2009's best books about books

Book Patrol, the Seattle PI book blog, recently put together a list of the best books on books from 2009. Included on the list is Ted Striphas’s The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control.

Here’s what “Book Patro” had to say:

[The Late Age of Print] is a book for both the student of deep book history and for the casual book culture enthusiast. Striphas shows us how despite the enormous pressures currently facing the book it continues to play a vital role in our culture. The book is packed with tidbits of biblio history; who knew that the bookshop and it’s shelving habits were the precursor to supermarket design, and also offers much on the long relationship between books and technology, from barcodes to Oprah (it is after all a television show), to online bookselling and now the rush of e-books. The cover illustration is the icing on the cake.

The Late Age of Print was also mentioned in a very interesting article in the Times Higher Education Supplement about open access and publishers’ increasing willingness to make books available for free online