Resilience, Ned Ludd, and an amazing Lego display

Combine these retold fairy tales with the shelf talker tips from this week's BTW, and you're good to go: "The Ugly Duckling: Swan suffering from case of mistaken identity learns that it's more important to be pretty than loved."

What we like to hear: "For me, part of the fun of this Great American Book Tour – the title of my next book, incidentally, a memoir of my book tour, coming out in a year, is getting out of Vermont and New England, my literary 'comfort zone,' and trying my luck with events, readings, and signings in the rest of America...if touring writers are willing to get off the beaten track, the usual 8-city circuit, they'll find world-class bookstores in the unlikeliest places."

From the Department of Fortuitous Coincidences (which, incidentally, sounds like an office somewhere in the inner reaches of the Ministry of Magic), I came across this post just as I was ranting about having to flip pages on the iPad: "Baron cites research suggesting that for some people, pagination is preferable to scrolling."

Enjoying The Irresistible Henry House? Here's some background: "It was believed to be an ideal situation as the school would assist the child and the child would give valuable lessons to the students."

And something for those who liked Loving Frank and The Women - Fallingwater in Legos: "Building process spread over total of almost 7 months, and the structure is made out of more than 15000 bricks (just an approximate guess)." (via)

Guys Lit Wire is organizing its second book drive: "If you love books then you know what they can do and you can understand how significant they can be to these particular kids."

Related: "Nelson began his career driving a bookmobile on the reservation's rural roads. He also is credited with building an American Indian collection that includes 11,000 books, oral history tapes and land-claim records dating to 1675." (via)

Chris Morrow responds to Clay Shirky: "So the question I keep asking is how can we build resilience into our businesses, our societies, our world? One way is to build systems that are simple – as in local instead of global, distributed instead of centralized, and small instead of humongous. We can do this with new technology and new methods and new ideas, but on the foundation of human scale development that has brought us this far."

Mike Shatzkin scares me sometimes: "Having half the market reachable without print-run risk or inventory storage; having half the customers connecting with their reading through online paths that make them at least theoretically identifiable; and having a quarter of those customers reading through a medium that enables interactivity will make all the changes we've seen so far in trade publishing appear trivial."

Nick Carr, on the other hand, makes me laugh: "If Ned Ludd had been a blogger..."

Posted at 01:50PM Apr 09, 2010 by Sarah Rettger in General  |