I love that there’s a word for this:

(n). buying books and not reading them; letting books pile up unread on shelves or floors or nightstands

From GalleyCat (“Tsundoku: Illustrated Definition of a Book Lover’s Problem“), via reddit.

Pretty good for a 12 year old illustrator! She’s got a bit of Edward Gorey-style, too.

GalleyCat posted a collection of Twitter responses to the image in question.

Perhaps books and ebooks can live in peaceful coexistence after all.

I’m always interested in new ways that people are using data to gain insight into readerly behavior. So here’s a neat idea: BookRx is a recently launched experiment from the Knight Lab, which crawls a Twitter feed (assuming one tweets about books), to make book recommendations.

The Huffington Post has a good interview, with some additional information –

“How does it work?

BookRx works in two phases. In the first phase, it analyzes your tweets (in terms of the words, Twitter usernames, and hashtags you use) and compares them to terms that are correlated with book categories. In the second phase, it looks within those categories to find specific books to recommend, again based on correlations with the terms in your tweets. The first phase is very fast but the second takes a few seconds.

What can people’s Twitter word usage tell us about their personalities?
That’s a really interesting question. We’re really interested in how Twitter can hold up a mirror to ourselves, and seeing BookRx’s recommendations might be one way to do that. That’s one of the reasons we show you the terms you used that made the system think you might be interested in a book it’s recommending to you — to make its operation a bit more visible.”

The Secret Sauce of book recommendations has always been rather mysterious, so I do like the BookRx approach. From Mashable, “New Web App Recommends Books Based on Your Tweets” – 

“…  For some, there is something innately unsettling about AI predictions. It is even more disturbing when the computer is accurate. Unlike sites like Amazon and Google, however, BookRx shows you the exact words you tweeted that led to its various recommendations.”

I think the idea for the experiment is very clever. It’s something to keep an eye on, particularly if they have good luck growing their user base — if BookRx is something that catches on, it’ll be interesting to see what kinds of information it can tell us about reading recommendations (and how good, or bad, those recommendations are).

What if we could gave away millions of books to children for free? Every day? This news story started to sound less crazy to me, the more I thought about it. Per The Atlantic: “The U.K.’s Biggest Distributor of Children’s Books Is About to Be … McDonald’s” –

“It’s easy to make fun of the experimental McLiterature initiative — in the way that it’s easy to make fun of McDonald’s itself. But the chain is, like it or not, a juggernaut … one that has, as such, immense power over the impressionable kids among its customers. And this could be one way — one small way that, via McDonald’s mass impact, could prove significant — to get kids excited about reading. The initiative, Yahoo Shine reports, was inspired by data from Britain’s National Literacy Trust

…finding innovative new methods of getting books into kids’ hands. And that’s a good thing. But it means a strange, telling twist: McDonald’s expects to distribute 15 million books over the course of its initiative, between now and 2014. Which means that it will become the biggest distributor of children’s books in the entire United Kingdom.”

Will kids go for books over toys? Sure, it’s possible. Most won’t. But, some might. And if even some small percentage of those children discover a love of books who might not ordinarily have picked up a book, then I would say McDonald’s would have done a damn good job. The upshot of the “Happy Readers” experiment, hopefully, is that this could inspire book publishers to think up more creative ways of getting books in the hands of more readers.

Apparently there are no current plans for a U.S. version, which is too bad. The L.A. Times (“Will the kids love it? McDonald’s swaps Happy Meal toys for books“) dreams upon such a possibility … 150 million free books to children? From Happy Meals? Wow.  

Here’s some food for thought, courtesy of Salon: “Study: People can remember more about Facebook than real books” –

“Researchers at the University of Warwick and the University of California, San Diego,tested how well people could remember text taken from Facebook updates and compared it to sentences picked at random from books. What they found is that participants’ memory for Facebook posts was about one and a half times greater than their memory for sentences from books.”

I don’t know if I would necessarily arrive at the same conclusions mentioned in the article, though: “Responses to news stories, thoughts about the world. Usually casual, often gossipy, these posts, researchers say, are easier to remember than more formal, edited content.”

Is that really true? I would be very hard-pressed to remember what I read on The Facebook last year, or last week — but I tend to fare better when trying to remember what I read from books. If anything, I would have guessed our very different states of distraction and attentiveness when browsing social networks as opposed to reading a book would make Facebook much less easier to recall. Or, maybe I’m just starting to get old and forgetful.*

I can’t help but wonder if randomly chosen book passages are less emotionally salient than a Facebook status and therefore less memorable. I’d also speculate that the social component of what we read on Facebook probably helps with remembering; maybe it’s that we can put a face to a status update that makes it more memorable. Maybe, or maybe not.

So … what about a Facebook Book, then?**

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Random things that I find myself googling: “Cognitive Decline Sets in Around Age 45”

** Speaking of the first image in this blog post, did you know that you can make a Facebook-book out of status updates? I’m actually very curious: why would someone want to do that?

I didn’t really know this is a thing that people did. I don’t love it, or really hate it. From Apartment Therapy (“In Defense of: Organizing Books by Color“). It is a photogenic approach to book organization, but super-convinced by the defense arguing for it:

“1. It can be practical.
Believe it or not, traditional organization methods like alphabetical by author, fiction/non-fiction or subject matter don’t work for everyone, all the time. Some people just don’t have a head for names or titles, and some books don’t fit neatly into a defined topic (a travel memoir which includes recipes, say).

For the visual thinkers out there, organizing their books by color might just be the easiest way to find what they’re looking for. You might not remember who wrote that great novel you read last summer, but the bright blue cover could easily stick in your mind.”

What a great idea: a website that aggregates book reviews, along the lines of RottenTomatoes.com.

In fact, iDreamBooks.com seems like such a good idea, I wondered why we haven’t seen something like it sooner.

The Huffington Post (“iDreamBooks Review Site: Rotten Tomatoes For Books?“) helpfully notes in their interview that the nature of movie reviews and book reviews are so very different, that creating a workable, accurate book review aggregation system makes for a tricky project indeed.

Here’s a quick rundown of the How and What –

“iDreamBooks, a site openly inspired by Rotten Tomatoes, has created a system that aims to aggregate and streamline book reviews, giving new releases from the big six publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Random House, and Simon & Schuster) a percentage rating. Like its popular film equivalent, the iDreamBooks team decides whether a certain review is positive or negative using both automated and manual techniques, and compiles the ratings to determine a book’s critical merit.”

Publishing Perspectives (iDreambooks Promises “Rotten Tomatoes-like” Site for Books) contributes their two cents — “Of course, others have announced similar intentions over the years, including Kirkus Reviews, which abandoned the project. So how does it differ from other review aggregators such as Bookmarks Magazine, Books & Media and The Complete Review?”

Don’t get me wrong, The Complete Review is pretty good, but … it’s been around since 1999, and really, really needs some updating.

iDreamBooks is a great idea, and has some work to do (need more books, and maybe a new website name?), but I would love to see this take off and become my go-to spot for book reviews.

Flavorwire: (10 Visual Artists Who Use Books as Their Medium) has a fun list of things that artists are doing with books. I’m picking out a couple of my favorites from that list –

Cara Barer‘s photographs of book sculptures have a sense of controlled chaos, that I rather like. From her website:

“My photographs are primarily a documentation of a physical evolution. I have changed a common object into sculpture in a state of flux. The way we choose to research and find information is also in an evolution. I hope to raise questions about these changes, the ephemeral and fragile nature in which we now obtain knowledge, and the future of books.”

And Brian Dettmer‘s book sculpture/dissection work is also pretty darn eye-catching. From his website:

“The richness and depth of the book is universally respected yet often undiscovered as the monopoly of the form and relevance of the information fades over time. The book’s intended function has decreased and the form remains linear in a non-linear world. By altering physical forms of information and shifting preconceived functions, new and unexpected roles emerge. This is the area I currently operate in. Through meticulous excavation or concise alteration I edit or dissect communicative objects or systems such as books, maps, tapes and other media. The medium’s role transforms. Its content is recontextualized and new meanings or interpretations emerge.”

And Anagram Bookshop came up with a clever series of ads a couple of years ago. Posting this one, because I like the octopus –

Personally, I like Su Blackwell‘s Alice in Wonderland pieces: “I often work within the realm of fairy-tales and folk-lore. I began making a series of book-sculpture, cutting-out images from old books to create three-dimensional diorama’s, and displaying them inside wooden boxes.” The approach works well for the subject matter: kind of otherworldly, but not weird in the Tim Burtonesque sense.

Here’s a neat infographic, courtesy of exp.lore.com: The Top 10 Most Read Books in the World.

Best to take the data with a 3000mg grain of salt, but it’s good discussion material.

Just for fun, here’s a Wikipedia List of Best-selling books. Interestingly, The Little Prince is near the top of the lists.