Books: February 2004 Archive Page

--Netstore USA (opengroup.com)

Buy my book, Technology in American Drama, 1920-1950... Priced at just $197.70! Outside of the US, that's $216.60, or about a dollar a page! Order now!

Sheesh! At that price, with the royalties I've earned so far, I could buy THREE WHOLE COPIES! Oh, wait, they already charged me for the advance copies I purchased, I guess I could buy just two more copies.

Thanks for the so-disturbing-you-just-have-to-laugh link, Rosemary. (It's much cheaper at Amazon, but if you ask your local university library to buy a copy, they'll be able to get it for less, and more people will get to read it.)

Part of Maloney's job is to evaluate books on the sleeper list and decide whether they go to the bargain basement sale or get a second chance.

"It's a really hard thing to get rid of a book," Maloney said. "A big, big consideration for us is just space. Our juvenile fiction shelves are packed right now. There comes a time when you have to say 'goodbye."'.... For the 800 hardcover juvenile fiction books on Maloney's list, the odds aren't good. Maloney estimates about 80 percent will wind up downstairs for bargain hunters. --Librarians struggle to let go of lonely books (AP/Mankatopa Free Press)

Ahh! I always thought libraries were like museums. Quick, run to the library you remember from your childhood... somebody, look in Patrick Henry library in Vienna, Va., or the Fairfax County Public Library... are those dog-eared copies of Lester Del Rey's classic science fiction still there? What about Encyclopedia Brown, or the Henry Reed Detective Agency? Or the wonderful books about astronomy, that paint Jupiter with no rings and about 12 moons? Is there still a copy of Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, which I checked out on one of my first forays from the Juvenile section to the Adult stacks, and is the page still folded down in the section that describes "Typical Dreams"?

According to the article, "Sometimes, all it takes to save a book from being discarded is a single person's desire to read it."

Via Waterloo Library Blog.

--Technovelgy: Inventions from Science Fiction Novels and Books

There's no good blurb on this site, but it features news of technological advances that have been predicted in science-fiction. For instance, here's the listing of real inventions first mentioned in Fahrenheit 451. Pretty cool.

Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine changed all that, changed a book into something that could be simply run off a press in a few minutes' time, on substrate more suitable to ass-wiping than exaltation in a place of honor in the cathedral. The Gutenberg press meant that rather than owning one or two books, a member of the ruling class could amass a library, and that rather than picking only a few subjects from enshrinement in print, a huge variety of subjects could be addressed on paper and handed from person to person. --Cory Doctorow --E-Books: Neither E Nor Books (Craphound)