This chart shows the upper/lower quartiles and median for circulation per FTE student. As you can see this data shows a much more dramatic drop in the circulation of library materials. Rising student populations hide this fact.

More from Will Kurt in his post The End of Academic Library Circulation?

Remind me again why we insist on grasping at straws with eBook outrage, holding on to an old model of librarianship?

If you’ve been fortunate enough to discover one of the 878 books we’ve left lying around Salt Lake City, you’re undoubtedly elated, but probably also a bit curious about our objectives. It’s simple, we love books and our greatest passion is in sharing this love and promoting literacy in our community, which is why we’ve emptied truckloads of free books specially wrapped in seven custom Weller Book Works covers all around town. So keep your eyes peeled because there are literally hundreds of great books out there just begging to be read and spread. If you do find a book, read it and leave it somewhere for someone else to find and enjoy. If you can’t wait to find one of our free books, come visit our new location at Trolley Square and we’ll set you up with something just right.

More from Weller Book Works

I noticed this cover of “Five Laws” on the Otlet’s Shelf example. I’ve never read the book (gasp!) so I don’t know if the design is meaningful or just random. Is there a theme of three or thirds?

Otlet’s Shelf is a Tumblr theme and a bookmarklet for Amazon.com.
Together, they make it easy to collect and publish a list of your favorite books.

How about a repurposing for libraries?

via Nate Hill

These are pairs of groups of books wrapped and meant to be checked out and unwrapped at home. With RFID they can be checked out while still wrapped, and without the patron knowing what they are (unless they look at the checkout screen or slip). – Todd Mecklem.

[via MCL's Twitter]

“An average Borders superstore stocked around 140,000 titles at immense cost, but if a customer craves selection, no store can compete with the long tail of the Internet. Maybe more crucially for Borders, the assortment of titles that provided the key to its identity didn’t give it a competitive edge over Barnes & Noble. Mark Evans, a director of merchandising strategy and analytics at Borders until 2009, says that the company surveyed customers to understand why Barnes & Noble, with its slimmer selection, continued to clobber them in terms of year-over-year growth, average sales per store, and even the number of books sold at each location. ‘Customers didn’t notice our larger assortment of books,’ Evans laments. ‘They didn’t care.’” – From The End of Borders and the Future of Books.

The article offers an interesting analysis of why Borders failed even though some of its stores were profitable and other booksellers remain so.

“Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.”

Coppola went to the San Francisco library, checked out books on the Mafia, and found a deeper theme for the material.

From The Godfather Wars, an article about the making of the film.

The director researching at the library struck me as neat and from another era.

Early library memories.

[via Book Worship]

Taken directly from the titles of the film adaptations.

[via]

Amazing covers by Peter Mendelsund for the forthcoming Alfred A. Knopf series of Kafka’s works.

The Independent Printing Resource Center in Portland is hosting a 24 hour reading of Moby Dick starting at 17:00 on 11 Feb 2011. I like the explanation of why they’re doing it:

When first published, Moby Dick was a near flop. It remains a totem to the importance of small, independent publishing for keeping alive great works ahead of their time.

It starts at Powell’s and moves to a mystery location from there.

For another Starck project, in Dallas, Mr. Wine used black paper to wrap the 2,000 vintage books he picked for their “distressed edges,” so they could be displayed backward.

Read more about “book solutions” at Selling a Book by Its Cover.