There’s a pretty good chance that the person reading this post doesn’t realize they’re reading a blog. A blog is, after all, just a website. We’re hoping the person who chanced upon this item was looking for information about how they can make updating their website easier. Or how they can reach more people. Or how they can promote their work more effectively without knowing jack-diddley about technology. Below, more links to articles designed to open your mind to possibilities. If you’re thinking you’re not the right person, the quote below offers a hint of the subject matter. It’s your

As always, the nuances of the publishing industry escape us. Maybe it’s because the things we think should be easy…aren’t. For example, accurate data about books. While we would expect various interested parties to update their databases throughout the life of a book, it doesn’t seem to be so. Luckily, Bowker and Ingram have stroked their chins and puzzled over the problem and come up with a solution to “provide the most robust and accurate bibliographic content in the book industry.” As we understand it, Books in Print (Bowker) will talk to Book in Hand (Ingram) and somehow accurate data

Maybe we’re reading too much into this opinion piece from The Guardian, but it appears that bringing the books that people want to read to them is anti-democratic. Lower prices and convenience are bad. The legacy of Penguin will not be the fact that more readers could afford books, but that more readers could afford books. Next thing you know, the masses will be attending the opera*. Even George Orwell worried about the likely effect on the book trade, reasoning that someone with five shillings to spend on books would probably settle for three sixpenny paperbacks rather than two half-crown

To hear it told, you’d think the world was ending. Nobody reads, nobody thinks. Yet there’s lots of evidence that plenty of reading and thinking is happening. In his new essay collection Bookmark Now, Kevin Smokler addresss the issue of reading and writing in these supposedley unreaderly times. As the opening piece, where a writer looks back at the irony, missed at the time, of his time as a soldier, reading Hemingway in Africa, indicates, there is far more reading happening than the watchful eyes of statisticians realize. Below, Kevin talks about his project and issues a call to arms

We’re taking a day off, but don’t go thinking that means you’re off the hook around here! Later today, we have an interview with Kevin Smokler. Kevin will be talking about Bookmark Now and how reading may not be as at risk as recent studies indicate. We’ll be back tomorrow, ready to annoy, annoy, annoy!