Old books and new tech

31Mar08

Great article highlighted by Book2book this morning from the NYT about couple’s books . Currently on mine and Sharon’s bedside is my H P Lovecraft’s ‘Selected Letters’ and Sharon’s ‘Things I want my Daughters to Know’ by Elizabeth Noble. Not sure what this says about us!

Interestingly one of the things people say about BookRabbit is how great it would be for dating. I’ll be interested to see if that actually is the case. I can see that bookcases are a rather unique window into someone’s interests – there are some real questions to be asked about what people mightlook for though.

We’ve been working on an easier to use bookcase application for the last week and this will go live tomorrow morning we’re hoping that it will be a whole lot easier to use and identify different editions of the same title. You can see a screen shot below.

This is still prior to our launch of Automatic Bookcase which is still being frantically developed.

I’ve just added a new book to the BookRabbit database which I’m rather pleased with, my copy arrived from California this morning, and I’ve been coveting a copy for some years, ever since it was mentioned in the now defunct Lovecraftian ‘zine Dagon. The book is called ‘The Book of Jade’ and 600 copies were printed at the turn of the century by a bookseller in New York, it was an anonymous book of ‘decadent poetry’ which was later revealed to be by a writer called David Park Barnitz (1878-1901) who died under mysterious circumstances later the year of publication (presumed suicide). It was mentioned in H P Lovecraft’s letters, hence my bedtime reading. The copy I’ve bought is in great condition – which is lucky as there were no pictures available, and it wasn’t cheap.

Anyone can add books (and supporting graphics) to the BookRabbit site on the fly – picture on the right included. So even wired titles like this can have a product page and connect with other bookcases, I’d be fascinated to know how many more exist out there!

Filed under: Beta, BookRabbit, Random book Recommends   |  1 Comment