The Monobookist Invades New York

 photo via CNN

 Doth One Book Make a Store?

Everywhere you look in the recently opened Ed's Martian Book in New York City's West Village you'll see the same book.

 Whether you're in the New and Noteworthy section or the Sale section you will be exposed to one book and one book only,  Kessler's recently released, Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days With the Phoenix Mars Mission, an account of his time spend inside NASA's mission control.

3000 or so copies of the book make up the entire inventory of the book shop.

photo Guy Calaf for The New York Times

"The store is part marketing ploy, to be sure (Mr. Kessler is a creative director at an advertising agency), but also part meditation on the meaning of the book in an age of e-readers and a bankrupt Borders" writes Elissa Gootman in her New York Times piece, A Book Store. That’s Right. Book, Singular.

 Kessler, who was able to pull off this book feat with the help of the landlord, expects to pack up the shop in mid-May. There is no word on where he will land afterward.

 

The BiebBus: A Mobile Library for the Ages

 The essence of a successful library is one that serves its community well.

But what about those places that are hard to get to and where it is to costly to build a library?

That's where the bookmobile or mobile library comes in and this one might just take the cake.

The Biebbus was specially designed for the people of the densely populated and difficult to navigate Zaan region of the Amsterdam metro area by architect Jord den Hollander.

It consists of a refurbished shipping container that pops up to provide two rooms, one for the 7,000 books it carries and one for the kids to stretch out and read or use one of the 4 computers on board. The floor that separated the two is magnified giving the library a "fun house" feel.

What a great way to show our kids how fun reading can be!

Thanks to Inhabitat for the lead

A Book Wall in a Food Place

 The restaurant is called Brushstroke, a much anticipated Japanese restaurant about to open in New York City,  and the walls of the bar/lounge are made of 12,000 used paperbacks!

The Gothamist notes in their post on the opening the potential problems of such an undertaking  "Who will be the first sake-bombed customer to idly pull out one of the books and bring the entire restaurant crashing down?"

The interior was designed by Super Potato

From the photo above it looks like, with some minor tinkering, the the room can be turned into a Kafkaesque biblio-prision for the illiterate.

A Flash Mob of Readers in Support of National Library Week

In honor of National Library Week about 75 people showed up at a mall in Holyoke, Mass to stop and read a book.

Here is the promotional poster for Library week featuring John Grisham as Honorary Chair:

and here is Grisham sharing some library love:

Andy Rooney on e-books

In 2007 Andy Rooney did a segment on 60 Minutes on his visit to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair. In it he reminded us that books are one of the greatest inventions of all time.

Now, nearly 4 years later, Rooney weighs in on e-books and e-readers and as you might expect he isn't too impressed.

"I'm not interested in having my books on an electronic device. I want them in books. I want my words in books" says Rooney.

Full text of segment here

And for those in the New York area the 2011 book fair is currently under way.

Text-Off

The folks at the app judgement show on the Revision3 network hold a text-off.

The rules: Who can type the sentence "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" the fastest on their mobile device.

It begins with the first mobile typing device, a typewriter!

A few info nuggets:

"Words Per Minute" is generally the standard used to measure the speed at which someone types and according to a study quoted by Wikipedia, the "average" typing speed for the average "fast", "moderate", and "slow" typists is 40, 35, and 23 words per minute respectively.

Also according to Wikipedia, the average professional typist reaches 50 to 70 words per minute with some up to 120. Arguably the fastest sustained speed recorded for 1-minute of typing is 216 words per minute.

Side Table with Book Slant

Here's a blast from the past - this gem made its way around the design blogosphere in July 2009.


The Lectus Pile of Books end table by Josefin Hellstrom-Olsson
25.59" tall x 17.72" wide and retails for around $800.

Should be available from Personal Interior Design once they get their website up and running again.

h/t booklicious

AbeBooks E-mail Database Hacked

 This email was recently sent by AbeBooks to its customers informing them that their email database had been breached:

Epsilon Informs AbeBooks of E-mail Database Breach

We have been informed by Epsilon, a third-party vendor we use to send e-mails, that an unauthorized person outside their company accessed files that included e-mail addresses of some AbeBooks customers. Epsilon has advised us that the files that were accessed did not include any customer information other than email addresses.

As a reminder, AbeBooks will never ask customers for personal or account information in an e-mail. Please exercise caution if you get any emails that ask for personal information or direct you to a site where you are asked to provide personal information.

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