IT100_50/2010 Reader Group

Another potential problem is maneuvering during free fall. In order to achieve Mach 1, Baumgartner will have to adjust his position during free fall and a normal suit is too restrictive to allow sufficient freedom of movement. One of the worries is what would happen if a person were to begin tumbling.

So far the Red Bull Stratos team has tested the new suit in wind tunnels, low pressure chambers and several jumps from 25,000 feet. Baumgartner has been fine tuning his “delta” position that he will use to achieve the supersonic jump.

Austrian skydiver Felix Baumgartner has been working with a company that makes space suits for astronauts in an effort to pull off a record-setting jump with the Red Bull Stratos project that he hopes will also lead to safer flight suits for future astronauts.

Ebullism can strike at 19,000 feet, but at 120,000 feet, the outside air pressure is less than one pound per square inch, so vapor bubbles in the blood expand causing the blood to basically boil.

No person has ever broken the sound barrier during free fall, though it is thought if a person were forced to bail out of a spacecraft at altitudes much higher than 120,000 feet, they would achieve supersonic speeds involuntarily. Baumgartner wants to help researchers better understand the possible affects of supersonic speeds on a person falling through the atmosphere as well as the affects on the suit.

As reading shifts “from the private page to the communal screen,”

It’s no longer just hip-hop sampling that rules in youth culture, but also jukebox musicals like “Jersey Boys” and “Rock of Ages,” and works like “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which features characters drawn from a host of classic adventures. Fan fiction and fan edits are thriving, as are karaoke contests, video games like Guitar Hero, and YouTube mash-ups of music and movie, television and visual images. These recyclings and post-modern experiments run the gamut in quality. Some, like Zachary Mason’s “Lost Books of the Odyssey,” are beautifully rendered works of art in their own right. Some, like J. J. Abram’s 2009 “Star Trek” film and Amy Heckerling’s 1995 “Clueless” (based on Jane Austen’s “Emma”) are inspired reinventions of classics. Some fan-made videos are extremely clever and inventive, and some, like a 3-D video version of Picasso’s “Guernica” posted on YouTube, are intriguing works that raise important and unsettling questions about art and appropriation.

Mr. Johnson added that the book’s migration to the digital realm will turn the solitary act of reading — “a direct exchange between author and reader” — into something far more social and suggested that as online chatter

“What we are engaged in — like birds of prey looking for their next meal — is a process of swooping around with an eye out for certain kinds of information.”

There are dozens of excellent reasons that books should quickly be made part of the emerging Web. But so far they have not been, at least not in great numbers. And there is only one reason: the hegemony of the copy.

A luckier 10 percent are still in print.

Two points outraged them: the virtual copy of the book that sat on Google's indexing server and Google's assumption that it could scan first and ask questions later. On both counts the authors and publishers accused Google of blatant copyright infringement.

The Chinese scanning factories, which operate under their own, looser intellectual-property assumptions, will keep churning out digital books. And as scanning technology becomes faster, better and cheaper, fans may do what they did to music and simply digitize their own libraries.

In the clash between the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen, the screen will prevail. On this screen, now visible to one billion people on earth, the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge.