From The Guardian:

A book looted from a US library during the American civil war has finally been returned, almost 145 years overdue.

The only stipulation of the Illinois handball coach who returned the title – the first in WFP Napier’s four-volume History of the War in the Peninsula and in the South of France – was that he didn’t have to pay the $52,858 fine.

Full story here.

The Espresso Book Machine, which allows users to print copies of books on demand, has just been installed in the New York public library.  The library’s offering free copies of any book out of a list of 20 available on the machine (see below) to anyone who goes to try it out.

The Espresso Book Machine will be available to the public at SIBL through August, and will operate Monday- Saturday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library is located at 188 Madison Avenue (at 34th Street).

Library users will have the opportunity to print free copies of such public domain classics as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain, “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens and “Songs of Innocence” by William Blake, as well as appropriately themed in-copyright titles as Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” and Jason Epstein’s own “Book Business.” The public domain titles were provided by the Open Content Alliance (“OCA”), a non-profit organization with a database of over 200,000 titles. The OCA and ODB are working closely to offer this digital content free of charge to libraries across the country. Both organizations have received partial funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The EBM, now available for sale to libraries and retailers, can potentially allow readers anywhere to obtain within minutes, almost any book title in any language, whether or not the book is in print. The EBM’s proprietary software transmits a digital file to the book machine, which automatically prints, binds, and trims the reader’s selection within minutes as a single, library-quality, paperback book, indistinguishable from the factory-made title.

The direct-to-consumer model of the EBM eliminates shipping and warehousing costs for books (thereby also eliminating returns and pulping of unsold books) and allows simultaneous global availability of millions of new and backlist titles in all categories and languages. These savings permit potentially lower prices to consumers and libraries, and greater royalties and profits to authors and publishers. Also, titles will never have to go out of print again.

Link to press release (via BoingBoing).

Here’s a great project that really makes me wish I lived in London:

The London Book Project is a free book exchange on a massive scale. Using the London Underground as a high speed distribution network, we aim to bring real literature to London’s commuters. Scrap the freesheets - read a free book instead!

Over the next two weeks we’ll be distributing thousands of second hand books across the tube and we want YOU to get involved. If you see one of our books, please pick it up! Then read it and replace with any book of your choice. Let’s make the tube a giant, free library!

Link (via BoingBoing)

Kenya’s mobile camel-borne library is holding a book drive.  This is a great opportunity to send off some of your extra books and support a good cause in the process.

Though The Camel Bookmobile (HarperCollins, April 2007) is a novel, the camel-borne library actually exists. It operates from Garissa in Kenya’s isolated Northeastern Province near the unstable border with Somalia. It brings books to a semi-nomadic people who live with drought, famine and chonic poverty. The books are spread out on grass mats beneath an acacia tree, and the library patrons, often barefoot, sometimes joined by goats or donkeys, gather with great excitement to choose their books until the next visit.

But of course, the bush is hard on books and the traveling library needs more.

What can you do to help?

BOOKS FOR THE CAMEL BOOKMOBILE can be mailed to:

Garissa Provincial Library
For Camel Library
Librarian in Charge, Rashid M. Farah
P.O. Box 245
Garissa, Kenya

Postage, economy, on a 5-pound box from the U.S. to Kenya is $23. Sending a 10-pound box is $33.75, and a 15-pound box costs $41.10. For a 25-pound box, the cost is $55.05.

Link (via Neil Gaiman’s journal)

Another book has found its place on ban lists around the country on the basis of protecting the delicate constitutions of American children.

The word “scrotum” does not often appear in polite conversation. Or children’s literature, for that matter.

Yet there it is on the first page of “The Higher Power of Lucky,” by Susan Patron, this year’s winner of the Newbery Medal, the most prestigious award in children’s literature. The book’s heroine, a scrappy 10-year-old orphan named Lucky Trimble, hears the word through a hole in a wall when another character says he saw a rattlesnake bite his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

“Scrotum sounded to Lucky like something green that comes up when you have the flu and cough too much,” the book continues. “It sounded medical and secret, but also important.”

The rest of the article can be read here, and the definition of ridiculous can be found here.

For a month now, Dr. Eskander’s intermittent diary entries have been appearing on the Web site of the British Library (bl.uk/iraqdiary.html), and they detail the daily hurdles of keeping Iraq’s central library open, preserving the surviving archives and books and, oh yes, staying alive.

The New York Times article can be found here, and the journal itself is here.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince was today named Scotland’s most borrowed library book.

The sixth novel about the boy wizard by JK Rowling topped the list of books lent out from public libraries between July 2005 and June 2006.

A Question of Blood and Fleshmarket Close, both by Ian Rankin, were second and third; Mary, Mary by James Patterson was fourth. Read full story on Scotsman.com.