Booklist Online: More than 130,000 book reviews for librarians, book groups, and book lovers - from the trusted experts at the American Library Association

For authors and would-be authors, a valuable reminder that, when basing your characters on real-life people, you should change more than just the names. Like their gender, for instance. Or your mean-spirited worldview. (“Director: Library Diaries Author Invaded Patrons’ Privacy,” American Libraries) Sherry Jones’ The Jewel of Medina will be published after all, in Britain [...]

In Time (“Mayor Palin: A Rough Record“), Nathan Thornburgh’s examination of Sarah Palin’s political past turns up a noteworthy allegation: Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language [...]

I had kind of been congratulating myself for my bravery in singing a few bars at the Booklist Forum, but after watching the recap of the Many Voices, Many Nations program, I’m in awe. Surely that was the year’s most musical discussion of books, writing, literacy, librarianship, and the fundamental unity of the global human [...]

Remember when people thought that putting newspapers on microform meant that they would be preserved forever? This kind of makes me think of that (“At Libraries, Taking the (Really) Long View,” by Andy Guess). But as libraries shift more of their resources to holdings that either originate as digital or become digital through scanning, it’s [...]

Over at Under the Covers, Lisa Chellman takes a look at a rarely discussed aspect of book design: the spine. She makes an excellent point that publishers would do well to heed: In libraries and bookstores, where face-out shelving is at a premium, readers’ first impression of a book isn’t the cover. It’s the spine.

With post-apocalyptic tales capturing our imaginations of late, it seems high time to revisit an earlier take on the subject. (Would that make it a pre-post-apocalyptic work? Or am I getting ahead of myself?) It’s Tomes and Talismans, a LibraryVenture! (Thanks, Carlos, for reminding me about this!)

I don’t know why, but this made me think of Michael Gruber’s excellent Book of Air and Shadows. Oh, wait, I know why. (Although this is more Donald Westlake than Gruber.) New tag: Life Imitates Art. (Although we know where Art gets his ideas.) From the Guardian (“Man held over theft of Shakespeare first folio,” by [...]

I’ve been meaning to take a look at BookLamp for awhile, a site that describes itself as being like Pandora for books. Where LibraryThing helps readers find books based on similarity of taste, BookLamp takes a more technical approach, scanning the books and, well, here it is in their words: So the first thing that we did [...]

Just read a terrific essay by Luc Sante about his personal library (“The Book Collection That Devoured My Life,” the Wall Street Journal): I’m not a snob about books, but I’m probably a show-off — as who isn’t? My showing-off is of a pretty low-key if not completely abstruse sort, though. No one has ever [...]

Well, not paper-and-glue books–those would be too heavy and would take up too much room. But, in two fascinating extraterrestrial tales, the always forward-thinking Baen Books is giving its e-books away free to astronauts–at least, to those astronauts currently residing on the International Space Station–and, thanks to the success of NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander, the Red [...]