Writing about Literature in the Digital Age

So, how many volumes do you need to read on your e-reader to break even? With respect to fossil fuels, water use, and mineral consumption, the impact of one e-reader payback equals roughly 40 to 50 books. When it comes to global warming, though, it's 100 books; with human health consequences, it's somewhere in between. All in all, the most ecologically virtuous way to read a book starts by walking to your local library. ♣

True originality consists not in a new manner but in a new vision. That new, that personal, vision is attained only by looking long enough at the object represented to make it the writer's own; and the mind which would bring this secret germ to fruition must be able to nourish it with an accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience. To know any one thing one must not only know something of a great many others, but also, as Matthew Arnold long since pointed out, a great deal more of one's immediate subject than any partial presentation of it visibly includes

This is really cool. Google's doing some great work.

Interesting take from an awesome blogger.  He talks about how really time-consuming posts have brought him lots of visitors.

Another tool that would probably have been helpful when making an ebook

imagine how this can change education, not just conferences

a great really basic explanation of twitter backchannel and its use in education

tech in hs learning ... like a promo vid for it

a blog about the educational uses of blogging and podcasting if you're interested

this video explains massive open online courses MOOCs which sound rather interesting.

this is interesting but how do they KNOW what the "original copy" is. and I just submitted a random homework assignment as a "book" to IA as a test to see if we could upload a copy of our ebook that we wrote as a class for ENGL 295. Are they just going to store those "books" people randomly upload as well? Who determines what goes in the hardcopy archive?

That is sounds like it could be the headline for The Onion!

We need distant reading, Moretti argues, because its opposite, close reading, can't uncover the true scope and nature of literature. Let's say you pick up a copy of "Jude the Obscure," become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England - to mention nothing of other times and places. You might know your George Eliot from your George Meredith, but you won't have learned anything meaningful about literature, because your sample size is absurdly small. Since no feasible amount of reading can fix that, what's called for is a change not in scale but in strategy. To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books.

Gaiman talks about how allowing online copies of his work has directly influenced sales of his books, especially in countries where piracy is common.

"Those were the best rules I ever learned for the business of writing," Hemingway told a reporter in 1940. "I've never forgotten them. No man with any talent, who feels and writes truly about the thing he is trying to say, can fail to write well if he abides with them."