The Reading Room

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
Bookstore-Themed Tokyo Hotel Has 1,700 Books And Sleeping Shelves Next To Them | Bored Panda (http://www.boredpanda.com... http://static.boredpanda.... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 7 ] -

"Some people love books, while other get put to sleep by them. Book and Bed Tokyo, a bookstore-themed hotel located on the seventh floor of a high-rise in Tokyo’s Ikebukuro neighborhood that opens its doors on November 5th, is perfect for both. Designed by Makoto Tanijiri and Ai Yoshida of Suppose Design Office, it promises to be the best place to curl up with a good book and fall asleep. The ‘Compact’ compartment measures 205 x 85 centimeters (80.7 x 33.5 inches), and the ‘Standard’ is 205 x 129 centimeters (80.7 x 50.8 inches); the price per evening can be 3,800 to 6,000 yen (US$32 to $50), depending on the size of accommodations. On opening day, there will be 1,700 English and Japanese language books available, but the hotel plans to eventually expand its library to 3,000." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

1 other comments...

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
Three Ways Publishers and Libraries Can Work Better Together (http://www.publishersweek... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

"As of this year, all Penguin Random House e-book titles are now licensed on a perpetual-access model, with prices as high as $65 per copy for new releases, including bestsellers like Danielle Steel’s Blue and Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air. Let’s call this what it is: bullying behavior. PRH—whose titles often make up half of any given bestseller list—is giving public libraries an impossibly hard choice. If we buy PRH e-books in sufficient numbers to meet demand, we are left with less money to acquire books from other houses, which stymies our ability to create diverse collections. If we hold back, we create a dissatisfied public and risk becoming irrelevant to our readers. But the impact is even more far-reaching. For example, would I feature a PRH author as part of a discussion series? Not likely, because I could never be sure that I could afford enough digital copies. If you can’t back up your program with access, why bother?" - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
The Library Card - The Atlantic (http://www.theatlantic.co... https://cdn.theatlantic.c... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"The traditional impression of libraries as places for quiet reading, research, and borrowing books—and of librarians as schoolmarmish shush-ers—is outdated, as they have metamorphosed into bustling civic centers. For instance, Deschutes Public Library in Bend, Oregon, now cooperates with dozens of organizations, from AARP (which helps people with their taxes) to Goodwill (which teaches résumé writing). A social worker trains staff to guide conversations about one of the most frequent questions people trustingly bring into the library: Can you help me figure out how to meet my housing costs?" - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
1001 Knights Is a Gorgeous Anthology That Will Examine What It Means to Be a Knight (http://io9.gizmodo.com/10... http://i.kinja-img.com/ga... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

"Currently seeking funds in Kickstarter, 1001 Knights plans to gather over 250 artists, including Steven Sugar, Ryan North, Molly Ostertag, Kekai Kotaki, and many more, across three volumes (titled Courage, Wisdom, and Fellowship, respectively) to create stories told through comics, prose, illustration and poetry about the romantic mythos behind knighthood. It also promises to cover those themes with feminist ideals in mind, promoting itself as “people-positive” portrayals of the characteristics that define that iconic knightly imagery. That probably means lots of amazing art and stories about dashing looking people in fancy armor, regardless of gender, race, or what have you." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
Tiny Mobile Libraries Revitalize a Corner of Seoul (http://www.visualnews.com... http://visualnews-wp-medi... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"There are few things that make you slow down better than a good book. Perhaps that’s why the Seoul Innovation Park and the City of Seoul chose them as one key part of an initiative to revitalize an unloved site previously occupied by the ministry of food and drug safety. The Mobile Library project sees four miniature library pop-ups designed by Korean studio Spacetong(Archworkshop) with collaboration from designers Jae-Choul Choi, John (Pyung Ki) Kim, and Woo-Yeol Lee. The four small spaces are called ‘Mirage’, ‘Block’, ‘Pipe’ and ‘Membrane’. It’s not hard to guess which is which, with each structure embodying its defining feature. Each lends a much needed touch of culture to a rather dull corner of the city, transforming it into a space you’d now consider for a relaxing break. Lovely." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

bentley to bentley's feed, The Reading Room
"Uploading of Anne Frank’s diary ruffles legal feathers" http://www.swissinfo.ch/e... The situation is more complicated than I realized. I knew Otto had edited the text, but I didn't know that there were two texts to begin with. (via http://www.tk421.net/libr... )

8 years ago - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
Bringing Poetry to Rikers Island, Where ‘They Can’t Cage Your Mind’ - The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/20... http://static01.nyt.com/i... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 5 ] -

Mr. Hodges, 25, is a spoken-word performer and a somewhat unusual ambassador of the New York Public Library, where he was hired this year to help create programs to attract members of the millennial generation. For the past couple of months, he has been developing a spoken-word program at Rikers, where the library has for years offered a variety of services, including a book-lending system. “I really wanted to include this other section of New York City that often doesn’t get discussed as part of the city,” Mr. Hodges said in an interview. “You’ll hear me say a lot: They can lock your body up, but they can’t cage your mind.” - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
Poetry used as 'a perfect weapon' for recruiting violent jihadis, study finds | Books | The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.co... http://i.guim.co.uk/img/m... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"Kendall’s research is based partly on data collected in conversation with 2,000 people in the sparsely populated but geographically huge Mahra region. Interviewees were asked about the significance of poetry in their lives, as part of a wider socio-economic survey conducted by the Mahra Youth Unity Organisation, an independent non-governmental body. “The survey was conducted in December 2012 by local fieldworkers, men and women, face to face, to capture illiterate respondents of both genders. A startling 74% of respondents believed that poetry was either ‘important’ or ‘very important’ in their culture today,” she writes. “Poetry was found to be very slightly more important among the desert tribes than along the more sedentary coast, among those in the poorest economic group and among those who carry a gun (a result that was not explained simply by any greater prevalence of guns in desert locations). Surprisingly perhaps, the presence of a television and level of education made no discernible impact, and the importance of poetry was only very weakly correlated to increased age. Finally, poetry was found to be more important among men (82%) than women (69%). This is not surprising, since it is the men who mainly recite at formal gatherings.”" - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed, Soup
For a Shakespeare Anniversary, an Online Re-Creation of a 1796 Show - The New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/20... http://static01.nyt.com/i... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 5 ] -

"The coming year promises to bring global Shakespeare mania, as the 400th anniversary of his death prompts a cavalcade of performances and exhibitions around the world. In advance of that deluge, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin are offering a more unusual view of the playwright’s early celebrity: a meticulous online re-creation of the long-vanished, and wildly popular, first museum dedicated to Shakespeare. The three-room Shakespeare Gallery, opened by the publisher John Boydell in 1789 on the fashionable Pall Mall in London, closed in 1805. In its day, it was a sensation, attracting emotional crowds who came to gawk at enormous canvases depicting scenes from Shakespeare’s tragedies, comedies and history plays, commissioned from Britain’s leading painters and hung cheek by jowl on the pale blue walls. “It was the Georgian equivalent of binge-watching Shakespeare,” said Janine Barchas, an English professor who led the project." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

"The project, which went live on Wednesday, grew out of an earlier digital project of Ms. Barchas’s, “What Jane Saw,” which reproduced an 1813 London exhibition of portraits by Joshua Reynolds as it had appeared on the day when Jane Austen visited, looking for a likeness of “Mrs. D.” — Mrs. Darcy — as she cheekily put it in a letter. The Reynolds exhibition, the first commemorative museum show dedicated to a single artist, attracted hundreds of people a day to gawk at the Annie Leibovitz-like array of royalty, society figures and theatrical stars on the walls. But during her research, Ms. Barchas — who is also a curator of the exhibition “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen and the Cult of Celebrity,” opening at the Folger Shakespeare Library in August — realized that the building that housed the Reynolds show had earlier been home to Boydell’s perhaps even more influential exhibition. “It was an amazing coincidence,” she said." - JustDuckie - -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
Quantifying the Weepy Bestseller | New Republic (https://newrepublic.com/a... https://images.newrepubli... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - -

"In other words, up to a certain point, sentimentality does not help us distinguish between ostensibly high-cultural things and low-cultural things (or popular things and serious things). It neither qualifies nor disqualifies you from a variety of possible outcomes, such as being reviewed in a major newspaper, selling books, or even winning prizes. Indeed, when we looked more closely at the sales data of the novels reviewed in the New York Times we found no correlation between sentiment and sales. It doesn’t appear to be a factor in helping or hurting a book’s sales. What sentimentality does do, however, is strike you from the list of twentieth century classics (CLASSIC). While the list of the 400 most-widely held novels in libraries since 1945 do not exhibit significantly lower levels of sentimentality (indeed it appears to be the opposite), the more constrained list of the 60 or so most canonical novels published between 1945 and 2000 (an admittedly very subjective list) appear to show more restraint when it comes to using a sentimental vocabulary. These are works by authors like Toni Morrison, Susan Sontag, Don DeLillo, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion, Ralph Ellison, among many others you’ve definitely heard of. (For those who are interested, Burroughs, Nabokov, and Bellow are at the top of that list while Cheever, Didion and Gordimer are at the bottom)." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

1 other comments...

"Our advice to writers? Based on the available evidence, if you want to write one of the fifty most important novels in the next half-century, then by all means avoid sentimental language. But if you want to get published, sell books, be reviewed, win a prize or simply make someone happy, then emote away and just write a good novel." - JustDuckie - -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
How Amazon came to dominate fiction in translation | Books | The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.co... https://i.guim.co.uk/img/... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 3 ] -

"The unwillingness of English-speaking readers to engage with fiction in translation has come in for its fair share of criticism over the years, not least from the director of the Edinburgh book festival, Nick Barley, who described the UK’s parochial reading habits as “something of an embarrassment” this summer. Help, however, might be at hand from an unexpected quarter: Amazon published three times more translated fiction in the US this year than its nearest competitor. “Three times more than the next press. Three times!” Chad Post wrote on Sunday, on the database of American translated fiction that he runs on the University of Rochester’s Three Percent blog. “[Amazon] makes up almost 14% of all the translations included on their own. That’s incredible.”" - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed, Soup
A Love Letter to College Libraries (http://bookriot.com/2015/... https://2982-presscdn-29-... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 6 ] -

"The first thing I love about the college libraries is their collection of books and how WEIRD it truly is. It is sprawling and eccentric, because while some of it is just general fiction and nonfiction that’s good to keep on hand, quite a lot of the contents are books teachers have ordered for class curriculums. Depending on the school and the range of their course catalog, this can lead to some weird and very, very specific books on topics you didn’t know they wrote books about. I own a book on the rise and development of modern astronomy in China, because I took a class that was about specifically, only, that." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - [ 2 ] -

1 other comments...

"I think that college libraries perhaps get a greater license to be truly weird than do public libraries, because a public is (amazingly, heroically) trying to serve the needs of the public as best it can, through book collection and other services. A college library exists to supply the weird books professors want, give students places to study and do that thing that young students do in secluded spots (take naps). It doesn’t have to be as open and serving, which helps keep the weird in. When my parents and us would take trips as kids, their hobby was to visit beautiful cathedrals and churches. Along those similar lines, I like to visit libraries when traveling…and if I can, I try to visit the libraries of any university I can find, as well. That sort of affable weirdness should be reveled in." - JustDuckie - [ 3 ] -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
Penguin blames likely job losses on rise of ebooks | Books | The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.co... https://i.guim.co.uk/img/... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] - [ 2 ]

"Readers’ preference for ebooks has been blamed for 225 potential job losses after publisher Penguin Random House announced cuts that leave staff facing an anxious Christmas. The publisher of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman and EL James latest 50 Shades novel, Grey, wants to cut jobs at its warehouse in Rugby, Warwickshire. It put its decision down to a fall-off in demand for physical books, which are distributed from the warehouse, and consolidation among publishers. “The revolution in reading habits, with ebooks becoming more popular, has put these 225 jobs at risk,” said Unite regional officer Peter Coulson. “It is a worrying time for employees and their families, especially in the run-up to Christmas, and is a real blow to the local economy.”" - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

"Ebooks now make up 25% of the market, just eight years after the launch of the Kindle in 2007. Figures released this year by NielsenBookScan showed physical sales of adult fiction had declined by more than £150m in just five years. But some bookshops have reported a surprise reversal in the trend, with Waterstones boss James Daunt ending Kindle sales after saying ebook revenues had “disappeared to all intents and purposes”." - JustDuckie - -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
If you enjoyed a good book and you're a woman, the critics think you're wrong | Jennifer Weiner | Comment is free | The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.co... https://i.guim.co.uk/img/... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 4 ] -

"Call it “Goldfinching”, after Vanity Fair’s 2014 yes-but-is-it-art interrogation as to whether Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer prize-winning, mega-bestselling book The Goldfinch is or is not literature. It’s the process by which a popular and previously well-regarded novel and, more importantly, its readers, are taken to the woodshed, usually by a critic who won’t hesitate to congratulate himself on his courage, as if dismissing popular things that women like requires some special kind of bravery – as if it doesn’t happen all day, every day." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

6 other comments...

There's the context, and also not everything "good" is going to be to people's taste, and so many just can't seem to handle that sometimes. I hate Dickens and Twain. That doesn't mean they're bad, I just don't make Twain or Dickens' mistake of assuming that my dislike equates to an actual reflection of quality. So much of the dismissal seems to be rooted in the belief that if you don't like what they like, in the way that they like it, then you must be faulty in some way (which is easier to apply to people that you don't respect opinions from already.) - Jennifer D. - [ 1 ] -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
Opinion: Do We Honor Girls’ Stories? The Double Standard of YA Lit | School Library Journal (http://www.slj.com/2015/1... http://www.slj.com/wp-con... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"It’s hard not to think it’s because they’re female-driven, female-centric stories. They do not bend to a male gaze, and they are unabashedly about being girls in today’s male-friendly world. These are girls’ voices that we don’t hear—ones of love and victimhood, of friendship and social change—and they’re voices we won’t hear lauded as unique, powerful, memorable, or life-changing. We may label them as “strong,” but it’s hard not to wonder why we label some female voices “strong” and not others? Perhaps we also need to wonder why we don’t use the label “strong male voice.”" - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

"When women take risks in their writing, when they choose to write female-driven narratives with take-no-bull girls who may not care at all whether you like them or not, they’re not seen as brave. They’re not seen as doing something new or inventive or award-worthy. They are instead dinged because they portray girls who aren’t “likable.” Because the stories are not always “nice.” Because those girls aren’t “realistic.” But when men write girls—any kind of girls—they’re seen as special. As empathetic. As doing new, creative, amazing things. As pushing the YA world forward." - JustDuckie - -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
City543 » Following Amazon’s Footsteps, Taiwan’s Books.com.tw Opens Physical Bookstore (http://city543.com/taipei... http://static.city543.com... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - -

"Situated by the 7-Eleven by National Taiwan University’s dormitory area, Books’ new store, however, does the exact opposite of what Amazon has done with its first new physical bookstore. Instead of buying physical books that are in sync with the e-commerce site’s massive online catalog, the store, a collaborative effort between Books and 7-Eleven, only offers previews of books; the actual purchasing still has to be done online through its website." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

"Books.com.tw has termed its new store The Future Bookstore (未來書店), and true to the name, Books presents two new features that would more likely appear in a sci-fi movie than a bookstore. The first is the Smart Shop Assistant, which is a screen with a webcam that will first scan the customer and determine his or her demographic data through face-recognition technology. Then based on the demographic result, the assistant will present a selection of books that the customer may like. If the suggestion hits the mark, customers can add it to their “like” list and later purchase the books online through customised QR codes on their app. The second feature is the iNTERPLAY technology, which projects images onto a desk that visitors can then interact with and receive tailored suggestions for books after a brief questionnaire. Again, purchasing will still have to be done through scanning QR Codes." - JustDuckie - -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
Amazon Will Never, Ever, Replace Libraries | Motherboard (http://motherboard.vice.c... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 8 ] -

"But the difference between the two institutions should be obvious. The goal of a public library is to lend books to citizens free of charge, and to provide spaces that serve all people in society equally. The goal of a bookstore—and Amazon Books is indisputably a bookstore—is to sell books to customers at a profit, and to provide spaces for those who are able and willing to purchase its products. Those are two different kinds of institutions and they inevitably produce two different kinds of communities. How then to account for this creeping argument? It’s worth addressing, as Amazon is increasingly drawing comparisons to libraries, especially through its Kindle Unlimited service. In 2014, Amazon rolled out that subscription service for ebooks, it was repeatedly said to be "like a library." (Except, of course, it wasn’t. Instead, it was a fee-for-service product similar to Netflix.) And last year, Forbes went so far as to argue that we should “Close the libraries and buy everyone an Amazon Kindle.”" - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - [ 1 ] -

"Tech evangelists and neoliberals want to have it both ways. They want to commoditize public space, but retain a strong sense of community. When citizens enter retail spaces, however, they are converted into consumers—not a bad thing, per se, and arguably necessary to keep the wheels of commerce going. But these sorts of spaces don’t bring people together; they pry them apart. The most common effect is not communion or collective feeling, as The Atlantic suggests, but atomization and anxiety. Meanwhile, a purely digital marketplace like the Kindle Lending Library, offers no public space at all—cheap, even free, books are one thing, but nobody’s going to mistake a Netflix-like download menu for a public community. Libraries, on the other hand, are different kinds of places altogether. They are built collectively through the allocation of public funds, and their mission, much like post offices or public schools, is to serve everyone equally regardless of one’s purchasing power. Though rarely sexy, slick, or technologically cutting edge, they provide something else—namely a rare and welcome respite from the relentless assaults of the market. In an increasingly venal, self-interested, and privatizedAmerican culture, libraries offer a glimpse of a more civil, humane, and social democratic impulse—the better angels of our nature." - JustDuckie - [ 2 ] -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
Unique libraries around the world - The Times of India (http://timesofindia.india... )

8 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

"CAMEL LIBRARY Fancy a camel that stacks up your favourite books on its back? Well, your dream has come true! The library camels of Kenya, as they are popularly known, serve the nomadic population in the country with books. A programme which was started way back in the late 80s, these book toting humps just sit around in empty spaces, allowing you to come and choose your book, read it and then keep it back in the book trunk. Now that's something everyone should experience!. " - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

"LIBRARY OF MASS DESTRUCTION Don't go by the literal meaning of the name -this library in Argentina represents a dark time in the nation's history. A mobile library which displays about 900 odd books, is in the shape of a tank (representing the Argentine War of Independence) and cruises along the streets of Buenos Aires and other smaller towns which do not have access to traditional libraries. It pulls up besides pedestrians and allows them to borrow books. " - JustDuckie - -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
In Praise of the Horrid Gothic Novel ‹ Literary Hub (http://lithub.com/in-prai... http://d3rde5ck80dcsn.clo... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 1 ] -

"I am unequivocally here for the Gothic novel, and not only because I’m inclined to like anything that upper class English people think is horrid. It’s taken literary theorists a long time to figure out what to do these books because of their structural predictability. It was not uncommon in 1801, or in 1960, or even in 1980, when Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick called the Gothic form “pervasively conventional,” to list the elements of Gothic works to illustrate their repetitiveness. “Once you know that a novel is of the Gothic kind (and you can tell that from the title), you can predict its contents with an unnerving certainty,” she claimed, which is true, but since that statement gains have been made in understanding how, instead of a mark of low quality, that rigid structure, especially for female authors, makes for a powerful exploration of themes of oppression, repression, obedience and sexual rebellion. Scholars have called this, among other terms, the feminine Gothic, and even Gothic feminism. Diane Long Hoeveler has my favorite definition: “The gothic feminist always manages to dispose of her enemies without dirtying her dainty little hands.” The act of reading a salacious, illicit scene is a powerful thing, though it might masquerade as ambivalent. That double consciousness is what’s made Gothic fiction influential on so many writers, male and female, from Edgar Allen Poe, to Angela Carter, Joyce Carol Oates, and Elena Ferrante." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

1 other comments...

Honestly, that's one of the reasons I enjoyed Northanger Abbey so much. The first night, when she freaks herself out about something that might be in the wardrobe? So damn funny - at least in part because who /hasn't/ accidentally spooked themselves at one point in time? - Jennifer D. - [ 1 ] -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
'Twilight' Characters Swap Genders in 10th Anniversary Bonus: 'Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined' - Yahoo (https://gma.yahoo.com/twi... https://s1.yimg.com/bt/ap... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - -

"In the new anniversary material, "Life and Death: Twilight Reimagined," the gender roles of the series’ main characters are reversed, turning Edward into Edythe and Jacob into Julie. "I wanted to do something fun for the 10th anniversary and the publisher wanted like a foreword and I thought, ‘Well, maybe something more interesting,'" Meyer said today on "Good Morning America."" - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

6 other comments...

Oh thank god, someone who is not me is hatereading it. May their suffering not be in vain. - JustDuckie - -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, Soup
Teens can read off St. Paul library fines - TwinCities.com (http://www.twincities.com... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 3 ] -

"Teens can erase library fines during October just by reading at their local St. Paul library. The St. Paul Public Library's Read Down month is open to ages 12-18. Teens must sign in and out at their local branch and read books, magazines or other print materials. (Teens who can't read can listen to audiobooks). For every 15 minutes reading, the teen gets $1 removed from any fine. Credit can be applied to replacement library cards or any fees charged for overdue materials, with the exception of fees related to renting DVDs or rental books." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

What a great idea! - JustDuckie - -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
The Curious Case Of The Book Blurb (And Why It Exists) : NPR (http://www.npr.org/2015/0... http://media.npr.org/asse... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - -

"Whatever the old adage might warn, there is a bit of merit to judging a book by its cover — if only in one respect. Consider the blurb, one of the most pervasive, longest-running — and, at times, controversial — tools in the publishing industry. For such a curious word, the term "blurb" has amassed a number of meanings in the decades since it worked its way into our vocabulary, but lately it has referred to just one thing: a bylined endorsement from a fellow writer — or celebrity — that sings the praises of a book's author right on the cover of their book. They're claims couched in quote marks, homes for words you might never hear otherwise — like compelling, or luminous, or unputdownable. Heck, at least three books have reportedly inspired celebrated memoirist Frank McCourt to say "you'll claw yourself with pleasure."" - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed, Soup
An Epic Dinner at the Library | Messy Nessy Chic (http://www.messynessychic... http://static.messynessyc... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"Make a toast to Tolstoy, order the chicken Kiev in honour Chekhov, let Stravinksy serenade you with every spoonful of caviar and Pushkin play host in his palatial library of gastronomic pleasures. For anyone who has a way with words or a weakness for a truly great story, it’s likely that the library is one of your favourite places in the world. So what if you could dine in a library with its very own restaurant, inside a Baroque Moscow mansion?" - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

"The old pharmacy and the library have been meticulously preserved as they were by the modern-day occupants, inviting guests to reserve their tables in the pharmacy hall surrounded by antique medicine bottles and scales, or in the Library, sitting amongst explorer’s globes, telescopes and rare copies of anything from Shakespeare, Dickens, Voltaire and Dante to Pushkin himself, Tolstoy and Russia’s greatest storytellers. The menu is a thoughtful take on dishes from Pushkin’s own times, both Russian and French, inspired by historic recipes and adapted to modern times." - JustDuckie - -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
How Libraries Have Embraced Their Role in the Public Safety Net - Pacific Standard (http://www.psmag.com/poli... http://a4.files.psmag.com... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 2 ] -

"The assumption among such commenters is that libraries should do their best to prevent homeless patrons from visiting, but libraries are public spaces that are legally open to everyone. The American Library Association even has a policy statement urging libraries to "recognize their role in enabling poor people to participate fully in a democratic society," and to train staff on reducing barriers that keep poor and homeless people from using the facility. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, meanwhile, opposes rules designed to keep people out of public spaces—including libraries—based on their housing status. For example, some libraries have rules against carrying large bags onto the premises. But that's just a cheap way of barring the homeless from visiting, as homeless folks must carry all of their belongings around because they don't have anywhere to store them and keep them safe from theft." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

"Especially in cities where other public services for homeless people are failing, library staff members must work to balance the desires of their homeless patrons and those who are uncomfortable with the signs of homelessness. Some big cities have figured out fixes, as American Libraries reported in November: hiring in-house social workers, or allowing non-profits serving the homeless to operate out of their conference rooms. The San Francisco Public Library even has a mobile shower parked outside. These are policies that embrace libraries' role in the public safety net. Perhaps it's time housed patrons took note." - JustDuckie - -

Comment

JustDuckie to The Reading Room, JustDuckie's feed
Roald Dahl book to be given away with every McDonald’s Happy Meal in the UK | Books | The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.co... https://i.guim.co.uk/img/... )

9 years ago from Bookmarklet - Comment - Hide - - [ 4 ] -

"The estate of Roald Dahl, the author behind such culinary delights as Wonka’s Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight and the upside-down fizzy drink Frobscottle, has teamed up with McDonald’s to give millions of books away with Happy Meals. For six weeks from tomorrow, 14m specially created Roald Dahl books will be free with Happy Meals in the UK, McDonald’s announced today. Eight titles have been put together for the promotion, each showcasing extracts from two Dahl books, including Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Families, with tasters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr Fox, and Roald Dahl’s Magical Mischief, extracting George’s Marvellous Medicine and Matilda." - JustDuckie from Bookmarklet - -

The Reading Room

Warning!