The Case for Books

Uh-oh, look at that cover.

It’s a meta-book, about books, and the title promises to make an argument for why they are important in the present age. Judging a book by it’s cover, I’d say we are going to talk about books that are plugged in - based on the white cords, perhaps an Apple Tablet, [...]

More books about books

The book I’m almost finished with now is Proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain by Maryanne Wolf. Wolf is a neuroscientist who studies dyslexia, which she says is catch-all phrase for problems learning to read.
I’m not terribly impressed with it - the opening chapters make weak and culturally [...]

and then i made another post

In And Then There’s This, Bill Wasik demonstrates how “viral culture” (or “viral marketing”) works and argues that for the most part, it is not accidental.
The most compelling bit of the book is the introduction, most of which is available in Google Books, where he argues that people writing blogs, tweeting and posting their [...]

the future of the internet and how to stop it by jonathan zittrain

In a comment on Anne-Marie’s “secret library books” post last week I mentioned that I had started reading The Future of the Internet and How to Stop it by Jonathan Zittrain. I’m not sure it turned out to be a secret library book or not, but there is much to interest librarians.
Zittrain describes something as [...]

backyard poultry raising

The first thing I did when I decided to raise chickens was put a hold on every book in the library with chicken or poultry in the subject heading. By far, the most informative and entertaining one I read is John Festus Adams’ Backyard poultry raising: the chicken-growing, egg-laying, feather-plucking, incubating, caponizing, finger-licking handbook, published [...]

Everything is Miscellaneous

At the 2008 Libraries in the Digital Age conference I attended a month ago, Jeffrey Pomerantz presented results of a study of library and information science curriculum that showed that David Weinberger’s 2007 book Everything is Miscellaneous was one of the most popular books assigned in courses on digital libraries metadata.
“That’s terrible”, I told Pomerantz, [...]