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Helvetica: The Movie on PBS January 5th, 2009

Set your VCR’s and DVR’s! Depending on where you live, you will get a chance to catch Helvetica, on your local PBS station, either Tuesday or Wednesday of this week. The full-theater release was about 80 minutes long, but they have condensed it to 50 minutes and are airing it as part of their Independent Lens series.

You can go here to see when it’s showing in your area. If I’m reading the schedule correctly, it first will air, in my little corner of Birmingham at midnight, Wednesday, January 7th.

BTW, I took the quiz and it turns out that the internet thinks I am Times New Roman. Not sure how I feel about that. It could have been worse I guess (can anyone say Comic S***?).


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Paperback Book Sale in Birmingham January 5th, 2009

The Emmet O’Neal Library is hosting one of its one-in-a-blue-moon Friends of the Library Paperback Book Sale on Tuesday, January 6th. The sale will run from 9am to 9pm. I’m always amazed how many great condition books these folks are able to collect.

If you plan on going, please try and go late in the day… so I might have a chance to pick through the offerings first! :)


Crowdsourcing Publishing Model Fails January 2nd, 2009

JPG Magazine broke out with a bold content generation plan a couple of years ago: bring a “photo enthusiast” print magazine, they would scour the internet for the best of the best non-professional images and reprint them in their pages. It’s always been a fun magazine to flip through. As innovative as this approach was, their business model was not so much, as they relied on ad sales to support the printed product.

In my opinion they made a VERY good run at it and I am sad that they are closing up shop. You can get the full run-down from their blog. At a minimum, they are one great case-study for publishers everywhere trying to divine the future of print media. I just wish Laura and crew could have made it.


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Word of the Year 2008 December 3rd, 2008

merriam-webster logoMerriam-Webster has declared the word “bailout” as the 2008 word of the year. It nabbed top honors for receiving the highest number of on-site searches in the shortest amount of time. Last year’s winner was “w00t“. Kinda paints a picture of how things have changed, doesn’t it?


Nabokov speaks December 1st, 2008

As big a fan of the printed word as I am, I admit that there is just something to be said for getting to hear an author speak. Even if you don’t listen to what all is said, just listening to the accent, voice, etc. is fun. So even after all the little Nabokov bios I’ve read over the years, I really enjoyed this video posted to video.thirteen:

{hat-tip to whoever posted this to Twitter, sorry I can’t find you now}


Ending Title Sequences December 1st, 2008

Just easing into the week with a fun Flickr collection rolling through on slideshow. It has almost 150 screenshots from various films and tv shows over the years. Lots of fun fonts. My favorite turned out to be this classic by Saul Bass.

saul bass title


World’s Most Expensive NEW Book November 26th, 2008

Cover of FMR MichelangeloNot what you’d call light reading (it weighs 62 lbs.), the World’s Most Expensive newly published book has just been released. It’s a velvet and marble-covered tome worth around $100,000. It was printed, chiseled, sewn, constructed in Italy and now resides at the New York public Library. It’s a portfolio/art study/biography of Michelangelo and took some six months to make.

So far the Renaissance-inspired publisher FMR has sold 20 books. No word yet ifGoogle Books Scan will get to have a go at it…


The Future of Libraries November 21st, 2008

Open Library LogoI am a HUGE fan of our library system here in Birmingham. They are great and very rarely do I feel let down. I’m betting the folks in Boston feel the same way about their library system too. Especially with the launch of their Open Library Scan-on-Demand program.

Here are the directions from their site:

…if it’s at the Boston Public Library and hasn’t been scanned yet, there will be a “Scan This Book” button… …we’ll have a librarian go and get the book from the stacks, bring it to our scanning center, and have our team of scanners digitize it page-by-page. Within 3-5 days, you should receive an email follow-up with a link to the newly-digitized copy, complete with PDF, online flip book, full text (using OCR technology) and more, all thanks to your request!

 

Open Library Screenshot

How cool is that? You can tell these people have put a ton of thought into their library system. if you go the site, you can even see which titles are in the process of being scanned. Kudos Boston!


The Bad Sex Award of Fiction November 21st, 2008

The Literary Review has released the shortlist for this year’s Bad Sex in Fiction award. The award is designed to

“…gently dissuading authors and publishers from including unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels”.

Here is the shortlist, in full:

James Buchan for The Gate of Air
Simon Montefiore for Sashenka
John Updike for The Widows of Eastwick
Kathy Lette for To Love, Honour and Betray
Alastair Campbell for All in the Mind
Rachel Johnson for Shire Hell
Isabel Fonseca for Attachment
Ann Allestree for Triptych of a Young Wolf
Russell Banks for The Reserve
Paulo Coelho for Brida

Last year’s winner was Norman Mailer and it was well deserved. This year’s winner will be awarded the Plaster Foot award November 25th.

{the Guardian}


Bill Bryson BookTV.org November 20th, 2008

BookTV has re-posted an appearance Bill Bryson did back in 2003 when he was traveling to promote his then-new A Short History of Nearly Everything. You’ll need the Real Player to watch, but he always makes me laugh.


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