TomFolio.com launched a polished new site design today. It looks great.

The front page is a litte richer in rolling content than the previous site. The right sidebar is now dedicated to featured items. The Authors Born on This Day list is supplemented by a list of the day’s celebrations, observances, and historical events with links to loosely related categories.

A more subtle, but still important, change is the new emphasis on the fact that the site is a member-owned co-op. (Using Books is currently a non-owning member.) It says prominently, at the top of the screen, “Shop Co-Op!” and “An International Co-op of Independent Dealers”. This is a stronger and more specific identity for TomFolio than the one encouraged by the old tagline, “Your Corner Bookstore on the Internet”.

Kudos to Laurie and the TomFolio members who made the redesign happen.

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In Slate today, academic David Greenberg begins a series of articles on the tension between pop history publishing and the world of highbrow history writers:

At one point, many academics seemed to consider popularity a first step into the Hades of commercialization and dumbing down. But today, most of my peers, myself included, seem eager to publish with trade presses, to write op-ed pieces about our research, or to appear on NPR and Charlie Rose—not just because we want the ego boost (though who wouldn’t?), but because we enjoy discovering new audiences who respond intelligently to our ideas.

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The big splashy headline on the cover of the catalog that came with my order of shipping supplies yesterday made me snicker. It said, “A World of Tape at Your Fingertips”. But then I found myself consumed with comparing the small variations between the new supplies and the old ones, and I could sort of see their point. I guess I’m more of a box man than I am a tape man though.

I ship most of my orders in these rectangular flats with flaps that fold up and over a book into a custom-sized box. At Amazon they called them VDFs, which it turns out stands for “variable-depth folders”. In the past I’ve ordered locally through Northwest Shipping Room Supply. But they’re sort of pricey. This new shipment came from Uline. Uline only ships in increments of 100, but their prices are almost half of Northwest Shipping’s, even after shipping. Northwest Shipping might be able to price their’s a little lower if they offered a range of them in plain brown, instead of just the more expensive bleached cardboard.

Now that I’ve written a post about boxes, there’s nowhere to take this weblog but up.

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A MetaFilter poster has gathered a collection of links to works inspired by Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

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Erik Benson has passed ongoing maintenance of his book tracking/networking site All Consuming along to his company, The Robot Co-op (makers of 43 Things, a personal motivation networking site). This is great news for All Consuming, which has never really had the resources or support to reach its potential.

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Two editorials today on the theme of the dumbing down of literature:

First, Gail Armstrong of Open Brackets records her conflicted reactions to a Wall Street Journal article (WSJ link susceptible to linkrot) about Barnes & Nobles’ line of simplified classics for younger readers and literacy programs.

Next up, in the Guardian, novelist DJ Taylor frets about the effect that expanded book sales in UK supermarket chains is having on the publishing industry:

Cheap books are apparently the spiritual equivalent of universal suffrage, and by offering works by Dan Brown, Patricia Cornwell and Tony Parsons for a pound or two below the prices levied by traditional outlets, Tesco and its friends are “democratising” the book trade. This is not to lament the vast sales racked up Dan and Tony, merely to suggest that there are other books lingering in the publishers’ catalogues whose chances of straying into the public’s line of vision are proportionately reduced every time another supermarket deal gets struck.

The Guardian article was posted to the Bookfinder Insiders list. The poster there mentioned that Tesco — the supermarket chain mentioned in the editorial — is rumored to be buying the UK bookstore chain Waterstone’s.

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For future reference, here is a student-compiled list of writers and works recommended by Lawrence Weschler to his Literary Nonfiction class, care of The Millions.

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