March 2013

A standoff over financial terms has prompted the bookstore chain Barnes & Noble to cut back substantially on the number of titles it orders from the publishing house Simon & Schuster, raising fears among other publishers, agents and authors that the conflict may harm the publishing industry as a whole.

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The Verge asks: “What if best-selling albums had been books instead? That’s the question graphic designer Christophe Gowans asked for his new collection, The Record Books. Gowans took album titles and artist names and constructed a fictional backstory behind each. The full collection is up on Gowans’ site“

Author of “Living and Dying in Brick City” on PBS Newshour

Just in time for the tournament, Bookreporter.com has some book brackets.

“As the NCAA brackets were announced we decided to have some fun with the lineups. While everyone was searching stats and scoring potential, we naturally looked at the selected schools another way, as bookworms are apt to do.

We researched alumni and faculty from each school — as well as some notable facts. From there we culled a list of authors — and their books — and chose one to represent each school on our version of the “bracket.””

Sad story from Huffington Post of the librarian who shook herself out of a job.

Students and politicians alike are calling for an Oxford University librarian to be reinstated after she was fired for the filming of a Harlem Shake video in one of the school’s libraries.

Though the librarian, Calypso Nash, did not actually take part in the making of the video, she allegedly lost her job because the filming took place on her watch, the Independent reports.

Rhetorical question from The Atlantic Cities:

In 2010, Poland’s National Library performed a survey to determine the reading habits of the Polish citizenry. The results were not buoying: 56 percent of Poles had not read a book in the past year, either in hard or electronic form. Just as bad was that 46 percent had not attempted to digest anything longer than three pages in the previous month – and this included students and university graduates.

So architect Hugon Kowalski conceived of a new kind of library that he hopes will one day be built in Mosina, a town just south of Pozna?. On its first floor, it’s all bibliotheca: Patrons squat on moddish stools among stacks and stacks of books. But then it gets weird: In the middle of the library is a glass column full of water and flailing human bodies. Go up one level and you’re suddenly in the middle of a vast swimming facility, complete with a snaking water slide that takes whooping swimmers on a ride inside and outside of the building.

Kowalski got to thinking about his watery wonderland of reading after consulting surveys that showed Poles “rarely indicated” a desire to build new libraries. Rather, they wanted to see more sports halls, pools, kindergartens and retail shops. So the architect decided to supply the public with a fun reason to repeatedly visit a mixed-use library facility. If it so happens that bathers exit the pool’s locker room with a fierce desire to consume Hans Fallada, that’s just a happy side effect of the building’s design.

Book: Creating Room to Read: A Story of Hope in the Battle for Global Literacy

What’s happened since John Wood left Microsoft to change the world? Just ask six million kids in the poorest regions of Asia and Africa. In 1999, at the age of thirty-five, Wood quit a lucrative career to found the nonprofit Room to Read. Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as “the Andrew Carnegie of the developing world,” he strived to bring the lessons of the corporate world to the nonprofit sector—and succeeded spectacularly.

Article about Room to Read

The Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday that U.S. companies that make and sell products abroad cannot prevent those items from being resold in the U.S.

For example if a textbook that is sold for $100 in the U.S. is sold in Brazil for $20 this ruling makes it legal for someone that purchases the $20 book to bring it to the U.S. to sell.

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This is a unique reading list – these books were all written by librarians and most of them were recommended to us (AbeBooks.com) by librarians. If any profession is well qualified to write books then librarians truly fit the bill.

The best known works by librarians, excluding Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book but including books by Strindberg, Borges, Ann Tyler etc.

Check them out in all their glory, courtesy of Library Journal. Lists include Change Agents, Innovators, Marketers and Advocates. Community Builders and Tech Leaders are forthcoming.