Reading Copy Book Blog

Do you love and collect books but are still a little in the dark as to their value? Or why they are valuable? There was a good article the other day in the Fine Books Blog on “points” (which are errors or parts of a book which differentiate that printing or edition from others thus [...]

Next time I walk into my local library, I want to see the librarians wearing these t-shirts and pushing some very pimped out bookcarts.

Good luck to Kristen at Meiser Books. She’s been selling online with AbeBooks since 2002 but has just signed a lease to take her bookselling business into the bricks and mortar world for the first time.

I’ve tried so hard to like baseball but it’s just not happening. But I am interested in some of the better books about its icons – Richard Ben Cramer’s Joe DiMaggio: A Hero’s Life is a great read, especially for a Brit like me who had no real idea about the true nature of his status in [...]

I recently started to read Erich Auerbach’s classic comparative study on world literature Mimesis. It is fascinating, with how many languages and literatures the guy was familiar with. Auerbach had been a professor at the University of Marburg and he wrote the book in Istanbul after his emigration to Turkey in 1935. In each chapter, [...]

I am not sure what to make of the whole Second Life thing on a day to day level. My ‘first’ life is busy enough. But the platform has fans, and now it is attracting the attention of some in the commercial world, including publishers. Cute that the first book offering from Penguin is Snow [...]

In Will the ‘Long Tail’ Work for Hollywood? Harvard Business School discusses some strategies retailers can use to adjust to the changing long tail entertainment economy. Admirably, they are trying to find recommendations for big business. Unfortunately these recommendations aren’t very good. One recommendation was to look at sales of items in the long tail [...]

I liked this story about how Mexican police are trying to improve their reputation… by becoming cultural and reading a few books. They could try this one or this one.

In high school, my chemistry teacher was exceptionally dull. We studied the periodic table until we were blue in the face but Primo Levi’s version – just named the best science book of all time – was not on the syllabus.

When I see some stories in the news, I just despair – this is one of them.  Here is a man suggesting that students should use old textbooks as shields against bullets when school shootings occur. “People might think it’s kind of weird, crazy,” said Republican Bill Crozier of Union City, a teacher and former [...]