Reading Copy

The new Sony e-Reader is reviewed in the Globe and Mail.

Oh thank God for that! I was worried there for a minute.

Popularity: 8% [?]

I am seeing many positive reviews for Mary Roach’s new book - Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex. Slate.com has a video interview with the author where she recounts flying to London to take part in an experiment where sex is filmed using ultrasound imaging technology. If you’ve become a parent in the past 20 years or so, you’ll know how ultrasound can generate pictures of the baby in the womb. (Link from Bookslut)

Popularity: 27% [?]

Stephen King spent Christmas reading a book on a Kindle. He says the Kindle is “just fine.” King adds the method of delivery really doesn’t matter and that the story is more important than anything, including the author. Incidently, this is the book he was reading.

Popularity: 17% [?]

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)

Popularity: 30% [?]

Chip Kidd’s take on what effect the new Kindle will have on book design - none. Succient, pithy and probably correct - for now. The son (or daughter) of Kindle and it’s ilk may be something to take notice of.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all Kindles came with one free book progammed into their memory? I’d suggest this classic. I wonder what temperature a Kindle ignites?

Popularity: 16% [?]

I wonder if someone will put a used Kindle for sale on AbeBooks.com? A slightly foxed true first edition that hasn’t been price-clipped. Not a book club edition.

In the meantime, who’d have thought there’d be so many books with Kindle in the title?

A Kindle of Kittens by Rummer Godden - a nice children’s book from 1978.

To Kindle A Soul: Ancinent Wisdom for Modern Parents and Teachers - pretty much what it says on the cover.

To Kindle The Yule Log: A Booklet of Verse - something for Christmas from 1899.

This one looks very interesting….Pen, Sword, Camisole: A Fable to Kindle a Hope - a book set in Brazil.

Popularity: 21% [?]

More than 250 people attended the AbeBooks.com Open House event last Friday. I thought may be 50 people would come along and would have been thrilled with 70, but they just kept arriving. In the end, we ran out of visitor badges. It was a real mixture of people - techies, project managers, marketing types, finance people, entrepreneurs, some folks who were regular buyers and wanted a look, and even a couple of booksellers sneaked in.

Thank you to everyone who attended - Judy Hamza, our HR director, has a huge pile of resumes and she began reading them almost immediately after the event ended.

Popularity: 22% [?]

AbeBooks.com is hosting its first ever Open House today, so if you are in Victoria, BC, and wondering what it takes to work for us then pop down. We’re at 655 Tyee by the Bay Street Bridge. Look for the big glass building with Bala Fitness on the ground floor - we’re on the fifth floor. The Open House runs from 12 noon to 2pm today (Friday 2 November).

Popularity: 28% [?]

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 of miles away from our office.

Although Cathy and her husband Keith have not been officially involved with AbeBooks since 2003, we remain in touch. The founders still attend the AbeBooks’ Christmas party, Cathy is frequently interviewed by the media about being a dotcom entrepreneur and she visits our office. Oh, and Grafton Books is an AbeBooks seller too.

No-one here at AbeBooks has forgotten that Cathy and Keith Waters and Rick and Vivian Pura built an incredible foundation, and we simply wouldn’t be here today without them. They started AbeBooks while holding down other jobs and built, from scratch, a company that changed the way used books are bought and sold.

Popularity: 15% [?]

We all know how technology has changed the book business. Google, e-books, us and all the other online sellers and marketplaces etc etc…. But The Times has a story about books and technology that I’ve never seen before.

Historic parchment manuscripts that are too fragile to be unfolded, such as parts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, could soon be read without being opened using a scanning technique that relies on the world’s brightest light.

Popularity: 11% [?]

William Gibson again. This time the author of Spook Country is interviewed by the New York Times.

NY Times: Are you sick of being known as the writer who coined the word “cyberspace” in 1982?
WG: I think I’d miss it if it went way.

Popularity: 16% [?]

Two years ago, I picked up the Globe and Mail newspaper and read about how Margaret Atwood had invented the ‘Long Pen’ - a remote autographing machine so authors didn’t have to leave their homes to sign books. I thought it was a joke, so did the Globe and Mail and lots of other people. It wasn’t.

Earlier this year, I was wandering around the London Book Fair and there she was. Magaret Atwood was manning the Long Pen booth, flogging her product, and I actually used the machine. I signed a square glass surface built into one machine and a few yards away my signature was replicated by a robotic arm on to a piece of paper.

I thought it was very clever but it seems to me that the Long Pen would have many other applications aside from author signings - sports stars signing contracts with their new team, mega-bucks international business deals etc.

The Canadian Press reports how the Long Pen is now being trialled in some shops.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Spook Country by William Gibson appears to be the most reviewed book around at the moment. The most excellent Penguin blog details Gibson’s recent over-crowded reading in Second Life.

Popularity: 15% [?]

I like reading books, they idea of e-books doesn’t quite do it for me. However I DO like this. Lonely Planet, the travel guide producers, are testing a program where you can download specific chapters of books that you need in PDF form.

For a big trip I would still buy the book, but for two days in or a layover only forking out a couple dollars for the chapter I need is brilliant!

Popularity: 16% [?]