A piece full of thought at If:Book on the situatedness of reading books: To succeed at publishing in the networked era, it won’t be enough just to re-conceive the work as a “networked book.” If we accept that social interaction will be paramount, not just at the level of the …
An amazing website by Ben Fry that depicts the textual evolution of Darwin’s Origin of Species. In Fry’s rendering we see the portions of the text that were expanded over each subsequent edition, showing how the notion of evolution evolved in Darwin’s thinking. Fry’s work is part of an interesting …
A delightful letter in the TLS by a chemist debunking the meme about the scholar (Paul Duguid) who traced a cholera outbreak by sniffing letters for traces of vinegar. This one has been circulating around as proof of the importance of the physical tangibility (and olfactory excretions) of books and …
A beautiful article by Joni Evans in the Sunday Times on what publishing used to be like. This is one of my favorite genres, the “what offices used to be like” article (spurred no doubt by my fascination with today’s best show, Mad Men — seriously what would happen if …
What if it turns out all along that the enemy of books was not scanners, but video cameras? I ask this seemingly ridiculous question because of a new website that promotes lecture videos online. It’s called academic earth. We have always thought that what we did fell into two categories …
A recent story on NPR about new concerns over Google books — this time because it will make reading trackable, like our web searches. The concerns expressed during the piece are all about how reading books should be an unobservable practice, that the very point of reading is to be …
The announcement about the new publication of Nabokov’s final, uncompleted novel as a facsimile of the notecards it was written on (and not as an imagined ideal edition) was a marvelous reminder of the great, and as yet unwritten, history of the intersection of the book and the “note” (-card …
Come check out the Bad Ideas Blog. The point of the forum is to explore the nature of “bad” ideas — i.e. ideas that don’t make their way into books. Common to the experience of writing books is the accumulation of vast amounts of material that will never make its …
The genre of Kindle reflections lives on. Just when you thought there was nothing left to be said on the book v. the kindle, a great piece by Nicholson Baker. In light of this, I thought it was high time to create a table of their differences drawn from Baker’s …
In the latest contribution to the genre of I miss books, James Wolcott comments on the fashionability of the book versus digital readers. “Books not only furnish a room, to paraphrase the title of an Anthony Powell novel, but also accessorize our outfits.” How will digitality integrate itself into our …