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 3, 2010
It’s interesting to consider how the kind of work I’ve just been doing will change as more and more books assume digital form. For instance, I had to look at several different editions of The Age of Anxiety — and to buy them from the wonderful AbeBooks — and compare them page by page in order to discover any significant...
March 2, 2010
Posting has been light around here for a number of reasons, chief among them being (a) my recovery from surgery and (b) the last stages of my most recent major project: a critical edition of W. H. Auden’s long poem The Age of Anxiety), to be published by Princeton University Press later this year. (I think.) I just mailed off the...
March 1, 2010
A Working Library says something very true very eloquently: On the page, the rhythm of the text emerges from both the macro design—the pleasing shape of the page, the proper amount of thumb space—and the micro—the right amount of leading, the evenness of the word spacing, the correct break of a line. On the screen, the rhythm of a...
February 27, 2010
So about a week ago I was reading a book on my Kindle when suddenly it disappeared. Not the Kindle, the book. The screen went blank, the Kindle restarted, and when restart was complete, the home page informed me that I had zero items on the machine and zero archived items. I set it aside and came back a few minutes later, and now, it...
February 25, 2010
From everything I’ve read about Chatroulette, it would appear that 95% of the time, or more, people click away within a second or two of seeing someone on screen. Surely Malcolm Gladwell is already working on an article about Chatroulette and snap judgments?Not every Chatrouletter shows a face to the world. Some show other body parts;...
February 24, 2010
Google is anything but my best friend these days, as readers of this blog will know, but I don’t think Google employees ought to be convicted of crimes because of videos other people upload.
February 24, 2010
Toby Lichtig has a problem: he can’t stop reading books to the end — even when he doesn’t like them. Meanwhile, Alan Bissett has declared war against the forces attacking his attention span, and he’s bringing in the heavy weaponry: Tolstoy. Perhaps the tide is turning. . . .
February 23, 2010
Jason Epstein writes, Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter — the human inability to read what is unreadable — will remain to winnow what is worth...
February 22, 2010
The legal wrangle over the fairness (or lack thereof) of the proposed Google Book Settlement is pretty darn fascinating. Check out this clear and detailed report, followed by this one. Well done, Professor Grimmelmann.
February 19, 2010
My recent exodus from Gmail and consequent return to the world of the desktop email client has got me thinking about what an email application really fundamentally is.It’s three things, it seems to me: it’s a text editor, it’s a database, and it’s a file manager. The problem is that there is no email client that fulfills all...