There is some really lovely stuff happening around the internet about books at the moment. Here’s just one thing I stumbled on that’s absolutely gorgeous.
One Book, Many Readings by Christian Swinehart
It’s a series of visualizations and commentary on what it means to move through a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and what sort of book you end up with if you just construct various scaffolding around places and events instead of providing a directed beginning-to-end narrative.
You may have to be of a certain age to appreciate this, but… here we go.
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Or, not so wild actually, it’s the Library of Congress!
We were thrilled to see our BookReader on the read.gov site today. The Library is using it to showcase of some gorgeous books from their Rare Book Collection, like “A Wonder-Book for Girls & Boys,” “The Baby’s Own Aesop,” and “A Christmas Carol.”
You might also be interested to follow along with a “book in progress” called The Exquisite Corpse Adventure, “an episodic progressive story game” with more than 20 contributors.
There’s information about the BookReader software on the Open Library site if you’re code-y too. We love it when the BookReader gets used!
We’re planning for a scheduled downtime on Wednesday, October 28 for hardware upgrade of Open Library servers. Open Library will be unavailable for 2 hours during 7:00 AM PST – 9:00 AM PST.
We’ll post here when the site’s back online.
Update at 8:36am: And we’re back!
I was listening to the radio over my morning coffee this morning when I heard that today is Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi‘s birthday. I thought I’d have a peek and see if Open Library holds references to any of his writings. Turns out we do.
From Third Class in Indian Railways, one of a short series of essays including The Moral Basis of Co-operation, published in 1917:
The compartment itself was evil looking. Dirt was lying thick upon the wood work and I do not know that it had ever seen soap or water. (From Page 5)
Or from A Guide To Health, published in 1921.