Posts by author
Ian MacAllen
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Amazon Knows Your Friends
Amazon is deciding who you are friends with—even if you aren’t. The retailer is using that information to scrub book reviews from customers who might be friends with authors, reports the Guardian. Though the tight-lipped company won’t reveal the formula…
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Ellen Pao: A Rumpus Roundup
On Friday, Ellen Pao resigned as CEO of Reddit, one of the largest sites in the world by traffic. She left amid a controversy created by efforts to civilize an online community often seen as hostile towards women and other…
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Notable NYC: 7/11–7/17
Sunday 7/12: Claudia Cortese, Alice B. Fogel, Chris Slaughter, and Jason Takayuki Ueda join the Cross Poetry series. WORD Jersey City, 5:30 p.m., free. Monday 7/13: Will Chancellor, Megan Mayhew Bergman, Karolina Waclawiak, J. Robert Lennon, and Mira Jacob join…
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A Library in an Abyss
A Swedish artist has converted an old mining shaft into a library that disappears into an endless abyss. The library is actually a sculpture, part of a 55-piece show, Sculpture by the Sea, located in Denmark. Colossal takes a look…
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Learning to Work with Rare Books
In 1983, Terry Belanger created a curriculum for librarians to learn how to deal with rare books at Columbia University. Nine years later, the University of Virginia hired him and the Rare Book School moved to Charlottesville. The school now has 80,000…
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Earn Fractions of a Penny With Amazon
Last month Amazon announced it planned on paying authors participating in its lending library program by number of pages read. The system is intended to encourage better content and reward longer works. Now, the Guardian reveals that some payments to…
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Are Romance Novels Ruining Subscription Services?
All-you-can-read subscription services are finding that readers of romance novels are heavy users. The service Scribd is removing some romance titles because voracious sex-fiends are reading too many of the sultry books. Over at Electric Lit, Lincoln Michel explains why…
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Notable NYC: 7/4–7/10
Saturday 7/4: Macy’s celebrates independence from the English King with fireworks. East River, 9 p.m., free. Monday 7/6: Tony Hoagland reads from Twenty Poems That Could Save America. BookCourt, 7 p.m., free. Tuesday 7/7: Julia Fierro celebrates the paperback release…
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Harry Potter Headed to the Stage
J.K. Rowling announced on Twitter that she is writing a new play to tell portions of Harry’s stories that the books skipped over. The new stage show include Harry’s parents, Lily and James Potter, but Rowling stressed it is not…
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The Laws of War
Government documents aren’t exactly page-turners, making hefty tombs like the 74,000 page tax code and the 33,000 page Obamacare law unlikely additions to any summer beach reading lists. The 1,200 page Department of Defense Law of War Manual might seem…
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The End of Bouquinistes?
Amazon launched an online bookstore two decades ago. Since then, the Internet has been changing the way readers buy books. Paris has been a major book-selling city since the 17th century, when the first bouquinistes began lining the banks of…
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The Most Banned Books
Every year, the American Library Association releases a list of the top banned books in the country. But how do you determine which book is the most banned? The statisticians at FiveThirtyEight attempted to figure out exactly which book earned the crowning…