@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
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/
#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.
@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.
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!
@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.