LISNews: Librarian News

"Once I could have sold my books to any number of local used bookshops for a reasonable sum--now nobody much wants anything, aside from rarities--because everything is available online. I myself understand the attractiveness of being able to buy everything you want, but I don't like the whole outlook. It's like a billionaire buying a beautiful woman any time he wants one to sleep with--where's the romance, where's the excitement, the heartache, the attendant glories and sorrows of romance? Once it was exciting to go out 'booking'--and there were scores of places to go. But now, now. To make everything freely available makes everything seem that much less interesting and desirable. But I begin to rant."--Michael Dirda in a discussion held Wednesday at the Washington Post.

Vermont's wonderful Northshire Bookstore is getting one of those hot new Espresso Book Machines. They are proud to be the first independent bookstore in the United States—and one of only five locations in the world—to have an Espresso Book Machine (EBM) right on the premises. The EBM is a patented fully integrated book-making machine that can automatically produce a beautiful, high-quality trade-size paperback book in mere minutes...take a peek here(quicktime movie).

Amazon.com offers pages of information on the book titles it sells online, including reviews. And now the reviewers are being reviewed, as customers are invited to rate a review's "helpfulness."

Full four minute audio clip at NPR

An Interesting Boing Boing Post with an essay by George Orwell from 1936, "Bookshop Memories." It's a hilarious, ill-tempered, mean-spirited and vastly entertaining rant about what's wrong with the booky trade -- sure to be appreciated by recovering booksellers like me, and bookstore junkies.

But as soon as I went to work in the bookshop I stopped buying books. Seen in the mass, five or ten thousand at a time, books were boring and even slightly sickening. Nowadays I do buy one occasionally, but only if it is a book that I want to read and can't borrow, and I never buy junk. The sweet smell of decaying paper appeals to me no longer. It is too closely associated in my mind with paranoiac customers and dead bluebottles.