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« Previous EntriesBooks from the President-Elect on Biblio.com
Wednesday, November 5th, 2008Browse books by Barack Obama, our U.S. President-Elect, on Biblio.com here.
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New work from an old friend: Stephenson’s Anathem
Thursday, October 2nd, 2008I like big tales. A fat book allows an author more chances to fail, I think, than to excel. But a big story well told transports you to a new world, at least for a while. Still, I must admit I approached Neal Stephenson’s new book, Anathem (just over 900 pages) with [...]
Have you ever been ’sheeped’?
Friday, September 12th, 2008OK–advance discalimer–this is not a post about fraternity hazing.
I read Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase a few months ago and the striking images and unsettling moods evoked by this novel have continued coming to mind ever since. Like one of the characters from the novel who develops a strange obsession with sheep, I can’t [...]
Open Source Textbooks: Menace AND Blessing?
Thursday, September 11th, 2008I came across an interesting intersection of the worlds of Book and Geek yesterday. Previous rants in this space have discussed in detail the cost of textbooks, and how that impacts the poor and worthy demographic of students. On the other end of the spectrum, the state of Virginia has released a Request [...]
Laying siege to your local library
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008Make no mistake, in the world of books, there is no idyllic indian summer. No lazy dog days’ afternoons. No sweet corn harvest. No last minute dash to the coast. For this is the beginning of the Library Sale Wars. This is the time that tries the souls of booklovers. [...]
Seven words you can’t upload
Friday, August 22nd, 2008Many of us older than compact discs (they turned 26 yesterday, hooray) remember George Carlin’s classic comedy routine, Seven Words You Can Never Say on TV. The routine was controversial, memorable, and (at least to me) quite hilarious. Carlin’s routine has recently come to mind here at Biblio World Headquarters, as we’ve [...]
Monday, August 18th, 2008
When you spend a lot of time looking at books like commodities, as I do in our business, sometimes you sort of forget that the books have things in them. Things like information, sometimes true and sometimes false, heartrending, well-told stories and trite, really badly told stories. When I go home and pass [...]
Digital Generation Gap for books?
Friday, August 8th, 2008I’ve collected books my entire life. I treasured my Hardy Boys collection above all things (yes, more than the dog), back when I was four feet tall (my treasured books today are considerably older, better written, and more significant, but I digress). And I’m also the parent of two teenagers. I strongly doubt there’s such [...]
A reading list inspired by watching TV
Wednesday, July 30th, 2008I was watching TV recently, and caught the movie High Fidelity again. Before anyone can begin their moral assessment of me, I did read the book many years ago, before the movie came out, but the movie is what inspired me to create my own Top 5 List.
We all know the literary cannon; the [...]
Textbooks, or, the Battle of Students vs Publishers - Part II
Thursday, July 10th, 2008Apologies in advance for belaboring the point in regards to my previous post on the broken textbook industry, but another interesting article on custom textbook publishing appeared this morning in the Wall Street Journal.
The article is mostly self-explanatory, so I won’t go into a lengthy discussion, but I would like to ask the reader to [...]