The Oblivion Book

I know little about videogames beyond the NES and Angry Birds and Wii Fit, but apparently there's a videogame called Oblivion that has a number of magical and pseudoarchaic books within the gameplay. Some guy decided that in-game reading wasn't good enough, so he turned the in-game tomes into a hard-copy, leatherbound book:

Per the creator, this was entirely done by hand, using a color laser, real leather, and a bunch of elbow grease. More images of the finished book here; pictures of construction here. And people worry videogames are going to result in fewer books — here's a perfect case of videogames resulting in new books!

Ode to a Bookstore Death

The recent implosion of the Borders bookstore chain has been a slow-motion collapse, a magnification of the fate that so many small bookstores have gone through in much the same way. The difference is that Borders was so much bigger; the causes and the outcome are mostly the same. People are reading less; those who are reading read more in digital form; competition and cost of inventory have made it difficult to compete; competition with other forms of media are taking up people's entertainment dollars and time. It's not good for the industry, particularly those who do not modify what they're doing to accommodate change. Borders failed to do so.

The booksellers at the Borders in Santa Rosa, California, wanted to get some things off their chest before they left. Here's the things they never told you: an ode to a bookstore death.

Image from here; full text can be found here.