Imagine every two weeks always having a new book to read. Sounds great, right? You could accomplish this with a subscription to Amazon Kindle Unlimited. Or you could accomplish this with… your local library. I love physical books. I love shelves filled with physical books. I love places with people who love books. Libraries. I …
Books and shopping baskets. They really quite similar. While shopping with my girlfriend yesterday, I held the basket while she picked them items and handed them to me. I asked her if it felt weird passing off the groceries and not carrying them into a basket or cart. She said that it did feel abstract. …
Grocery shopping can be a simile for reading books Read More »
The Library of the future is coming and it has no books! San Antonio has plans for a bookless library. The rendering is quite curious. iMac-o-rama I love me some iMacs, but is the future of libraries really all the same computers? For some reason, I’d like to see a diversity of computers. I like …
Do you remember when Amazon used to rank books by their popularity in various cities? I enjoyed seeing which books were topselling in Chicago. Or at my alma mater, Illinois Wesleyan University. But Amazon no longer has those rankings listed with the books. What gives? To find the answer, I tweeted this question and my …
What happened to Amazon’s book rankings by city? Read More »
“Lignin, the stuff that prevents all trees from adopting the weeping habit, is a polymer made up of units that are closely related to vanillin. When made into paper and stored for years, it breaks down and smells good. Which is how divine providence has arranged for secondhand bookstores to smell like good quality vanilla …
Do you enjoy showing off your books? Or maybe you enjoy seing your shelves filled with books. While I do like my book shelves, I also find myself running out of shelf room for additional books. Enter eBooks. Readers are no longer limited by shelf space. You can own hundreds or thousands of books. But …
When eBooks take over, will we hang posters of books on our walls? Read More »
Goodreads has a poll asking about where you heard about the previous book you read. Here are the results: I voted for “blog post” because I heard about “Shape of Design” from Craig Mod’s post “Hack the Cover.” Although I had to think about it for awhile, because I read a bunch of books at …
The vast selection of used books in the basement of After-words bookstore makes me appreciate being able to discover books. But it also makes me aware that I don’t purchase physical books anymore. I enjoy the experience of reading books on my iPhone so much that I rarely pick up a real book to read. …
What could the bookstore of the future look like? Bethanne Patrick, Executive Editor of Book Riot, asked this question on her blog post, “The Bookstore of the Future, Installment One: What Would Don Draper Handsell?” (hat-tip to @dbsalk for tweeting a link to this post.) I’d love to see specific niche-by-topic bookstores. Like a bookstore …