For the holidays, why not give that special someone a home-made book scanner. We’re all Google Books now. “A dumpster full of building materials, really cheap cameras and outrageous textbook prices was all I needed to do it.”
Another piece, this time at NPR, on the way we are read when we read electronically. The historical nexus between reading and anonymity (between anything and anonymity) seems to be decidedly on the way out. Unless of course we read books. My favorite line in the piece comes from Google …
An interesting reflection by David Bordwell, film professor at U Madison, on the problem of academic books quickly going out of print. He gives useful advice, especially to younger authors. He also has provided an example of how to web publish that out of print title, assuming you get the …
Another notch in the belt of digital media: the projectionist. An amazing piece in Slate on the death of the projectionist that began in the 60s with the rise of chain theaters to today’s no-humans-required digital projectors. I guess the thing that always interests me about these stories is why …
Next time someone tells you “young people” only read online, send them this. It’s a study by the National Association of College Stores that found that 74% of college students prefer to read print.
I teach a course called “The Language of Media” where we look at the way technologies impact forms of human expression from the middle ages to the present. Nicholas Osler, chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages, has written a new book about the technologically assisted future of language, and …
The roundtable on “The Future of the Book” that I participated on last spring for the Blue Metropolis Literary Festival will be airing on the CBC tonight at 9 pm on “Ideas,” hosted by Paul Kennedy. I am joined by Kim McArthur of McArthur Publishing and Yvonne Hunter from Penguin Canada. …
A beautiful posting on an online exhibit of the history of Dutch bookbindings. Another nice reminder of the richness of meaning imbedded in book objects that cannot be replicated in plastic electronic gadgets.
As a follow-up to my visit to the Art Book Fair last week, I wanted to draw attention to a “book trust” I joined while there. A group of art students from Yale were asking attendees to donate a book to their “trust” and in return receive a share of …
My title comes from a line from Goethe’s The Man of Fifty. I like it because it draws attention to, and complicates, what is shaping up to be a new ideology of digital reading: “social reading.” Almost all major digital textual initiatives today (see the latest: Social Books) are driven …