Exact Editions Blog

PersonaNonData notes a thoughtful posting on the role of catalogues in today’s market from Arsen Kashkashian who is a buyer in a Boulder bookstore. Arsen’s recommendations are interesting and progressive, but the situation is both more complicated and in several respects simpler than he allows.

• “The catalog would be available online, and each store would access it through a distinct login.” But a publisher’s catalog to the extent that it is a promotional tool should be ‘open access’ without need

We have opened a shop for Debrett’s through which they are initially offering indvidual and institutional licenses to their formidable (3000 pp in print) and authoritative Debrett’s Peerage and Baronetage.

The resource will clearly have a strong appeal for the growing interest in family history and genealogy and the publishers have generously allowed free searching from the Debrett’s shop. That is right ‘free searching’ but browsing limited to the 16 page view; but come to think of it Exact … Keep Reading

Yesterday the second iteration of the iPhone appeared. Much anticipated and even with the hype not a disappointment. The iPhone and the soon to arrive Google Android are opening up a new wave of geo-rooted software.

Google Maps/Google Earth is helping a lot of this innovation and it is extraordinary how much can be done with the resource. Gutenberg would have been amazed that there is now a buildings-in-Google-earth typeface. One could even write a poem with … Keep Reading

What is the carbon footprint of a digital book? We have to make some possibly heroic simplifying assumptions. The first point to note is that a digital book has a very, very low carbon footprint if no one reads/accesses it. This is a matter of some concern to librarians and archivists who may wish to simply preserve, or ‘back up’, large amounts of literature which will be little read. It can be held in computer memory for an infinitesimal energy … Keep Reading

So what?

Exactly. There is really no possible interest in this line of discussion. I cited with approval Robert Darnton’s recent piece in the New York Review of Books on the Digital Library. But I missed this truly silly paragraph:

Books also give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books. CaféScribe, a