Tag Archives: book

Happy Banned Book Week

Banned Book Week which is held during the last week of September is the US equivalent of Canada's Freedom to Read Week which is held during the last week of February.Here's a post on MetaFilter about Banned Book Week including a really cool Google maps mash-up of book challenges across the US since 2007. 

A Couple Interesting Ways to Analyse Individual Beatles' Popularity/Contribution Within the Group

Here's a couple very quantitative way to determine which Beatle added more to the group…– assign point values in descending order based on who wrote each of the Top 50 Most Played Beatles Songs on last.fm (Paul has a slight edge over John)– using the Beatles #1 album, count who wrote more of their #1 […]

Design Your Own Cover For The New Douglas Coupland Book (Which Is A "Generation X" Sequel)

*I'm backdating a few posts to this past weekend to keep up the illusion that I never leave the front of my computer for such things as camping and otherwise spending quality time with my family.*CustomizedCoupland is an opportunity for you to design your own cover for his new book – for a price of […]

Friday Fun Link – Obama's Reading List for His Holiday in Martha's Vineyard (August 29, 2009)

Sorta interesting but not as cool as hearing what's on his iPod.

Friday Fun Link – Guess The Famous Novels From Their Opening Lines (August 21, 2009)

I got 12/16 and once I saw the four I missed, realised I probably should've got 16/16.  If you want a hint, mouseover the following text…the site fills in the titles automatically as you guess correctly so picking names of classic novels at random is a good way to cheat…and for the record, I didn't […]

Friday Fun Link – BookSeer (August 14, 2009)

Some of the folks on MetaFilter are reporting bugs but after a few trials (admittedly with fairly well-known and recent books), I had no problems with BookSeer.  It's nothing ground-breaking – simply a pretty cool interface to present the book recommendations provided by Amazon and LibraryThing in a unique, streamlined fashion. 

The Tipping Point For E-Books?

As I mentioned before, the first book I downloaded to read on my new iPhone is “Little Brother” by Cory Doctorow.  I'm quite enjoying it – both the story and the convenience of always having a book with me in a very compact form.  I also just finished “Free: The Future of A Radical Price” […]

Cory Doctorow on Copyright

Because Cory Doctorow's new novel, “Little Brother” is the first e-book I'm reading on my iPhone (very readable, thank-you very much), I got to see his copyright notice which I'm reproducing here in its entirety because it's such a great summary of how copyright should work in a sane and rational world: THE COPYRIGHT THING […]

Turning the Page In A Digital Age

A recent Globe & Mail article on Indigo's current practices and strategies provides a lot of ideas about what public libraries will have to consider in an increasingly digital age. 

Friday Fun Link – You Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover – But Can You By Its Title? (July 3, 2009)

Print-on-demand web site, Lulu.com has a service that helps project how well your book will do based solely on its title.  The algorithm was developed exclusively for Lulu by statisticians who studied 50 years' worth of bestseller data encompassing over 700 titles from 1954 to 2004.  They compared the attributes of these titles against a […]