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Libraries that use self-checkout stations will be forced to give patrons an extra book.

Hard truth: Crappy AI-written books wouldn't be getting book deals if people had taste to begin with.

People are getting their brains cooked by AI—dividing into idiotic AI boosters and Salem-Witchcraft-trial AI haters—because social media cooked their brains first.

It's important to oppose conspiracy thinking wherever it is. Vaccines aren't a conspiracy. Trump lost in 2020. And while it's understandable to oppose AI and AI book scanning, the AI companies aren't destructively scanning books as part of a master plan to destroy all the world's physical books.

The past is a foreign country www.librarything.com/work/709369/...

It's happening! Bookish people, swing by @librarything.com this Friday 12-2pm Eastern. It'll feel like 1997 all over again.

I finally read it, and now I realize almost all the criticisms were by people who clearly hadn't read it. Which… yeah. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

The End of Reading Is HereOptimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.www.theatlantic.com

Visited the intersection in Biddeford where Joan Sebastian Guerrero was shot by ICE yesterday. There was a continual stream of Mainers bringing votives candle and flowers. The asphalt where his body lay, bleeding out, was still distinctly red.

Typeface Monday: What do you think of Palatino?

To keep the same basic healthcare plan, @librarything.com needs to spend 21% more next year. We’re 10 people and health insurance is 2-4 employee we aren’t hiring. Yeah, gas is bad, but this stuff is absolutely crushing for a small business.

An LC librarian I met at ALA had business cards printed on the back side of actual, discarded catalog cards. Where can I get a gross of them myself, so I can slavishly imitate him?

The answer is clear: Gambling Books, a new line of "Choose Your Own Adventure" books, but instead of making decisions about what page to go to, you roll dice to find out. The "Lottery" book would have a lot of "You have lost." pages.

Democrats will lose the Senate because the left caught Trumpism—he "wasn't perfect" but he was “our champion” who “fights"! Competence and character were boring and ignored. Every scandal made him stronger. "The media" was out to get him! You got your man—and now he’s going to lose it all.

Today is the 150th anniversary of Portland, Maine's Great Fire of 1866—lit by a firecracker, the biggest US city fire before Chicago! portlandfiretours.com/2025/02/16/t...

Pointless, but pretty.

My new Maine dating website: PlentyofLobsters 🦞

There's a real need for new library tech. One might even say there's a vacuum.

The most interesting tech I saw at ALA Chicago was an industrial-strength Roomba-like vacuum robot. I could totally see them running around libraries every night. That a vacuum was the most interesting technology, however, tells you something about the stagnation of library technology.

Proposal for a Fiction Decimal System—"DDC for fiction," "BISAC as a shelf order." Genres make people mad, so let the 10-minute hate begin! www.librarything.com/topic/385147

To save space, monthly LibraryThing work-popularity numbers were stored by "LibraryThing month," with month 0 being the month we started—one byte. LibraryThing has now hit the 256-month problem—we need two bytes!