Here’s a neat list posted by the folks at Publisher’s Weekly; it charts the current most popular books in the Czech Republic, Greece, Italy and Sweden.
It’s pretty interesting to see how many titles are from this side of the pond. But also how many titles from over there that we all have read over here. I guess nothing is as universal as a good story.
Nut what’s with the Czech Republic’s non-fiction selections? Not even a cookbook could make the list?
This upcoming Friday, Irma Boom will accept the award for “The Most Beautiful Book in the World” at the Lepzig Book Fair. It’s for Sheila Hicks: Weaving as Metaphor, that Boom designed last year.
Here is a fantastic article that ran this weekend about Boom and her work. I want to call Boom up and find out exactly, word for word, what she says to convince publishers to go these “unorthodox” routes. Because I fail miserably every time I try.
Maybe forwarding that article to every publisher I have ever worked for would be a goo dfirst step… What publisher wouldn’t want to be known for having “The Most Beautiful Book in the World”?
One Google engineer is viewing the world via a new lens: books. Not atlases, per se, but all books. As posted over on the Google BookSearch blog, he built a little app to scour every book in the Google database and pinpoint every geographic location mentioned.
The results are pretty cool and historically telling, as he lines it up by decade. The color intensity of the pinpoint indicates how frequently it’s mentioned in books over the past 200 years.
I keep going back and forth on the whole “Google digitizing every book” debate. But I think this is a pretty cool use of the data. It seems the older I get, the cooler nerds get. Or maybe they’ve always been cool?
Over the past couple of weeks Random House and Harper Collins have released web-based apps/widgets that are allowing folks to do some pretty cool things.
They both are offering ways for you to embed “Browse Inside” and “Search Inside” features of books into your own blog. If you’ve ever used Amazon’s “Look Inside” feature then you get the idea.
I haven’t put these new offering through their paces yet, but I have to say that I’m pretty excited.
Here’s a blog maintained by a developer of the Random House widget, but I have to admit he does a good job of offering reviews/links from both sides.
There’s plenty of talk of “the end of the book” and all that. I don’t buy it. But folks in the book biz better get on board with these new ways to “repurpose” “realign” and deliver content in “chunks” if they want to keep their head above water. Either way, these new tools are cool!
