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Over at the Christian Science Monitor‘s Chapter & Verse blog, Marjorie Kehe has this to say about BookSwim: They’re calling it “Netflix for books” and the most surprising thing about it is that no one has tried it before. Perhaps unsurprisingly, someone has tried this before. As previously noted by your humble blogger, Booksfree.com beat [...]

Speaking of good books for bad times, Gawker looks at authors’ stock-market speculations–speculative fiction, to be more precise–asking, “What have our finest authors found to redeem us from this depression?” Speculative fiction often refrains from defining the terms of an economic collapse, but it’s always forced to either solve the problem or make things considerably worse [...]

When times are tough, we turn to books for help. In Slate, Erica S. Perl suggests books to read to your children during a financial crisis: Many of the books I discovered during the late ’70s featured themes of economic hardship that made my circumstances seem manageable by comparison—a happy coincidence, I thought at the [...]

And while I’m cribbing from Galleycat, I love this stuff:

You know those ecstatic, generally untrustworthy quotes on the back of books–no, not the ones from respected journals like Booklist, but the ones from authors whose connection to the praised author is usually unclear but worth Googling? Well, Blurbings LLC is about to put a price on the process, even if the value to the author is [...]

Last year while Keir was away fighting forest fires in the wilds of Montana, I was battling a faulty compact disc player. You may recall that I won the scuffle with the CD player when I introduced it to my hammer. But I lost the war. I bought an iPod that same day. My fellow [...]

Galleycat links to a Slate piece (“Everyone Will Be Lonely Eight Months from Now,” by Seth Stevenson), whose exploration of “the weird science of stock photography” mentions a different kind of book-jacket trend: the ubiquity of Jennifer Anderson. Of course, it is possible for an image to become too popular. A few years ago, a model/actress living [...]

In New York (“A Warming Trend“), Christopher Bonanos noticed a sweet new book-jacket trend:                         I love this stuff, although I usually find out about it second-hand: most of the books that I review have plain paper covers. Seen a good trend lately? Let [...]

On Galleycat, Ron Hogan expresses his surprise that the Wall Street Journal‘s Jeffrey Trachtenberg (“Amazon Shows Its Clout“) didn’t mention an important detail about David Wroblewski’s The Story of Edgar Sawtelle–that it happens to be to Hamlet what Jane Smiley‘s A Thousand Acres was to King Lear. Good point, and one worth mentioning. Furthermore, Trachtenberg didn’t mention [...]

There’s been a bit of discussion lately about writers whose publishers pressure them to write a new book each and every year (“Top writers feel heat from publishers’ presses,” by David Mehegan, Boston Globe). And, no doubt about it, the author-as-brand-name is a growing trend. In some instances, it feels like we’re seeing a new book each [...]