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Every week seems to bring news of more bookstores closing, not least this week with the news that Borders will definitely be going into liquidation and many of its remaining stores will close. So here to brighten your Friday is a happy little time-lapse video of a new bookstore going from empty to open in less than 80 seconds.
Update: 7/16
Austen's manuscript ended up selling for £990,000 (US$1.6 million)! It was purchased by Oxford University's Bodleian Library.
Original Post: 7/13/2011
The Watsons, an unfinished manuscript by Jane Austen is to be auctioned by Sotheby's tomorrow and is expected to sell for over $330,000. Apparently, Austen worked on The Watsons in 1804, after she'd drafted Sense and Sensibility, but abandoned it the same year.
According to Booker Prize-winning author Penelope Lively, e-books are for "bloodless nerds". Considering her somewhat advanced 78 years, one might assume that this was simply a reaction to new technology, but Lively owns an iPad (although she "wouldn't dream of reading a book on it" unless she was traveling or in hospital) and, for what it's worth, thirteen of her books are available as ebooks, including Moon Tiger (which won the Booker Prize in 1987).
To be fair, although the "bloodless nerd" soundbite is being quoted far and wide today, her full comment was, "It seems to me that anyone whose library consists of a Kindle lying on a table is some sort of bloodless nerd." Do you think she has a point? If a person's entire literary collection was contained within an electronic device, might their experience with reading be a tad soulless? Or does the written word rise above the confines of the media containing it?
Effective June 29, Amazon has cancelled its contracts with about 10,000 California-based affiliates after Govenor Brown signed a law that requires large out-of-state retailers with affiliates in California to collect sales tax on purchases made by their California customers.
California is the latest state to pass a law to push back against the exemption that allows out of state retailers to not collect sales tax - an exemption made by the US Supreme Court decades ago, in favor of the mail-order industry, based on the constitutional premise that one state may not tax another.
Who among us doesn't suffer from information overload? But information can and should be a beautiful thing, and no where is it displayed more beautifully than at informationisbeautiful.net
created by David McCandless, a London-based author, writer and designer whose passion is visualizing large quantities of information with nary a boring Powerpoint chart to be found!
Here are some of my favorites. Click on the image to go to the original post which usually includes the sources used to create the chart.
A cool book promotion idea comes to us from Cairo, Egypt where
Alef Bookstores has launched the "Taxi of Knowledge" initiative.
Alef Bookstores mission is to "instill the light of knowledge and learning that once upon a time made great Arab thinkers the pillars of modern civilization in each and every individual who walks through our doors" - an objective that now extends to the passengers in over 200 Cairo taxis.
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