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Katie Day

Giles Slade: Eebs: A History of Future Publishing - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...istory-of-future_b_223747.html

ebooks kindle google future publishing

shared by Katie Day on 15 Sep 09 - Cached
  • The Kindle, on the other hand, is what you keep at home or take with you on vacation to relax into. It is for the book-lover who might occasionally buy a first, a signed or a special edition. It is lingerie. It is a box of chocolates or a bottle of double-malt. Especially well-timed for the recession as a luxury item that keeps on giving by allowing you to 'save' on cheaper electronic editions, it's now here to stay
  • According to the current growth curve, electronic books will dominate world-wide book sales by 2018. (This is the book industry's own prediction, and is extremely 'safe.' It does not anticipate a watershed or 'tipping point').
  • What I want to see is an e-Book that is no longer a simulacrum of a printed work. Soon, when people begin writing exclusively for eBooks, book metaphors like pagination will lose their functionality and fall away. But I also want the new medium to develop brand new possibilities. Maybe then, we will stop calling them e-Books and simply call them 'eebs.'
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • The Kindle feature of reading itself aloud is a good beginning in expanding this new medium. In the future, I foresee hyperlinks that will break the reader out of the printed page and take him or her on a roller-coaster ride across the Internet during an accelerated and compressed 'knowledge-journey' [nahjer?] that would be impossible in a printed work. I don't know how long this will take, but I know it has to come.
  • Katie Day on 15 Sep 09
     
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Katie Day

On the ropes? Robert Darnton's Case for Books - 9/14/2009 - Publishers Weekly - 0 views

www.publishersweekly.com/...CA6696290.html

reading history books articles libraries

shared by Katie Day on 17 Sep 09 - Cached
  • The Future Whatever the future may be, it will be digital. The present is a time of transition, when printed and digital modes of communication coexist and new technology soon becomes obsolete. Already we are witnessing the disappearance of familiar objects: the typewriter, now consigned to antique shops; the postcard, a curiosity; the handwritten letter, beyond the capacity of most young people, who cannot write in cursive script; the daily newspaper, extinct in many cities; the local bookshop, replaced by chains, which themselves are threatened by Internet distributors like Amazon. And the library? It can look like the most archaic institution of all. Yet its past bodes well for its future, because libraries were never warehouses of books. They have always been and always will be centers of learning. Their central position in the world of learning makes them ideally suited to mediate between the printed and the digital modes of communication. Books, too, can accommodate both modes. Whether printed on paper or stored in servers, they embody knowledge, and their authority derives from a great deal more than the technology that went into them.
  • E-Books I want to write an electronic book. Here is how my fantasy takes shape. An “e-book,” unlike a printed codex, can contain many layers arranged in the shape of a pyramid. Readers can download the text and skim the topmost layer, which will be written like an ordinary monograph. If it satisfies them, they can print it out, bind it (binding machines can now be attached to computers and printers), and study it at their convenience in the form of a custom-made paperback. If they come upon something that especially interests them, they can click down a layer to a supplementary essay or appendix. They can continue deeper through the book, through bodies of documents, bibliography, historiography, iconography, background music, everything I can provide to give the fullest possible understanding of my subject. In the end, they will make the subject theirs, because they will find their own paths through it, reading horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, wherever the electronic links may lead. Authorship
  • Katie Day on 17 Sep 09
     
    Darnton is the library directory of Harvard University and his new book is called "The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future
Katie Day

Book Review - The Book in the Renaissance - By Andrew Pettegree - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...Pinsky-t.html

printing history communication media_literacy

shared by Katie Day on 03 Dec 10 - No Cached
  • ephemeral material supplied the main business of the early publishing industry. Classical authors, we are told, accounted for “around 5 percent of all printed books published in the 15th century.”
  • Pettegree writes well and amasses information superbly. He refrains from explicitly comparing the technology of print, and its historical impact, with the technology of the Internet. Implicit similarities include issues of intellectual property and privacy, of power, of libel, as well as a general challenge to old modes — the proliferation of personal expression, the contentiousness, the question of how to capitalize, and capitalize upon, a new medium. This scholarly restraint, leaving his readers to compare and contrast, seems wise. And there are certainly contrasts with the modern age.
  • In an appended “Note on Sources,” Pettegree allows himself to acknowledge that, “Ironically, it has been the next great information revolution — the Internet — that has allowed this work on the first age of print to be pursued to a successful conclusion.” Digital information newly available from all over the world enhanced his research on early print culture — in all its frequently vulgar, ephemeral, zany and menacing variety.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • in the Renaissance these works were not read in the prolonged, silent trance experienced by readers of Dickens or Flaubert
  • In contrast to this industrial-age solitude of print narrative, the 16th-century verse romances and other episodic books like “The Decameron” were suited for reading aloud — enjoyed in a communal, social setting.
  • Katie Day on 03 Dec 10
     
    ""  "The humanist mythology of print." With this phrase the British scholar Andrew Pettegree indicates the cultural story his book amends, and to some extent transforms. In an understated, judicious manner, he offers a radically new understanding of printing in the years of its birth and youth. Print, in Pettegree's account, was never as dignified or lofty a medium as that "humanist mythology" of disseminated classics would suggest.
Katie Day

Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading-By Ursula K. Le Guin (Harper's M... - 0 views

www.harpers.org/...0081907

digitalgist reading research article ursula_leguin literacy books future

shared by Katie Day on 31 Oct 09 - Cached
  • But I also want to question the assumption—whether gloomy or faintly gloating—that books are on the way out. I think they’re here to stay. It’s just that not all that many people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?
  • For most of human history, most people could not read at all. Literacy was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless; it was power itself. Pleasure was not an issue.
  • I see a high point of reading in the United States from around 1850 to about 1950—call it the century of the book—the high point from which the doomsayers see us declining. As the public school came to be considered fundamental to democracy, and as libraries went public and flourished, reading was assumed to be something we shared in common.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • Literacy was not only the front door to any kind of individual economic and class advancement; it was an important social activity. The shared experience of books was a genuine bond.
  • A person reading seems to be cut off from everything around them, almost as much as someone shouting banalities into a cell phone as they ram their car into your car—that’s the private aspect of reading. But there is a large public element, too, which consists in what you and others have read.
  • The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere P.R. because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.
  • Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.
  • How can you make book sales expand endlessly, like the American waistline? Michael Pollan explains in The Omnivore’s Dilemma how you do it with corn. When you’ve grown enough corn to fill every reasonable demand, you create unreasonable demands—artificial needs. So, having induced the government to declare corn-fed beef to be the standard, you feed corn to cattle, who cannot digest corn, tormenting and poisoning them in the process. And you use the fats and sweets of corn by-products to make an endless array of soft drinks and fast foods, addicting people to a fattening yet inadequate diet in the process. And you can’t stop these processes, because if you did profits might become listless, even flat.
  • What is a good growth-capitalist publisher to do? Where can he be safe? He can find some safety in exploiting the social function of literature. That includes the educational, of course—schoolbooks and college texts, favorite prey of corporations—as well as the bestsellers and popular books of fiction and nonfiction that provide a common current topic and a bond among people at work and in book clubs. Beyond that, I think corporations have been foolish to look for safety or reliable growth in publishing.
  • And the Internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from Web-surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven’t done it yet.
  • A book won’t move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not “interactive” with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer’s mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.
  • It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.
  • I am far from dismissing the vast usefulness of electronic publication, but my guess is that print-on-demand will become and remain essential.
  • I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism.
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