According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, almost one in four Americans has not read a book in the past year. So to find out if that is true, we sent a team to the street to ask pedestrians to name a book, and here are the very sad results.

Bold efforts to push academic publishing towards an open-access model are gaining steam. Negotiators from libraries and university consortia across Europe are sharing tactics on how to broker new kinds of contracts that could see more articles appear outside paywalls. And inspired by the results of a stand-off in Germany, they increasingly declare that if they don’t like what publishers offer, they will refuse to pay for journal access at all.

Swedish universities have moved to cancel their contract with journal publisher Elsevier as concern over slow progress towards open access spreads. The Bibsam Consortium, which represents 85 higher education and research institutions in the country, said that its current agreement with Elsevier would not be renewed after 30 June.

Uplifting monument or waste of space? Philip Johnson’s Bobst Library and a conflict between professions, a shift from book warehouses to social hubs. Photographs by Andrea Geyer.

At 157ft tall and 17 floors, Cambridge University Library’s tower can be seen for miles around but has largely kept its secrets to itself and its contents (approaching one million books) have given rise to much speculation. But now in a new free exhibition, Tall Tales: Secrets of the tower, we reveal some of the truth about what the great skyscraper really holds.

But internationally accepted standards and best practices of audiovisual preservation call for retention of originals, due to the unknown characteristics of digitization, such as long-term stability and vulnerability to electromagnetic interference, the foundation said. It also questioned why Radio-Canada was preserving its master recordings after making digital copies but CBC had opted to rely only on digital copies. “Such inequitable treatment of cultural treasures is not acceptable,” said Wilkinson.

Growing up in the 1960s, Storm Reyes lived and worked in migrant labor camps across Washington state. When she was 8 years old, she began working full-time picking fruit for under a dollar an hour. At StoryCorps, Storm shared stories of her difficult childhood with her son, Jeremy Hagquist, and remembers the day a bookmobile unexpectedly arrived, opening up new worlds and bringing hope.