Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store by Robin Sloan is a magical novel about the quest to find things out and the nature of friendship in the new millennium. Its interesting cast of characters joins in the search for answers to century old mysteries and more modern questions like hard cover book or ebook in the age of the Kindle, the Nook, and the iPad all the nature while seeking to solve the mystery of what is really going on in Penumbra's Bookstore in Great Recession, entrepreneurial San Francisco. Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Book Store is a good read for web designers, book lovers, seekers of traditional knowledge, the A2K crowd, typologists, book scanning enthusiast, gamers, Ruby programmers, data visualizers, googlers, virtual reality wizards, wizards, warlords, and rogues. There is even a thread of invention and innovation woven through the tale.
And, it has a glow in the dark cover if you buy the hard copy. (You can check it out here.)
You can see the rest of the Way Better Patents Reading List here.
