Now that Nicholas Carr has declared the ebook revolution over, it’s time to get back to thinking about the interactions between print and digital media and how they mutually influence one another. A few years back I wrote a piece about digital companions that accompanied a website I created to …
Three major publishers have joined together to create a new reading recommendation engine called “Bookish.” The site allows you to find books that are similar to other ones you like, share suggestions with others and create your own “bookshelf.” Bookish joins a host of other sites trying to capitalize on …
A fantastic piece in The New Yorker on a new publishing initiative called Inkling to make books more web-friendly by dividing them up into small chunks similar to index cards. Books are hard for search engines to get into — they are big and baggy to borrow from H. James …
A new series of exhibits at the Goethe Institute in New York City called “The End(s) of the Library.” David Horvitz will be producing an exhibit on the problems of DRM called “How can a digital be gift?” and Julieta Aranda, Fia Backström, and R. Lyon will be exploring “the way …
The announcement of the new German Digital Library, or Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek, made me realize just how limited our thinking is about electronic reading today. It is part of the broader Europeana initiative and as such has an impressive collection of both books and images. As I played with the …
For the first time, I have to admit that my conviction of a commingled print-digital future has seriously begun to wane. Over the course of the past 10 years, I have tried to argue against the either/or nature of the debate, both for practical reasons (I think this would be …
It seems like this is going to be one of those debates that will be rehearsed over and over again, but here’s a quick response to the scuffle caused by the recent LA Review of Books piece on “literature is not data.” The general resistance to electronic reading (aka digital humanities) …
A nice collection of images from Google Books, showing the visual and informational paradoxes of digitization — what is lost, found, and fused. I’m drawn in particular to the accidental nature of it all. We have many examples in the history of reproduction technologies of what is known as remediation …
I’d like to introduce a site dedicated to the new kinds of experiments I’ve been working on with my collaborator, Mark Algee-Hewitt. We’re interested in trying to visualize the lexical networks that comprise our literary past, what we call reading “topologically.” To do so, we’re developing quantitative techniques that try to …
A bit macabre, I know. But here begins a new category looking at the ways we talk about the death of books and other kinds of media. Its part voyeurism, part debunking of the hyperbole surrounding reading. The first exhibit belongs to Laura Miller’s recent piece in Salon, “Click here …