I often write about reading in this blog; it is a fairly natural - even logical - progression or collocation for anyone thinking about information, books or libraries. In Is Google Making Us Stupid, Nicholas Carr wonders if - like the Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico [who, after Gutenberg's printing press] worried that the easy availability ...

… and what does Ray Bradbury mean when he says that There is no future for e-books because they are not books at BookExpo America When, or indeed, why is a book not a book? If we take digitized version of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence, or even of his Fahrenheit 451, and present it on-screen, surely we have an electronic or digitized version ...

Well, my portfolio is pretty much done. It’ll be sent off soon. This blog was started as part of the chartership process. Now it is nearly at an end, I think it’s time to put an end to the blog. I have said all I want to say on the issues I have covered. As a summary:- Above all [...]

The Kathleen Fitzpatrick article I referred to in my last posting, talks about ''the tyranny of the book'' (Stallybrass) and ''bookness'' - her word for what I have called 'book-like'. She notes: Stallybrass suggested, almost as an aside, that the book is a production, finally, of the binder. This is a point I’d like to dwell on a bit, as it ...

An interesting new blog on Slow Reading has been launched. It is interesting to see slow reading defined as part of a resistance to the hectic pace of modern life. This is something I can see the sense of. We all need to slow down at times, for true appreciation to take place. And books do offer [...]

Where America leads, it seems, we are bound to follow. I know it is a while since Tim Coates published and publicised Yinnon Ezra, board member of the MLA and head of leisure services in Hampshire, who publicly questioned the need for fiction in public libraries ''we have to ask whether fiction should remain in libraries when most people buy ...