http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron text@machinemachine.net http://splitsider.com/2012/01/the-ballad-of-horse_ebooks/the-ballad-of-horse-ebooks-splitsider On the trail of the wild and wonderful @Horse_ebooks : http://t.co/QYGn0092 #fb ]]> Tue, 10 Jan 2012 07:06:45 -0700 http://splitsider.com/2012/01/the-ballad-of-horse_ebooks/the-ballad-of-horse-ebooks-splitsider http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ There’s a new online threat to writing. Critics of the web like to blame email, texts, and chat for killing prose. Even blogs—present company included—don’t escape their wrath. But in fact the opposite is true: thanks to computers, writing is thriving. More people are writing more than ever, and this new wave of everyone’s-an-author bodes well for the future of writing, even if not all that makes its way online is interesting or high in quality.

But two new digital developments, ebook spam and content farms, now threaten the survival of writing as we know it. ]]> Mon, 25 Jul 2011 02:46:50 -0700 http://blog.oup.com/2011/07/content-free-prose/ http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_activist_aaron_swartz_indicted_for_data_t.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 For a long time, it was the folks who downloaded music or movies illegally that faced the wrath of government prosecutors. So the unsealing of an indictment today against Aaron Swartz, former Reddit-er and founder of Demand Progress, for the illegal download of some 4 million-odd academic journal articles may sound a bit unusual.
Demand Progress has issued a statement suggesting Swartz's actions were akin to "checking too many books out of the library." But the government clearly disagrees as the charges include wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Schwartz now faces up… ]]> Wed, 20 Jul 2011 04:10:10 -0700 http://m.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_activist_aaron_swartz_indicted_for_data_t.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+readwriteweb+%28ReadWriteWeb%29 http://www.printmag.com/Article/Content-for-Users-on-the-Move What is a book, really? For that matter, what is an article, a record, or a movie? For each of these, I have a very clear picture in my mind that says more about when I came of age than about the content itself. When I think of books, my mind retrieves an image of my grandparents’ bookshelves, which I used to browse after school as a child. Records? I see the CD stacks of my teenage years, collected from local music shops and trading with friends. And somehow, thinking about movies still produces images of VHS tapes and memories… ]]> Wed, 13 Jul 2011 02:35:42 -0700 http://www.printmag.com/Article/Content-for-Users-on-the-Move http://craigmod.com/journal/post_artifact/ We will always debate:
the quality of the paper, the pixel density of the display;
the cloth used on covers, the interface for highlighting;
location by page, location by paragraph.

But really, who cares? 3

Hunting surface analogs between the printed and the digital book is a dangerous honeypot. There is a compulsion to believe the magic of a book lies in its surface.

In reality, the book worth considering consists only of relationships. Relationships between ideas and recipients. Between writer and reader. Between readers and other readers… ]]> Wed, 15 Jun 2011 08:50:47 -0700 http://craigmod.com/journal/post_artifact/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k08xsjjlNc&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Wed, 02 Mar 2011 07:49:30 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9k08xsjjlNc&feature=youtube_gdata http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 08:03:34 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514 http://www.theliteraryplatform.com/2010/12/the-novel-is-not-under-threat-from-technology/ One of the first things I did with my palm-sized glossy black pebble of the future was to download loads of free books using the app Stanza. I read The Island of Dr Moreau on a flight to Japan. I started reading War And Peace. Again. Then I downloaded an app which was a book by a writer who hadn’t been published conventionally. On his website, he revealed he’d had 14,000 downloads in three months. My eyes nearly fell out. It was the final prod I needed. I was going to make an app. It’s what Arthur would have wanted.]]> Mon, 10 Jan 2011 04:34:33 -0700 http://www.theliteraryplatform.com/2010/12/the-novel-is-not-under-threat-from-technology/ http://thenewinquiry.com/post/2583944966/open-books-the-e-reader-reads-you It’s fitting that at the end of this essay about the proliferation of e-readers, Scott McLemee invokes critic Franco Moretti, who has devoted the past decade to deromanticizing literary criticism and reconfiguring serious study of the novel as a bloodless, quasi-objective matter of empirical data analysis. In this New Left Review essay, which touches on his idea of “distant reading” — the opposite of close reading, the careful scrutiny of particular works— Moretti declares, “We know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.” If e-readers live up to their potential, he just may get his… ]]> Thu, 06 Jan 2011 21:17:54 -0700 http://thenewinquiry.com/post/2583944966/open-books-the-e-reader-reads-you http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/10/books-electronic-publishing/ Above all, the translation of books into digital formats means the destruction of boundaries. Bound, printed texts are discrete objects: immutable, individual, lendable, cut off from the world. Once the words of a book appear onscreen, they are no longer simply themselves; they have become a part of something else. They now occupy the same space not only as every other digital text, but as every other medium too. Music, film, newspapers, blogs, videogames—it’s the nature of a digital society that all these come at us in parallel, through the same channels, consumed simultaneously or in seamless sequence. ]]> Sun, 24 Oct 2010 17:05:00 -0700 http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/10/books-electronic-publishing/ http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v4s8v/Night_Waves_Is_the_Book_Dead/ Philip Dodd goes to one of Britain's largest second hand bookshops and is joined by a panel of publishers, authors and an audience of readers for a public debate that tackles the vexed question: Is the book dead? As e-books outsell hardbacks for the first time is reading itself facing a future that is empowered or impoverished?

The venue is Barter Books in Alnwick, Northumberland, which famously occupies a former railway station. Onstage with Philip will be guests writer David Almond, author of the prize-winning novel Skellig, Chris Meade of the Institute for the Future of the… ]]> Thu, 21 Oct 2010 03:10:00 -0700 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00v4s8v/Night_Waves_Is_the_Book_Dead/ http://www.scaryforkids.com/who-goes-there-by-john-w-campbell/ Who Goes There? is a science fiction novella by John W. Campbell, Jr. under the pen name Don A. Stuart, published August 1938 in Astounding Stories. In 1973, the story was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the finest science fiction novellas ever written, and published with the other top vote-getters in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two. The novella has twice been adapted as a motion picture: firstly in 1951 as The Thing from Another World and later in 1982 as The Thing. ]]> Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:46:00 -0700 http://www.scaryforkids.com/who-goes-there-by-john-w-campbell/ http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/Reading-in-a-Whole-New-Way.html As digital screens proliferate and people move from print to pixel, how will the act of reading change?

America was founded on the written word. Its roots spring from documents—the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and, indirectly, the Bible. The country’s success depended on high levels of literacy, freedom of the press, allegiance to the rule of law (found in books) and a common language across a continent. American prosperity and liberty grew out of a culture of reading and writing.

But reading and writing, like all technologies, are dynamic. In ancient times, authors… ]]> Fri, 09 Jul 2010 03:24:00 -0700 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/specialsections/40th-anniversary/Reading-in-a-Whole-New-Way.html http://www.slate.com/id/2258054 Because we perceive print and electronic media differently. Because Marshall McLuhan was right about some things.

In case you don't recall one of the more influential thinkers of the late 20th century: McLuhan was an academic media theorist who ended up being called a "high priest of popular culture." He was big enough to be a standing joke on Laugh-In ("Marshall McLuhan, what are you doin'?") to appear in a cameo in Annie Hall, to get interviewed in Playboy. One of the fundamental things McLuhan said was that new media change us and change the world. We… ]]> Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:21:00 -0700 http://www.slate.com/id/2258054 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/business/20unbox.html?ref=business “THE point of books is to combat loneliness,” David Foster Wallace observes near the beginning of “Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself,” David Lipsky’s recently published, book-length interview with him.

If you happen to be reading the book on the Kindle from Amazon, Mr. Wallace’s observation has an extra emphasis: a dotted underline running below the phrase. Not because Mr. Wallace or Mr. Lipsky felt that the point was worth stressing, but because a dozen or so other readers have highlighted the passage on their Kindles, making it one of the more “popular” passages in… ]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:56:00 -0700 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/business/20unbox.html?ref=business http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/19/INL91DU44K.DTL Look closely at what you're reading right now. See those little spaces between the words? They may look unimportant, but the invention of word spaces, back in the Middle Ages, changed the course of culture.

For the first couple of thousand years after people began writing, they didn't bother separating one word from the next. Long lines of letters ran together across the length of the scroll or the page. Reading in those days was a trial. Your brain cranked away as you tried to decipher where one word ended and the next began. No one read… ]]> Sun, 20 Jun 2010 10:55:00 -0700 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/06/19/INL91DU44K.DTL http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price. On a twenty-six-dollar book, the publisher receives thirteen dollars, out of which it pays all the costs of making the book. The author gets $3.90 in royalties. Bookstores return about forty per cent of the hardcovers they buy; this accounts for $5.20 per book. Another $3 goes to overhead costs and the price of producing and shipping the book—leaving, in the best… ]]> Wed, 21 Apr 2010 04:10:00 -0700 http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683 Though Gutenberg's invention made possible our modern world with all its wonders and woes, no one, much less Gutenberg himself, could have foreseen that his press would have this effect. And no one today can foresee except in broad and sketchy outline the far greater impact that digitization will have on our own future. With the earth trembling beneath them, it is no wonder that publishers with one foot in the crumbling past and the other seeking solid ground in an uncertain future hesitate to seize the opportunity that digitization offers them to restore, expand, and promote their backlists to… ]]> Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:51:00 -0700 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683 http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62514/ It seems significant, somehow, that Infinite Jest—the big buzzy signature meganovel of the nineties—was set at the end of the aughts. Most of the book’s action appears to take place in 2009, which means that we’ve all just survived the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment. It also means that David Foster Wallace’s prophetic window has now (at least in the most literal sense) closed forever, in the same way Orwell’s did when we reached the actual 1984. And in fact Infinite Jest’s vision of the future does, these days, look slightly dated. One of the book’s nightmare scenarios is… ]]> Fri, 08 Jan 2010 06:21:00 -0700 http://nymag.com/arts/all/aughts/62514/ http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6703852.html?industryid=47109 The future of reading is very much in doubt. In this century, reading could soar to new heights or crash and burn. Some educators and librarians fear that sustained reading for learning, for work, and for pleasure may be slowly dying out as a widespread social practice. Only at living history farms will we see people reading. For decades the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has been studying the reading habits of adult Americans, issuing a series of reports with rousingly alliterative titles such as “Reading at Risk” (July 2004) and “Reading on the Rise” (January 2009). Sometime in… ]]> Tue, 03 Nov 2009 10:30:00 -0700 http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6703852.html?industryid=47109