http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com 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.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/11/lost-art-editing-books-publishing But what happens the rest of the time? Away from the world of freak glitches, what fate befalls the writer as his or her magnum opus enters the publishing production chain? For some years now – almost as long as people have been predicting the death of the book – there have been murmurs throughout publishing that books are simply not edited in the way they once were, either on the kind of grand scale that might see the reworking of plot, character or tone, or at the more detailed level that ensures the accuracy of, for example, minute historical… ]]> Tue, 15 Feb 2011 04:32:53 -0700 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/feb/11/lost-art-editing-books-publishing 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://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://chronicle.com/article/What-Are-Books-Good-For-/124563 I've been wondering lately when books became the enemy. Scholars have always been people of the book, so it seems wrong that the faithful companion has been put on the defensive. Part of the problem is knowing what we mean exactly when we say "book." It's a slippery term for a format, a technology, a historical construct, and something else as well.

Maybe we need to redefine, or undefine, our terms. I'm struck by the fact that the designation "scholarly book," to name one relevant category, is in itself a back formation, like "acoustic guitar." Books began… ]]> Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:23:00 -0700 http://chronicle.com/article/What-Are-Books-Good-For-/124563 http://canopycanopycanopy.com/9/mao__king_kong__and_the_future_of_the_book In 2004, Bob Stein founded the Institute for the Future of the Book, with the goal of finding new models for publishing as it moved from the page to the screen, from the enclosed world of the individual reader to the networked one of the Internet. While innovative for its own time, the Institute’s mission built on Stein’s decades of experience exploring the frontiers of electronic publishing, whether with Atari, the Criterion Collection, or Voyager. Long before the popularization of the Internet, the tools that Stein developed for publishing with floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and LaserDiscs laid the groundwork for dramatic… ]]> Wed, 08 Sep 2010 03:37:00 -0700 http://canopycanopycanopy.com/9/mao__king_kong__and_the_future_of_the_book http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/08/29/cover_story/?page=full In the beginning, before there was such a thing as a Gutenberg Bible, Johannes Gutenberg laid out his rows of metal type and brushed them with ink and, using the mechanism that would change the world, produced an ordinary little schoolbook. It was probably an edition of a fourth-century grammar text by Aelius Donatus, some 28 pages long. Only a few fragments of the printed sheets survive, because no one thought the book was worth keeping.

"Now had he kept to that, doing grammars...it probably would all have been well,” said Andrew Pettegree, a professor of modern… ]]> Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:16:00 -0700 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/08/29/cover_story/?page=full http://nplusonemag.com/goodbye-to-the-graphosphere For half a millennium, across continents and civilizations, the human readership did almost nothing but grow and consolidate itself. Constantly more people in more and more places could read, and could read more books more cheaply, with increasing ease. And not only were they able to do this, but they chose to. It would be astonishing to learn, if some retrospective survey could be carried out, that hours per head spent reading didn’t increase across all capitalist or otherwise modernizing countries (most Communist regimes having been energetic promoters of literacy) until at least the middle of the past century. ]]> Sat, 17 Jul 2010 12:36:00 -0700 http://nplusonemag.com/goodbye-to-the-graphosphere 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://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/136961 Innovative Books: I am looking to compile a list of the most innovative uses of the book format. Books that break the mould in their layout and design, perhaps books that use online systems to extend their content value or push their form into new places. I am most interested in narrative and theory, but any book that is interesting (artist books etc.) would be really appreciated. I have a few examples, in order of publication, to set the ball rolling:

Compendium for literates : a system of writing by Karl Gerstner - A book about book form… ]]> Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:37:00 -0700 http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/136961 http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2009/06/poetry_marathonsaturday_and_su_1.html The Serpentine Gallery Poetry Marathon is an ambitious two-day poetry event taking place in London during Frieze Art Fair week and featuring unique performances from leading poets, writers, artists, philosophers, scholars and musicians. An international group of major figures will be brought together to perform in the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2009, designed by architects Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa of the acclaimed Japanese practice SANAA. The event will include performances of new work, collaborations, discussions and experiments. ]]> Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:04:00 -0700 http://www.serpentinegallery.org/2009/06/poetry_marathonsaturday_and_su_1.html http://fictional-stimulus.ning.com/ Fictional Stimulus is a reading experience for people who like books and are curious about the future of literature in the digital world. It's an introductory taster for those new to reading online, and its form is inspired by the bookgroup where everyone reads the same material then gets together to discuss it at the end. Fictional Stimulus started on 22 September 2009 and runs for four weeks, over which time you’ll be sent twelve emails, one each time we make available a new batch of stimuli. Click on the green headings above to find the latest concise selection of… ]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 08:54:00 -0700 http://fictional-stimulus.ning.com/ http://mashable.com/2009/09/16/write-novel/ Though you’ll still have to do your writing using the old fashioned method — one word at a time — web applications and social media have made the process of writing a novel considerably easier and arguably more enjoyable. Here is a toolkit for using the web to write a book. If you know of any other great applications useful to aspiring writers, please leave them in the comments. ]]> Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:27:00 -0700 http://mashable.com/2009/09/16/write-novel/