TO SEE how profoundly the book business is changing, watch the shelves. Next month IKEA will introduce a new, deeper version of its ubiquitous “BILLY” bookcase. The flat-pack furniture giant is already promoting glass doors for its bookshelves. The firm reckons customers will increasingly use them for ornaments, tchotchkes and the odd coffee-table tome—anything, that is, except books that are actually read.

"You must train the robot that will replace you (or at least train the engineer building it)"

As far as company blogs go, @Typekit's is exemplary. Came across their contribution guidelines today. This is progress!

History of profanity at the New Yorker. Ha!

He made the book using MagCloud (HP Indigo press print-on-demand technology) to print the signatures, and then bound them by hand in a fairly straight forward binding, using inkjet canvas on the hardcover. It is a brilliant use of old and new technologies to self-publish. Bravo, Phil!

The Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS) is an O'Reilly experiment that tries to bridge the gap between private manuscripts and public blogs. Following on the let-them-comment-on-everything model established by the Django Book, Real World Haskell, and Mercurial: The Definitive Guide (among others), OFPS allows readers to read in-progress O'Reilly manuscripts, communicate suggestions with the authors, follow others' comments, and directly participate in the development of new books.

Manuscripts developed with OFPS sites allow the authors to publish the in-progress work as whenever they think it's ready for public comment and then update the site with new versions as the text is improved. Authors note sections of the text that they'd like comments on (potentially down to an individual paragraph) and that allows readers on the site to comment on that particular section.

“Every page must explode, whether through seriousness, profundity, turbulence, nausea, the new, the eternal, annihilating nonsense, enthusiasm for principles, or the way it is printed. Art must be unaesthetic in the extreme, useless and impossible to justify.” —Francis Picabia