I sat down with my Kindle e-reader on Saturday morning to read the Los Angeles Times.  There was an article about an L.A. used bookstore called Iliad Books.  Sounded nice.  So I went.  What should I find but a section of books about books and publishing.  There was a copy of The Nature of the [...]

I don’t understand much about the book business.  But I do know what makes a person want to go and be somewhere.  I read a good blog post at The Devil’s Accountant about the troubles small bookstores have with the existing book business and the emerging business of ebook publishing.  Small bookstores have to purchase [...]

After two years of reading reviews, watching products come out and compete, listening to people gripe about DRM and ebook pricing, I jumped directly into the fray and opted for the Kindle from Amazon. I am completely and utterly smitten with the thing.  It feels like a magic book.  No – more like a printing [...]

Stephen Worth of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive has an excellent post about how Gustaf Tenggren developed illustrations techniques that led directly to the classic Golden Book style of illustration.
Read the article here

Here’s a stop-motion film about the making of a book called The Complex of All These.  It was made at the Women’s Studio Workshop in Rosendale, New York and consists of 3,000 photographs taken over a 2-month period.
Via Dangerous Minds

Remember the book?  Of course you do, because you have plenty of them in shelves, half-read, dusty, bent, torn, coffee-stained, wine-colored, smudged, smelly, misprinted, broken and cherished. They catch your glance as you walk from one room to another, reminding you of a year or a moment when you were doing something else but had [...]

John Grisham on NBC’s Today Show discusses his new book, writing novels versus short stories, and so-called predatory book pricing by large retailers like Walmart, Target and Amazon.com.  I like Grisham in this interview.  He’s a good interview and he seems sharp.  He talks about how it’s much more difficult to fix a problem in [...]

I’m looking at this new e-reader from Barnes & Noble called the nook and I’m a little worried.  It’s that split screen.  The top is an e-Ink display for reading your books.  But the bottom is a color LCD.  Look at that picture.  I don’t know about most readers, but I certainly don’t want that [...]

On Friday evening I went into Hollywood looking for monsters.  I found some really bad ones.  They’re inside The Vampire Archives, an enormous volume of vampire stories edited by Otto Penzler and published by Vintage Crime.
The book is organized into sections like Pre-Dracula, which holds gems like Good Lady Ducayne by English writer M.E. Braddon, [...]

The wonderful science fiction podcasting site, Starship Sofa, in celebration of its 100th episode, has published its first collection of stories as a book. Not just an ordinary book. It’s a book filled with fantastic illustrations and gorgeous layout that hearkens back to the pulp publications of the 1930s through 1950s. It [...]

The University of Texas has an excellent program online called The Edgar Allen Poe Digital Collection.  They’ve got digital copies of Poe manuscripts, letters, early editions, books that he owned, newspaper clippings, and photos.  This image shows an edition of collected poems owned by Poe in which can be seen his handwritten notes and corrections [...]

The Rumpus has short article by Julie Greicius about her favorite book by biographer James Lord who recently passed away.  His book, A Giacometti Portrait, chronicles the effort by Alberto Giacometti to paint a portrait of Mr. Lord.  The work goes on for days with the artist constantly destroying the previous day’s work and [...]

We have totally had enough of Amazon.com at Candlelight Stories and have completely removed them from advertising space on this site and permanently severed our ‘associate’ relationship with the company.  The reason is simple.  Over the weekend, Amazon went into customers’ Kindle ebook devices and deleted purchased copies of George Orwell’s classic novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four [...]

Pirate Jack
I just went and uploaded the print version of the Pirate Jack adventure novel to Scribd.com.  That’s the embedded preview of the book in their viewer above.  You can read about 53 pages of the book for free and then pay $1.99 to get the entire thing.  It’s the book version of our [...]

Tim O’Reilly has posted quotes from an interview with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

“We’ve co-evolved with our tools for thousands of years,” he says, explaining how ease of Kindle buying changes behavior.
“Reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device….It’s a myth that multi-purpose devices are always better…. I like my phone… I [...]

The Gutenberg Bible from approximately 1455 was the first book printed in Europe with moveable metal type.  The BBC reports that Cambridge University is preparing to make a scan of this book available online.  Scholars from around the world will soon have access to one of the first printed books in history.  The university will [...]

My wife and I were knocking around New York City last week because we visited the excellent show of Picasso paintings and etchings at the Gagosian Gallery on West 21st Street.  Afterward, we stopped into The Strand bookstore in Greenwich Village.  They were selling the book that accompanies the Picasso show for a full twenty [...]

Life Inc. is a book by Douglas Rushkoff that details the invention and evolution of the corporation as a means of privatizing life and maintaining economic power in the hands of the few. In the film above which promotes the ideas of his book, Rushkoff talks about how our entire lives are spent [...]

Kindergarten to Second Grade Book of the Year, The Pidgeon Wants a Puppy, written and illustrated by Mo Willems:

Here’s a marvelous children’s book for Children’s Book Week. Igraine the Brave is by Cornelia Funke. It’s published by The Chicken House Ltd. Reading ages are 9 – 12.
Princess Igraine dreams of becoming a famous knight just like her great grandfather, but the truth is, life at the family castle is rather boring. [...]