Category Archives: On the Web

Book Design, On the Web, Type

Lots of Lettering & Font Fun

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BookPatrol mentioned a cool archive this weekend that features 100 Years of Alphabet Books. I wish I had all the time in the world to go through and look at these. Some of the lettering is worthy of framing.

Over on BibliOdyssey, this weekend,  a collection of over-the-top “holy smokes how long did it take them to make that back then” ornate letters and folios were posted. Some of the letters are so ornate that I wouldn’t know what letter it was if not for the tag line. I’ll remember this is how they used to do it, the next time I’m cussin’ a font designer for not setting the kerning correctly on a new display font and maybe it won’t seem so bad.

Media, On the Web

Steve Jobs saves reading

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Is that a headline of the future? The rumor mill has cranked out enough “what ifs” to come full circle. Ever since Steve jobs announced that no one reads anymore and that publishing is a dead-end market, people have have been picking at him.

But the NY Times’ blog has a post today, not double guessing, but quadruple guessing Jobs and Apple’s plans and wonder if they plan to reinvent book reading the way they reinvented the way people listen to music.

Book Talk, On the Web

Novels in nuggets

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DaliyLit.com is now serving up dollop size doses of books. The new service sends you the book you are reading in installments, either via email or rss, so that you don’t have to ‘burden’ yourself with finding a place to sit and actually hold a book.

I guess there is a market for this? I can’t imagine reading The Terror (which I am about to finish) in my RSS reader alongside random posts from the blogs I lurk. I wondered how long it would take to read a book, the faq’s say:

…am currently reading Dracula, which has 187 installments and I am receiving installments on weekdays, i.e. 5 days/week. So at most it will take me 187/5 = 37 weeks. But when I am on the train or waiting, I often read more than one installment, so I usually wind up reading about 10 installments/week. This means I will finish Dracula in about 19 weeks or 5 months.

I guess that “send me the next installment immediately” feature helps some. The cool part are all the free titles. You don’t have to pay for the Public Domain stuff. So most of the classics are there. I couldn’t find any book that cost more than $6.95. So I guess there’s that factor too.

Let me know if any of you have experience with a service like this. It just seems like it’d be too hard to digest the books in any meaningful way.

{via Guardian Unlimited}