Library Stuff

Goodreads Blog – “Goodreads continues to grow at a phenomenal pace. Today, we had our 300 millionth book cataloged! To give this statistic some context: It took the Goodreads community three years to catalog 100 million books (including books marked as read, to-read, or currently reading). Fourteen months later, in late September 2011, we reached 200 million books. Now, just seven months after that, we’ve hit the 300 million benchmark. Take a look at how the number of books cataloged has skyrocketed.”

Press Release – “Thomson CompuMark, a Thomson Reuters Intellectual Property & Science business and the global leader in trademark searching and brand protection solutions, today announced plans to launch 136 new databases for its SAEGIS® on SERION® online trademark screening solution. The addition of this content will make Thomson CompuMark the world’s largest provider of trademark screening data, covering 186 countries and registers. Thomson CompuMark made the announcement at INTA, the International Trademark Association’s annual meeting.”

Tennessean – “A school district has deemed an awkward teen’s two-page oral sex encounter at boarding school in the coming-of-age novel “Looking for Alaska” too racy, banning the book from class reading lists.

Sumner County Schools are at least the second in the state, after Knox County in March, to keep students from reading it together in class.”

SF Weekly – “Jessa Crispin arrived at the 2012 Public Library Association Conference in Philadelphia in March with high expectations. And by high, we mean abysmal. “Secure in the knowledge that libraries are now permanently fucked,” wrote the editor-in-Chief of the popular “litblog” Bookslut. Surely librarians would crumble before her, the harsh fiscal realities having reduced the bibliognosts into heaps of despair, wailing about furloughs and nonexistent arts grants. But Crispin is not a librarian. Once a publishing outsider, she launched Bookslut in 2002 while working at a Planned Parenthood in Texas. She now enjoys insider status, and she contributes to likes of NPR, PBS, and the Washington Post on all things books. The conference falls within the realm of the “book world,” so Crispin, donning black garb, traveled all the way from Berlin in search of heavyhearted roundtable discussions and forsaken vendor booths.”

New York Daily News – “In a handsome new website called The Hemingway Papers, the Toronto Star has collected the columns that Ernest Hemingway wrote for that newspaper. In doing so, it sheds much-needed light on a little-known aspect of the great writer’s career, and does so in a sleek, inviting and easy-to-navigate format.”

Associated Press – “Maurice Sendak, the children’s book author and illustrator who saw the sometimes-dark side of childhood in books like Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, has died. He was 83. Longtime friend and caretaker Lynn Caponera says she was with him when he died early Tuesday at a hospital in Danbury, Conn. She says he had a stroke on Friday.”

LA Times – “The Book Depository is a British-based online bookseller that ships to countries around the world, for free. To bring that point home, it has built a map that shows who bought what, where, just now. The window of the map moves to reach the most recent purchase, zooming back and forth from Germany to Singapore to the United States to Australia to Norway. In each location, the title pops up. It’s hypnotic.”

NY Daily News – “Beloved as a crown jewel of world culture, the New York Public Library’s stately main branch is up for a historic makeover that promises to well serve the city. The building, outside which the lions lounge on Fifth Ave., houses 5 million volumes, most of them on 90 miles of shelving spread across seven floors overlooking Bryant Park. It’s time to move the books, which couldn’t give a Dewey decimal about the view, to make way for people.”

Wired – “I’m going to assume you’ve already heard the argument that comics are a great way to teach literacy, and not re-hash that here. Comics are also a pretty good way to teach other things as well: it’s a very blurry line between comics and instructional diagrams, for instance. The combination of words and pictures is something that just clicks for many readers, particularly when it’s done well. Reading With Pictures is a non-profit organization that aims to “get comics into schools and get schools into comics.” Tom Stillwell wrote about their first anthology last year, which covered a variety of subjects as their proof of concept, and was very well-received. Now, RWP is seeking funding on Kickstarter for The Graphic Textbook, a 144-page comics anthology covering Social Studies, Math, Language Arts, Science — all drawn from a list of common core standards. Their hope is to weave comics-based learning into virtually every subject by producing a book that can actually be used as a textbook, and not simply a literacy aid.”

Florida Today – The erotic “Fifty Shades of Grey” apparently is too blue for the Brevard County Public Libraries system. The wildly popular first installment of a titillating trilogy by British author E.L. James, “Fifty Shades” is parked atop every best-seller list in the country, from Amazon to the New York Times. But the sadomasochistic saga won’t be found any longer on Space Coast library shelves. All of a “handful” of copies were removed from circulation earlier this week. “It’s quite simple — it doesn’t meet our selection criteria,” said Cathy Schweinsberg, library services director “Nobody asked us to take it off the shelves. But we bought some copies before we realized what it was. We looked at it, because it’s been called ‘mommy porn’ and ‘soft porn.’ We don’t collect porn.”