is completely different from the constant rustle of ambient noise that counts as what we could call “library quiet.” Today, the distinctive energy of the Manuscripts Room is nowhere to be found: on a typical day, staff and readers alike are focused, on the clock, working swiftly and deeply, using fragile materials that are, by definition, unique and irreplaceable. This distinctive energy is the product of a thrilling alchemy of two forms of raw materials: readers, and the works in their hands. Absent readers, absent works, the reading room is just a room. from How to Lose a Library [more inside]
Pink to give out 2000 banned books at her Florida concerts
Read Palestine Week - Nov 29-Dec 5
Palestinian books shared this week by their publishers. These are free to read at the publisher sites, and cover a diverse array of genres, ideas and languages, with more activities planned and shared from over 400 publishers. As Kazuo Isiguro said: "But in the end, stories are about one person saying to another: This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it feel this way to you?"
Some obscure and mysterious mix of expected and unexpected
Regardless of how we understand “timelessness,” that vague but irreplaceable quality we take to inhere in any classic, a good joke comes as close as possible to embodying its reality in the written word. [more inside]
A murky engine of influence
The list is as much a cultural signifier as it is an accurate index of what the public is reading. The tagline makes it easier for readers to find a book within today’s info glut and makes it easier for an author to convince a publisher to let them write another one ... “It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy,” she says. “It has a cumulative, rich-get-richer effect, if you’ve managed it successfully.” Sales come and go, but a NYT bestseller bio line is forever. from The murky math of the New York Times bestsellers list
The Big Fail
New book analyzes the United State's response to the COVID pandemic. Why did so many countries follow China's lead in strict lockdowns? Were lockdowns helpful in averting excess deaths during the COVID pandemic? What can this teach us about reacting to new public health emergencies? The Big Fail, by Vanity Fair's Beth McLean and the New York Times Joe Nocera. As suggested by the title, they think things could have gone better.
Scholastic's "bigot button"
'[T]his year, facing pressure from right-wing ideologues, Scholastic is facilitating the exclusion of books that feature people of color and/or LGBTQ characters. Scholastic has grouped many of these titles in a collection called "Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice." School officials are then given the option to exclude the entire set of books from the book fair. Scholastic has, in the words of one librarian, given schools a "bigot button" to exclude these books and mollify intolerant pressure groups.'
The Right to Read
“What they’re trying to do offends me at the root of who I am and what I’m about.” - LeVar Burton Wants You to Read Banned Books
He saw a whole new genre to populate
Lester del Rey was a strange Minnesota farm kid with a wild imagination and a knack for business. He intuited that what millions wanted from a publishing industry urgently optimizing to keep up with capitalism was to escape the modern age into a world where capitalism and industry had never happened. There is magic in that. from The Man Who Invented Fantasy
The 24-Year-Old Who Outsold Oprah This Week
The Shadow Work Journal has exploded on TikTok as an inexpensive mental-health tool, even as experts question its approach—and the author’s credentials. The rise of The Shadow Work Journal is another reminder of TikTok’s power—to generate conversation, to sell a ton of books, to keep people in an algorithmic loop indefinitely. Though it was first published in the fall of 2021, the journal reached hit status this year, after being listed in TikTok Shop. It has sold 290,000 copies on TikTok alone since April—45 percent of its overall sales, Shaheen says, meaning more than half a million sold in total.
A Mystery That Should Not Exist
Sarah Elizabeth, author of the upcoming book The Art of Fantasy, posted in May that she'd been searching for years for the name of the artist who painted the cover for the 1976 Dell Laurel Leaf edition of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time. Four months of dead ends from various internet sleuths later, the folks at WBUR's Endless Thread podcast have announced the mystery is solved and described how they did it. (Full transcript available at the link.)
Finally a killer AI
“There are hundreds of poisonous fungi in North America and several that are deadly, They can look similar to popular edible species. A poor description in a book can mislead someone to eat a poisonous mushroom.” - AI generated mushroom foraging books are spreading on Amazon, placing the public at risk.
One of the First Parts I Remember Noticing was the Section on Mermaids
Printed books from this period cover a huge range of topics and dozens of languages, but for me at least, they have one thing in common: I almost always find them far more interesting — more beautifully designed, more strange, more intriguing — than modern books. The rest of this post is a few thoughts on why. from Why Early Modern Books Are So Beautiful by Benjamin Breen [more inside]
Did you ever know a different world?
The Life, Death—And Afterlife—of Literary Fiction. In the golden age of magazines, short stories reigned supreme. Has the digital revolution killed their cultural relevance? By Will Blythe for Esquire.
33. The Communist Manifesto
"I tried to title this post for 20 minutes and failed"
Trigun Fan Account's Tweet Turns Queer Sci-Fi Novel Into An Amazon Bestseller. An enthusiastic tweet on Sunday from the account of one bigolas dickolas woIfwood now has the 2019 scifi novella This Is How You Lose The Time War sitting at #7 on Amazon's bestseller list. Co-author Amal El-Mohtar reacts and is interviewed. Co-author Max Gladstone says it feels like coming full circle. Bookriot: "There is something so delightful about this whole experience."
Provocation
"'What might she have written next?' asked Margaret Atwood in her tribute to Hilary Mantel, after the Booker prize-winning novelist’s sudden death in September last year....We now know the answer to Atwood’s question: Mantel was working on a rewriting of Pride and Prejudice, told from the perspective of the overlooked middle sister Mary Bennet, to be titled Provocation. Even more intriguingly, it was planned as a mischievous Austen mashup, with characters from all her novels making an appearance in unfamiliar guises." The article in The Guardian includes an excerpt from Mantel's notebooks. [more inside]
Getting Involved With Your Local Library
Ways to support libraries in trying times As promised, resources to help support libraries and the freedom to read. These are US-centric. More resources and descriptions within. [more inside]
Books Unbanned
In response to the growing number of libraries and schools banning books, both the Seattle Public Library and the Brooklyn Public Library have made their complete e-book and audiobook catalogs available to teens and young adults anywhere in the US. “ We believe in your right to read what you want, discover yourself and form your own opinions.” [more inside]
Banned Book Book Club
Banned Book Book Club [via mefi projects
"Displays information about a book that has been banned in American schools 2021-2022, alongside a readable preview of most books (on desktop only) and a link to buy it. Reload to see another one.]"
50 Best Sci-Fi Books of All Time
Another list to argue about! What does Esquire Magazine know about sci-fi? I don't know either, but have at it! [more inside]
"I never heard the reverse, that a boy was 'girl crazy.'"
How Rural America Steals Girls' Futures (Monica Potts for The Atlantic, adapted from her upcoming book The Forgotten Girls)
"Poverty persists because some wish and will it to."
Matthew Desmond's book Poverty, by America (adaptation, NYT gift) (WaPo video discussion, NPR audio/text, New Yorker, The Atlantic, NYT, Roxane Gay reviews) argues that poverty persists in the United States because more fortunate people benefit from it.