I ran across this post over at Reading Matters where people are wallpapering their homes with big photos of stacks of books. As a “book person” I thought they were pretty cool and fun to look at. I know I enjoy my stacks around the house.
But then I read this post over at fade theory about how “55% of people buying books do so just to decorate with them and have no intention of reading them”!!! Can that really be so? That’s really kind of sad.
So maybe these wallpaper books are for people who want to merely decorate with books and do so with no appreciation for books themselves. If that’s the case, then I don’t think this is very cool at all.
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.
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?
