The author of the popular Freakonomics book looks at the question, “If public libraries didn’t exist, could you start one today?” “But here’s the point I’m (finally) getting to: if there was no such thing today as the public library and someone like Bill Gates proposed to establish them in cities and towns across the […]
LibrarianActivist has highlighted a couple sites in the past that offer free e-book downloads but this page has a comprehensive list of all the options online for getting free e-books and tree-books. (I love that the title of the post where I saw it on MetaFilter is “The Best Place To Get Free Books” and […]
A classmate wrote recently and mentioned in passing that I should read The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness and Greed. This made me realise it might be interesting to do an open post asking my readers (most of whom are librarians, writers or book industry types) what books they're reading and/or would […]
There are a number of astounding stats about The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan which came out during Saskatchewan's Centennial in 2005. Most pages of any book ever published in Saskatchewan. Most contributors. Most illustrations. Longest gestation time. Heaviest. The print edition is an amazing book and now, the CPRC has put the whole thing online for […]
Dave Margoshes is a Regina-based writer who's originally from the States. He sent the following anecdote to the Sask Writers listserv and has kindly allowed me to reprint it here. Since there's been a lot of Vonnegut talk recently, I thought I'd toss this in. I was at Iowa in the late '60s, overlapping with […]
Britain’s biggest specialist book chain, Waterstone’s, asked its 5,000 staff to name their favourite five books written since 1982, the date Waterstone’s opened its first store. The list features the cream, both male and female, of the modern international literary world of the last quarter of a century – from Umberto Eco and Bill Bryson […]
Where is home? I've wondered where home is, and I realized, it's not Mars or someplace like that, it's Indianapolis when I was nine years old. I had a brother and a sister, a cat and a dog, and a mother and a father and uncles and aunts. And there's no way I can get […]
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)
