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 […]
“A sappy woman sent me a letter a few years back. She knew I was sappy, too, which is to say a lifelong northern Democrat in the Franklin Delano Roosevelt mode, a friend of the working stiffs. She was about to have a baby, not mine, and wished to know if it was a bad […]
Guess who? I'd have guessed the FBI. Or the Library of Congress. Or a private collector with an interest in the area – someone like Larry Flynt. But nope, the biggest collection of banned books is owned by the Catholic Church. Their List of Forbidden Books is an index of books that the Church has […]
It's Freedom to Read Week and to celebrate, I'm going to do a week's worth of posts on the topic. I know a lot of librarians, writers and others will be talking about this topic so I'm going to try to come up with some unique angles for my posts where possible. But with that […]
Just what the world needs (and what I need too) – another blog!I've set up a blog called The Universal, mainly as a place to link-dump stories and web sites related to the topic of online broadcasting which is a personal interest of mine (remind me to do a post about my summers selling door […]
There are lots of lists of best opening and closing lines/paragraphs of novels. But how about a list of best opening paragraphs from academic titles? (via MetaFilter which, as always, has some good discussion, other suggestions and related links) Here’s a bonus FFL – “Virus“, a fun little Flash game that’s sort of like a […]
