@jalcine Everything about this is so ridiculous except for the catch-line on its Amazon listing, which is "A little birdy told us you needed to know more about Mastodon." 😂
A librarian helped me find the book my son requested today. She knew the plot & the characters & even pointed me to the newest story from the series in case he might enjoy that too. Then she recommended other #books he might like.
When I thanked her, she simply shook her head explaining, “It’s my job. And I really love my job!”
I share this anecdote simply bc librarians are the best people 📚✨
I highly recommend supporting the Standard Ebooks project. 📚
«Standard Ebooks is a volunteer-driven project that produces new editions of public domain e-books that are lovingly formatted, open source, free of copyright restrictions, and free of cost.»
@paulox Interesting! Especially in light of potential migration from Amazon Kindle users like me since their recent ADs introduction this month. Best of luck in your endeavours.
@paulox Being able to conveniently browse the source for their ebooks and view history is a nice way for those crafting their own ebooks to see some of the process, decisions, and corrections/refinements.
@TracyTThomas “good girls” don't think about sex. Sex is defiling, nasty, brutish and meant to be endured solely for the purpose of procreation. Boys are hormonally-crazed creatures meant to be tamed, harnessed and trained to support their ambulatory incubators, er, their wives when they reach manhood. Strumpets and roundheels are to be used for seed-sowing practice so that chaste good girls may be a man's original inseminator. /s
I sometimes thought my father thought he could't die while he still had books on his pending pile (a stab at immortality I seem to be replicating)... so, it was strangely touching to see Tom Gauld has had similar thoughts.
The Women Who Rode Miles on Horseback to Deliver Library Books
Librarians are amazing.
They were known as the “book women.” They would saddle up, usually at dawn, to pick their way along snowy hillsides and through muddy creeks with a simple goal: to deliver reading material to Kentucky’s isolated mountain communities.
“What an astonishing thing a book is… one glance at it & you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly & silently inside your head, directly to you.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. #Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
This is one reason why the #GOP wants to ban books. They do not want Americans to experience what Sagan refers to as "binding people together who never knew each other".
The GOP wants Americans to feel isolated and fearful of anyone "other" than themselves. It's much easier to exploit people so full of fear that they can't think straight. People who are calm and feel secure are much harder to manipulate, because they can take the time to think things through.
@ChrisMayLA6 Joyce and Proust?? Do people really, honestly consider reading them more than once?
If my unread pile only rose by 17% I'd be very proud of myself 😂
The Banned Book Club is a project of the Digital Public Library of America. You download their Palace e-reader and choose Banned Book Club as your #library. It gives you access to all (most?) of them plus others
#Authors and #publishers will be invited to post about their books, or related subjects like research, using the #FediBookFair hashtag. They can also run competitions, offer signed copies, etc.
#Readers can watch or follow the hashtag to find #books to read and authors to follow.
I know I've mentioned this before but worth another one because it's amazing: You can download tens of thousands of academic books on a staggering variety of humanities and social studies topics legally for free at the OAPEN library https://library.oapen.org/
@Rasta Mind of the right: Not old enough to decide what you are (since you cannot be trusted!), but still old enough to work full-time jobs and skip having an education.
@benetnasch@dancinyogi Exactly. My partner is blind and mostly listens to audiobooks because they are easier to access generally than books in Braille. She says Braille books also take up much more physical space than print books.
Oh my God! Oh fck! I wake up to this big news and all I can say is fck! I went to bed having read something about Philip K Dick Awards (I can't even remember what I read about it!) and I wake up to learn that my book, Where Rivers Go To Die, has been nominated for this and its a big deal to me and all I can day is f*ck! What a way to start the year!
This one-woman Indigenous-owned bookstore has put out a call for support to stay in business after a long series of family sicknesses and other struggles. If you love books and care about supporting small, BIPOC-owned businesses, check out Paperbacks and Frybread: https://paperbacksandfrybread.com/collections/new-books
The all-day flood of boost notifications for this post reminds me what I love about this site. Like anything I love, I reserve the right to criticize it and know it can improve in a lot of ways, but y'all are great.
@NerdyNativeMama - I hope you had a big day of business at the store. I know this post sent at least a few people your way, and I hope they keep coming.
#OTD in 1903, Marie Curie defended her doctoral thesis in the physical sciences, entitled "Recherches sur les substances radioactives", before the Faculty of Science at the University of Paris; she was awarded a "very honourable" distinction.
She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person to win a Nobel Prize twice, and the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two scientific fields. via @Wikipedia
Maria Skłodowska-Curie, ca. 1898. Portrait of Maria Skłodowska-Curie (November 7, 1867 – July 4, 1934), sometime prior to 1907. Curie and her husband Pierre shared a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903. Working together, she and her husband isolated Polonium. Pierre died in 1907, but Marie continued her work, namely with Radium, and received a Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911. Her death is mainly attributed to excess exposure to radiation. via @wikipedia
@gutenberg_org@Wikipedia funny how women are constantly demonstrating how full of shit misogynists are. It’s almost like women aren’t less than because of their gender.
Plenty of new titles are available now and volunteers at @DProofreaders will have plenty of work ahead.
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie
The Giant Horse of Oz by Ruth Plumly Thompson
Tarzan, Lord of the Jungle by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Money for Nothing by P.G. Wodehouse
The House at Pooh Corner by A.A. Milne
Hunting for Hidden Gold by Franklin W. Dixon
Some jails allow book shipments from Amazon and big-box chains, while denying book shipments from independent bookstores. Now, an independent bookstore, Avid Bookshop, has filed a lawsuit alleging that this is unconstitutional.
I agree with Elon. Likewise this Bill Withers song could also be much shorter. Here, I've cue'd it up to explain the point. He just says "I know" over and over. How inefficient. A LLM could nicely summarize the song with a single "I know" (0:50)
'"Books cut shorter. Condensations. Digests, Tabloids. Everything boils down to the gag, the snap ending.”
“Snap ending.” Mildred nodded.
“Classics cut to fit fifteen-minute radio shows, then cut again to fill a two-minute book column, winding up at last as a ten- or twelve-line dictionary resume. I exaggerate, of course. The dictionaries were for reference. But many were those whose sole knowledge of Hamlet (you know the title certainly, Montag; it is probably only a faint rumor of a title to you, Mrs. Montag), whose sole knowledge, as I say, of Hamlet was a one-page digest in a book that claimed: now at last you can read all the classics; keep up with your neighbors. Do you see? Out of the nursery into the college and back to the nursery; there’s your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.”
Mildred arose and began to move around the room, picking things up and putting them down.
Beatty ignored her and continued: “Speed up the film, Montag, quick. Click, Pic, Look, Eye, Now, Flick, Here, There, Swift, Pace, Up, Down, In, Out, Why, How, Who, What, Where, Eh? Uh! Bang! Smack! Wallop, Bing, Bong, Boom! Digest-digests, digest-digest-digests. Politics? One column, two sentences, a headline! Then, in mid-air, all vanishes! Whirl man’s mind around about so fast under the pumping hands of publishers, exploiters, broadcasters that the centrifuge flings off all unnecessary, time-wasting thought."'
Hypatia (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) was a Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician who lived in Alexandria, Egypt.
She was a prominent thinker in Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy. Hypatia constructed astrolabes and hydrometers, but did not invent either of these, which were both in use long before she was born. In March 415 AD, she was murdered by a mob of Christians led by a lector named Peter.
A pack horse librarian delivering books in rural Kentucky in 1938. During the Great Depression, the Pack Horse Library Project was a Works Progress Administration (WPA) program in which the librarians, who were often called "book women" or "book ladies," delivered books to remote parts of Appalachia.
@StrangeNoises@mostaurelius@bookstodon@gaileyfrey@Gaileyfrey
I first learned about book women when I read "The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek". It's fiction, based on real events. Not exactly great literature, but interesting and informative history.
