Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
March 19, 2010
Here’s a statement that will find its way into my book on reading: Of course, you can’t take your pen to the screen. When it comes to annotating the written word, nothing yet created for the screen compares to the immediacy and simplicity of a pen on paper. The only effective way to respond to text on screen is to write about it. The...
March 18, 2010
I wish people would stop saying things like this: Books are changing from physical to virtual objects. . . . The 25-cent paperback took us halfway there; now we have fully arrived. The physical book does not exist, and has no value. Not quite in the book-as-despised-Jew category, but still. . . . Let’s be clear: the physical book does...
March 17, 2010
The 20 most annoying book review clichés: 1. Gripping 2. Poignant: if anything at all sad happens in the book, it will be described as poignant 3. Compelling 4. Nuanced: in reviewerspeak, this means, “The writing in the book is really great. I just can’t come up with the specific words to explain why.” 5. Lyrical: see...
March 16, 2010
1) In light of recent posts on the fragility — supposed and real — of digital data, here’s an interesting story on how Emory University is dealing with their trove of Salman Rushdie’s old computers, disks, et al.: At Emory, Mr. Rushdie’s outdated computers presented archivists with a choice: simply save the contents of...
March 15, 2010
In a forthcoming issue of The New Atlantis, James Bowman writes: Tolkien and the other old-time fantasists may have felt themselves to be working within the Western tradition, from which they would cite the gods and heroes of classical literature as their precedents. But to believe that is to overlook the fundamental difference between...
March 15, 2010
At the bookstore of the National Theatre in London you can pick up a bookmark that features these sentences: The best moments in reading are when you come across something — a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things — which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you...
March 12, 2010
On this London visit, I barely escaped from the magnificent Foyle’s with my solvency intact — it’s way better than it ever was though not nearly as eccentric as it used to be — so imagine my pleasure at seeing this story on its recent renewal.
March 12, 2010
I’m back from England and full of ideas. I was not able to do what I went to London primarily to do — let me just say that the Jesuit Archive in London is a stern and jealous guardian of the documents in its care — but I had a productive time anyway. There are different ways to be productive, and one of them involves sheer thinking...
March 5, 2010
Folks, I will be traveling for the next week and may not be able to post, so let me leave you with a few chewy nuggets of information:Kathleen Fitzpatrick has produced a really interesting online monograph on the future of scholarly publishing, Planned Obsolescence — a recursive scholarly project, that embodies its own subject. Note...
March 4, 2010
An excellent point by Ted Striphas: Wax cylinders, forty-fives, LPs, eight-tracks, cassette tapes, CDs, mini discs, digital audio tapes: the fact is that music formats have changed significantly — indeed, regularly — over the last 50 or 100 years. Music lovers have long understood that “music” is not equivalent to “format.”...