I am pleased to announce that I shall be appearing on Vancouver Co-op Radio (http://www.coopradio.org/), on Thursday 4 May, to talk about my soon to be released collection of poetry, “My Old Clock I Wind and Other Poems”.

My interview will also include me reading a selection of my poetry. To listen please tune in at 1:10 pm Vancouver time (9:10 pm UK time).

For my previous interview on Vancouver Co-op Radio’s The World Poetry Reading Series, please visit http://worldpoetry.ca/?p=11413.

My thanks to Ariadne Sawyer of the World Poetry Reading Series for enabling my appearance.

Kevin

Svalbard, Bellsund, Tundra by Jerzy Strzelecki, Wikimedia Commons, 2003.

People like to prepare for end of the world, and sometimes they use libraries to do it.

There is, of course, the Survivor Library, a digital collection of over 7,000 freely available PDFs intended to help humanity rebuild after a cataclysm. It contains information about “[h]ow to make water safe to drink. How to build a weather proof shelter from available materials. How to build a fire….[And how] to build a new infrastructure which can eventually replace what was lost.”

It all sounds a bit melodramatic, but the Library Index with its sections on accounting, livestock, and welding is interesting to peruse if nothing else.

However, I am more of a romantic about the end of the world. (Or perhaps just more of a historian.) I worry about preserving books that I love. Luckily folks in Norway share similar concerns.

by Mark Sweney at the Guardian

Consumer sales down to £204m last year and are at lowest level since 2011 – when Amazon Kindle sales first took off in UK

Britons are abandoning the ebook at an alarming rate with sales of consumer titles down almost a fifth last year, as “screen fatigue” helped fuel a five-year high in printed book sales.