Jace Clayton quotes an article from The Economist:

A lot of the people who read a bestselling novel, for example, do not read much other fiction. By contrast, the audience for an obscure novel is largely composed of people who read a lot. That means the least popular books are judged by people who have the highest standards, while the most popular are judged by people who literally do not know any better. An American who read just one book this year was disproportionately likely to have read “The Lost Symbol”, by Dan Brown. He almost certainly liked it.

It’s worth paying a look at the original article, “A World of Hits”, which originally came out last November. It’s been borne out since: my holiday and post-holiday discussions of the media were dominated by Avatar, to the exclusion of almost anything else. A lot of people wanted to talk about Avatar, and there’s a fair amount to discuss there: how pretty it is, how it works as mass spectacle, the film’s deeply muddled politics, how ecology and religion are connected. What stands out to me is how rarely this happens any more. It’s not that I don’t have, for example, film people to talk about films with, or movie people to talk about movies with, but there’s always some element of singing to the choir in this. An example: the record I liked the most in 2009 was the favorite record of plenty of other people, but didn’t merit a mention in the New York Times. I don’t think this is necessarily because the Times has especially bad music coverage; there’s simply a lot of media happening, and it’s impossible for any publication to cover everything in depth. The sheer ubiquity of Avatar changed how it could be discussed: something so big can cut across our individual interest groups, enabling broader conversations.
But the inevitable question arises: what does it mean if the only cultural object that everyone can talk about costs $300 million? Producers aren’t going to give $300 million to anyone who has a story that they need to discuss. The great power of the written word – why the word “book” continues to mean so much to us – is its fundamental democracy: that anyone literate can set pen to paper and write something. Technology, the truism goes, is politically neutral; but I wonder if this can be true in a practical sense when the tools of expression are so expensive.

Julio Cortázar is one of those writers who is mentioned far more often than actually read; most people know that he wrote Hopscotch, a novel often mentioned as a precursor to hypertext fiction, or that he wrote the short stories that became Antonioni’s Blow Up and Godard’s Weekend. I’ve been belatedly making my way through his works over the past year, a pleasurable endeavor that I’d commend to anyone. For all the pleasure of his fiction, there’s a great deal that still bears consideration, especially in the English-speaking world where Cortázar hasn’t been widely read.
“We Love Glenda So Much” is the title story of one of Cortázar’s last collections of short stories, unfortunately out of print in English but easily available online. It’s a short Borgesian piece, told in the first person plural, and the premise is quickly related: the anonymous narrators idolize the movie star Glenda Garson and constitute a secret fan club for the most devoted fans who understand that her films are the only ones that matter. Things quickly escalate: though the members believe Glenda’s work to be perfection, they acknowledge that her films are perhaps not quite perfect. They laboriously gather up all the prints and re-edit them, creating not a director’s cut but a fans’ cut; the recut films are redistributed to an unsuspecting public; the differences between the new films and those released years before are chalked up to the vagaries of memory. All is well in the world; until Glenda decides to return from her retirement, at which point her fans lethally prevent her from sullying the perfection they have helped her achieve.
We Love Glenda So Much was originally published in 1980, just before the VCR became ubiquitous; it’s unclear when the story is set, but it presumes a world where all the copies of Glenda’s films can be gathered in by her hard-working (and conveniently rich) fans. Read 29 years later, it’s a remarkably different text: while fans are still reliably crazy, the way that the entertained interact with entertainers and that the media can be controlled – or not – has been transformed so much as to render Cortázar’s story a strange postcard from a forgotten land. Subcultures no longer exist in the way they did in the way Cortázar describes, even in the way they existed a dozen years ago, when it was necessary to hold fast to your own personal Glenda because of the investment, cultural or economic, that you’d made in loving her above everyone else. With ubiquitous media, everyone is free to be a dilettante.
More importantly, though, there’s been a shift in the center of control. When Cortázar wrote, the producers maintained control tightly; since then, media control has been dispersed to the point where it’s meaningless. (Cortázar’s language suggests a focus on this power shift: the members of the club that loves Glenda, a movement to seize power from Glenda’s producers, announce that think of themselves as a “nucleus,” suggesting a center of force, rather than a simple “club.”) It’s not hard to re-edit any movie you like to your pleasure; however, making your cut – even if you’re the director – the definitive cut is increasingly impossible. I’m not trying to argue that Cortázar was unperceptive and didn’t see the future coming; the story is a fabulation through and through, and I don’t imagine for a minute that Cortázar thought that what he was describing could happen in the real world. But I don’t think that it’s out of line to read Glenda, whose fans know better than her what she should do or not do, as a portrait of the artist himself. This story did appear in his penultimate collection of short stories, released four years before his death, and he may well have had posterity on his mind. Authorial intent is quickly dispensed with after the death of the author: the past year, for example, has seen new editions of the work of Hemingway, Carver, and Nabokov that would almost certainly violate authorial intent.
What makes “We Love Glenda So Much” interesting to me is how it points out this world of transformation that we’ve lived through. When looked at in terms of control, there’s also a distant echo of another transformation – Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press – which similarly dispersed control from the center to the masses. The generally accepted narrative of history has it that the coming of printing led directly to the massive societal upheaval that was the Protestant Reformation: the ability to quickly disperse texts led to a plurality of viewpoints. Gutenberg’s contemporaries aren’t noted for having had any idea how quickly their world would become utterly unrecognizable. Nostradamus, who might have, would arrive a generation later, just in time for the printing press to distribute his prophecies. One wonders how much of an idea we have now.

It’s the shortest day of the year, New York is under a thick blanket of snow which will soon turn to slush, and it’s hard not to feel let down by the world: when the Democrats gut health care reform in the name of passing something; when Obama fails to accomplish anything meaningful in Copenhagen; as it becomes clear that the war in Afghanistan will soon be marching into its second decade; when bankers still gain million-dollar bonuses for doing, as far as one can tell, nothing useful; when Mexico City can legalize gay marriage before New York State. December, the end of the decade, both summon up the retrospective urge: to look back and wonder what was accomplished, what could have been accomplished. One feels more disappointed when it seems like something could have happened: a year ago it felt like Obama might be a light at the end of a decade-long tunnel.
It’s also the end of a year in which electronic books have received an amount of press that would have been unthinkable five years ago. At the same time, I find it hard to get as excited about anything recently: there’s been a great deal of hubbub about devices, but it seems clear that’s premature: any device will be obsolete in a year or so, when Apple rolls out its long-delayed tablet and a barrage of Google-powered devices follow in its wake. There’s a lot of publishing talk, but it’s not especially interesting for the would-be reader: publishers argue about the dates at which e-books come out relative to hardcovers, and whether to grant exclusive rights to a single distributer. It’s not particularly interesting, especially with the past five years in mind: in the current discussions, the book is simply a commodity, something to be passed off to consumers at the greatest profit the market will bear. (An analogous argument might be made about the social networking world, which seems to reach a logical conclusion in Blippy, a new social networking platform with the genius idea – albeit a recession too late – of replacing the arduousness of even Twitter-length communication with a record of one’s credit card purchases.) The argument could be made that electronic books have finally made it; executives make grand proclamations about how electronic sales will figure as such and such a percentage of future sales. Stephen Covey makes exclusive distribution deals with Amazon. Motoko Rich dutifully reports it all daily in The New York Times.
Part of my problem is personal. The technology world turns over so quickly: the five years that I’ve spent at the Institute is more than enough to make anyone feel wizened and elderly in the amnesiac new media world, if one didn’t come into it feeling that way. It becomes increasingly hard to find anything that seems new or interesting, let alone revelatory. And, as mentioned, it’s the end of the year; it’s dark, there’s a recession going on. But I’m not sure I’m alone in feeling that there’s been something of a longueur in the world of new or social media; I’ve had a number of conversations recently that come back around to this. A post by Whitney Trettien at diapsalmata beautifully identifies a related sort of frustration: the sense of being on the verge of a future that’s dragging its feet. Trettien begins her post with a triad of quotes on the imminence of a new digital reading experience, quotes that the unassuming reader might imagine to be from the present; they turn out to be from 1999.

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Symptoms suggest a diagnosis; for a physician, I’ll suggest St. Teresa of Avila. Answered prayers, she noted, cause more tears than unanswered ones; Truman Capote would have put this on the cover of his unfinished novel about the unsated. At about the same time I was reading Capote, Courtney Love offered a more profane restatement: “I told you from the start just how this would end / when I get what I want I never want it again”. It’s a description that seems apt for the present: we’re living in a world of answered prayers. Obama restored order after eight years of misrule; millions of people are reading digitally from their iPhones and Kindles and whatever else they’re using.
Why tears then? By and large, the current raft of devices and software aren’t particularly innovative or attuned to how reading works; the reading experience itself isn’t substantially different than it was fifteen years ago, when Voyager was offering mass-market books on 3.5” disks for sale in bookstores, though the hardware’s much better. What’s different is the networked aspect: it’s now possible to get a huge number of books near instantaneously. Bored on a Virginia highway over Thanksgiving & feeling the need to re-read Edgar Allan Poe’s Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, I could nearly instantaneously (and without cost) download a copy to my iPhone. This is, it should be said, astonishing. The reading experience was terrible, but that’s beside the point: I could get the text (or an approximation thereof) almost as soon as I could imagine it. This is something new.
I’m interested in this sensation of immediate gratification: it’s one of the hallmarks of the present. Something similar is present when you can buy almost any piece of music from iTunes, or when you can choose from a plethora of movies to watch instantly on Netflix. In a weakened form, it’s the same experience as buying used books on Amazon, something I’m constantly doing: almost any book, no matter how out of print, will pop up on Amazon, and most can be yours for under $10 and inside a week. In all these cases: given enough capital and access to a network, the majority of our desires for media can be solved, increasingly instantaneously.
We don’t think about this very much, but this newfound ability to instantly satisfy our desires is actually a very strange development. So much of human development is a process of learning to deal with desires that are delayed or vexed; so much of the history of the book is a narrative of scarceness. In terms of the market, there was more demand than supply. The move to the digital has changed all that: the supply of a piece of digital content is, for most intents and purposes, infinite, and we find ourselves in a position where supply far exceeds demand. It isn’t just books where this is the case: it might be said that all electronic reading is in this position. If you have an even marginal amount of curiosity, there’s no end of content that could, given the time, be interesting.
But this change in values comes at a price: with this shift in values, it becomes very hard for us to know how to value content. We’re used to the arc of wanting – conceiving a desire, justifying it to ourselves, figuring out a way to get it, receiving it – that serves to convince ourselves of the importance of what we want. When that’s short-circuited, we’re left at a loss. In a previous end of the year piece, I used the example of the rescued Robinson Crusoe in Elizabeth Bishop’s “Crusoe in England”: he looks at his knife, the thing he once valued religiously, and finds that it’s become meaningless, just another knife. “The living soul,” he notes, “has dribbled away.” Maybe that’s where the book is now.
Raymond Aron, from Eighteen Lectures on the Industrial Society: “It is poverty that humanity, as a whole, still suffers from today. Poverty, defined simply by the lack of common measure between the desires of individuals and the means to satisfy them.”

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I’ve been keeping a list this year of the books I’ve finished this year, from a need, I suppose, to keep some kind of record: if books make a man, keeping a list of ingredients might be useful, though for what I’m not sure, yet. I haven’t tallied up my year in reading yet, but I suspect I’ll wind up having read somewhere around a book every three days. (This isn’t particularly difficult if you have a typical New York commute and count on other people to read The New Yorker for you.) This seems desperate: a frantic attempt to stay abreast of a world that moves ever faster. There are more books on my lists of books to read than I have any reasonable chance of completing in my lifetime. This happens.
The most interesting reading experience of my year, however, wasn’t a book that I finished; rather, it was reading at a book that can’t be finished. I’ve been going to the monthly meetings of the New York Finnegans Wake reading group. I’m not, it should be said, the most religious of Joyceans; re-reading Ulysses a decade ago, I had an epiphany and suddenly understood what style meant, but if I had to make a list of my ten favorite writers I’m not entirely sure that Joyce would make the cut. It’s Proust that I go to when I want answers. But there’s something pleasing in the ritual aspect of the group reading of Finnegans Wake: feeling oneself a part of a community, a community devoted to something greater than oneself.
Each month the group makes its way through about two pages in two hours. Wine is drunk, everyone reads a bit of the text aloud. The group has been at this task for a very long time; the median age of the members is twice my age, and plenty of them have been at their reading since before I was born. Close reading is the only real way into Finnegans Wake. In a text so dense, the reader can only begin to understand by listening to others. Different readers find something different in it; some scrutinize the text silently, some sound out words for unvoiced puns, others argue their own idiosyncratic theories about the text. Digressions invariably arise and are followed. But when it works, it feels almost as if the text lifts off the page: out of the cacophony, you begin to hear how Joyce’s overlaid narratives resonate.
One arrives, finally, a bit closer to an understanding of the text. It’s something that’s only really possible through group reading: the individual reader can’t possibly know as much as the group – although something like the experience could certainly be asynchronously recreated if you had enough books and patience. But I’m most interested in the experience of reading this way: because in this community context, reading becomes something more than the interior experience that we usually think of reading as; it’s something entirely outside of the economic context (or even an academic one). I’ve never found anything quite like it on the Web, despite long residencies on a couple of literary mailing lists. Reading like this, one gets the sense that maybe one book might almost be enough for the rest of one’s life – provided, of course, that it was the right book. This, I think, might be one remedy we should be looking for if we’re trying to find way forward for reading: to think about reading as a matter of communal exchange rather than of commodity exchange.

An extremely interesting new book by Stanislas Dehaene entitled Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention has just been released. Dehaene, a neuroscientist, is curious about exactly what happens in the brain when we read, a subject of much conjecture but previous little evidence until now. My copy’s still on its way, but an interview with Scientific American‘s Gareth Cook makes it sound like Dehaene’s book will be essential for anyone thinking about how we read in new environments:

DEHAENE: One of my long-time interests concerns how the human brain is changed by education and culture. Learning to read seems to be one of the more important changes that we impose to our children’s brain. The impact that it has on us is tantalizing. It raises very fundamental issues of how the brain and culture interact.

As I started to do experimental research in this domain, using the different tools at my disposal (from behavior to patients, fMRI, event-related potentials, and even intracranial electrodes), I was struck that we always found the same areas involved in the reading process. I began to wonder how it was even possible that our brain could adapt to reading, given it obviously never evolved for that purpose. The search for an answer resulted in this book. And, in the end, reading forces us to propose a very different view of the relationship between culture and the brain.

COOK: What is this “new relationship”?

DEHAENE: A classical, although often implicit, view in social science is that the human brain, unlike that of other animals, is a learning machine which can adapt to essentially any novel cultural task, however complex. We humans would be liberated from our past instincts and free to invent entirely new cultural forms.

What I am proposing is that the human brain is a much more constrained organ than we think, and that it places strong limits on the range of possible cultural forms. Essentially, the brain did not evolve for culture, but culture evolved to be learnable by the brain. Through its cultural inventions, humanity constantly searched for specific niches in the brain, wherever there is a space of plasticity that can be exploited to “recycle” a brain area and put it to a novel use. Reading, mathematics, tool use, music, religious systems – all might be viewed as instances of cortical recycling.

Of course, this view of culture as a constrained “lego” game isn’t that novel. It is deeply related to the structuralist view of anthropology, as exemplified by Claude Lévi-Strauss and Dan Sperber. What I am proposing is that the universal structures that recur across cultures are, in fact, ultimately traceable to specific brain systems.

• On April 26 in Los Angeles, haudenschildGarage presents a performance entitled The Last Book, an “attempt to resurrect the medieval illuminated manuscript through the invocation of our current alchemy, the new technologies, to conjure a future as the past in reverse”. The artists and writers involved include Steve Fagin, Mary Gaitskill, Mian Mian, Leslie Thornton, Davina Semo, and Greg Landau; their site has more information.
• Max Bruinsma has an interesting essay at Limited Language entitled “Typographic Design for New Reading Spaces”, addressing the issue of designing for screen reading and why text on screens is still generally so ugly.
• Mediabistro points out Moulinarn Mobile Books (website under construction), devoted to publishing content specifically for the iPhone platform. Their content doesn’t seem especially interesting, but it does look like it’s not a generic e-book reader.
• Those with a subscription to the Chronicle of Higher Education might be interested in this article about Matthew Kirschenbaum work on writers’ digital archives.
• DiRT is the Digital Research Tools wiki, a collection of useful resources for scholars doing research digitally. Most of the tools they point out are open-source; it’s nice to have all these things in one place. More advanced users might look at XTF, an interesting new public domain extensible text framework designed to make archives digitally accessible.
• The Digital Poetics blog suggests a new method of film criticism: grabbing a screen shot at 10 minutes, 40 minutes, and 70 minutes into the movie & talking about what’s on the screen at that instant and how it relates to the rest of the movie.
• Dene Grigar’s “Electronic Literature: Where Is It?” has been up at the Electronic Book Review for a while, but it’s still worth a look. I’m not entirely sure it will convince skeptics, but it is a good overview of the present of electronic literature and its place in the academy.
• Brazilian novelist Claudio Soares has put his 2006 novel Santos Dumont Número 8: O Livro das Superstições into the Institute’s CommentPress. He’s given all of the characters Twitter accounts; an impressive online presentation introduces the online version of the novel, which looks to be a fairly serious undertaking although put together with free tools. Once again, I wish I spoke Portuguese. (Edit: Claudio Soares suggests three auto-translated links – http://ow.ly/2g0r, http://ow.ly/2g0x, http://ow.ly/2g17 – for English speakers who wish to get a better idea of the project.)
• And finally, if:book London presents Songs of Imagination and Digitisation, a variety of new media responses to the work of William Blake.

• Arc90 has released Readability, a bookmark that strips away most of the cruft that generally surrounds text on the Web to focus on the main text column. It doesn’t work on every website, of course, but it does point out how messy our reading environments generally are. (An analogy might be drawn to Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day, in which the poet transcribed every word in a single day’s New York Times; set like a novel, the result was a 836-page book. A good deal of the act of reading is knowing what to ignore.) It seems a reader-oriented version of the full-screen writing environments in tools like WriteRoom or Scrivener. Probably also of interest as a model for making websites more accessible to the blind: this would make sites much easier for a screen reader to read.
• John Willinsky has a paper in the Journal of Electronic Publishing entitled “Toward the Design of an Open Monograph Press”: he presents a very detailed model for how academic publishing could work online which should be read by everyone interested in the subject.
• There’s an interesting blog entry by Johannes Görannson about the Stephanie Strickland piece on electronic poetry noted here recently. Görannson notes that network-based writing practices (like those of inveterate prankster Tao Lin) seem more radical than the multimedia works than Strickland presents, which generally don’t acknowledge community ad the network.
• Dan Green has a pair of well-reasoned posts on ideas about how text should be written differently for the perceived problem of the lack of attention. Green doesn’t believe that breaking books into smaller chunks (smaller chapters, smaller paragraphs) is likely to help anything; to argue this is to miss the point of what books can do.
• Have we mentioned TextSound here? It’s a fairly new journal presenting sound poetry; what’s interesting to me is the sheer volume of material that can be presented in it. Their second issue would take up 6 CDs, if presented that way; on the web, projects can swell to their own sizes. Artist Paul Chan’s My Own Private Alexandria might be mentioned in the same breath: Chan has created his own library of audio books, nicely tagged.
• If you happen to be in Oakville, Ontario, you could do worse than to pay a visit to “Novel Ideas”, an exhibition on the changing book at the Oakville Galleries. Alex Itin is showing his Orson Whales; the other work also looks interesting.

There have been a raft of reviews of the new Kindle and the various iPhone reading applications lately. In general, reviewers are more positive about the experience of reading from a screen than they have been in the past. However, I’ve noticed that one enormous factor in reading tends to get passed by; maybe it’s not something that people notice if they don’t think about book design. See if you can identify it from these screenshots, which you can click to enlarge:
The new Kindle 2:

The latest Sony Reader:

Stanza, a popular iPhone ebook app:

eReader, another popular iPhone ebook app:

All of these screen-reading environments fully justify their paragraphs of text: there’s not a ragged right margin. This is what we tend to expect books to look like: typically, a book page has an even rectangle of text on it, a tradition that extends back to Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible:

One might notice here, however, that Gutenberg’s page has something that the screen-reading environments do not: hyphenation. When Gutenberg’s words don’t fit in a line (see, for example, the third line down in the right column) he broke them with a hyphen, starting a tradition in book design that has made its way to the present moment. The reason for hyphenation is apparent if you look at the shots of the screen-reading devices: if words aren’t split, often the spacing between words must be increased, making it harder for the eye to follow. This is more apparent when the width of the text column (called the measure) is narrow, as is the case on iPhone apps: notice how spaced-out the penultimate line, “necessary to effectiveness in an”, is in the eReader screenshot. The Kindle and the Sony Reader look a little bit better because there aren’t such glaring white spaces in the text, although weirdly both appear to have lines in the middle of paragraphs that aren’t fully justified.
Why don’t these reading devices hyphenate their lines if they fully justify them? This isn’t, for what it’s worth, a problem that affects more than just these devices; plenty of text on the web is fully justified and has no hyphenation. The problem is that hyphenation is trickier than it might initially appear. To properly hyphenate a paragraph, the hyphenator needs to understand at least something about how the language that the paragraph of text is written in works. Here’s how Robert Bringhurst outlines what he calls the “etiquette of hyphenation and pagination” as rules for compositors in his authoritative Elements of Typographic Style:

2.4.1. At hyphenated line-ends, leave at least two characters behind and take at least three forward.
2.4.2. Avoid leaving the stub-end of a hyphenated word, or any word shorter than four letters, as the last line of a paragraph.
2.4.3. Avoid more than three consecutive hyphenated lines.
2.4.4. Hyphenate proper names only as a last resort unless they occur with the frequency of common nouns.
2.4.5. Hyphenate according to the conventions of the language.
2.4.6. Link short numerical and mathematical expressions with hard spaces.
2.4.7. Avoid beginning more than two consecutive lines with the same word.
2.4.8. Never begin a page with the last line of a multi-line paragraph.
2.4.9. Balance facing pages by moving single lines.
2.4.10. Avoid hyphenated breaks where the text is interrupted.
2.4.11. Abandon any and all rules of hyphenation and pagination that fail to serve the needs of the text.

Rule 2.4.5 might be worth quoting in full:

In English we hyphenate cab-ri-o-let but in French ca-brio-let. The old German rule which hyphenated Glockenspiel as Glok-kenspiel was changed by law in 1998, but when össze is broken in Hungarian, it still tuns into ösz-sze. In Spanish the double consonants ll and rr are never divided. (The only permissible hyphenation in the phrase arroz con pollo is thus arroz con po-llo.) The conventions of each language are part of its typographic heritage and should normally be followed, even when setting single foreign words or brief quotations.

Can a computer hyphenate texts? Sure: if these rules can be made comprehensible to a computer, it can sensibly hyphenate a text. Donald Knuth’s TeX typesetting program, for example, contains hyphenation dictionaries: lists of words in which the various points at which they can be hyphenated are marked. Hyphenation points are arranged by “badness”: it’s worse to use hy-phenation than hyphen-ation, for example, but it would be even worse not to break the word and leave a gap of white space in the line. The TeX engine tries to find the least bad way to set a line; it usually does a reasonable job. Not all hyphenation is equal, however: Adobe InDesign, for example, will do a much better job of hyphenating a paragraph than Microsoft Word will.
And: as rule 2.4.5 suggests, if a computer is going to hyphenate something, it needs to know what language the text is in. This is a job for metadata: electronic books could have an indicator of what language they’re in, and the reader application could hyphenate automatically. But that won’t always help: in the text on the Kindle screen, for example, der Depperte isn’t English and wouldn’t be recognized as such. A human compositor could catch that; a computer wouldn’t guess, and would have to default to not breaking it. The same problem will happen with proper names.
There aren’t really easy solutions for this problem. A smarter ebook reading device (and smarter ebooks) might hyphenate automatically; if this were the case, the reader would need to rehyphenate whenever the user changed the font or the font size. (There are some possibilities in HTML, but they do require a lot of work on the part of the author or designer; some day this might work better.) It’s not a problem with PDFs, of course, but PDFs don’t allow reflowing text. There’s no shame in using a ragged right margin; at least then one might not subject to Bringhurst’s opprobrium towards to poorly justified in The Elements of Typographic Style:

A typewriter (or a computer-driven printer of similar quality) that justifies its lines in imitation of typesetting is a presumptuous machine, mimicking the outer form instead of the inner truth of typography.

• Ars Technica has a review of an interesting-sounding iPhone application called Papers, designed to make it easy to carry around a library of scientific papers on your iPhone. It works with a desktop app also called Papers; it also interfaces with various scientific search engines so you can download more papers on the go. It’s not free, and it’s not for everyone, but it’s nice to see software that seems to understand that different kinds of reading need to be done differently.
• Thematically related: Adam Hodgkin argues that dedicated e-book devices generally lack an awareness of the place of the network in the task of reading; this is more natural in things like the iPhone.
• Jason Epstein’s keynote from O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference is now online. There’s not much in here that’s particularly surprising to anyone who’s been paying attention to the field for the past few years – the Espresso Book Machine is still his hope for the future of publishing.
• And James Long, over at the digitalist has a wrap-up of Tools of Change.
• Michael Cairns points out that the trouble with e-books is that publishers still think of them only as an electronic version of the print book.
• Ted Nelson, who we mention here from time to time, has a new, self-published book out, entitled Geeks Bearing Gifts, which is his own deeply idiosyncratic take on the history of the computer and how we use them, starting from the invention of the alphabet and explaining exactly where things went wrong along the way. Ted Nelson, of course, is the inventor of hypertext among other things; I hope to have an interview with him up here soon.
• And there’s a new issue of Triple Canopy out; not all the content is up yet, but Ed Halter’s piece on Jeff Krulik and public-access TV – something of a Youtube-before-Youtube and Bidisha Banerjee & George Collins’s memoir/video game combo are worth inspection.