Like squirrels collecting nuts it is easy to try to fill a hard drive with “useful stuff” – just to have it available at some later date. The stuff of interest right now are various books I like/need/reread/ that are licensed under Creative Commons licenses. Often when I come across a CC licensed book of [...]

OK, so I should be writing but I needs a break and this seems like a worthwhile attempt at procrastination… Every time someone dares to create a canon they are naturally shot down. But at the same time I really want to list the 20  non-fiction books a well rounded person should read. A list [...]

The last book giveaway worked really well so I decided to continue the tradition a bit longer. Let me know in the comments if any of the books on the list catch your fancy. I have a Swedish list on a separate blog. Sean Lang Parliamentary Reform 1785-1929 Bruno Giordano The Ash Wednesday Supper Stephen [...]

I am now faced with an aesthetic dilemma – I have too many books and not enough will-power to stop buying more. The solution to the problem was to decrease the number of books I had so that I could keep up my addiction to dead trees. So first I used BookCrossing to release a [...]

Tim Radford reviews the short listed books for this years prestigious Royal Society Science Book Prize. Read the reviews and then go read the books. We are living in a time when science books are fun reading – are we at the height of science reporting? So sure the criticism that science becomes devalued into [...]

King Oscar I of Sweden 1799-1859 was the son of one of Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, one Napoleon’s marshals who became king Charles XIV John of Sweden. During Oscar’s time as crown prince and heir to the Swedish throne he was very socially active. Among other things he wrote a series of articles on popular education, and [...]

To the academic summers are a mix of joy and dispair. Everyone is envious of our summer holidays while most that I know are all busy clearing time for some larger project. Not many other career choices lead you to voluntarily take a laptop with you on a beach holiday. Each summer the over-optimistic academic [...]

An interesting sounding book The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control by Ted Striphas is out now both in print and in a online Creative Commons version or as the author puts it: …not only as a copyrighted, bound physical volume, but also as a Creative Commons-licensed electronic book.  You [...]

Like most computer people I spend most of my days reading and writing off a computer screen not producing a large product but doing my work (which in total is a large product). As a researcher I use most of my reading time to read books which are either necessary or helpful for my work. [...]

LibraryThing is a fun site which allows users to put their libraries online which helps comparisons and recommendations based on users libraries. The new project launched by LibraryThing is really cool it puts online famous people’s libraries, the project is called I see dead people’s books. Try it out and browse the libraries of Sylvia [...]

After MissPrism set the pace with her list Ten books you’re supposed to like but I didn’t several lists began popping up. I wrote mine here and “Reading at Naptime” linked to mine and added the suggestion that the next assignment for the overeducated blogosphere is a list of books we love that nobody else [...]