Category: Books
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Brilliant ideas of the 21st century
At first I was nervous about this. Secret Santa arrangements are not my sort of thing. But the more I though about Librarything’s Santathing, the better I thought the idea was. It works thus: participants register and undertake to buy a book to the value of $20 (that is to say about £9.80) to another…
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Steven Pinker
I heard Steven PInker speak last night, and his speech was rich and fast, and defied reporting. His disquisition on the psychology of swearing was pure delight, as was his discussion of the predominance of Steves in his age-group, mentioned à propos of project Steve. He made me think about prepositions and tenses, which I’ve…
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Choosing the best children’s books of the past seventy years
Next year will be an anniversary for two of the more worthwhile and less commercialised book awards, the fiftieth for the Carnegie Medal for children’s books and the seventieth for the Kate Greenaway medal for illustration in a children’s books. To mark this CILIP, who appoint a panel of children’s librarians to decide on the…
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Librarything Unsuggester
How wonderful! Librarything has a new feature, Unsuggester, which predicts the books least likely to be shared by readers of a title. To quote, “Unsuggester takes “people who like this also like that” and turns it on its head. It analyzes the seven million books LibraryThing members have recorded as owned or read, and comes…
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Booker Long List
Or the Man Booker prize, as we must call it. Sponsors become twitchy and disagreeable if they aren’t given their full and proper titles. It’s here. I would like Howard Jacobson to win. These are William Hill’s prices, not that I’d bet on anything so culturally valuable and significant: Mitchell, David: Black Swan Green 5/1…
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LibraryThing in CILIP Gazette
There’s a piece on LibraryThing in the new CILIP Gazette, not online though. It seems that awareness of LibraryThing and interest in how it might work with library catalogues is growing more and more in the world of institutional as well as personal collections, and exciting interest in this great profession of ours; witness this…
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Capitalist publishing doesn’t work
From yesterday’s Guardian, Publishers unite against Google, a story on Google Book Search. “Joel Rickett, deputy editor of the Bookseller, says publishers are tempted to back Google in its partner programme because there are no devices in much of the world on to which a scanned book could be downloaded so the threat posed is…
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Camels and Spode
Reading Ferdinand Mount’s review of two books on Mosley in the latest London Review of Books, I noticed a mention of Arnold Leese, vet, author of the One Humped Camel in Health and Disease, and leader of the Imperial Fascist League. Leese was typical of the bizarre and sinister world of British fascism; Mount also…
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Librarything: the cataloguer’s webcam
Librarything now has a fascinating enhancement, a page where one can see all the recently added books, or, as Tim Spalding, the power behind librarything describes it, a LibraryHypnotismThing. “I find it hypnotic, both fascinating and will-depleting at the same time. I hope you do too”. he says. I certainly do. My librarything may be…
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Thirteen digit ISBNs
Yesterday I bought my first book with a thirteen digit ISBN: Williams, Hugo Dear Room London: Faber, 2006 978-0-571-23037-2 A defining moment, indeed