“Don’t let anyone tell you different: the future is not here. Our cars? Not flying. Our food? Not in pill form. Our books? Not electronic.” An article by Joshua Fruhlinger in IBM’s developerWorks addresses the ebook problem. Nothing new here; but he does give an entertaining summary of the troubles with and the aspirations for future books.
Category Archives: ebooks
books behind bars – the Google library project
How useful will this service be for in-depth research when copyrighted books (which will account for a huge percentage of searchable texts) cannot be fully accessed? In such cases, a person will be able to view only a selection of pages (depending on agreements with publishers), and will find themselves bombarded with a variety of retail options. On a positive note, the search will be able to refer the user to any local libraries where the desired book is available, but still, the focus here remains squarely on digital texts as simply a means of getting to print texts.
Absent a major paradigm shift with regard to the accessibility and inherent virtue of electronic texts, this ambitious project will never achieve its full potential. For someone searching outside the public domain, the Google library project may amount to nothing more than a guided tour through a prison of incarcerated texts. I’ve found this to be true so far with Google Scholar – it turned up a lot of interesting stuff, but much of it was password protected or required purchase.
article in Filter: Google — 21st Century Dewey Decimal System (washingtonpost.com)
NYPL ebook collection leaves much to be desired
I just checked out two titles from the New York Public Library’s ebook catalog, only to learn, to my great astonishment, that those books are now effectively “checked out,” and cannot be downloaded again by anyone else until my copies time out.
It boggles the mind that NYPL would go to the trouble of establishing a collection of electronic titles, only to wipe out every advantage offered by digital texts. In fact, they do more than simply keep the ebooks on the level of print, they limit them further than that, since there are generally multiple copies of most print titles in the NYPL system.
The people responsible for this catalog have either entirely failed to grasp the concept of infinitely accessible, screen-based books, or they grasp it all too well and are trying to stunt it at its inception, perhaps out of fear of extinction of the print librarian. More likely, they are under heavy pressure by a paranoid copyright regime. Whatever the reason, the new ebook catalog shows a total lack of imagination and offers nearly no tangible benefit for the reader.
Beyond that, the books themselves are poorly designed and unpleasant to read. My downloaded copy of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (which, by the way, I found in the “Romance” section) evidences no more than ten minutes worth of design work, and appears to be simply a cut-and-pasted ASCII file from Gutenberg with a garish graphic slapped on the cover. My copy of Chain of Command by Seymour Hersh was a bit more respectable – more or less a pdf facsimile of the print edition.
On an amusing note, the “literary criticism” section is populated almost entirely by Cliff’s Notes.
3,000 electronic titles at new york public library
This is the third Times article this week on e-books. What’s happening?
“Libraries Reach Out, Online”
No Need to Click Here – we’re just claiming our feed at Feedster
microlit looms large
We’ve been hearing more and more about the phenomenon of books downloaded to a cell phone screen, so much so that even the mainstream press has been talking about a resurgence of e-books – a topic they almost entirely dropped after the efforts of Microsoft and Gemstar failed to take off a couple years back. And people are doing more than simply reading books on their phones – they can surf the web, watch soap operas and, of course, play video games as they throttle through the subway or break for lunch.
Perhaps most interesting is that while many cell phone readers are downloading conventional print texts – novels, popular nonfiction etc. – there are many more, especially in Asia, who are downloading literature that is being written exclusively for this new medium, particularly serialized novels. These stories are intended for bite-sized consumption, peppered throughout the day, week or month. And they often employ the new technology as literary device – SMS romances, mysteries spun from a single errant text message. Once again, the medium proves to be the message..
It’s hard to tell where this is going, but it’s certainly more interesting than the prefab model promoted in the first generation of e-books. There is something totally original, totally native, about this new wave of digital reading.
Take a look at this piece from yesterday’s New York Times…
Three Books That Influenced Your Worldview: The List
Yesterday I was thinking about the fact that books were the crucial element in the formation of my world view and wondered if that is the case with younger people. My guess yesterday morning was that people over 40 would easily come up with a list of books that influenced their way of looking at the world. Also – and this was probably the key idea I was testing – I assumed that when baby boomers came of age, specifc books (let’s say a dozen titles) were a crucial element in a shared cultural zeitgeist. By contrast, today I don’t see particular titles dominating the scene as they did 35 years ago.
Well . . . turns out I was pretty much wrong, at least as far as the 100+ people in my 40+ and 35- sample groups were concerned. Very few titles made it on to more than one list and I don’t see dramatic differences in the lists based on age.
One remarkable fact which you’ll notice when you look at the lists is the fantastic diversity in print culture. One can only dream that we will one day have such rich variety among works which are born digital.
This experiment of course hints at the bigger question: are books as important today in terms of forming world view as they were 35-40 years ago, and if not, what is taking their place? Most importantly: if not, what effect does the shift in dominant media have on the creation of world view?
If this gets anyone’s juices flowing, we’d love to have suggestions about how to explore these questions further.
Continue reading for the list…
Parsing the Behemoth: Thought Experiments
Bob talks about the book as metaphor. It is the thing that does the heavy lifting, a technology that allows us to convey our thoughts through a concrete vehicle. This site looks at how that vehicle is changing as a new electronic means of conveying written information begins to come of age.
When asked to imagine a metaphor for “the book,” we come up with something more organic, a lumbering behemoth with a hundred arms, waving anemone-like through the air to catch out particles of human discourse. The creature has some kind of hair or fur entangled with innumerable flotsam and jetsam. It is buzzing with attendant parasitical organisms, and encrusted with barnacles. To ask if the behemoth has a future is not the right question because the book, as we are picturing it in this analogy, is an immortal. The electronic incarnation of the book does not kill the old behemoth, but rather becomes part of it.
In his afterword to “the Future of the Book,” Umberto Eco noted that:
“In the history of culture it has never happened that something has killed something else, something has profoundly changed something else.” We are interested in the nature of this change as it relates to the book and its evolution.
To examine this heavy lifting device, to define and to understand this aggregate behemoth is the project of our “future of the book” blog. To begin, we have initiated a few thought experiments and put forth several questions that we hope will engender productive discourse. We welcome ideas and suggestions for future experiments.
Go to Thought Experiment #1: Three Books That Influenced Your Worldview