Are Travel Guidebooks Dead? Spoiler Alert: No.

The Huffington Post offers some reasons why they're better than what you get on your device.

From the post...


Paper Maps
Ebook maps are hopeless. The format just doesn't lend itself to usable maps. Once cached, Google maps on a smartphone or tablet are convenient but don't quite replace a good paper map with a map key that locates important highlights and is easy to annotate. If I need directions (as I surely will), I'm more comfortable whipping out a paper map on a busy street than asking a stranger to pour over my tablet. In fact, just taking out the map can attract a helpful local. 

Easier to Use
Unlike a novel which is read sequentially, using a travel guide involves a lot of jumping around. Flipping through paper pages or turning to a good index to find what you're looking for is easier than the tapping, searching and bookmarking in an ebook. Should I visit this village or that village? In a guidebook, I can put a finger on one page while reading another, easily comparing the two places. Not so in an ebook, let alone an app. And, it's still useful to hand-write a notation, cross out a phone number or circle an essential sight.

Guinness Book of World Records' Best of 2012

The Ten Best Sex Guides

The list, care of the Guardian.

De Hortus Sanitatis

A rare 500-year-old medical text is being displayed at the University of Aberdeen.

From a piece in the Daily Mail...

The De Hortus Sanitatis, which translates as the Garden of Health, shows some of the medical methods practiced in Scotland five centuries ago and is one of the earliest European medical texts.
 
The book, first printed in Mainz, Germany, in 1491, is a fusion of late medieval science and folklore. 

It contains detailed writings and annotated illustrations on plants, herbs, animals, and minerals.

Meanwhile, detailed illustrations reveal how physicians used to study the colour of urine to make diagnoses.

The RGB Colorspace Atlas

It depicts every color imaginable. Weird and cool.

The World's Largest Atlas

Enjoy!

No More Encyclopedia Britannica in Print?

Nope. After 244 years, nope.

From a story in the Guardian...

The Encyclopedia Britannica has announced that after 244 years, dozens of editions and more than 7m sets sold, no new editions will be put to paper. The 32 volumes of the 2010 installment, it turns out, were the last. Future editions will live exclusively online.

For some readers the news will provoke malaise at the wayward course of this misguided age. Others will wonder, in the era of Wikipedia, what took the dinosaur so long to die. Neither view quite captures the company or the crossroads.

Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc, suggested that the encyclopedia was already something of a relic within the company itself, which has long since moved its main business away from its trademark publication and into online educational tools.

"The company has changed from a reference provider to an instructional solutions provider," Cauz said. He projects that only 15% of the company's revenue this year will come from its namesake publication, mostly through subscriptions and app purchases.

Why are Textbooks So Expensive?

Mental Floss finds out, here.

Reference Books Going the Way of the Dodo

John Walsh laments that fact in the Independent.

From the story...

Bluntly put, dictionaries are in trouble, and have been for years. The big, dusty, 2,000-page family dictionary has become surplus to requirements, as potential users have turned to the internet for their definitions. The figures for 2010 show that spending on dictionaries fell for the seventh consecutive year, to a record low of £9.2m. Single-language and bilingual dictionaries dropped 13 per cent. Other reference books, including atlases and home-learning titles, sank by 10 per cent. But as early as 2007 some publishers were predicting that paper dictionaries will die out completely, as the word-curious turn wholly online. And if they go the way of reel-to-reel tape recorders, vinyl records and camera film, we'll have lost a substantial source of intellectual delight: the reference shelf.

The reference shelf used to be something no professional writer or scrupulous journalist would be without: the books represented a small army of helpers in the fight to express oneself in writing or to understand obscure words or references in someone's work.

If You Have the World's Largest Coffee Table

You could place upon it the largest book in the world. You couldn't yourself, though. It takes six people to lift the Klencke Atlas. It's 360 years old and, as The Guardian reports, will be displayed soon at the British Library.

Almanacs and the Private Library

The Private Library discusses collecting almanacs on a recent post.

From the piece...

By the middle of the 17th century some 400,000 almanacs were being printed every year in England alone.

Almanacs were first printed in the United States in 1639 when William Pierce published (and Stephen Daye printed) An Almanack For The Year Of Our Lord 1639 Calculated For New England on Harvard University's one-year old press. But the best known early American almanac, Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanack, did not begin publication until almost 100 years later (1732).

Behold, the World's Largest Thesaurus

It's massive. 4,448 pages. 2 volumes. 920,000 entries. Over 40 years of work compiling it. Poets & Writers Magazine has a behind-the-scenes look about how it was created.

From the piece...

Begun in 1965 under the auspices of the University of Glasgow, the project has passed through several technological incarnations—moving from paper slips to microfilm to computer files—and survived the death of founders and dodgy financial backing. Christian Kay, one of the work's four coeditors, was twenty-seven when she joined the endeavor as a research assistant. She's now a sixty-nine-year-old professor. "Fund-raising produced all sorts of cliff-hangers," Kay told the Times of London. "People didn't know if they would get paid or not. Just as the money was about to run out, you would get a little bit more from one academic foundation or another."

Work in the early years progressed slowly, with researchers combing the twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary and transcribing lists of synonyms on 6 x 4-inch cards. In 1978, things nearly went up in smoke when the building housing the sole copy of the work-in-progress caught fire. The nineteenth-century structure was burned to a shell, but the thesaurus—safely ensconced in metal cabinets—survived the blaze. "We were always very good about putting things away at night," Kay told the Daily Mail, "and the Victorian doors stood up well, although you can still see singe marks on some of the documents."

The project's chief intellectual hurdle was devising a classification system capable of organizing the more than 920,000 lexical items collected over the decades.