Somehow, with the emergence of the internet, this list seems quaint... but these books all contain some pretty powerful stuff. Funny that our Grandparents generation was terrified of the ideas on these pages. click the pic for more. Read More...

The "Rare Book Room" site has been constructed as an educational site intended to allow the visitor to examine and read some of the great books of the world.

Over the last ten years, a company called "Octavo" embarked on digitally photographing some of the world ’s great books from some of the greatest libraries. These books were photographed at very high resolution (in some cases at over 200 megabytes per page).

This site contains all of the books (about 400) that have been digitized to date. These range over a wide variety of topics and rarity. The books are presented so that the viewer can examine all the pages in medium to medium-high resolution.

In particular the site contains:

1. Some of the great books in science, including books by Galileo, Newton, Copernicus, Kepler, Einstein, Darwin and others.

2. Most of the Shakespeare Quartos from the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the University of Edinburgh Library, and the National Library of Scotland. It also contains the First Folio from the Folger Shakespeare Library.

3. The complete copies of Poor Richard ’s Almanac by Benjaman Franklin.

4. Very rare editions: Gutenberg ’s Bible of 1455 (from the Library of Congress), Harvey's book on the circulation of blood, Galileo ’s Siderius Nuncius, the first printing of the Bill of Rights, and the Magna Carta. Read More...

Click the link to view the scanned collection of 18th Century Entertainment Ephemera. fascinating. Read More...

Miranda July is a filmmaker, performing artist and writer. She grew up in Berkeley, California where she began her career by writing plays and staging them at the local punk club. July’s videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in the 2002 and 2004 Whitney Biennials. Her short fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker, and a collection of stories is forthcoming from Scribner in May 2007. July created the participatory website, learningtoloveyoumore, with artist Harrell Fletcher and a companion book will be published by Prestel in fall 2007. She wrote, directed and starred in her first feature-length film, Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005), which won a special jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival and four prizes at the Cannes Film Festival, including the Camera d’Or. July recently debuted a new performance, and is currently working on her second movie. She lives in Los Angeles.

Click the pic to see her clever promotional piece for her book "No one belongs here more than you" written with dry erase marker on various appliances

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A book that will open your eyes. Jef Raskin, the father of the Macintosh wrote this masterwork shortly before his way to early death. It’s the requiem of a modern genius. He makes bold yet undeniable statements like:

"There has never been any technical reason for a computer to take more than a few seconds to begin operation when it is turned on."

and

"Our honeymoon with digital technology is over: We are tired of having to learn huge, arcane programs to do even the simplest of tasks; we have had our fill of crashing computers; and we are fatigued by the continual pressure to upgrade. The Humane Interface delivers a way for computers, information appliances, and other technology-driven products to continue to advance in power and expand their range of applicability, while becoming free of the hassles and obscurities that plague present products."

clic the book to get it at Amazon.

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When coastal engineers decide whether to dredge sand and pump it onto an eroded beach, they use mathematical models to predict how much sand they will need, when and where they must apply it, the rate it will move and how long the project will survive in the face of coastal storms and erosion.

Orrin H. Pilkey, a coastal geologist and emeritus professor at Duke, recommends another approach: just dredge up a lot of sand and dump it on the beach willy-nilly. This “kamikaze engineering” might not last very long, he says, but projects built according to models do not usually last very long either, and at least his approach would not lull anyone into false mathematical certitude.

Now Dr. Pilkey and his daughter Linda Pilkey-Jarvis, a geologist in the Washington State Department of Geology, have expanded this view into an overall attack on the use of computer programs to model nature. Nature is too complex, they say, and depends on too many processes that are poorly understood or little monitored — whether the process is the feedback effects of cloud cover on global warming or the movement of grains of sand on a beach.

Their book, “Useless Arithmetic: Why Environmental Scientists Can’t Predict the Future,” originated in a seminar Dr. Pilkey organized at Duke to look into the performance of mathematical models used in coastal geology. Among other things, participants concluded that beach modelers applied too many fixed values to phenomena that actually change quite a lot. For example, “assumed average wave height,” a variable crucial for many models, assumes that all waves hit the beach in the same way, that they are all the same height and that their patterns will not change over time. But, the authors say, that’s not the way things work. Read More...

The Book of Bunny Suicides: Little fluffy rabbits who just don't want to live anymore is a collection of black & white cartoons showing one or more rabbits in their creative attempts to end their lives using a variety of items. The hilarity that ensues marks the authour, Andy Riley, as a comical genius. He's aware of the fine balance between unlikely gore and straight-up comedy. Where else will you see a Bunny impaled on a light saber? This book might not be for everyone, but for those that will find it funny, will find it ridiculously funny. Read More...

This caught my eye because Desert Solitaire is one of my favorite books and it tops their list.

Nice diverse selection. click the pic for the whole list.

snip: "The editors at CounterPunch read all those lists of the hundred best books of the century and didn't care for them. So we've talked to friends, striven to remember what shaped us, informed us, what was innovative, path-breaking. Here's our reckoning. This first instalment is of non-fiction, first published in English. They are presented here in alphabetical order by author." Read More...

Alastair France's new book is Five Myths of Consumer Behavior: Create Technology Products Consumers Will Love.

Something every marketing student and product designer or engineer should pick up.

At only 147 big-print pages it's a rather quick read but it packs a big punch and does a fine job at outlining core yet often overlooked consumer behaviour principles. In particular, Smethers articulately explains (in plain English) the various phases and stalling points of new product adoption, the barriers to initial use and proper usability, the different types of users and how to approach them, the many costs to the consumer and why it's so important to highlight a product's true value. Here are the five myths:

Myth 1: Consumers behave the same in all markets
Reality: Consumers behave differently in new markets than in established markets

Myth 2: The more consumers see it, the more successful it will be
Reality: If the offspring isn't attractive, there is no sense getting more users to see it

Myth 3: If I’ll use it, my users will
Reality: Consumers don't have your knowledge or your motivation when they try your product

Myth 4: Consumers will find a product’s value
Reality: The value must find the user

Myth 5: Consumers want more features
Reality: Consumers only want a few key features, and they want them to work well Read More...

The new Worldchanging tome contains over 600 pages of innovations and emerging solutions for building a sustainable planet in the 21st century. It has been written by a collective of leading eco-writers including a chapter from Jill of the great Inhabitat blog. Each chapter offers readers new answers to questions like "Why does buying locally produced food make sense?" and "What steps can I take to influence my workplace toward sustainability?" Read More...

Wil McCarthy’s incredibly compelling book, Hacking Matter, has been released in a free pdf form. It’s great that the book can now be freely shared.” Hacking Matter is a science book about Wil’s research on “quantum dots”—configurable “mezzoscale” (larger than nano) machines that can be controleld with software to mimic the properties of different elements. click the picture to get the PDF.
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I only wish they had a deeper database! Nifty little application that lets you move the sliders to find books with characteristics you desire in your reading material. Click the pic to visit.

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