Magic ‘Lybrary’ Expansion
Christopher Wasshuber is an old friend of mine. Unlike many Internet inspired relationships which come and go like moths and mosquitos, some endure. Chris is like that to me. Even though we have never met in person, I feel as if I know him and most certainly consider him a friend. Chris began his business, Lybrary.com, with the intention of preserving magic books one at a time lest they be lost forever. Don’t laugh. They do get lost. As a book seller, (GrandmaHawk’s Eyrie & EsotericaWeb) I can assure you that even the rare first editions of many books are getting rarer every year. Disaster befalls books in many ways. Fire, flood, theft, vermin, loss and even zealous heirs who treasure space on the shelf rather than those dusty old books all diminish the numbers of any book title. Imagine if one day in the hopefully distant future your grandkids put all of your books in boxes and send them off the the great pulping house in the sky for recycling. Ouch.
When Chris first proposed saving magic books in this way, it was very early in the cycle of life that eBooks are now experiencing. So many devices now handle PDF (Portable Document Format) files that it’s hard to find a high tech item that doesn’t. My phone does. I have a library with me all the time. Just don’t ring me while I’m reading or you may go straight to voice mail.
Adding books to Lybrary.com has expanded the availability of some books and kept the costs down at the same time. In addition, a rather wonderful offshoot of his preservation business is the fact that people like Aldo Columbini, Michael Close and Robert Giobbi are using the electronic book format for publication. He even has some authors who have only submitted their work in that format.
From an end user point of view, eBooks are terrific. I recently bought a book with 250 pages and liked three items enough to want to learn them for performance. At Lybrary’s dazzlingly small price of $19.00 including shipping, I was able to select and print only the 14 pages that those effects resided upon and now have just the right sized paper booklet I want without all the other items getting in the way. Those 250 pages wouldn’t really be all that hard to manage but imagine the Apocolypse collections in hard copy. Those books are enormous. Print the pages that interest you and you can actually take them along quite easily. Now I will go back to the original book one day and may even find a few more items that I like well enough to print them. But that’s for another day.
Another valuable feature of Lybrary.com eBooks is their searchable nature. Imagine trying to find an effect or technique in Tarbell’s Course in Magic as it resides on my bookshelf. Days could be wasted enjoyably leafing through and getting distracted while I looked for the Hunter Knot. Chris’ eBooks are all indexed and searchable. That includes those which are published in HTML format – there are a few of those available. Even Perth’s very own Pierre Achour has is name in a book published by Lybrary.com which he translated from the French for Chris.
All in all, Lybrary.com represents a terrific bargain and I most highly recommend you pay them a visit. Tell Chris I sent you when you place your order. He likes it when I do that.
Go here now: http://www.lybrary.com
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