2009-2018

By: Alan Jacobs

brave new digital world (number 3,782 in a series)

Craig Mod on how the digital world changes books: The biggest change is not in the form stories take but in the writing process. Digital media changes books by changing the nature of authorship. Stories no longer have to arrive fully actualised. On the simplest level, books can be pushed to e-readers in a Dickensian chapter-by-chapter...

opting out of the monopolies

At the Technology Liberation Front, Adam Thierer has been reviewing, in installments, Tim Wu’s new book The Master Switch, and has received interesting pushback from Wu. One point of debate has been about the definition of “monopoly”: Wu wants an expansive one, according to which a company can have plenty of competition, and...

less than singular

Cosma Shalizi (click through to the original for important links): The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the close of 1918. Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible...

Daily Lit

Here’s the place to go if you would like to have books emailed to you in installments, at a frequency you set yourself. At first I strongly disliked this idea: I thought, “But what if I get to an end of an installment and still have the time and the inclination to read further?” On further reflection, though, I...

novelty, once more

There have been some interesting reflections recently on the advantages and disadvantages of the blog as a medium for literary criticism and reflection: see here, here, and here. I have mixed feelings on these points. On the one hand, since blogs tend to be personal, non-professional, and unpaid, they ought to be ideal venues for people...

email, we hardly knew ye

Cringely is sad about the decline and fall of email. Me? Not so much. I like the lightweight minimalism of text/IM/Twitter, and use them when I can in preference to email. That said, there’s one very important way in which email is superior to those other technologies: it is completely asynchronous. People may send emails hoping...

copia

If I think of Copia as a standard, everyday way of reading, it seems like a nightmare to me. But if I think of it as a way to conduct a focused, purposeful conversation about a book — social reading and commentary for the classroom, or for scholarly collaboration — it seems like a dream. Via the always-provocative Matthew Battles.

material developments

So what should e-readers be made of? How about, let’s see — yes: paper. This article reports on the use of paper as the substrate for the formation of displays based on the effect of electric fields on the wetting of solids, the so-called electrowetting (EW) effect. One of the main goals of e-paper is to replicate the look-and-feel...

university presses

After reading yet another story this morning about the problems university presses find themselves in, with all-too-brief suggestions about the ways that digital publishing could help rectify these problems, I thought, “I need to write a post on this. After all, scholarly writing is tailor-made, more than any other kind of writing,...

reader’s report: Jane Smiley

Well, the recent traveling and busyness may have kept me from posting, but it didn’t keep me from reading. Nothing keeps me from reading. So here’s what’s been going on: I’ve been working my way through Tony Judt’s magisterial Postwar, but it’s a very large book — exactly the kind of thing the Kindle...