From the New York Times Arts Beat:
Elvis Presley’s earliest known signature – on a library card he signed as a 13-year-old student in Tupelo, Miss. – is one of the main draws in an auction of Elvis memorabilia to be held at Graceland, the singer’s palatial headquarters, in Memphis on Aug. 14.
In 2012, the card was sold for $7500 – a bargain, you would think .
remarkable book posters by German designer Gunter Rambow for S. Fischer Verlag from the 1970s while compiling images for the post, and I thought I would share them now while you wait.
A Sacramento man has donated 13,000 books to the Friends of the Arden-Dimick Library, the largest donation the organization has ever received and one that includes works spanning topics from the Civil War to women’s studies.
Frank Rose, 85, spent decades amassing the collection, which he stored in two apartments in the building he manages. Library volunteers this week began packing the books – 500 boxes worth – to move to a storage space provided by Hines, a real estate firm, in preparation for sale. Rose also threw in steel bookcases.
“We take daily donations, but nothing on the scale of Mr. Rose’s,” said Margaret Clausen, a board member who oversees book sales for the Friends of the Arden-Dimick Library.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140721/14523127960/tons-sites-including-whitehousegov-experiment-with-tracking-technology-that-is-difficult-to-block.shtml
ProPublica has a new story about the rise of “canvas fingerprinting,” a new method of tracking users without using cookies. It’s a method that is apparently quite difficult to block if you’re using anything other than Tor Browser. In short, canvas fingerprinting works by sending some instructions to your browser to draw a hidden image — but does so in a manner making use of some of the unique features of your computer, such that each resulting image is likely to be unique (or nearly unique). The key issue here is that the popular “social sharing” company AddThis, which many sites (note: not ours) use to add “social” buttons to their website, had been experimenting with canvas fingerprinting to identify users even if they don’t use cookies. As ProPublica’s Julia Angwin notes, it’s very difficult to block this kind of thing — and tons of sites make use of AddThis — including WhiteHouse.gov (whose privacy policy does not seem to reveal this, saying it only uses Google Analytics as a third party provider).
From the New York Times a preview of the collection of love letters between President Warren G. Harding and his mistress, Carrie Fulton Phillips. The letters are going on display next week at the Library of Congress.
http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-28344300
A 540-year-old book, known as the first to be printed in the English language, has sold at auction for more than £1m.
The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye is a version of a French book written around 1463.
It was translated over a three-year period by William Caxton, who pioneered the printing press in England.
Google wants WebP to become the internet’s next dominant image file format. That’s not likely going to happen anytime soon — but WebP could still have a huge impact.
http://gigaom.com/2014/07/19/the-story-of-webp-how-google-wants-to-speed-up-the-web-one-image-at-a-time/
“Driving the prices lower isn’t likely to expand the market of readers, since book prices don’t seem to be the deciding factor on whether someone reads a book (time is). But those lower prices directly shrink the incomes of authors, who lack any other means of translating their sales into additional revenue. ”
http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/07/19/139219/amazon-isnt-killing-writing-the-market-is
http://www.newsobserver.com/2014/07/18/4014220/libraries-battle-bed-bugs-in-books.html
UNLV undergraduate engineering students Jack Cheney, Nicole Ramos and Vachara Maneeraj created a solar-powered book drop that roasts bed bugs to death. The project was part of UNLV’s engineering senior design competition in May. All engineering students must collaborate for a year to produce a product using their engineering skills.
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