Excuse the silence, it’s been a pretty hectic few weeks! But here are three weeks worth of digested news related to books, although by this time some of them may have been retweeted and shared to death. Aside from John Charles Gilkey being on the loose again, and the Codex Calixtinus going missing, here’s the shortlist of what’s up:
1. THE SLA [Special Libraries Association] CONFERENCE HAPPENED: Not that I was there, but the beauty of Twitter is that it allows for some distilled information of a very heartening sort, check out the feed here.
2. IN DIGITAL NEWS: Setting type and printing from an old-fashioned letter press? There’s an app for that. Single Stroke alphabets? Xerox has the patent for that. Although speaking of Apps, the British Library has released about 1,000 19th C books for iPad, and that’s only the start of it.
Creative Commons done made a book, The Power of Open, compiling stories of the glories of their work.
PS: E-books are decreasing in value, does that mean economic capital follows cultural capital, or vice versa? On that subject: I have been looking into Nabu Press which so often appears in my wildest Amazon and ABE searching frenzies– and I wonder if their impact on both economies of books doesn’t contribute in some way to the deterioration of perceived value of ebooks when they go back to hardcopy. The internet is rife with horror stories of Nabu buys, but has anyone ever gotten a print on demand that they were proud of?
Which brings us to:
3. IN DE-DIGITAL NEWS: The Internet Archive is backing its stock up in paper copies. Prediction: this is only the beginning of what will be a real news category, as we backtrack from the theoretical dreams & superfluities the internet seems to make possible, to the contingencies of their practical application.
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