Pete

According to Wired, books, and bookstores, can coexist with the dominant e-tailer Amazon just fine thank you.

“Print books have persisted, but ebooks are not going away. Amazon is powerful, but physical bookstores are still here. The book is not immune to the powerful digital forces that have re-shaped so much of the rest of the world. At the same time, books have been able to resist the forces of change because books really are different.”

According to Wired, books, and bookstores, can coexist with the dominant e-tailer Amazon just fine thank you.

“Print books have persisted, but ebooks are not going away. Amazon is powerful, but physical bookstores are still here. The book is not immune to the powerful digital forces that have re-shaped so much of the rest of the world. At the same time, books have been able to resist the forces of change because books really are different.”

Via Comic Book Resources, Aritst Brian J. Davis has rendered famous literary characters in the form of police sketches — ensuring that if you run into one of these characters on the street, you know exactly what to expect.

Using “commercially available law enforcement composite sketch software,” Daivs drew accurate sketches based on the characters’ descriptions in their respective books. Take a look at even more on Brian’s Tumblr page.

Here’s Hannibal Lecter from the novels of Thomas Harris,

Via Comic Book Resources, Aritst Brian J. Davis has rendered famous literary characters in the form of police sketches — ensuring that if you run into one of these characters on the street, you know exactly what to expect.

Using “commercially available law enforcement composite sketch software,” Daivs drew accurate sketches based on the characters’ descriptions in their respective books. Take a look at even more on Brian’s Tumblr page.

Here’s Hannibal Lecter from the novels of Thomas Harris,

WIRED asks, “How did J.R.R. Tolkien create The Lord of the Rings?”

“The simple answer is that he wrote it…The more complicated answer is that in addition to writing the story, he drew it. The many maps and sketches he made while drafting The Lord of the Rings informed his storytelling, allowing him to test narrative ideas and illustrate scenes he needed to capture in words. For Tolkien, the art of writing and the art of drawing were inextricably intertwined.

In the book The Art of The Lord of the Rings, we see how, and why.”

Librarians down under are cooking up a campaign to change the country’s copyright laws according to this ABC story.

“However, those involved want people to bake biscuits and cakes rather than picket Parliament.

Social media users are being encouraged to cook a vintage recipe and share a photo of the result.

The aim is to encourage the Attorney-General to look at changing the law so that unpublished works are treated the same way as published ones.”

The all things Science Fiction site, i09, tells of an interesting find at the University of New Brunswick library,

“File this under “Why we need libraries and librarians”: A copy of the original shooting script for Star Wars Episode IV was found sitting on a shelf in the University of New Brunswick’s library in Saint John. And it may settle whether or not Han shot first.”

This blog post on Gizmodo makes the case for paper bound books.

“So how can I be confident that paper books are going to be with us for a long time to come? First of all, because they’re lovely and I refuse to believe they’ll ever disappear. But also because paper books are still a fantastic and irreplaceable piece of technology.

Believe it or not, paper book sales have made a modest comeback in the past year. Ebooks are mainstream. But paper books have too many benefits to simply die out anytime soon.”

io9 looks at the copyright status of James Bond:

“On January 1st, 2015, the works of Ian Fleming entered the public domain in a number of countries. That means that the character of James Bond is no longer copyrighted in those countries, just like Sherlock Holmes has been for a while. But it doesn’t mean that it’s suddenly open season on that character.

But why now and what exactly does it mean?”

Harry Guinness states his case in this post on Make Use Of.

“As someone who’s dropped a Wheel of Time novel on my face, I can tell you the debate on reading experience is well over. Modern e-readers hold thousands of novels, weigh next to nothing, have built in lights, high resolution screens and don’t give you a concussion when they hit your nose. Books hold a single novel (or occasionally a couple of shorter ones), weigh way more, have to be angled towards a light, rely on manual screen refresh and can give you a black eye for weeks.”

In his Search/Research blog, Google’s research scientist Daniel Russell has this to say about using all the research tools at your disposal, the most important of which just may be the humble library card.

“One of the more powerful research tools you can have is a library card.

I’ve written about why libraries are great before, but this is worth repeating: A library card is instant access to a world of resources. Both offline AND online.

That might surprise you, but here are 5 reasons why you want a library card to be a great researcher.”

Tech Crunch has some sobering news for the indie author while also highlighting the incredible allure of Amazon,.

“In an interesting post, writer Claude Nougat estimated the total number of books on Amazon – about 3.4 million at last count (a number that could include apps as well) and then figured out how many books were added in a day. Nougat noticed that the number rose by 12 books in an hour, which suggests that one new book is added every five minutes. And, most likely, it’s probably an indie book.

Let’s let that sink in.

What does that mean for the indie publisher? If you’re perpetually optimistic, very little. If you’re even a little bit pessimistic, however, you might want to rethink your career.”