Reading Copy Book Blog

Next week we will have several guest postings from Cathy Waters – one of the four original founders of AbeBooks.com. Today, Cathy has come full circle and once again runs a used bookstore just like she did when AbeBooks was created. She owns Grafton Books – a wonderful antiquarian bookshop in Victoria that’s a couple [...]

Here on the West Coast of Canada we have a bit of extra pride in BC-born singer, Michael Buble.  We’ve got even more reason to be proud with Buble’s announcement yesterday that partial proceeds from ticket sales for his 2008 concert tour will be donated to the Canwest Raise-a-Reader literacy initiative. Although his latest album [...]

AbeBooks is, as the expression goes, many things to many people. It is the place to: find the latest paperback, discover a lost classic, add a rare find to your collection, or purchase a unique gift for the person in your life who has everything (because no one has every book.) For me, this week, [...]

September is New Zealand Book Month. This is a month dedicated not only to get more New Zealanders reading but reading more books by authors from New Zealand. AbeBooks is celebrating this month with our friends from Down Under.  For our next book, the Avid Reader Book Club will read a novel written by a [...]

I’m a sucker for companion books. Not books to keep me company but those that accompany TV shows. My collection of titles from the British DIY series Changing Rooms can testify to that.   My latest book craving has to do with my new guilty pleasure – the reality series, The Biggest Loser.  I’ve avoided [...]

The Oxford English Dictionary has expanded once again to include new words that have been brought into common vernacular. This year’s additions include Jaffa Cake (“a sponge biscuit with an orange-flavoured jelly filling and chocolate topping”, known and loved by all with British blood). Also included this year Wags, yummy mummies, heaviosity and garburator.

Not an illuminated manuscript in the traditional sense, but a manuscript that actually illuminates.

This is a whole new kind of book art I haven’t seen before, I can’t even imagine the time and skill it would take to create one of these pieces.

The BBC’s man in Kabul reports on the making of The Kite Runner movie and how the cast handled the key scene of Khaled Hosseini’s 2003 novel – a book that continues to sell well on AbeBooks. (Just look at these prices for signed first editions)

The Guardian reports from Moscow about how Russians are addicted to an author called Boris Akunin, who writes detective tales set in the Tsarist era. Akunin began writing in the 1990s for Russia’s new middle class. At the time, post-communist Russians had two choices of reading: classical masters such as Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy or pulp [...]