“Recently, I was having lunch with a friend in the café of the Morgan Library when the topic of electronic books came up. We all have friends with whom we cannot discuss certain things, but I had no idea that this particular friend was fond of those barbarous contraptions that are threatening to wreck the book trade. No sooner did the Kindle topic come up than it nearly ruined an otherwise festive lunch …” (more)
[Edward Short, The Weekly Standard, 5 March]
“… What are we to make of this? Well, one thing we don’t need to conclude is that nobody is reading books. That is manifestly not the case. But how people buy them has changed fundamentally …” (more)
[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 3 February]
“Juliana Adelman Over Christmas I read The Selected Works of TS Spivet by Reif Larsen which my canny husband somehow knew I had almost bought for myself each time I entered Hodges Figgis …” (more)
[Pue’s Occurrences, 2 January]
“As students cut costs by buying books from cheaper online retailers or by downloading e-textbooks, campus bookstores sell fewer and fewer textbooks. That’s triggering an identity crisis for one of the oldest institutions on campus and leading some college officials to ask: If textbooks go digital, does the campus even need a bookstore? …” (more)
[Jeffrey R Young, Chronicle of Higher Education, 14 November]
“… Whenever I visit the homes of friends, I’m often depressed by the lack of books. No books on tables, no books on shelves. No books. The home interiors seem painfully incomplete …” (more)
[Bernie Goldbach, Inside View, 24 October]
“Many of the pages in Worldcat Identities are for corporate authors, Ohio State University, for example. It is interesting in these cases to see what the most widely held works about the institution in question are. Here are some examples from universities …” (more)
[Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog, 4 October]
“Google has released their estimate for the number of books: 129,864,880. They also offer a full explanation of their counting methods, with some interesting quotes …” (more)
[Steven Matthews, Slaw, 5 August]
“Dear cash strapped university heads, My name is James Foley, I’m in my third year of study in the University of Limerick and I have a confession to make. In my three years here, I’ve only bought two books. I think that needs to be put into perspective a bit …” (more)
[James Foley, 5 January]
“Many of the pages in Worldcat Identities are for corporate authors, Ohio State University, for example. It is interesting in these cases to see what the most widely held items about the institution in question are. Here are some examples from universities … So, the list of most widely held items about Ohio State University, maybe not unsurprisingly, has a strong football flavor. Quite a few universities have strong sporting coverage. Thinking along these lines, I tried Notre Dame, only to discover that the list is dominated by mystery novels by Ralph McInerny. Where an institution figures centrally in a popular work of fiction, it may not be surprising to see it in the list, although it might not be what immediately comes to mind. So, E.M. Forster’s posthumously published Maurice is recorded as the most widely held work about the University of Cambridge. There are also two writers of mysteries set in Cambridge on the list …” (more)
[Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog, 16 February]
“… I recall the occasion when, in my last university, I was at a meeting at which the Librarian explained that, at that point, the cost of new journal and book acquisitions necessary for maintaining our teaching and research had begun to exceed our means. And he pointed out that this would get worse, that academic publishers were putting up journal prices in particular at a rate far beyond inflation, and that soon only very wealthy universities would be able to maintain an adequate collection. That was still in the days before widespread digital and online publications. Now the hard copy versions of a good many publications are beyond the resources of most institutions …” (more)
[Ferdinand von Prondzynski, University Blog, 1 February]
