BookFinder.com Journal

Happy Birthday OED!

The Oxford English Dictionary turns a sprightly 125 on the 1st of February.  Sure it's put on a few pounds but honestly there's just more of it to love.  According to Wikipedia it would take a person 120 years to type the 59 million words of the OED second edition, 60 years to proofread it, and 540 megabytes to electronically store it.  The Oxford English dictionary's latest, complete print edition was printed in 20 volumes, comprising 291,500 entries in 21,730 pages.

The first publication of the Oxford English Dictionary came on February 1st 1884 and was titled A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles; Founded Mainly on the Materials Collected by The Philological Society.  It was 382 pages and contained the words beginning with A to Ant.  The project would not see completion until 19 April 1928, a full 67 years after the project began and 44 years after the first fascicle was published.

In other wordy news, an online dictionary just released what they consider the 100 most beautiful words in English.... Here are the top ten:

1	adroit	Dexterous, agile.
2	adumbrate	To very gently suggest.
3	aestivate	To summer, to spend the summer.
4	ailurophile	A cat-lover.
5	beatific	Befitting an angel or saint.
6	beleaguer	To exhaust with attacks.
7	blandiloquent	Beautiful and flattering.
8	caliginous	Dark and misty.
9	champagne	An effervescent wine.
10	chatoyant	Like a cat's eye.

Would you get an ISBN tattoo?

Would you get an ISBN tattooed on your body? What if it was the ISBN of your favorite book?

Turns out there's an enterprising fellow out there who's tried it. Writes Michael S. at travel website MatadorLife:

"I had a friend who got the bar-code from his copy of "A Clockwork Orange" book tattooed on the back of his neck." (via)

Now I love books as much as the next guy, but the thought of spending my life with an ISBN on my neck freaks me out. It's not that I'm squeamish about announcing my reading tastes to the world; I've been keeping a public reading list for years. Nor is that I don't like long numbers; I do—very much so—and in fact my favorite number is 65,536 (2¹⁶).

I think for me, my biggest issue is the fact that ISBNs identify specific manifestations of a book, rather than the work itself. I first read many of my favorite books in cheap editions, which I then went go on to upgrade as new printings come out. Which edition to choose? Do I really want to single out a particular mass market paperback edition as worthy of being immortalized on my body? Sadly, there's no work-level identifier scheme that really meets my needs: library-oriented systems like LCCNs are still too granular, and most other systems are proprietary and have uncertain lifespans. Who wants that?

Alas, I may just have to find other ways of showing my love for my favorite books, other than tattooing ISBNs on my neck. With much respect for Michael S.' adventurous friend, I think I'll stick to name-dropping titles, the old-fashioned way.

(Thanks to ToastyKen for the original neck image.)

The search is over

A big thanks to everyone who contacted us about copy's of The Guide to Fresh Water Angling in Hawke's Bay, by Charles Russell Barham. Last week we posted a plea for someone who could sell the authors family a copy of this book. We passed along some details we had received, and the Hawks Bay Today newspaper also received some calls from residents, so it looks like the Barham family will get their copy of the book after all. I like it when a story has a happy ending.

Posted by Scott

Author's family also seeking the most sought after out of print book in Australia

BookFinder.com’s most searched for out of print books in Australia list is making waves in Hawks Bay, New Zealand. The top book on the list, “The Guide to Fresh Water Angling in Hawke's Bay, by Charles Russell Barham” has been out of print for years and it seems the family of the author is also looking for a copy.

Hawks Bay Today first published BookFinder.com’s list at the beginning of January. When Barham’s widowed wife Maree returned home from her Christmas holiday and read about its online popularity she was floored. In a followup article published yesterday, Maree spoke to the paper, and explains that her family is also searching for a copy of her husband's book.

"I was just blown away, it's been more than 25 years since he died," she said. "When I saw the article in the newspaper I thought, 'what's this?'"

"To know that 40 years after it was published people are looking for it now is amazing. He put his heart and soul into that book."

She said Barham, who went by his middle name, was a great outdoors man and angler. Born in New Plymouth in 1932, he spent most of his adult life in the Bay.

The book's appearance in the news also stirred emotions for the couple's youngest daughter, Cathy Davel, who was 9 when her father died. Mrs Davel, who now lives in Wellington, said she didn't have much to remember him by or much to give her own children to know him by, either.

"I'm a mum now of two children and it would be special to have something to pass on to them."

So if you are a bookseller, or an avid angler, and happen to have a copy of this sought after tome send us a note and we will put you in touch with the family who would be very happy to hear from you. Come on everyone, let's make this a happy ending and find them a copy of this book!

Posted by Scott

Cheaper books for Australia

The power of the Internet never fails to amaze me. I was talking to a friend of mine who was in Seattle over the Christmas break, and she was telling me that while at a local bookstore she ran into an Australian lady purchasing a large stack of books. They got to talking and she explained to my friend that every time she heads overseas. She buys as many books as her baggage weight will allow because books in Australia are so costly.

After having the story recounted to me, I did a little bit of web snooping and discovered that this lady wasn't just miffed over a few pennies; the price of books has long been a well documented sore spot among Australian readers.

However there is still hope, even with the cost of international shipping you can usually find books cheaper on BookFinder.com.

I just looked up Jamie's Ministry of Food, the newest offering from Jamie Oliver. It's currently a top seller in Australia and you can find it on BookFinder.com for A$39.80, where at Angus & Robertson it's A$58.50, and at Dymocks it's A$71.50 postage paid.

It always pays to shop around.

Posted by Scott

Notes from all over

I’ve been waiting to do a big dump of links I’ve been enjoying…

Used books up, new books down?

• “Bargain Hunting for Books, and Feeling Sheepish About It” (New York Times)
• “Second-hand book sales up” (London Telepgraph)

Library consortium OCLC changes policies, draws ire:

• “Stealing Your Library: The OCLC Powergrab” (Aaron from Open Library)
• “Why libraries must reject the OCLC Policy (part 1)” (Tim from LibraryThing)
• OCLC policy change overview (Code4Lib)

Bay Area indie bookstores, dead and alive:

• Stacey’s Bookstore in San Francisco shutting down
• But wait, not every Bay Area indie is dying!

Book rental in the news:

• Chegg raises $25 million round from Kleiner, others
• Chegg CEO interview

Yay, reading:

• New NEA study shows US reading rates on the rise
• Britons think reading is sexy

More notes from all over:

• Barnes & Noble does mild cutbacks
• Slate calls BookFinder.com “the Google of dead books”
• Ebook pricing arguments

Posted by Anirvan

Personal reading index, 2008

I’ve been keeping an online reading list for several years now. Here’s my annual summary, inspired by Jessamyn West’s annual end-of-year reading indexes.

number of books read in 2008: 92
number of books read in 2007: 120
number of books read in 2006: 103
number of books read in 2005: 103
number of books read in 2004: 80
average read per month: 7.7
average read per week: 1.8
number read in worst month: 5 (December)
number read in best month: 9 (February, March, July, August, November)
percentage by male authors: 76%
percentage by female authors: 24%
fiction as percentage of total: 48%
non-fiction as percentage of total: 52%
percentage of total disliked: 9%
percentage of total ambivalent or sorta-liked: 37%
percentage of total actively enjoyed: 54%

I read substantially fewer books this year than last, 92 books in 2008 vs. 120 in 2007. I trace some of that to reading more periodicals, and the rest to time spent on personal projects. I started keeping a personal blog last year, where I expand on non-book-related interests that don’t fit into the BookFinder.com Journal. I’ve also been tinkering with some interesting side projects: open sourcing code to read LCCN numbers, developing an (unreleased) data portability tool for Netflix users, and setting up a website for people thinking of buying voluntary carbon offsets.

Some of the themes in my reading this year included disease-hunting (China Syndrome, The Ghost Map), angsty Indian male protagonists (An Outline of the Republic, The Romantics), the ethics of violence (Rising Up and Rising Down, Pacifism as Pathology, Igniting a Revolution), body-bending lit (Half Life, The Pregnant King, Black Man), and San Francisco (On the Lower Frequencies, Little Brother, The Mayor of Castro Street, The Tree Bride, The City, Not Long After).

Two of my favorite books from 2008 both deal with punk — a musical genre that does absolutely nothing for me. I loved On the Lower Frequencies: A Secret History of the City by Erick Lyle, a book of intensely personal essays about ethics and urban life by a San Francisco punk squatter musician. And The Taqwacores by Michael Muhammad Knight, an unputdownable coming of age story set in a fictional burgeoning Muslim American punk/alternative scene, where characters grapple with belief, identity, music, and growing up.

Happy new year. Hope you enjoy a year full of great books.

[Now reading The Bioscope Man by Indrajit Hazra]

Posted by Anirvan