With a literacy rate hovering around an estimated 5 to 10 percent of the population during the Middle Ages, only a select few of society’s upper echelons and religious castes had use for books. So who would have use for a sextuplet of stories bound by a single, multi-hinged cover like this? Some seriously busy scholar.
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Amidst endless stories about the death of the printed word and the closing of America’s libraries, another issue remains unresolved: What’s to be done with all the leftover books? In Albany, administrators at the former State Library are embroiled in a debate over the value of books—and what’s "too precious" to throw away.
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Like a buddy movie where two retired cops stuck in their ways have to return to active duty, these adorable bookmarks—designed to look like miniature unwound cassette tapes—work alongside antiquated printed books to help you remember what page you were last reading.
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It’s tough for humans to predict how well a book will sell until after it’s published—it’s something of a gamble. But now, a new algorithm can tell if a book will be a commercial success or not long before it hits the shelves—with a staggering 84 percent accuracy.
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One of the great joys offered by an old library is stepping through the doors and being greeted by an overwhelming sense of stillness. Endless stories exist between the covers resting on the shelves but, until you crack open a title and start to read, it’s blissfully oh so quiet.
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Ever since the internet came along, our relationship to libraries has changed dramatically. But recent studies show that these institutions—pillars of the OG sharing economy—are still viewed as essential to American communities. So it’s fascinating to take a look through the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign‘s collection of posters and propaganda from the American Library Association, an organization founded in 1876 and still going strong in its quest to make libraries—both physical and digital—cultural hubs for learning and leisure.
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Remember Guy Laramée, the French artist who sculpts shockingly realistic landscapesout of old books? Well, he’s still at it—and his latest is an ode to the Encyclopedia Britannica, the publishers of which announced last year that they would stop printing the 245-year-old volumes.
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What will robots really be like when they finally achieve a human level of intelligence and autonomy? No one knows for sure, but we’ve put together a list of books that will challenge and disturb your preconceptions about what robots might become.
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We’ve all done it: stood in a library, looking around, we’ve been confronted by the fact that there are way, way too many books in existence for us to ever read. But when in history did that happen?
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When the first drum machines hit the market in the 1950s, they must have felt like the future. Imagine that—a robotic drummer that does exactly what you tell him to, and doesn’t get loaded after the show. Of course, the human drummer never quite went out of style, but drum machines changed music forever.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
