Early library memories.
The Way Things Work
May 18, ’11
7:00 AM
Horizontal Cain Book Covers
Mar 28, ’11
8:37 AM
New Kafka Covers
Feb 18, ’11
10:08 AM
Take to the Ship!
Feb 3, ’11
5:19 PM
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.
Print Books as Niche Fashion Accessory
Jan 31, ’11
8:00 AM
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.
Trees of Code
Nov 16, ’10
1:00 AM
I don’t have a strong desire to read this book but I might anyways just because it is an amazing artifact. Insert obvious ebook joke here.
Trees of Code by Jonathan Safran Foer was written by removing words from his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.
More photos at Visual Editions
Biblioracle
May 27, ’10
10:51 AM
From a (very entertaining) intro to a readers’ advisory service on The Morning News:
It is important to draw a distinction between Amazon’s “Customers Also Bought” feature and the Biblioracle. Amazon is primarily constituted of servers and processors and computer programs. Amazon employs only seven actual human beings plus Jeff Bezos, who is a cyborg. The Biblioracle is flesh and blood.
best opening lines graphic
Mar 27, ’08
6:42 PM
Yeah, I’ve got some deadlines to meet. But you know what? Sometimes taking a break to play in Photoshop is just what I need to get on track.
Ever since Stephen Abram mentioned the 100 best opening lines from novels list from the American Book Review I wanted to put them into some sort of image. Mostly because I enjoy looking at vast canvases of Helvetica.
Today was the day. It looks only okay shrunken down here, but laser printed at its full tabloid size of 11″x17″ [15.21 MB - wow] it looks pretty nice. If you want to print it but aren’t crazy about the background color, I’ve uploaded a Photoshop file for you: firstlines.psd [7.27MB].
If you print of it, I’d love to see a photo of it hanging up.
click-a-story two
Nov 27, ’07
6:14 PM
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UPDATE: A few people said that the video crashed their browsers. I’ve taken it out of this post and put it on a separate page. I’ll have to sort it out. Any reports would be appreciated!
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Way back in the day at the TFML some YS librarians recorded stories, I put them online and since the site is (soon to be was, I understand), blog based, the stories were being podcast. Yay. As neat as it was to have a podcast, the interface for listening to stories online was not ideal. As you’ve likely experienced before, clicking on an mp3 takes you to a grey page with a simple controller. Not very pretty, and not good for usability.
I want to provide a better interface for listening to stories the second time I implement a “listen to stories online” program. Considering how easy it is to add artwork to audio by exporting AAC files from Garageband, I thought I’d start there.
This is fine and dandy but makes iTunes the only way to see the artwork while listening to the audio. Why? I can’t find any online tools that will let me embed .m4a files in a website. Do you know of one?
Compressor is one of the most versatile file encoding tools and I guessed that if anything could convert an .m4a file into something useful (like a QuickTime file to embed!) that would be it. It did, but with only slightly satisfactory results. Something like this will appear on the NPPL’s Click-A-Story page (yes, that’s the same name, but give me a break, the libraries are across the country). If this embedded video doesn’t appear in your RSS aggregator, you’ll have to click through:
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The offending video was here. To see it, though for some reason it might crash your browser, here it is on a seperate page.
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iTunes artwork is 300×300 pixels, but Compressor keeps turning the files into 160×160 pixels for some reason. I’ve not yet been able to find the right setting that spits out proper images. Scrolling is unsatisfactory too. I thought I’d put this out regardless as a quick proof of concept, and to see if anyone has suggestions.
Recently, Joshua M. Neff posted about his library’s Johnson County Library Online Storytime. You know, the title of their project is pretty straightforward and I like it. Another part of the project that I like and that I’m planning on replicating is having CDs of the stories for distribution. That’s a good way to get content to do more work.
I’ll be sure to let you know when the project is live and what the response is like!
