Word: bookings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Eisenberg knows how to shop. He can see through marketing campaigns, advertisements, and all the subtle nuances behind a store's attempt to make you spend your money. In his new book, Shoptimism the former executive vice president of clothing retailer Lands' End (and former editor-in-chief of Esquire) examines why we shop, how we buy, and what sort of tricks the advertising industry tries to play on us. (Watch TIME's video "Are You Ready To Shop...
...prospect, though, I can’t help but feel a measure of nostalgia, already, mixed with my exhilaration. Last summer, I spent a glorious week in Dublin at the National Library of Ireland, reading dusty volumes of 18th-century pamphlets for my thesis. In the world after Google Books has conquered all libraries and the Book Espresso Machine has delivered them all to bookstores around the country, will such trips even be necessary...
...Book Espresso Machine, Google Books, and the myriad other print digitization schemes now afoot carry the danger of turning research into something that can be conducted without ever leaving the compass of one’s local bookstore—or even one’s desk. Surely the heyday of the academic as an explorer, an adventurer, traveling to distant libraries in search of rare and exotic books, has already passed. But must technology wipe away all vestiges of that former side to the vocation...
...can’t help but feel reservations. The challenge of looking for an elusive book is one of the singular joys of scholarship for me, part of what rescues it from becoming a mere exercise in pedantry or reinterpretation. Even Harvard’s relatively sensible library system has supplied me with a few pleasurable scavenger hunts. Now a Google search and a glorified Xerox machine threaten to supersede that entire process...
Borges, in that haunting short story “The Library of Babel,” imagined the universal library as a dystopia, where “the shelves register every possible combination of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols,” where the availability of all possible books means the reliability of none, and where the librarians spend their days searching vainly for a master catalog which must, by logic, exist somewhere amid the annals of nonsense. I fear for the opposite: a world where finding the proper book is all too easy and simple...