Group items tagged

Very interesting article about publishing houses' efforts to keep up with the e-book world. Ties in nicely to some points Hayles made in "Print is flat; code is deep." 

Interesting in terms of our discussion on the democratic nature of electronic literature.

What strikes me as especially interesting about this book review is that it emphasizes and leads with the buzz surrounding its predominantly digital publication instead of the controversy about the popularity of hardcore erotic literature for women.

This is a google book that discusses some of the same things I mentioned in my post regarding the use of wikipedia and other networks and how that shapes our ideas of freedom.

This seems like a smart commentary on many of the issues we're seeing in the book and it helps modernize the Miller v California debate. It's again, largely focused on the idea of policing rights which focuses on freedoms of expression.

another plug for e-texts

I'm posting this article because the author and this website are referenced in our book and I think this is also relevant to the ideas presented in O'Reilly's book. We often see discussions about knowing the audience and bringing them to certain and specific actions which brings into question the kind of rhetorical situations we react to online.

Lovink's latest book is all about social media. It addresses a number of the critiques we offered in class - which is not to say it answers or does away with them - but also reinforces that he offers less a theory than a report or journalistic take. (One example is the way he looks at the uneven use of blogging world wide, so that blogging becomes much less monolithic in this account.)

Interesting concept of books as an app. I find it interesting that these textbooks are not being "written" but "developed".

This article looks at how lowering e-book prices now could lead to less competition and consequently the danger of prices rising in the future.

For all the times I was saved by a good book. I still have a secret desire to be a librarian!

Finally (and what will appear first), all this talk about digital technology and web design pulls up an equal impulse in me to talk about other skill sets that get undervalued in an information economy. I read this a bit ago and enjoyed it. There also seems to be a trend currently that is leading us toward a sort of steam punk utopia where we will have a mixture of high and low technology. For more on the philosophical argument being put forward in this article, I highly recommend Shop Class as Soulcraft and The Mind at Work. To see some indications of the trend I'm talking about watch How It's Made (which tends to skew toward human components of the production process and is based in a tactile fetish of understanding modes of production since you do not learn how to make things ... or really how things are made) and check out all the books on craft skills, cooking, and carpentry that are exploding all over Amazon with noticeably nostalgic titles. Speaking of which, did the knitting craze end or am I just not around 50 people that have recently taken up knitting anymore?

Oh! Also add to the "evidence" list farming/gardening and the back to earth books ... and psychologically the zombie and (to a lesser extent) virus craze in movies, books, games, etc.

According to Google, over 20 million books have been digitized thus far.

Interesting article from Wired magazine on the future of print books.

Another resource for thinking about design.

"Print will survive. Books will survive even longer. It's print as a marker of prestige that's dying." Discusses Wikipedia as an extension of its predecessors' vanity and inherent print medium. 

Blod devoted to videogame "archaeology" as Bogost would call it. The site actually suggests reading his book too.

Interesting idea from Bogost. Although he labels it as game art, I might consider this a multimedia piece as the code itself, the process of "re-soldering" and essentially rebuilding the game cartridge, and then the finished project performed online with DIY functionality seems much more complex than the book describes. Personally I think it's a brilliant but I'm not sure I know what (if anything) it means...

I'd like to say that this has implications for Bogost's book, but really it's just awesome.

"The e-books include items such as the shooting script, production notes, storyboards and on-set photographs."