More timely old stuff: lifehacker’s 13 Book Hacks for the Library Crowd.

Most of us spend a lot of time in the virtual world these days, but that doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate a good book every now and then.

From your local library to the classroom to the bookstore, there are a lot of tools available to help you save time and money when it comes to the bound world of information. Today, in the interest of lifehacking your bookshelf, I’m rounding up my favorite 13 “book hacks” for getting the most from your bound literature.

This has been stuck in my in-box for a staggeringly long time, but these books are timeless, so I forgive myself. The Rare Book Room offers, well, here:

The “Rare Book Room” site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

Over the last ten years, a company called “Octavo” embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).

This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.

So whether it’s Gutenberg’s Bible of 1455 you’re after, or the Magna Carta, or indeed Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (the perfect reading accompaniment to The Rule of Four),

Nominees for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes have been announced. I don’t have time to list or link them all, so I’ll just do the fiction:

Fiction

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz (Riverhead)

Be Near Me, by Andrew O’Hagan (Harcourt)

Last Night at the Lobster, by Stewart O’Nan (Viking)

Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson (Graywolf)

The Shadow Catcher, by Marianne Wiggins (Simon & Schuster)

Booklist reviewers liked these books, too.

Also worth noting is the inclusion of Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone–not surprising, because it’s showing up on a lot of lists, but the category is interesting: Current Interest, not Biography. Clever people there at the Times.

Jim Shepard has won the 2008 Story Prize for his 2007 collection, Like You’d Understand, Anyway. Runners up were Tessa Hadley (Sunstroke and Other Stories) and Vincent Lam (Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures).

Details and video on Galleycat.

How could I have missed this? On Nerdworld, Matt Selman offers The Unabridged Rules of Library Management. (Personal libraries, that is.)

RULE #1: THE PRIME DIRECTIVE – It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it. Therefore, to be placed on Matt Selman’s living room bookshelves, a book must have been read cover to cover, every word, by Matt Selman. If you are in the home of Matt Selman and see a book on the living room shelves, you know FOR SURE it has been read by Matt Selman.

Ezra Klein responds:

No, this is all wrong. Bookshelves are not for displaying books you’ve read — those books go in your office, or near your bed, or on your Facebook profile. Rather, the books on your shelves are there to convey the type of person you would like to be. I am the type of person who would read long biographies of Lyndon Johnson, despite not being the type of person who has read any long biographies of Lyndon Johnson.

And, at Inside Higher Ed, where I stumbled across this, Scott McLemmee has some fun with it (”Bookshelf and Self“):

My experience (which can’t be unique) is that some books end up accumulating out of a misguided attempt to win the approval of authors already well-entrenched on my shelves. A few years back, for example, Slavoj Zizek started to insist that I had to be familiar with the work of Alain Badiou - a French poststructuralist philosopher whose work I had never heard of, let alone read. Well, OK, sure. Thanks to some busy translators, Badiou volumes started crowding in, next to all the Zizek titles.

But in short order, Badiou lets it be known that I am expected to understand something about mathematical set theory - and furthermore should come to appreciate one particular approach to formalizing the basic axioms. Chances are, that second part is just not going to happen. I am willing to try to learn to recognize a formalized axiom when I see one, but can promise no more, and even that much is probably pushing it. So, anyway, off to the nearby secondhand bookshop in search of a couple of introductory works. They are terrifying. The shelf in question is starting to turn into a neighborhood I am afraid to visit.

His actual conclusion is much more sensible. But I realize now that I haven’t given the subject nearly enough thought. I’m constantly acquiring books and constantly ordering more bookshelves–about the most thought I give to what goes where is a general attempt to keep like with like. There’s a crime fiction section, a literary fiction section, a poetry section, a film section…but due to the unpredictable sizes and numbers of my books, there are odd little colonies, like the crime fiction that seems to be attacking the poetry.

And I love having hardcovers around to look at, whether I’ve read them or not–having lots of unread books around sustains my hope that I’ll actually live the 537 years required to read them all–but in terms of shelf space, one hardcover equals three paperbacks and so I tend to keep more of the latter.

More free stuff: books (well, some of them are free), in your in-box, in little bits (or, if you will, bytes), from Dailylit.com. But, asks Graeme Allister (”The book is dead… Long live inboxed gobbets!” theblogbooks, The Guardian), do we really want to read War and Peace in 675 sittings?

Despite this flexibility, there’s a certain sterility in reading in ready-sized portions. Perhaps it’s a little too reminiscent of homework. Then there’s the problem of reading a screen, a sensation which, in my opinion, doesn’t really lend itself to fiction. Does anyone else find this? It’s not just that I miss the romance of curling up with a good book. It’s a matter of distraction, as an email pops up in mid-sentence, or the prose is suddenly overtaken by a corporate screensaver.

I think this is exactly what some readers want: reading as exercise, an act of self-improvement to be added to the daily routine and then accomplished through a sheer act of will.

But, thankfully, not too many of them.

From the You’ve Got a Point There Department:

Whether said as an apology, boast or sidestep, “I’ve no time to read” crops up whenever books are mentioned. (And it only ever applies to books - when have you ever heard anyone say they don’t have time for TV or music?)

February must be Give Away a Book Month. Why, here’s another one: Charles Bock’s Beautiful Children (Random House). But is free publicity worth a potential drop in sales? And did I really just display their whole ad in my blog post? Why, it must be worth it!

Giving something away for free in order to help you sell it surely seems counterintuitive to publishing’s old guard, but we’re living in Seth Godin’s age of souvenirs now:

As he pointed out, he’s not in the business of selling books; the books are the souvenirs for the ideas people pick up from his blogs and his speaking engagements. But not everyone was convinced: As the guys behind me in the lunch line commented later that morning, “he’s not in the business of selling books, but we are.”

…has been announced. Visit the Bookseller.com to vote for your favorite.

In the Guardian, Sarah Crown has words from the delightfully named Horace Bent on the prize’s raison d’etre (”Shortlist announced for the year’s oddest book titles“):

“I confess, I have been anxious that as publishing becomes ever more corporate, the trade’s quirky charms are being squeezed out,” he said. “But happily my fears have been proved unfounded: oddity lives on.” He also paid homage to those titles that just failed to make the shortlist, with honourable mentions going to Drawing and Painting the Undead, Stafford Pageant: The Exciting Innovative Years 1901-1952, and Tiles of the Unexpected: A Study of Six Miles of Geometric Tile Patterns on the London Underground. “All sound like they are positively thrilling reads,” said Bent. “I do hope that the authors will try again next year.”

Jerome Weeks (who you may know as book/daddy) on the plucking of the Quills–and on awards in general:

More than any critic or well-meaning organization, publishers have helped inflate the profile of book awards, although there’s relatively little evidence they influence sales much (beyond the Pulitzer). And I’m certain the vast majority of readers couldn’t distinguish among the American Book Award, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Kennel Club. I once jokingly asked a leading book editor that if a Pulitzer could actually increase sales by, say, 10,000 to 50,000 copies, had anyone ever thought of bribing a judge?

He laughed derisively. If I’m going to bribe anyone, he said, I’d bribe Oprah’s producer.

OK, he’s recycling a post, but it’s a good one. Follow the link to Jason Cowley’s equally old, equally worth reading piece in the Guardian (”And the winner is?“):

For ours is truly the age of awards. Prizes are becoming the ultimate measure of cultural success and value. One prize inevitably spawns another, in imitation or reaction, as the perceived male dominance of the Booker spawned the Orange Prize for women’s fiction. There are now so many, in so many different fields, that it can be difficult to find a professional artist, writer or journalist who has not been shortlisted for a prize.

The proliferation of prizes is perhaps greatest in the movie industry, where there are now twice as many cinema prizes (about 9,000) as there are feature films produced each year. The troubled pop star Michael Jackson has won more than 240 awards. The architect Frank Gehry has won 130. The novelist John Updike has won 39. Where will it end? Can it end?

William F. Buckley, who, despite his myriad activities, still found time to write books (The Rake, 2007; Last Call for Blackford Oakes, 2005), has died. From the Associated Press, via the Chicago Tribune (”William F. Buckley Jr. dies“):

“I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition,” he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. “I asked myself the other day, ‘Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?’ I couldn’t think of anyone.”

Buckley had for years been withdrawing from public life, starting in 1990 when he stepped down as top editor of the National Review. In December 1999, he closed down “Firing Line” after a 23-year run, when guests ranged from Richard Nixon to Allen Ginsberg. “You’ve got to end sometime and I’d just as soon not die onstage,” he told the audience.

Well, he was certainly right about that.