The Stacks
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Who is this ISBN guy?
So, no, this isn’t a post about International Standard Book Numbers, and, no, this isn’t even really directly about the book we are featuring.
But since the back cover of this book provides one of two featured quotes in my Book Cover Project, and the front cover features on my “book wall” pictured at the start of the project, it seemed to make sense to give the book its due as a case study for that same project…
Star Wars: A New Approach
In 2015, no doubt propelled by the-marketing-machine-that-is-Disney acquiring Lucasfilm three years prior, three “original retellings” of the original three Star Wars movies arrived in bookstores and libraries in hardcover format, followed by paperback editions in 2019…
Oh Yes!
As we continue to explore book covers as part of our Head Alien’s Book Cover Project, we wanted to pull an example from our visual storytelling collection. And Oh No! (Or How My Science Project Destroyed the World), written by Mac Barnett and illustrated by Dan Santat, published in 2010 by Disney Hyperion Books, is a great example…
Everything is #@%!ed or Everything is f*cked?
So does this post need a content warning?
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
First published in 1970, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret by Judy Blume quickly became a bestselling novel. Forty-four years after its first publication, Atheneum Books released a new edition of the book with a truly brilliant jacket design by Lauren Rille and illustrations by Debbie Ridpath Ohi…
Introducing The Book Cover Project
You may have noticed mention of The Book Cover Project in several recent posts. If you haven’t seen it yet, I’ll include a link below. But first I thought I’d share the associated introductory video presentation here on its own…
Book News: A push for free textbooks
For this week’s addition to the library school book news project we’re stepping a bit outside the usual trade book publishing focus here at The Butterflies & Aliens Library. But in the big business that is publishing, textbook publishing is the biggest. So as a bibliophile and a student, any push to make textbooks free is going to get my attention…
Book News: Sensitivity Readers in Publishing
For this week’s contribution to the library school book news project, I wanted to share a CBC article exploring the rise of “sensitivity readers” in publishing. It relates to many of the topics that have come up in the course, including representation and diversity in publishing, the fine line between editing and self-censorship, and the not-so-fine and much muddier line between censorship versus serving your audience… which may or may not be the same as catering to the market…
Solarpunk
Following up on my recent post about Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot series, I wanted to dig a bit deeper into the “solarpunk” subgenre to which these two novellas belong. This is what I found…
Book News: The bookstore is the most recession-proof business in America for 2023
This week in our library school book news project, the topics touched on, among other things, the role of bookstores within the larger publishing ecosystem. Given our close connections with localn independent bookstores in particular here at the Butterflies & Aliens Library, this was a particularly interesting topic to dig into…
Book News: Open Access!
For our book news project, the topic of this week’s class was scholarly publishing, but for me the real revelations were about open access books – in other words, books being shared for free because the author and publisher think they should be shared…
Book News: Markus Dohle’s Big Flop
With this week’s books news assignment topic looking at trade publishing, I came across this article that does a bit of a deep dive into the aftermath of the proposed merger of ‘Big Five’ publishing giants Penguin Random House (PRH) and Simon & Schuster (S&S)…
