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?
Big companies shouldn’t be allowed to own anything. Too much corruption and they’re often too big for anyone to really know what’s going on. That’s what leads to bankruptcy and the layoffs.
The money is not always the best. But I know a lot of people who work for small companies and small presses and they always seem happier and have a more stable job. I think there’s a lesson to be learned there.
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.
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!
