Category Archives: Book Talk

Birmingham, Book Talk, Events, Groups, News

Birmingham’s ‘Big Read’

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Susan Swagler posted about the JCLC’s new “one city, one book” type program which kicks off with Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird.

Festivities officially start January 14th and go all the way through April. Looks like lots of movies, group talks, road trips are on the calendar. I’m digging their plan to place 1,500 copies of the book around town for folks to pick up, read and then set loose in the wild again. Could be good fun!

According to Swagler’s post, one of the speakers at the Alabama Bound event, in April, is a scholar who wrote a paper “questioning Atticus’s heroism.” Huh? What blasphemy is this? I’m going to have to find said paper and investigate. You can bet I’ll have red markers at the ready!

Actually, I’m just glad that the JCLC has taken the time to get all this organized.

Book Talk, Media, On the Web, Publishers

Adding more ads

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It’s getting imppossible to keep up with the latest trend in book publishing… ads. Folks like WOWIO led the way. Yahoo! even mentioned last year that they are offering this service, now Lulu.com is offering their self-published customers the same revenue stream.

So now you can self-publish a book with them and they’ll help broker ad deals, kinda like you would for placing ads on your blog, I think. I guess book publishers got tired of seeing all the rich folks sitting over at the magazine publisher’s table and decided to  hop on the train.

Book Covers, Book Design, Book Talk, Media, On the Web

A bunch of Chip Kidd

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The folks over at GalleyCat posted a link to mediabistro’s design blog unbeige which featured a year-end wrap up of Chip Kidd highlights. If you’re interested in bookcover design, Kidd news is always colorful and insightful.

I especially liked this article in The Telegraph, but only in the celeb-news junkie kinda way. Not sure why it’s important that I know what Kidd has over his sofa, but I enjoyed the piece none-the-less. Sort of a pop-ish look, at the man that puts out some of the best book covers, on the planet.

Also, here is a link to the USA Today page which is posting the serialized version of Kidd’s sophomore novel effort The Lerners.

Ok, enough with the love-fest…

Book Talk, On the Web

Looking at social libraries

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Being a LibraryThinger, I like to keep up with what the field of “social library services” are doing. So I was really enjoying BookPatrol’s thoughts on the subject. I think he has some good “big picture” views. But then the reading got even better when I saw the first comment was from Tim Spalding over at LT. He offered some great insights into the workings of information sharing and data. Both are worth the read, if you have the time.