Reading Copy Book Blog

The Winners have been announced for the BC Book Prizes, of which AbeBooks is a sponsor for the Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize Conceit by Mary Novik Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize Everywhere Being is Dancing by Robert Bringhurst Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize Forage by Rita Wong Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize The 100-Mile [...]

Free copies of Star Wars Legacy of the Force: Betrayal in E-book and audiobook format are available here until May 13th. Publishers… more like pushers, Go and get me hooked with a freebie and then jack up the price.

Alpinism, mountaineering, and climbing. Call it what you will, The Guardian selects the 10 best books on traversing the highest peaks. 1 Touching the Void by Joe Simpson 2 Starlight and Storm by Gaston Rébuffat 3 Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage by Herman Buhl 4 The Mountains of My Life by Walter Bonatti 5 Conquistadors of the [...]

While attempting to research a biography on Louis XIV’s mistress Veronica Buckley stumbled upon the lost diaries of the former king of France. The problem was the diary was not written 282 years ago, but in 1998. What Buckley quotes is in fact the work of François Bluche. In 1998 this French academic decided to [...]

This month’s Avid Reader is all about ephemera, which on AbeBooks includes all manner of paper collectables that are not specifically books. One thing we don’t talk about in this Avid Reader is newspapers, which can also end up being collectable, though some people are a little more passionate about it then others.

Douglas Todd, a religion and spirituality reporter for the Vancouver Sun, was supposed to interview touted atheist Richard Dawkins (author of the God Delusion). However Dawkins refused to do the interview. Eventually an interview was arranged with a different reporter. You would think that someone like Dawkins would be just itching to get into it [...]

There is a nice interview with Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid about their most recent book, Beyond The Great Wall: Recipes and Travels in the Other China which combines the best elements of life cooking and traveling though China.

A big thanks to everyone who visited the AbeBooks and Story Laboratory booths at the LA Times Festival of Books over the past weekend. We met buyers, collectors, booksellers, librarians, teachers, authors, researchers, publishers, mums, dads, kids and many more bookloving folk on Saturday and Sunday. It was blazing hot on Saturday (almost 100 degrees) [...]

The shortlist for the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse comic fiction prize has been announced. Alan Bennett – The Uncommon Reader Garrison Keillor – Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon Joe Dunthorne – Submarine Julian Gough – Jude: Level 1 John Walsh – Sunday at the Cross Bones The thing about a prize for funny books is [...]

James Frey is back, and this time he is admitting it’s a novel