The book publishing industry recorded total revenues of just over $2.4 billion in 2005, up only 1.6% from 2004. This was in sharp contrast to the 19% growth rate that occurred from 2000 to 2004. Despite the lackluster performance nationally, total revenue gains were strong in the West with British Columbia (+19.9%), Saskatchewan (+9.1%) and Alberta (+8.7%) outpacing the national average. In contrast, publishers […]
See below for some happy-making stats from a recently released survey. Two questions occur though – how do they correct for the people who over-represent their reading habits? (Even if asked anonymously, some might be inclined to say that they read more than they do. What's the term for that? Where you try to please […]
LoudIt.org offers free MP3 audio books of classic works that you can download or read long with onscreen. (via MetaFilter)
(This is just a random picture I grabbed off Flickr. Not a photo of the DVD collection of anyone I know.) Something I've noticed more frequently when visiting friends and family (and even on occasion when I get access to strangers' homes – ie. going to check out used baby items or whatever) is that […]
It's funny – you do a post you think will get lots of responses and then, ..not really. But then you do a bit of a throwaway post albeit on a fairly interesting hypothetical question and you get tons of thoughtful, passionate responses. So inspired by Cenobyte who said she was going to pose that […]
Last night, while thinking about the vast publishing industry and the fact that you could never read even a fraction of the books published each year, even in a lifetime of reading, I wondered “Are there any books that you could be sure that almost every single person who is a reader has read?” I […]
Bush's wife is a librarian for anybody who doesn't know. (Now if she could just teach him to pronounce “eclectic”…)Oh, and I'm tagging this with “humour” but really, it's about as far from funny as it gets. I think it was better when Bush admitted that all he read was Sports Illustrated and summaries of […]
When I uploaded my FTRW interview to YouSendIt a couple days ago, I didn't realise they now required you to set-up an account before downloading files (boo!) Quinn has very generously agreed to host the file for those of who who may have found this a barrier for whatever reason. To save the file to […]
Scribd is a new site attempting to be the “YouTube of documents.” It currently accepts .doc, .ppt, .txt, .pdf, .xls, .ps, .lit, .cia and .nhl file formats (just seeing if you’re paying attention on those last two!) Right now, the site seems to be a mix of pirated e-books (there’s that YouTube connection!) and documents […]
Here's something that was posted to the Canadian Library Association mailing list this week that's a fitting way to end my week of FTRW posts: the results of the CLA’s Advisory Committee on Intellectual Freedom’s web survey titled “Tracking Challenged Resources in Canadian Libraries” (PDF) for the year 2006. This report doesn’t include every instance […]
