Subway library train

For the next six weeks, any member of the public in New York can head to subwaylibrary.com or download the New York Public Library's reader app, SimplyE, to have unlimited access to a wide selection of NYPL-provided e-books. The initiative also aims to promote the free Wi-Fi service at each of the subway's underground stations, which rolled out late last year. When users log onto the service, a link to the Subway Library website will appear, encouraging you to read a book instead of your Facebook feed.

Library Train is designed to look like the iconic Rose Reading Room with the seats and walls on each car made to resemble bookshelves (and a faux–Gilded Age ceiling to boot). The train is scheduled to run on the E and F lines between Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens.

TimeOut  and New York Public Library

NearSt

We’re on a mission to get all of us back into our high street shops. We believe finding and buying something from a real shop nearby should be faster and easier than ordering it online. You can already shop over 100,000 products from bookshops all across London on NearSt, and we’re rapidly adding more types of shops.
NearSt

Shelfie

• Explore bookshelves to dig up your next read.
• Digitize your library by taking a Shelfie.
• Create a profile and share your collection.
• Rediscover your books, read and listen anywhere

Shelfie

Shakespeare 'digital library' wallpaper

For the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death, Vodafone and the British Library have made some of the earliest and rarest editions of Shakespeare's plays available to all, allowing people to download the Bard's most popular works from specially-designed wallpaper featuring virtual library bookshelves.

The pop-up Digital Library is providing new access to free digital copies of the quartos by allowing people to simply scan the QR codes printed on the virtual books as the 'digital library' tours the UK. The wallpaper will also provide digital links through to the British Library's Discovering Literature website (http://www.bl.uk/shakespeare), revealing more about the world of Shakespeare and his plays, from King Lear and madness to the violence of Romeo & Juliet and the life of the Bard himself.

The Digital Library's first official appearance will be as part of the St George's Day celebrations in Trafalgar Square on 23 April, open to the public from midday until 6pm but, in order to share the quartos with a broader audience around the UK, from 25 April the Digital Library will be taken on a tour of cities and rural locations, including Birmingham, Penzance and Silchester.

I Murdered My Library

What happens when you begin to build a library in childhood and then find you have too many books? From a small collection held together by a pair of plaster of Paris horse-head bookends to books piled on stairs, and in front of each other on shelves, books cease to furnish a room and begin to overwhelm it. At the end of 2013, novelist Linda Grant moved from a rambling maisonette over four floors to a two bedroom flat with a tiny corridor-shaped study. The trauma of getting rid of thousands of books raises the question of what purpose personal libraries serve in contemporary life and the seductive lure of the Kindle. Both a memoir of a lifetime of reading and an insight into how interior décor has banished the bookcase, her account of the emotional struggle of her relationship with books asks questions about the way we live today.
Kindle Single

iPhone bookshelf

Shelves wallpaper for iPhone 2G, 3G, 3Gs, 4
iPhonebrella

This is not a bookshelf

It’s not an oddly painted bookshelf made of scrap lumber. It’s not.
Lewis Wadsworth

Barack Obama's Oval Office bookshelves

One of Barack Obama's first tasks as president will be to redecorate the Oval Office. The Guardian asked some top designers and architects to tackle the job. Bookcases have been added to either side of the fireplace to communicate the idea that this is a literate presidency. All the furniture, including the previous president's desk, has been replaced by a large round table, suggesting that the participants in meetings and discussions are equal. The globe of the world can be used as a learning aid for any official unsure of the difference between a continent and a country.

BBC 4 indent

BBC 4

BiblioRoll

BiblioRoll is a device for the reading activity in ubiquitous computing environment. BiblioRoll is shaped cylindrical with scroll interaction and a display divided into three, which suggests a different appearance from traditional books. With this device, users can read by combining or comparing with the information from the books they have or from the ones spread everywhere. In addition, it is possible to put meta-data on them. BiblioRoll enables to treat these operations easily in a hand. Therefore, it makes users experience a totally different way of reading from traditional books or e-books. Using BiblioRoll gives not only an experience of reading but a new experience of gaining knowledge.
BiblioRoll

Zoomii

Because I love bookstores. Spending afternoons wandering the shelves. Happening across great books I didn't even know existed. But it's an experience I never found online. Online bookstores are wonderful. They've got amazing prices, huge selections, and they're open all the time. If you know exactly what you want, they're perfect. But somehow I kept coming back to the bookstore just to browse. Zoomii is my attempt to bring online as much of the real bookstore experience as possible.
Chris Thiessen
Zoomii