AbeBooks' Reading Copy

The BBC has interviewed author Marina Lewycka about following up on the success of A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian. Her second book is called Two Caravans and “follows the experiences of two Ukrainians, four Poles, two Chinese and a Malawian, who find themselves picking strawberries in the same field in Kent.”

I have an apology to make. When Oprah named Sidney Poitier’s The Measure of a Man as her book club pick earlier this year, I misspelt Poitier as ‘Poiter’ when I posted on this blog. I’m sorry for such shoddiness, but that mistake has opened my eyes to huge numbers of incorrectly spelt author names [...]

Bibliophiles love books – even when they are in the middle of a warzone. That’s what we discovered after investigating the reading habits of US troops and western civilians living on bases in Iraq. We put together a list of 50 books that have been purchased from AbeBooks.com and sent to bases in Iraq. We thought [...]

The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois is staging a book collecting contest amongst its students, according to the school’s student paper. We’d love to see more of these.

The Times of London spoke to Ian McEwan several days ago – the writer’s first interview since he discovered that he had a brother who was given away at a railway station. McEwan’s new book, On Chesil Beach, is now out.

The news that Oprah has selected Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as her second book club pick of 2007 is intriguing. Not because she’s chosen a book that’s downright bleak, but because she’s selected an author who never gives media interviews. It appears only he’s only ever done one interview in over 40 years of writing [...]

The cover art for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has just been released – fuelling more speculation about the book’s plot. Here is Bloombury’s for the UK, and Scholastic’s for the US, and Raincoast’s for Canada. Harry looks distinctly older on the Scholastic version – hardly the boy-wizard anymore, more like the youth-wizard.

Time magazine has the bestselling books for 2027.

LibraryThing.com members attended a ‘party’ in the Second Life 3-D virtual world at the weekend. It seemed very successful, especially as a Second Life newbie turned up naked after losing her clothes and being unable to recover them. I know a few people who have this problem at ‘this life’ parties.

This story about the launch of an audiobook version of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows broke yesterday but I’ve only just had a chance to think about it. Why isn’t a downloadable version of the book to be released? Harry Potter 7 on an iPod – that’s a ‘dream team’ combination and the easiest [...]