Archive for the ‘books’ Category

Tuesday, November 16th, 2010

New group: “Books in 2025—The Future of the Book World”

I’ve started a new discussion group LibraryThing Group, Books in 2025.

The group aims to centralize and restart a site-wide conversation about the future of books and reading. It’s a conversation that’s been going on for years here and there on Talk, especially Book talk and the librarians group, in comments to my Thingology posts about ebooks and my Twitter stream. It needs it’s own group. It will also be refreshing to hear more from LibraryThing members–not technologists or industry people. After all, who better to discuss the future of books than the people who love them most?

Anything about the future of books is welcome, but the focus will be on how ebooks and social reading are and will change things, with 15 years as a proposed timeframe:

  • How will ebooks change reading? Has it changed your reading?
  • How fast will ebooks rise, and how high will they go? Is the paper book dead?
  • Where is social reading going? What’s core and what’s fad?
  • Will sites like LibraryThing continue to exist, or will ereaders leverage their advantages to make book discussion a platform-dependent activity?
  • Will libraries contract or prosper in an ebook world? What can they do to make sure things turn out right?
  • How will ebooks change the world for publishers?
  • Will writers see increased opportunities–or be decimated by piracy? How will ebooks change literature?
  • Are physical bookstores doomed?
  • What about the rest of the book world–small and informal libraries, agents, rare books, small presses, book reviewers, etc.?
  • Amazon, B&N, Apple… How many will win, and how will they evolve?

Anyone can post, and start a topic. But we’re going to keep this a LibraryThing project. We’ll be starting some topics ourselves, and bringing in authors and other book people to discuss what they know, and where they think things are going.

So, come check out the group “Books in 2025,” and participate in a first topic, “Welcome to this group / Books in 2025?


Group image by Javier Candeira, released under CC-Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (see on Flickr).

Labels: books, bookstores, ebooks, libraries

Monday, July 20th, 2009

Upcoming book: Library Mashups

If you’re interested in Library 2.0 and library technology generally, you might want to pre-order Library mashups : exploring new ways to deliver library data (website), a collection of articles on innovative ways to use (and abuse) library data.

I haven’t read it yet, except for the chapter I wrote, “Breaking into the OPAC.” I’m looking forward to many, including one on John Blyberg/Darien Library’s SOPAC and something on “Zack Bookmaps,” an effort to show local library copies of a book, without using OCLC. There’s also a chapter on the LibraryThing API and libraries, written by Robin Hastings. Nicole Engard (a LibraryThing author), shepherded the whole thing to completion.

I found the book-process frustrating at times. At their fastest—and multi-author collaborations aren’t that—books are slow things. This one took about a year. But the articles still look timely to me, and it’s going to be good to hold “my” book in my hands.

Labels: books

Sunday, December 28th, 2008

Book blogs?

I need to broaden my horizons, and pick up a few good book-industry and bookseller blogs. I don’t care about book deals, but I wouldn’t mind some insight into how publishing is changing, particularly when it comes to technology.

I subscribe to some 114 blogs right now—mostly library-related, with a smattering of technology, startup, web 2.0 and competitor ones thrown in. But I don’t follow much in the way of publishing industry blogs—pretty much only the BookFinder Journal, Michael Cairns’ Persona non Data, Eoin Purcell, BookBrunch and Joe Wikert. And I only read one bookseller blog, the recently-discovered Hang Fire Books, which I read for the pulp covers.

Does anyone know of any good blogs?


Labels: book blogs, books