Wednesday 27 August 2014
First printed book in English sold for over £1m
A 540-year-old book, known as the first to be printed in the English language, has sold at auction for more than £1m.
The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye is a version of a French book written around 1463.
It was translated over a three-year period by William Caxton, who pioneered the printing press in England.
He published his version around 1474, at a time when when most books were printed in Latin, in either Ghent or Bruges, Belgium.
The story is an epic romance which portrays the heroes of
Greek mythology as chivalric figures, according to Sotheby's, which
auctioned it.
It was produced as a gift for the Duke of Burgundy's new wife Margaret - the sister of the English King, Edward IV.
The book was offered for auction by the Duke of
Northumberland, who has been selling off dozens of family heirlooms
after his estate was left with a massive bill for flood damage.
Last week, £32m of sculptures, ceramics, paintings and
furniture were offloaded. A 1st Century Roman marble statue of Aphrodite
- the Greek goddess of love - fetched £9.4m alone.
The sale was prompted by floods at Newburn, Newcastle, in 2012, during which a culvert collapsed and led to buildings being demolished.
There Is One New Book On Amazon Every Five Minutes
In an interesting post, writer Claude Nougat
estimated the total number of books on Amazon – about 3.4 million at
last count (a number that could include apps as well) and then figured
out how many books were added in a day. Nougat noticed that the number
rose by 12 books in an hour, which suggests that one new book is added
every five minutes. And, most likely, it’s probably an indie book.
Thursday 21 August 2014
Just How "Legal" Are Seed Libraries?
After the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture cracked down on a
community seed library, hundreds of seed libraries in the U.S. are
suddenly wondering if they are breaking the law. According to PA
regulators, in order to give out member-donated seeds, the Simpson Seed
Library in Cumberland County would have to put around 400 seeds of each
variety through prohibitively impractical seed testing procedures in
order to determine quality, rate of germinability, and so on. The result
of the PA crackdown is that the library can no longer give out seeds
other than those which are commercially packaged.
Read More
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Thursday 7 August 2014
The story of WebP: How Google wants to speed up the web, one image at a time
Google
wants WebP to become the internet’s next dominant image file format.
That’s not likely going to happen anytime soon — but WebP could still
have a huge impact.
Tired of slow web pages? So is Google, and the company thinks it has the key to speed up the web: smaller image files. Google’s WebP image format
aims to replace existing image file formats like JPEG with a smaller
file size, resulting in faster load times and significant bandwidth
savings for website operators. But will the company be able to convince
everyone to switch, or are we about to see even more media format
fragmentation?
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