Suppose you could design your own moleskine-esque notebook, where every page and the cover is fully customizable. What kind of pages and images would you include? Please leave your ideas in the comments!
Filed under: books |
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Tagged: diy notebook
Dr. Alexander Shulin’s first laboratory notebook has been scanned and put online.
If you want higher resolution images, check out the JPEG 2000 files here.
Filed under: archive, books |
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Tagged: 2CB , MDMA , pharmacology , shulgin
May, Jess, and I went to hear Alice Waters speak at Red Hill Books. It was packed! Here is the view from the very back:
Here is a strange thing with feathers, in a window display next door to Red Hill:
It was cold night! Even Zara needed a scarf!
Filed under: books, san francisco, zara |
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Tagged: AliceWaters , bernal , RedHillBooks
For the Open Content Alliance meeting two weeks ago, the conference room at the Internet Archive HQ was transformed into a prototype library that will soon be open to the public. Here are some pictures of what Brewster calls the Open Library.
When you enter, you are greeted with a sign that explains the library:
This is a prototype library of the future that has access to millions of books, videos, and audio items from thousands of libraries worldwide. This library fits into a small room but still can house music, videos, one of a kind or popular books, and a librarian. It has download capabilities for patrons with music players, e-books, audio books and storage devices, and a Print on Demand machine that can print and bind a book in ten minutes.
The purpose of the open library is to provide universal access to all published knowledge. By using digitizing equipment, computer storange, and the Internet, we can realize the dream of the Library of Alexandria.
When you walk in, the first thing that grabs your attention is the Espresso Book Machine, which can print a book and bind a book in about ten minutes.
The EBM completely changes the physical structure of the library. Using the public access terminal in the library or your own laptop, you can order one of the 200,000+ books from the Internet Archive book collection. It takes about five minutes of preparation and another five minutes of printing, and then a perfect-bound book shoots out of the machine. Here is some video of the EBM in action.
Even though this prototype library is pysically quite small, it has a collection larger than 80% of the libraries in the US. The Internet Archive book collection is growing at a rapid pace (15,000 books a month and rising). Soon, this might be the largest library in the world, and you will be able to put one in every town!
In the two pictures above, you can see the ingredients of the Library of the Future:
Filed under: archive, books |
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Tagged: EBM , library , OpenLibrary , PrintOnDemand
We went to the Illuminated Corridor event, Prelinger on Prelinger, at the Prelinger Library last night. Lots of video art! Some pics:
Filed under: archive, books, photos |
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Tagged: library , prelinger , videoart
This is the first time I got the Espresso Book Machine to print and bind a book without human intervention! I happend to capture a video of Flatland being printed. Very cool!
(click play to start) (link to other sizes)
Filed under: archive, books, video |
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Tagged: EBM , library , PrintOnDemand
Here is a short video of a test run of the Open Content Alliance’s Espresso Book Machine, an automatic print-on-demand robot that makes perfect-bound paperback books. The Espresso Book Machine was created by On Demand Books.
This video was shot during configuration of the machine, so you can see the printing/binding process, but the book gets stuck and comes out mangled.. I’ll upload another video after the machine is set up..
(press play to start video) (link to other sizes)
Filed under: archive, books, tronix, video |
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Tagged: EBM , library , PrintOnDemand
Today I was thinking about Fray, the old-school story-telling website from back in the day. Unfortunately, they went on hiatus a couple days ago, and and have definitely been missed. It’s odd that the same day that I decided to check up on Fray is the same day that they announce the return of Fray, as a printed quarterly publication! Submissions are being accepted until October 1, so get busy!
I hope they resurrect the Fray Day events as well. We went to Fray Day 7 in SF and got to hear Armistead Maupin read and Noe Venable sing. It was magic.
Update: OK, it’s not odd that Fray picked today to relaunch; today is their 11th anniversary. But it is weird that I picked today to randomly start think about Fray.. hmm…
Filed under: all talk, books, inspiration, san francisco |
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Tagged: fray , recommended
You know how they have Camel Bookmobiles in Kenya? Well, in Venezuela they have Mule Bookmobiles! Bibilomu-u-u-u-las!!!
via BB.
Filed under: bobslobster, books |
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Tagged: library
I think definitely wins the award for Funniest Thug Parody of the Week.
Read A Book
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Announcing The Open Library!
What if there was a library which held every book? Not every book on sale, or every important book, or even every book in English, but simply every book—our planet’s cultural legacy.
First, the library must be on the Internet. No physical space could be as big or as universally accessible as a public web site. The site would be like Wikipedia—a public resource that anyone in any country could access and that others could rework into different formats.
Second, it must be grandly comprehensive. It would take catalog entries from every library and publisher and random Internet user who is willing to donate them. It would link to places where each book could be bought, borrowed, or downloaded. It would collect reviews and references and discussions and every other piece of data about the book it could get its hands on.
But most importantly, such a library must be fully open. Not simply “free to the people,” as the grand banner across the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh proclaims, but a product of the people: letting them create and curate its catalog, contribute to its content, participate in its governance, and have full, free access to its data. In an era where library data and Internet databases are being run by money-seeking companies behind closed doors, it’s more important than ever to be open.
So let us do just that: let us build the Open Library.
I thought of the smartest programmers and designers I knew and gave them a ring, sat down for coffee with them, threatened to fly out to their homes and knock on their doors. In the end, we got together an amazing group of people — all sworn to secrecy of course — and in the past few months we’ve put together what’s probably the biggest project I ever worked on.
So today I’m extraordinarily proud to announce the Open Library project. Our goal is to build the world’s greatest library, then put it up on the Internet free for all to use and edit. Books are the place you go when you have something you want to share with the world — our planet’s cultural legacy. And never has there been a bigger attempt to bring them all together.
Congrats Aaron and team!
Filed under: archive, books |
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Tagged: library
This is highly weird. In April 2006, a First Edition copy of the Principia Discordia was recovered from the John F. Kennedy Archives (see routing slip). Here is a bit of detail on how it was found:
I stumbled upon knowledge of the Dead
SeePresident Scrolls purely by chance - a reference number on a scan of a copy of something I did not believe I was looking at: so much so that I passed over the title page of the first edition of the Principia Discordia (How The West Was Lost) many times before it dawned on me what it was before my eyes.On that sheet was an Accession Number. And that number pointed to a secret which has lain hidden for over 30 years, trapped unseen in a musty, dusty vault in Maryland.
As luck would have it, the Rev. Karl Musser happened to be in the neighbourhood of that very vault, and willing to do me a favour, All Blessings Unto Him.
But how did these papers end up in the Assassination Archive in the first place?
In the late sixties, founding Discordian Kerry Thornley, who had been in the Marines with Oswald, found himself under the microscope of those investigating the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. Such Official Investigations generate a Paper Trail - evidence proffered is indexed and stored… preserved against the erosion of time. (Well, mostly…)
Filed under: archive, books |
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Tagged: wtf???
What’s summer without a summer read and a little armchair travel. Apparently, this book has it all. Via Drawn…
James Teitelbaum and Santa Monica Press are pleased to announce the June, 2007 release of Tiki Road Trip 2, the follow-up to James Teitelbaum’s hugely successful book, Tiki Road Trip (Santa Monica Press, 2003).
Tiki Road Trip is your best - and only - comprehensive travel guide for those seeking a south seas adventure in the big city, an island escape from the urban jungle, or the location of the nearest metropolitan luau. At 360 pages (compared to 280 in the old edition) and packed with new images, this edition of Tiki Road Trip is a huge leap forward from the previous edition, and is absolutely mandatory summer reading.
Filed under: books, tiki lifestyle, tikibar |
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reCaptcha is a project by Prof. Luis van Ahn at CMU.
Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.
reCAPTCHA is a great project. I added the WordPress plugin to TikiRobot, which will hopefully reduce all the crap that Akismet fails to catch. If you haven’t seen Prof. van Ahn’s TechTalk on Human Computation, check it out. It’s very good!
His other projects are The ESP Game and PeekABoom.
Update: Here is a quote from Brewster:
“I think it’s a brilliant idea — using the Internet to correct OCR mistakes,” said Brewster Kahle, director of the Internet Archive, in a statement. “This is an example of why having open collections in the public domain is important. People are working together to build a good, open system.”
Filed under: archive, books, code code |
4 Comments
Tagged: neat , opensource
I just finished reading this book called Me Write Book, It Bigfoot Memoir. I can’t say it’s very good. It’s okay….but, oh my god, I read *A BOOK*!! Seriously, I don’t remember the last one I read before this. In fact, this could be the first book I’ve read all year…and may be the only book I read all year (which is kind of sad because there aren’t very many words in it…and only a few coherent sentences).
Anyways, I’m posting it here because firstly, I need to gloat about having read *A BOOK*…and secondly, I’ve resolved to not keep books that I don’t absolutely love (no space)…so if anyone else wants it, lemme know and I’ll drop it in the mail or give it to you the next time I see you.
Filed under: books |
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99 Ways to Cut, Sew, Trim, and Tie Your T-Shirt into Something Special
Each tshirt project is illustrated with clear instructions - most don’t require anything but a pair of scissors, a pen, and a ruler…and most take between 5-15 minutes. The design on the left is especially good for all those tshirts with annoying logos on the back!
Filed under: books |
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Tagged: crafty , tshirt
Miranda July has an absolutely brilliant website for her new book, No one belongs here more than you.
According to her stove, she will be in LA on May 15 and in SF on May 16 to promote her new book. We should go!
Filed under: books, san francisco, upcoming |
2 Comments
Tagged: LA
I just got the Sticker Nation book and love it! It’s filled with 435 stickers designed by Srini Kumar of unamerican.com. My desk now says I ♥ Source Code and my TV says SET ME FREE. My favorite one is this one:
It’s only 10 bucks on Amazon and it’s made by a Kumar, so you know that it is BEST QUALITY!
Filed under: books |
4 Comments
The Boring Store, 826’s new Chicago imprint, is absoutely not a secret agent supply store. The Methods Reporter, a Chitown blog by Notherwestern J-school students, sneaks inside. They sell Bob’s favorite brand of grappling hooks, so there’s something for everyone, whether you are spy or a ninja!
The Camel Bookmobile in Kenya is the best thing I’ve seen all day! Check out the pictures, video, donation info, and amazon wishlist. They need donations of books in English and Swahili. You can ship eleven pounds of your old books to them for $11.55. (via boingboing)
Filed under: bobslobster, books, transportation |
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Tagged: library
A couple weeks ago, we went to a discussion at the Commonwealth Club entitled The Future of the Book: Dead or Alive.
Unsurprisingly, no one thought that books were going to die out anytime soon. Brewster Kahle showed off a prototype book reader on the OLPC, and said something which I’ve never heard anyone say before. He held up a book produced by the Internet Archive Bookmobile and said that now it costs less to print a book and give it away than it does to loan it out from a library. And that means we can give away books and pay authors at the same time.
Filed under: archive, books |
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High-rez scans of a first-edition copy of Flatland: a Romance of Many Dimensions are now available at the Internet Archive. Yay! Direct links to Ajax-y FlipBook and 12MB PDF.
There’s a good interview with Sanjay Patel in SF Gate today! He created the The Little Book of Hindu Deities I posted about earlier and is also an artist at Pixar. So happy to hear that his book is getting around!
Filed under: books |
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Covers is a nice site dedicated to the appreciation of book cover design.
When I was a kid, my fantasy job was to be a book cover designer. I imagined reading books all day and then designing covers for them, thereby combining my 2 favorite childhood activities. How cool would that be?!
Anyways, I don’t design books right now and I’ve been buying most of my books from Amazon these days but I still love going to Green Apple Books (my very favorite store in all of SF) to browse…I think part of the pleasure I get from going there comes from looking at all the different covers and touching the different types of paper…I always walk out with something beautiful I didn’t know about that makes me happy or that pokes my head in the all the right places, reminding me of how tiny my world is and expanding it just a little bit.
Browsing through this site feels a little bit closer to the serendipitous experience of browsing through Green Apple than browsing through Amazon. (though of course still not the same)
Filed under: books, design |
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I recently read Banker to the Poor after it showed up in our sidebar. I found it so facinating that I stayed up late and finished it in one sitting.. It’s the autobiography of Muhammad Yunus, a professor of Economics who, in 1976, started making small loans to provide capital to the poor in Bangladesh. He started the Grameen Bank, which has now loaned more than US $5 billion to those who can’t get traditional bank loans. The Grameen Bank provides no-capital loans to the poorest of the poor. They have an almost perfect repayment rate, and 97% of their borrowers are women. The bank is structured so that 90% of the bank is owned by its borrowers. Grameen Bank aims for poverty elimination by making credit a human right. Prof Yunus’ dedication to fighing poverty is inspiring. He won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize.
In addition to the Grameen Bank, there are now many Grameen enterprises, including Grameen Energy and Grameen Telecom, which are also focused on helping the poor of rural Bangladesh. In 1997, the Grameen Foundation was formed to help support Microfinance institutions around the world. Today, peliom pointed me to Mifos, an open source account management system developed by the Foundation. They have a SourceForge project, and they are also hiring a program manager and an intern. If you are Java type interested in finance, you should check them out!
I became interested in microfinance after reading May’s post about Kiva. Kiva is looking for volunteers to help with web development. It would be great if Kiva provided traditional bank accounts similar to ING Direct or other online-only banks, where the account funds were used for funding microfinance loans. I’m sure a lot of people would use such a bank, even if the account earned no interest.
Filed under: books, inspiration |
3 Comments
