As if it wasn’t enough to found a field, Robert Darnton might just be on the verge of creating a national digital public library. His latest update in the NY Review indicates that he is well on his way to guiding a digital library into existence. Because it will be …
I’m sure many saw this classic New Yorker cover recently. A lot of people mentioned it to me. Look, they were saying, a funny cartoon about the death of the book. But what I like most about it is the way it highlights one of the ways through which books …
A funny new project by Giles Turnbull who along with a few friends decided to send their Twitter posts as postcards instead of electronically. It gives a renewed vitality to the word “post.” One of the most basic things it shows is just how expensive printed communication is by comparison. …
I’ve written before how the death of the book is connected with the death of a range of other analogue technologies. Nostalgia for the cinema projector and celluloid is as intense as anything by Sven Birkerts. The latest in a long line of dead products is now a major corporation: …
The latest in digital neologisms, Klout aggregates your influence on social media and gives you a “score.” We’ve been able to tell how many books an author has sold or how many records a band has sold or how much a movie made at the box office. But we’ve never …
More on 3-D printing kits. I’m intrigued by the way “print” keeps getting more sophisticated, and more accessible, even with the so-called death of print. Either its like phosphorus (brightest before extinguishing) or people keep misunderstanding the long history of technologies of impression and their durability.
A new press specializing in digital illustrated content. For me it raises all the old questions about monetizing digital files and the problem of free culture. I get that an iPad can be a gorgeous visual tool. I get that you might be able to get content through a publisher …
Meet Little Printer. He’s cute, little, and smart. He prints out your own customized newspaper (more like ticker tape). You program an app to deliver information from various sources (The Guardian, Twitter, Dictionary.com) and the thermal-powered device prints it all on a spool of paper a couple of times a …
Here’s a link to the book artist Bruno Munari’s books for kids called prelibri. They are wordless constructions that use different materials to convey to children the tactility of reading.
While on the topic of children and reading, see this latest from the New York Times. While ebook sales for adults are expanding faster than expected, electronic children’s books aren’t growing at all. “It’s intimacy, the intimacy of reading and touching the world. It’s the wonderment of her reaching for …