Here are three short clips. And there’s a ton more at this wonderful site, Mcluhan Speaks
1960: “We’re just trying to fit the old things into the new form.”

1968: “There’s no longer any gap between the campus and wall street”

1977: “Another strange effect of this electric environment is the total absence of secrecy”

James Bridle continues to be one of the most interesting observer/bloggers about books — both print and not
http://booktwo.org/notebook/items-received-by-post/

The Book Xylophone

Bill McCoy has assembled a mouth-watering schedule of the International Digital Publishing Forum IDPF meeting on 23-24 May during Book Expo in New York. registration info and full program at http://idpf.org/digitalbook2011.
The program includes a special keynote from multiple Hugo and Nebula award-winning best-selling science-fiction authors Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear, who will discuss their experience with The Mongoliad, a ground-breaking project in direct-to-consumer and community-augmented online serial publishing.
Confirmed speakers and session topics include:
“The Year of the eBook” – Abe Murray, Google; Yoshinobu Noma, Kodansha
“Publishers Roundtable” – Dominique Raccah, Sourcebooks; Richard Nash, Cursor/Red Lemonade (formerly of Soft Skull Press)
“Special Keynote: The Mongoliad, Year One – a ground-breaking investigation into the future of publishing” – Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear, Subutai Corporation
“Creating Highly Accessible Interactive Content” – Liza Daly, Threepress Consulting
“International Market Opportunities” – Cristina Mussinelli, Italian Publishers Association;
Ronald Schild, MVB Marketing/German Book Publishers Association
“EPUB 3 First Look” – Bill McCoy, International Digital Publishing Forum
“Update on eReading Devices & Apps” – Mary Tripsas, Harvard Business School; Allen Weiner, Gartner; Mitch Weisberg, Sawyer Business School
“Transforming the Business of Publishing”- Lisa McCloy-Kelley, Random House; Ken Brooks, Cengage Learning; Bob Young, Lulu.com
“Breakthrough Business Models” – Theresa Horner, Barnes and Noble; Justo Hidalgo, 24symbols; TJ Waters, Autography
“Metadata Boot Camp” – Bill Kasdorf, Apex; Mark Bide, Editeur; Beat Barian, Bowker
“Lending of Digital Books” – Peter Brantley, Internet Archive, Erica Lazzaro, OverDrive
“Wrangling the Backlist” – Jonathan Hevenstone and Herve Essa, Jouve Group; Sririam Panchanathan, Aptara
“The Future of Digital Reading and the Business of Digital Publishing” – Masaaki Hagino, Voyager Japan, Inc.; Brad Inman, Vook; Peter Balis, John Wiley
“eBook Production Jumpstart” – Josh Tallent, eBook Architects
“Distribution Update” – Andrew Weinstein, Ingram; Bob Nelson, Baker & Taylor
“The Future of EPUB” – George Conboy, Google; Markus Gylling, DAISY Consortium
“Book Industry Study Group Consumer Research Findings” – Steve Paxhia, Beacon Hill Strategic Services
“Social/Direct Marketing: Case Studies from Publishers and Authors” – Malle Vallik, Harlequin Enterprises, Ltd; Sol Rosenberg, Copia
IDPF Digital Book 2011 is being sponsored by industry giants like Adobe, Aptara, Baker and Taylor, Book Business, Ingram, Innodata Isogen, OverDrive, LibreDigital, MeeGenius, Publishers Weekly and SPi Global.

Eric Kraft is a wonderful writer with a penchant for exploring new ways to express ideas. He’s just announced a new project on KickStarter where he’s trying to raise some funds. Here’s the video intro. There’s quite a bit more detail on the KickStarter site.

My 88 year-old mother, an avid reader, said that the last seven books she’s read were in the Kindle reader on her iPad. When asked what she likes most about e-reading, she answered . . . a) being able to read in the dark so as not to disturb my father and, b) the online dictionary which she uses extensively.
And then my mother’s fortune cookie said “Read in order to Live”

The New York Times hit a hot-button with yesterday’s article on the “dim future” for marginalia as books go electronic. As you might imagine, I think marginalia is alive and well in the digital era. If you haven’t seen it yet, check out the complex discussion conducted by seven women over the course of six weeks in the margin of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook.

Wikileaks is turning out to be a profoundly interesting phenomenon. The questions it raises about communication in the age of the internet, particularly in the context of an ever-weakening U.S. empire, are so new and so complex that people and organizations who normally don’t have too much difficulty figuring out what side of a problem they are on, are scrambling for purchase on unsure ground.
Geert Lovink and Patrice Riemens’ Twelve Theses on Wikileaks is one of the more thoughtful pieces I’ve read so far.

Joseph Pearson of Inventive Labs, the developer of Monocle Reader and Booki.sh recently wrote an eloquent explanation of why we should bother to maintain some form of pagination even in the digital era. [this originally appeared on the private Read 2.0 list serve, re-posted here with permission.]
I’m perplexed by the suggestion that we chose pagination “for the sake of tradition”, since pagination is the one and only difficult problem with building a browser-based reader. It’s actually the only thing Monocle does, and I didn’t waste this year doing it without reflecting on it.
I’m delighted by the proposal that someone should build a serious scrolling browser-based reader, because I’ll have somewhere to send people who ask this question. And I’m greatly amused by the idea that we should inplement both modes and make it the reader’s choice — as if a responsible software designer COULD actually shrug their shoulders and say “Damned if I know, you decide.”
The software designer has to make the call — has to ask: “what is the best way to read content with these characteristics?” I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about it. Back in March I wrote up some notes on it, but didn’t publish them. I’ve pasted them below.
Nb: Monocle has a scrolling mode for “legacy browsers” that attempts to get around the problems with scrolling described here. Open a Booki.sh book in a recent Opera to see it. I’ve been told it “sucks” (thanks Blaine!), which is probably true.