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
June 19, 2009
I’m not getting especially helpful advice from the Book Seer, but maybe you’ll do better. I read about the Seer at booktwo.
June 18, 2009
Google says I can now embed certain passages from Google Books — those books with previews — on my website. Let’s see if it works: Hmm. Well, sort of. You don't seem to be able to choose what you want to show — I thought I was choosing to embed a portion of the text, but evidently not. Not sure what...
June 18, 2009
Pagehand is a new word processor for the Mac whose native file format is PDF — yep, it saves its documents as PDFs. I’m not sure what I think about this. Whatever you write in it is immediately shareable across all platforms with maximum compatibility, and that’s good. But the documents won't be readily...
June 18, 2009
Now this is fabulous: the British Library’s enormous archive of 19th-century newspapers. (Story in the Guardian here.) The terms are somewhat confusing, and only paid subscribers will be able to download stuff — but still. Amazing. It might not make Nicholson Baker happy, but it makes me happy. I have to get...
June 17, 2009
That essay by Ann Kirschner I linked to the other day beat me to a punch: I had been planning a post about choices of, shall we say, reading venue. It’s been about ten years since I’ve read Middlemarch — one of the two greatest English novels, the other being Bleak House, if you want to know — which means that...
June 16, 2009
When I was a kid I didn't really dislike brushing my teeth, but sometimes that was just one too many things to do. So when I had forgotten, and my mom asked me whether I had remembered, of course I lied. But then she started checking behind me: “Your toothbrush isn't wet.” Okay, well, at that point it became a...
June 15, 2009
So you know how people — like, for instance, me — have pointed out that if you lose your Kindle you lose all your Kindle books? Well, at about the time that I wrote that post Amazon released its Kindle app for the iPhone, which I dutifully downloaded, and now I’m really glad I did, because . . . I lost my Kindle. Yep, I...
June 12, 2009
Very interesting article by Rachel Toor in the Chronicle of Higher Education on trying to get people to understand the value of writing well. She focuses particularly on friends of hers who are scientists and who, though they have to write a good deal, can't be bothered to learn how to do it skillfully. There's something crucial...
June 12, 2009
Here’s a fascinatng interview with Remi Brague, author of the recently released history The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The interviewer begins by asking Brague, “How do you view the relationship between the three religions of the book and philosophical...
June 10, 2009
We know, thanks to the poet Keats, that “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter” — but might something similar apply to stories? Told tales fascinate, but those untold fascinate more. Recently on the Happy Days blog at the New York Times, Tim Kreider wrote a brief essay that began like this: Fourteen...