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Katie Day

FT.com / Comment / Opinion - Accessing the e-book revolution - Stephen Johnson - 0 views

  • The difference between our time and Gutenberg’s is, of course, the rate of change. It took almost half a century for the alphabetical index to become a standard; Arabic page numbers were not adopted until the 1500s. There were feature wars in the new platform of the book, but salvos were fired only every 20 years. It may have taken a long time, but when all those features coalesced into the system of citation, indices, page numbers, footnotes, bibliographies and cross-references that we now take for granted, they helped usher in the scientific revolutions of the modern age. Entire ways of interacting with information became possible because we had agreed on how to describe where the information lived and how to point people towards it.
  • This is a story with a direct connection to our current situation. This year is the 20th anniversary of Tim Berners-Lee’s world wide web specification. The defining property of that standard was this: it established a way to describe where information lives and how to point people to it. The extraordinary run of innovation seen on the web starts with the breakthrough of web addresses and links. For two decades, this new universe of linkable data expanded faster than any other form of information. But this year, for the first time in my adult life, unlinkable information began growing at a meaningful clip.
  • Where links abound, a rich ecosystem of commentary, archiving, social sharing and scholarship usually develops because links make it far easier to build on and connect ideas from around the web. But right now, books exist outside this universe. There is no standardised way to link to a page of a digital book.
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  • Fortunately, a solution to this problem exists, one that merely involves a commitment to use technology that already exists. Call it the mirror web. If you create digital information in any form, make a parallel version of that information that lives on the web. A magazine publisher creating an iPad app should ensure that each article has clear links to a mirror version of each article on the web. Then, if anyone wants to cite, tweet, blog or e-mail a reference to that article, it is always one tap away. The web version can be behind a pay wall or some other kind of barrier if the publisher chooses; what matters is that there is an address you can point to.
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    discusses the danger of information on the web (e.g., inside/via apps and pages inside e-books) that cannot be directly linked to - proposes the solution is the mirror web, whereby you have parallel information online
Katie Day

The 21st Century Writer - The Future Writer -- from The Futurist - 0 views

  • Beyond blogging, this means that the writers of the future (both fiction and nonfiction) will work with Web designers, software writers, and other professionals to create product.
  • To Lapham, the crudeness, silliness, and uncultured quality of today’s Web culture is a symptom of the immaturity of the new medium and the youthfulness of its users. The change will be gradual. “We’re still playing with it like it’s a toy,” he said of the Web. “We don’t yet know how to make art with it. McLuhan points out that the printing press was 1468, it’s a hundred years before you get to Cervantes, to Shakespeare.” 
  • “Look at Notre-Dame de Paris,” he said. “The novel is not about the hunchback so much as it is about the church, and the idea of sculpture as a way of communicating stories. In the preliterate era they told the stories through these churches.… Victor Hugo was lamenting the loss of that stone literacy, where people would look up at the church and know what it was about. Yes, something was lost. But we gained a lot. I remember a conversation I had at our open source convention with Freeman Dyson, the physicist. He said something wonderful; someone asked him what do you think about the fact that we were losing something or other, and he said, ‘We have to forget, otherwise there would be no room for new things.’ That’s an important thing to take.… Be accepting of the losses and the gains.”  “Reading isn’t going to go away,” agreed Abram, “but it’s only one aspect. Probably, it will be some combination of reading, visual conversations, and lessons. What you’re authoring is contributing to a corpus that is significantly larger than it is now, electronically. Most of the important stuff will have been converted 20 years from now. We can convert the entire Library of Congress for $9 billion right now, which, in terms of national priorities, is only five weeks of Iraqi conflict. It’s doable. It used to be undoable. The corpus, the ability to create cultural context, is going to change the nature of how culture is expressed.”
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  • “The written word will survive because there are things you can do with the written word that you simply cannot do with film or with radio. I don’t know if it will be a mass medium,” said Lapham. “The large majority of mankind is passive. The change comes from the active minority. Those people will continue to read. Books will continue to be read. Maybe the more popular forms of writing will be taken over by video games. But it’s up to members of your generation to teach young people how to read and what the difference is between reading literature and sifting data.”
  • Rushkoff sees new kinds of information systems springing to life next to writing, and sees this as part of a grand evolution in human communication. “Just because things became written down, we didn’t lose oral culture,” said Rushkoff. “Read Walter Ong [author of Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word]. We changed, but we still talk to each other, dance for each other. We do them in different situations. The written word is cool. It’s for a certain kind of thing. The more media we have to exchange, the better we understand what the biases are. The written word is abstract, contractual. It launched monotheism, ethics; it launched evolution. It was really important for a lot of things, and that will remain. But visual media will lead to other kinds of insights.”
Katie Day

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

  • 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.
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  • 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.
Katie Day

Official Google Blog: Our commitment to the digital humanities - 0 views

  • We've given awards to 12 projects led by 23 researchers at 15 universities:Steven Abney and Terry Szymanski, University of Michigan. Automatic Identification and Extraction of Structured Linguistic Passages in Texts.Elton Barker, The Open University, Eric C. Kansa, University of California-Berkeley, Leif Isaksen, University of Southampton, United Kingdom. Google Ancient Places (GAP): Discovering historic geographical entities in the Google Books corpus.Dan Cohen and Fred Gibbs, George Mason University. Reframing the Victorians.Gregory R. Crane, Tufts University. Classics in Google Books.Miles Efron, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois. Meeting the Challenge of Language Change in Text Retrieval with Machine Translation Techniques.Brian Geiger, University of California-Riverside, Benjamin Pauley, Eastern Connecticut State University. Early Modern Books Metadata in Google Books.David Mimno and David Blei, Princeton University. The Open Encyclopedia of Classical Sites.Alfonso Moreno, Magdalen College, University of Oxford. Bibliotheca Academica Translationum: link to Google Books.Todd Presner, David Shepard, Chris Johanson, James Lee, University of California-Los Angeles. Hypercities Geo-Scribe.Amelia del Rosario Sanz-Cabrerizo and José Luis Sierra-Rodríguez, Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Collaborative Annotation of Digitalized Literary Texts.Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia. JUXTA Collation Tool for the Web.Timothy R. Tangherlini, University of California-Los Angeles, Peter Leonard, University of Washington. Northern Insights: Tools & Techniques for Automated Literary Analysis, Based on the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books.
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     "Google's Digital Humanities Research Awards will support 12 university research groups with unrestricted grants for one year, with the possibility of renewal for an additional year. The recipients will receive some access to Google tools, technologies and expertise."
Katie Day

Trine U. School Requires E-Textbooks for Entire Curriculum - Wired Campus - The Chronic... - 0 views

  • Starting next semester, faculty members will be required to teach from digital editions of their textbooks using the CaféScribe platform, operated by the Follett Higher Education Group. The Web-enabled e-textbook system allows students to highlight and take notes on the text while they read as well as compare notes and discuss their reading in online forums. Faculty members can also embed comments, links, and discussion questions into the digital text.
Katie Day

Google Set to Launch E-Book Venture - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • Google Editions hopes to upend the existing e-book market by offering an open, "read anywhere" model that is different from many competitors. Users will be able to buy books directly from Google or from multiple online retailers—including independent bookstores—and add them to an online library tied to a Google account. They will be able to access their Google accounts on most devices with a Web browser, including personal computers, smartphones and tablets.
  • "Google is going to turn every Internet space that talks about a book into a place where you can buy that book," says Dominique Raccah, publisher and owner of Sourcebooks Inc., an independent publisher based in Naperville, Ill. "The Google model is going to drive a lot of sales. We think they could get 20% of the e-book market very fast."
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    Set to debut at the end of 2010 in the US and internationally in the 1st quarter of next year.....
Librareanne @diigo

iMinds - General Knowledge for our Lifestyle and Devices - 1 views

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    iMinds offers 8-minute AudioBooks and eBook articles that deliver bursts of knowledge on an array of topics through iPods, eReaders and other technology.
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