Shelfari

Shelfari makes it easy to see what your friends are reading, what others with similar tastes have enjoyed, and even get and give book recommendations.

And it's free.

It's a lot like Librarything.com's method which I use on this blog. I'm not sure which is better than the other, try both and see :)

3 Million Dollar Book

Roger Shashoua is offering a diamond-encrusted edition of his new book Dancing With The Bear for the sum of three million dollars.

He says Russian tycoons are the target readers for the made-to-order book which features more than 600 flawless diamonds.

The book is an account of how the author made £100m through business in post-Soviet Russia.

I'm offering my unpublished book for 10Million dollars. I haven't finished it yet and I don't have any real ideas other than the title which will be "How To Sucker Rich People Into Buying Crap They Don't Need, To Fulfill Their Empty Souls And Lives Devoid Of Purpose".

The Espresso Book Machine

A company called OnDemandBooks has released a printer like no other. I literally prints out and BINDS books. Yes, you read that correctly.

On Demand Books LLC. is planning to become the first company to globally deploy a low cost, totally automatic book machine (The Espresso Book Machine), which can produce 15 - 20 library quality paperback books per hour, in any language, in quantities of one, without any human intervention.

Rather than describe it, just watch the video.

You know what's cool about this? Not printing out your own books, which is, but the potential to browse a library's library and downloading and printing out your very own copy of the book to run around with and read. Or, if a library doesn't have a book you want, rather than have one shipped, they'll just print it out for you in a few minutes and you're on your way. There's something romantic about having your own copy of a book printed to me. I love the idea.

Books As Art

Not the words inside, the actual books themselves. I've never been one to deface a book. To me they are like sacred objects containing fragments of the mind of their author. But someone named Georgia Russell does do some interesting things with books by eviscerating and goring them into misshapen splayed open objects.

It's a bit horrifying and intriguing simultaneously. The gallery is here.

What fascinates me is that while they're still books, they're now unreadable. Yet the fact that they are/were books is what makes them more than just abstract art. You can almost hear the information inside screaming.

Gordonator Precision Search Engine

I have no idea really how accurate or updated the "Gordonator Precision Search Engine" is but it's a good idea overall.

The Gordonator Precision Search Engine (GPSE) seems merely complex, but is actually extremely complex. The basic idea is to make finite categories which describe the plot, character, setting, and style of a book or movie and list those categories to users and reviewers in a logically organized hierarchical system. By making the categories finite and presenting them to the user, the user is helped because he is presented with the same list that the reviewer of the book used when the book was categorized. Also, by presenting the categories to the user, the list of options may give search ideas to the user that the user hadn't before considered.

Try it out here and see for yourself.

Of course the main site has a more basic plot search engine but it's not that good. Searching for "talking spider" did not turn up Charlotte's Web.