November 22nd, 2009
I was just alerted via a link on Books & Publishing to an excerpt in Vanity Fair of the wonderful illustrator Bruce McCall’s new book called, straight-from-the-headlines, “50 Things to Do with a Book (Now That Reading is Dead).”
Dedicated to Johannes Gutenberg, the “Browse Inside” feature on the HarperCollins web site offers the introduction and a few of the illustrations. The intro notes that “Librarians recently thrown out of work are forced to take jobs assembling Kindles in Amazon.com basement facilities where books were formerly stored,” and that “any publishing executive or editor employed today will admit that being paid in books instead of currency, though reducing their firm’s unsold inventory and representing once-in-a-lifetime windfalls for bibliophile employees, can create morale issues that not even free copies of How to Get Rich without Brains!! can easily resolve.”
From Vanity Fair a sample of the illustrations:
Truly a pertinent work, or as McCall notes, “50 Things to Do with a Book” may be “the most timely book ever published.”
I see that the publisher is offering the eBook for several dollars less than the printed version, while Amazon sells the eBook for slightly more!