Hundreds of volumes in the library and bookshops of Herne Bay have had pages torn in half, but police remain baffled

Wait! Stop! Before you order that copy of David Benioff's City of Thieves from Amazon (a book I highly recommend), check to see if it's available at your local library. Because free! Oh, I know what you're saying: You don't have time to visit your library's website or load up one of the e-book-borrowing apps (as described in how to get free e-books from your public library) and do all that manual searching.

University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.

On the Boats Bringing Books to Thousands Who Need Them

A book borrowed from an Irish library has been returned more than 80 years after it was due to be taken back. The White Owl by Annie MP Smithson was borrowed on 23 July 1937 from Donegal County Library in the Irish-speaking Gaeltacht area of Gweedore. It was returned to Gweedore Public Library on 17 May.

The first 24 hour automated library in the United States was installed in Norman at Irving Recreation Center.

Even the quietest of buildings can make a loud-and-clear design statement, as these libraries prove. Housed in architecturally ambitious structures, they are places that celebrate human achievement with awesome environments.

A Texas man had the book thrown at him when he failed to return an overdue study guide to a local library, resulting in jail time and a $200 fine, KWTX.com reported.

Sit at President Kennedy's Oval Office Desk and discover what it means to hold the highest office in the land. Click on the icons on the desk.

A study from the Library of Congress reveals for the first time how many feature films produced by U.S. studios during the silent film era still exist, what condition they’re in and where they are located.

The British Library announced yesterday that it has uploaded more than one million public domain photos from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries to Flickr. The move comes as part of an ambitious project that will crowdsource inventive ways to navigate the massive store of photos, foster research, and encourage users to remix and repurpose the images.

The Vatican Library and Oxford University's Bodleian Library put the first of 1.5 million pages of their precious manuscripts online Tuesday, bringing their collections to a global audience for the first time.

In a lapse that national security experts call baffling, a high-ranking FBI agent filed a sensitive internal manual detailing the bureau's secret interrogation procedures with the Library of Congress, where anyone with a library card can read it.

PW takes a look back at 10 big library stories of 2013, and a look ahead to what might be on the horizon in 2014.

On Saturday, about 14,000 people in Latvia's capital formed a human chain of book lovers to kick off Riga's year as a 2014 European Capital of Culture. The crowd braved icy temperatures to pass library books — by hand — from the old National Library to the new building 1.2 miles (2 km) away. As you can see from this video, there was much dancing and rejoicing

Several places are competing to be the host of the Obama library in Chicago.

A few individuals give new meaning to the idea of spending forever in the library—their skin binds three of the books in Harvard’s 15-million-volume collection. Without extensive genetic testing, Harvard librarians still do not have the “foggiest notion” of how many volumes wrapped in human hide exist throughout the system, says Director of University Libraries Sidney Verba ’53.

Around the turn of the 20th century—a golden age for libraries in America—the Snead Bookshelf Company of Louisville, Ky., developed a new system for large-stack library shelving. Snead’s multifloor stack systems can still be seen in many important libraries built in that era, for instance at Harvard, Columbia, the Vatican, and at Bryant Park in New York City. Besides storing old bundles of bound paper, Snead’s stacks provided load-bearing structural support to these venerable buildings.

Going to the library gives people the same kick as getting a raise does — a £1,359 ($ 2,282) raise, to be exact — according to a study commissioned by the U.K.'s Department for Culture, Media & Sport. The study, which looks at the ways "cultural engagement" affects overall wellbeing, concluded that a significant association was found between frequent library use and reported wellbeing.

Sarajevo's City Hall, a stately neo-Moorish edifice marked by the violence of two 20th-century wars, has returned to its old glory after being destroyed by Serb shelling during the siege of the city in 1992.

Discover 1,200 Romantic and Victorian literary treasures, new insights by 60 experts, 25 documentary films, 30 inspirational teachers’ notes and more.

The Internet's eyes turned to the Federal Communications Commission on Thursday, as the panel approved a plan to consider allowing Internet service providers to charge Web sites like Netflix for higher-quality delivery of their content to consumers. In the lead-up to the vote, tech companies, venture capitalists and even celebrities all expressed opposition to the proposal, arguing that it would effectively end the open Internet.

These libraries aren't just buildings for books. They are some of the most beautifully designed and classic buildings we have ever seen.

A book owned by Harvard University has been been bound in human skin, scientists believe. Des destinees de l'ame (Destinies of the Soul) has been housed at Houghton Library since the 1930s. Writer Arsene Houssaye is said to have given the book to his friend, Dr Ludovic Bouland, in the mid-1880s.

Visit some of the most beautiful historic libraries of the world. These amazing book deposits will boost your desire for reading.

The city of Leawood is using the full power of the law to protect property values from the threat of, uh, free cabinet-sized libraries. A municipal statute designed to ban all detached structures is being levied against Leawood residents Brian and Sarah Collins after their 9-year-old son, Spencer, worked with his dad and grandpa to build the Little Free Library as a Mother’s Day gift.

Amazon has launched the mooted read all you can manage service and called it Kindle Unlimited. It costs, sadly for the US only at present, $9.99 a month and gives unlimited access to some 600,000 titles. Various people have various ideas about all of this. My colleague Michael Humphrey points [...]

Wired ho confirma: Amazon ha llençat la seva oferta de subscripció il·limitada a una col·lecció de 600.000 ebooks per 9'99$ al mes. Encara no es pot subscriure fora del USA, però potser prest la tindrem a l'abast. Quin impacte tindrà això sobre el sector, tant dels llibreters com dels editors, com dels autors, o sobre les biblioteques?

- Liibook.com és una plataforma que ofereix l'autopublicació de ebooks i permet la seva venda. Es defineix com una combinació de biblioteca, editorial i llibreria

The "take a book, return a book" boxes are catching in even on places where Kindles and brick-and-mortar books abound. 

One hundred years before post-millennial parents were deeming Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs inappropriate for young vegans, the children’s librarians of the New York Public Library kept a card catalog of hand-typed kids’ book reviews. “There’s about a billion card catalogs in the library,” says Lynn Lobash, who oversees reader services at the NYPL. “But these are special in that they were used as a tool for collection development, for the staff to evaluate the children’s collection.”

These summer days have me feeling nostalgic for the summers of my youth, when I’d ride my bike to the local library for another stack of paperbacks.

If you’re a sci-fi or fantasy fan who loves to read, there’s no cooler place than the massive Eaton Collection library at UC Riverside — but all that could change soon. Housed in the UC Riverside Libraries' Special Collections and Archives in the Tomás Rivera Library, the Eaton Collection is touted as the largest publicly accessible collection of science fiction, fantasy, horror and utopian literature in the world.

Back in the 1990s, historical societies, museums and symphonies across the country began transferring all kinds of information onto what was thought to be a very durable medium: the compact disc. Now, preservationists are worried that a lot of key information stored on CDs — from sound recordings to public records — is going to disappear. Some of those little silver discs are degrading, and researchers at the Library of Congress are trying to figure out why.

Libraries in the Pittsburgh area say thief has found a way to bypass security