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
May 22, 2009
Like this: To any of you who are feeling down, and saying, “Oh, no one’s reading anymore”: Walk into 826 on any afternoon. There are no screens there, it’s all paper, it’s all students working shoulder to shoulder invested in their work, writing down something, thinking their work might get published. They...
May 18, 2009
I’m going to be traveling for the next week or so, so posting will be light to non-existent, but before I go I want to take belated note of this thoughtful post from Sebastian Mary (or maybe it's sebastian mary) over at if:book. Let's look at books for a moment. While in the early Wild West publishing days of the...
May 15, 2009
Thomas Allen's work has been noted on many blogs over the past few years — just start with this page and follow the links — but Text Patterns would be incomplete without some acknowledgement of it.Allen takes old pulp paperbacks, carefully cuts out figures from their covers, reassembles the images into something like...
May 14, 2009
Peter Wayner: The kind of book I write, thick with equations that play to computer lovers, is also the first to be pirated. It’s a canary. O’Reilly Publishers, one of the top technical presses, reported that in 2008, the computer book market was the only segment to lose sales. According to the company, the category sold 8%...
May 14, 2009
At the Chronicle of Higher Education I read this: Leslie Morris is used to handling John Updike's personal effects. For decades, Mr. Updike had been sending a steady stream of manuscripts and papers to Harvard University's Houghton Library, where Ms. Morris serves as a curator. But in late February, several weeks after the iconic...
May 14, 2009
Jeremy Paxman tells the story here of his love of reference books. “A long time ago, when I had ambitions to start a personal library, a bookish friend told me there were three sets of reference books I had to get hold of. They were the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Oxford English Dictionary, and the Dictionary...
May 12, 2009
. . . to publishers, that is. Consider this a follow-up to last week's post about the Big New Kindle and its possible use for textbooks: Over at Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody makes an important and troubling point: "the only reason why publishers are really interested in electronic books is that they can use DRM to crush sales of...
May 12, 2009
Is a book in progress , "version zero," still a book? Would you be interested in buying it? "Marks and meaning" — shouldn't that be Marks and Meaning? — "is a work in progress; an evolving exploration of visual language, visual thinking and visual work practices by the founder and Chairman of...
May 11, 2009
I don't seem to be able to get this video embedded properly, so I'll just link to it. The making of books by hand is a beautiful thing.
May 9, 2009
Good news and bad news at Oxford’s legendary Bodleian Library. The good news (especially if you’re Nicholson Baker or share his devotion to saving old books and magazines and newspapers) is that millions of books that there’s no room for in Oxford will be finding a new home in Swindon. The bad news is that many of the...