Category: words

“Sometimes a publisher hits the reset button on a book that has already been released, giving a title that might have been ignored, or overlooked, the first time around a second chance at success.”

“An e-reader encourages each of us to get sucked into our favorite characters and plots, thus turning what is normally a standardized experience (reading from page one forward) into a more customized, journey. I feel an ownership over the novels — something I’ve never felt with the show — and that’s the driving force of my obsession.”

“Durant mentioned it several times in interviews in the 1970s, once calling it ‘a not very serious book which answers the questions of what I think about government, life, death, God.’ But the whereabouts of the manuscript were unknown before it was found in a box in his granddaughter’s attic last year.”

“Her style has both tone and undertone; it attempts to register the impossibility of saying very much, but it insists on the right to say a little. So what is essential is the voice itself, its ways of knowing and unknowing. An observation; a dry fact; a memory; something noticed; someone encountered; a joke; something wry; a provocation; something playful.”

“In what can only be described as an impressive piece of research, a Pittsburgh schoolboy has calculated that the US state and federal governments could save getting on for $400m (£240m) a year by changing the typeface they use for printed documents.”

How do prison libraries actually work, and if you were locked away, how easy would it be to get hold of the books you wanted?

“A new, lavish coffee-table book, Libraries, pays homage to 44 of these vaults of wisdom around the world. In these photos, spines of shelved books appear like ornate mosaics; labyrinthine stacks seem like architectural gestures.”

The creators of the app Spritz argue that “only around 20% of your time is spent processing content. The remaining 80% is spent physically moving your eyes from word to word.” They mean to reverse those percentages. If they’re right, what does that mean for how we experience the written word?

George Packer: “The essential scene of First World War writing is the mass slaughter of the trenches. In the archetypal Vietnam story, a grunt who can never find the enemy walks into physical and moral peril. In much of the writing about Iraq, the moment of truth is a reunion scene at an airport or a military base – families holding signs, troops looking for their loved ones, an unease sinking deep into everyone.”

“It is a paradox: Books that traveled around the world via interlibrary loan in the 20th century paper era are safeguarded locally in the Internet age.”