Reading.com

New Scientist reports on a two page flippable e-book.

From Google Book Search

“How do you find out whether a book was renewed? You have to check the U.S. Copyright Office records. Records from 1978 onward are online but not downloadable in bulk. The Copyright Office hasn’t digitized their earlier records, but Carnegie Mellon scanned them as part of their Universal Library Project, and the tireless folks at Project Gutenberg and the Distributed Proofreaders painstakingly typed in every word.

Thanks to the efforts of Google software engineer Jarkko Hietaniemi, we’ve [Google] gathered the records from both sources, massaged them a bit for easier parsing, and combined them into a single XML file available for download here.”

Christie’s auctioned off Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium On the revolution of Heavenly Spheres in which he first wrote about the sun being the center of the universe.  It sold for $2 million.

ABOUT THE CONFERENCE: NEW YORK CITY | OCTOBER 23–26 2008

In collaboration with Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair, the Art Libraries Society of New York (ARLIS/NY) announces a conference on contemporary artists’ books.

The program will include speakers, panels, artists’ presentations, institutional tours, and receptions. The conference focuses on recent developments in artists’ books, a period of increasing diversity in the field. The conference will present a rare opportunity to explore the contemporary scene, promising a thought-provoking opportunity for discourse among scholars, collectors, artists, and librarians.

Conference venues include the New York Public Library, Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, and the NY Art Book Fair at Phillips de Pury.

This site will be updated as plans develop.

San Francisco Center for the Book’s monthly, free and open to the public, Bookarts Users Group meeting will have a guided tour of the Book Club of California on Tuesday, June 3rd at 7:00 pm.  The Book Club, whose “chief aims are to further the interests of book collectors and scholars and to promote an understanding and appreciation of fine books,” has a library, publications, exhibitions, and a lecture series.  Located at 312 Sutter Street, Suite 510, San Francisco, near BART. Call the Book Club of California, (415) 781-7532 or SFCB, (415) 565-0545 with questions.

“The new breed of e-readers could do for reading what the iPod did for listening to music, say Claudine Beaumont and Matt Warman.”

The Telegraph compares ebook readers

Three copies of the Gutenberg Bible are going to be on display at the Morgan Library in New York. Printed in 1455, only 180 copies were made, of which 50 survive.

“We invite all our friends to visit the current exhibition English in Print: from Caxton to Shakespeare to Milton, featuring rare early printed books from the collections of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Yale’s Elizabethan Club. The show is open free of charge through July 26, Monday-Saturday, 10 am-5 pm”

The Grolier Club in NY