http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/ Copyright 2011 Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:02:54 -0500 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=4.34-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss I think this is going to be a terrific conference. MobilityShifts: An International Future of Learning Summit The New School in NYC October 10-16, 2011 The New School presents the second event in its Politics of Digital Culture conference series... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/08/mobility_shifts_conference.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/08/mobility_shifts_conference.html Tue, 30 Aug 2011 00:02:54 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/07/in_honor_of_the_centenary_of_m.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/07/in_honor_of_the_centenary_of_m.html Thu, 21 Jul 2011 09:52:07 -0500 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/... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/07/an_observer_worth_paying_atten.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/07/an_observer_worth_paying_atten.html Tue, 19 Jul 2011 14:37:25 -0500 The Book Xylophone... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/05/add_this_to_the_list_of_future.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/05/add_this_to_the_list_of_future.html Sun, 08 May 2011 16:40:23 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/04/idpf_meeting_in_may.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/04/idpf_meeting_in_may.html Thu, 28 Apr 2011 10:20:09 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/04/persistence_a_rich-media_ficti.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/04/persistence_a_rich-media_ficti.html Sat, 09 Apr 2011 12:29:12 -0500 I do my reading almost exclusively on screen. I've got a kindle, an ipad, an iphone, a blackberry, and a laptop, but this weekend, I did something radical and old school, I checked a big thick book out of the... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/03/shift_happened.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/03/shift_happened.html e-books Wed, 23 Mar 2011 23:44:35 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/02/read_in_order_to_live.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/02/read_in_order_to_live.html Wed, 23 Feb 2011 22:48:42 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/02/the_future_of_marginalia_is_br.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2011/02/the_future_of_marginalia_is_br.html Tue, 22 Feb 2011 16:27:10 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/12/wikileaks_as_a_harbinger_of_st.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/12/wikileaks_as_a_harbinger_of_st.html Fri, 10 Dec 2010 12:01:04 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/12/a_defense_of_pagination.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/12/a_defense_of_pagination.html Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:37:32 -0500 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/12/a_test_of_the_internet_archive.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/12/a_test_of_the_internet_archive.html Thu, 09 Dec 2010 15:09:30 -0500 today marks the sixth anniversary of the first post on if:book -- "Three Books That Influenced Your World View" and a day later, an exchange with Alan Kay about the list... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/12/anniversary.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/12/anniversary.html Tue, 07 Dec 2010 10:53:44 -0500 Kassia Krozser has posted a long thoughtful piece on social reading. As much as the idea of enhanced ebooks brings the sexy to publishing, it doesn't really do much for most of the books published. Enhanced, enriched, transmedia, multimedia...these are... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/12/excellent_review_of_social_rea.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/12/excellent_review_of_social_rea.html Wed, 01 Dec 2010 10:47:36 -0500 at 9am this morning MCM kicked off a 3-day experiment in LIVE social reading and writing.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/11/reading_and_writing_--_live.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/11/reading_and_writing_--_live.html Fri, 26 Nov 2010 10:51:06 -0500 a little less than three weeks ago in conjunction with the Books-in-Browsers meeting at the Internet Archive, i posted a proposal for a taxonomy of social reading. here's a brief summary of what i've learned from the discussion so far.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/11/what_ive_learned_since_posting.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/11/what_ive_learned_since_posting.html Wed, 10 Nov 2010 21:25:28 -0500 Jane Litte recently launched lostbooksales.com, a site where readers tell the tale of how a publisher lost a sale because a book wasn't available in a certain territory or format. While lostbooksales.com is a valiant effort to collect and... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/11/lost_book_sales.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/11/lost_book_sales.html Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:57:32 -0500 The Monocle Reader, developed by Inventive Labs in Melbourne, demonstrates the potential of using HTML5 to create beautifully formatted books which display in a browser rather than a standalone app. The Booki.sh reader from Inventive Labs on Vimeo.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/11/a_beautiful_implementation_of.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/11/a_beautiful_implementation_of.html Thu, 04 Nov 2010 10:44:36 -0500 John Battelle (first editor-in-chief of Wired) has written a very thoughtful piece on how our sense of self and privacy is evolving on the web. it begins as follows: Are we are evolving our contract with society through our increasing... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/10/the_web_and_our_evolving_sense.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/10/the_web_and_our_evolving_sense.html Tue, 26 Oct 2010 05:43:26 -0500 James Bridle, who is doing some of the most innovative thinking and doing in terms of the future of the book gave a very interesting talk in Sydney last week about new forms of fiction. There's a write-up on his... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/10/network_realism.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/10/network_realism.html Mon, 25 Oct 2010 18:42:14 -0500 In conjunction with a talk i'm giving today at the Internet Archive's Books-in-Browsers conference, I've just posted a proposal for a taxonomy of social reading. Apropos of the subject, it's in CommentPress so everyone can join the conversation.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/10/proposing_a_taxonomy_of_social.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/10/proposing_a_taxonomy_of_social.html Fri, 22 Oct 2010 10:03:45 -0500 James Bridle (designer and programmer of the Institute's Golden Notebook project in 2008) just published the complete history of the Wikipedia article on the Iraq War. James writes on his blog: This particular book--or rather, set of books--is every edit... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/09/james_bridle_designer_and_prog.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/09/james_bridle_designer_and_prog.html Tue, 07 Sep 2010 23:54:53 -0500 The New York Times ran a front-page story yesterday about open peer review, featuring an experiment conducted by MediaCommons for The Shakespeare Quarterly using CommentPress. The article is here and the experiment itself is here. Both MediaCommons and CommentPress were... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/08/open_peer_review.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/08/open_peer_review.html Wed, 25 Aug 2010 11:58:12 -0500 One of my best friends' parents both became very ill this year. Her mother, 87, elected to have a feeding tube inserted permanently. She is confined to her bed, alone much of the time, and in constant pain, waiting for... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/08/hospice_for_publishers_one_of.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/08/hospice_for_publishers_one_of.html Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:49:28 -0500 Assuming that whatever replaces the book in the futurist landscape to come will not be called "a book," people often ask me why I named our group The Institute for the Future of the Book. My answer has consistently been... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/08/the_future_of_the_app.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/08/the_future_of_the_app.html Mon, 02 Aug 2010 10:37:24 -0500 Just a quick note to say that a condensed version of an interview that I did with Bob Stein back in March for The Public School NYC is now online at Triple Canopy as part of their ninth issue, which... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/07/an_interview_with_bob_stein.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/07/an_interview_with_bob_stein.html Wed, 28 Jul 2010 09:56:20 -0500 thanks to a number of people who wrote to say they had heard this on NPR over the weekend.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/07/on_the_media_npr_--_interview.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/07/on_the_media_npr_--_interview.html Tue, 06 Jul 2010 05:26:49 -0500 Feed magazine, edited by Steven Johnson and Stefanie Syman, started publishing online in 1995 as a "webzine". They've been gone for a long time: they stopped publishing after the first dot-com boom, in the summer of 2001. It's exciting to... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/06/out_of_the_past.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/06/out_of_the_past.html Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:26:32 -0500 a fairly smart wishlist for iPad's iBooks -- including two features that are directly related to social-reading.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/06/ibooks_wishlist.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/06/ibooks_wishlist.html Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:04:39 -0500 I've been reading Homer lately, particularly The Odyssey. Obviously, I should have read him a long time ago, probably in high school: I remember, vaguely, extracts from the book, but nobody ever made me read the whole thing. To a... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/cheap_editions_past_present.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/cheap_editions_past_present.html Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:50:11 -0500 Alain Pierrot gave us permission to repost this: Martyn Daniel's remark about Ether Books' move into the digital short story, which can be "read as installments" (thanks to Virginie Clayssen for the link) rang a bell for me about the... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/alain_pierrot_on_time_chunks_i.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/alain_pierrot_on_time_chunks_i.html Mon, 26 Apr 2010 19:25:02 -0500 Embracing the Digital Book, by Craig Mod... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/very_interesting_piece_on_the.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/very_interesting_piece_on_the.html Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:22:44 -0500 apropos the mention of Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/a_young_ladys_illustrated_prim.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/a_young_ladys_illustrated_prim.html Thu, 08 Apr 2010 08:41:33 -0500 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/slow_reading.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/slow_reading.html Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:40:55 -0500 As readers of if:book know, i've often referred to books as the principal vehicle humans have used to move ideas around time and space. Thanks in large part to the internet, over the past fifteen years that function is increasingly... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/the_ipad_is_more_a_re-inventio.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/the_ipad_is_more_a_re-inventio.html Sat, 03 Apr 2010 12:14:34 -0500 People keep sending me links to this Dorling Kindersley video expecting I'll love it. Actually, although i find it cute in its construction, i think it's fundamentally inaccurate in both directions. Young people are not as vacuous as portrayed in... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/future_of_publishing_--_not_re.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/04/future_of_publishing_--_not_re.html Thu, 01 Apr 2010 16:12:03 -0500 Recent piece by Margaret Atwood in the New York Review of Books. Posting this mostly because it's a lovely read. One question it raises though is whether the Twitterverse that Atwood describes is more a broadcast medium than a mechanism... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/03/margaret_atwood_in_the_twitter.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/03/margaret_atwood_in_the_twitter.html Wed, 31 Mar 2010 06:54:37 -0500 MediaCommons yesterday unveiled The New Everyday, an experiment in "middle-state publishing" being undertaken as part of a two-year project undertaken by the New York Visual Culture Working Group, housed at NYU and funded by its Humanities Initiative. The New Everyday... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/03/the_new_everyday.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/03/the_new_everyday.html Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:08:20 -0500 This month's Wired has an article by Steven Levy on the expected impact of the iPad. The article includes a sidebar with thirteen comments from various people including me. The editors cut my first paragraph which contained some crucial context... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/03/follow_the_gamers.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/03/follow_the_gamers.html Wed, 24 Mar 2010 05:20:02 -0500 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/03/against_writingthis_progress.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/03/against_writingthis_progress.html Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:13:40 -0500 For those in New York: I'm going to be interviewing Bob Stein on Thursday as part of The Public School New York. This is part of The Public School's series on The Page + The Screen, which looks interesting all... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/02/for_those_in_new_york.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/02/for_those_in_new_york.html Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:10:33 -0500 how we think about the future Wayne Bivens-Tatum at Academic Librarian: The kindest interpretation of statements like "the future is mobile" or "the future of reference is SMS" or "the future is librarians in pods" or whatever is that the... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/02/futures_of_the_book.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/02/futures_of_the_book.html Mon, 08 Feb 2010 14:29:31 -0500 The iPad has arrived, to no one's surprise: as soon as you use an iPhone, you start wondering what a computer-sized version of the same would be like. (Those interested in how past predictions look now might look at this... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/and_now_we_have_an_ipad.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/and_now_we_have_an_ipad.html Thu, 28 Jan 2010 11:00:02 -0500 Good weekend reading: Jonathan Dee's examination of the fall from grace of Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs. Internecine fighting on the right isn't inherently interesting; however, Dee's piece is as much about how we think now. A few samples: That... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/how_discourse_on_the_web_works.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/how_discourse_on_the_web_works.html Sat, 23 Jan 2010 11:10:56 -0500 Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, has an essay up at Mother Jones with the alarmist title "The Death of Fiction?": he points out, to the surprise of nobody, I expect, that the magazine component of the... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/reading_vs_writing.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/reading_vs_writing.html Sat, 16 Jan 2010 19:31:04 -0500 question posed by John Brockman and answered by predictable (but interesting) members of the digerati. definitely worth browsing.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/how_has_the_the_internet_chang.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/how_has_the_the_internet_chang.html Mon, 11 Jan 2010 10:57:01 -0500 Following are Dan Cohen's prepared remarks for a talk at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting, on January 7, 2010, in San Diego. The panel was entitled "Is Google Good for History?" and also featured talks by Paul Duguid of... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/is_google_good_for_history.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/is_google_good_for_history.html Fri, 08 Jan 2010 15:40:08 -0500 the never-ending stream of announcements of tablets and dedicated e-book devices from CES is a clear indicator that e-reading is coming of age. the open publishing lab at RIT is keeping track of all the relevant developments here.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/the_zeitgeist_checks_in_to_the.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/the_zeitgeist_checks_in_to_the.html Thu, 07 Jan 2010 14:36:06 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/the_other_side_of_the_long_tai.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/the_other_side_of_the_long_tai.html Thu, 07 Jan 2010 13:41:58 -0500 Mitch Ratcliffe posted this very smart piece yesterday and gave permission to cross-post it on if:book. How to create new reading experiences profitably Concluding my summary of my recent presentation to a publishing industry group, begun here and continued here,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/smart_thinking_from_mitch_ratc.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2010/01/smart_thinking_from_mitch_ratc.html Thu, 07 Jan 2010 08:59:42 -0500 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/12/the_final_cut.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/12/the_final_cut.html Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:04:17 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/12/when_we_get_what_we_want.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/12/when_we_get_what_we_want.html Tue, 22 Dec 2009 21:09:47 -0500 My colleagues and I are very happy to announce a completely re-vamped version of CommentPress. Available for download at http://www.futureofthebook.org/commentpress/. If you want to see the new version in action, check out Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/commentpress_31.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/commentpress_31.html Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:01:52 -0500 Robert Winter's CD-Companion to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony was published twenty years ago this week. As you look at this promo piece it's important to realize that the target machine for this title was a Macintosh with a screen resolution of... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/published_by_the_voyager_compa.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/published_by_the_voyager_compa.html Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:01:13 -0500 Just before Thanksgiving 1984, twenty-five years ago this week, The Criterion Collection was launched with the release of laserdisc editions Citizen Kane and King Kong. In the video below critic Leonard Maltin introduces Criterion to his TV audience. Roger Smith... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/two_anniversaries.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/two_anniversaries.html Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:12:17 -0500 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,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/how_we_read_an_investigation.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/how_we_read_an_investigation.html Sun, 22 Nov 2009 19:23:59 -0500 There was a book sale outside the library at UCLA today. lots of wonderful paperbacks for 50 cents each. a year ago i would have bought a bag full. today zero. why? i do almost all my novel reading now... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/sea_change_1.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/11/sea_change_1.html Thu, 05 Nov 2009 01:52:21 -0500 two interesting pieces about the importance of the Android OS to "the future of the book" http://ireaderreview.com/2009/10/27/androids-impact-on-ereading/ http://ebooktest.wordpress.com/2009/10/27/the-coming-android-mini-tablet-flood/... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/the_android_os.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/the_android_os.html Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:48:28 -0500 Cody Brown, an NYU undergrad, just announced Kommons, an ambitious effort to build a new model of news gathering and presentation. I just read his blog post announcing the new venture, "A Public Can Talk To Itself" and find myself... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/theres_no_such_thing_as_an_amo.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/theres_no_such_thing_as_an_amo.html Thu, 29 Oct 2009 09:43:35 -0500 October 22, 2009 The Board of Directors of the American Booksellers Association today sent the following letter to the U.S. Department of Justice requesting that it investigate practices by Amazon.com, Wal-Mart, and Target that it believes constitute illegal predatory pricing... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/independent_booksellers_fight_1.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/independent_booksellers_fight_1.html Fri, 23 Oct 2009 10:27:28 -0500 Congratulations to Brewster Kahle and Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive for the very exciting, maybe sea-changing debut of the BookServer initiative. Possibly some real competition to Google, Amazon and Apple. Here is a re-post of Fran Toolan's detailed account... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/the_internet_archive_and_frien_1.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/the_internet_archive_and_frien_1.html Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:00:04 -0500 Sue Thomas and Kate Pullinger today announced the formation of The Transliteracy Research Group, a research-focused think-tank and creative laboratory. They define transliteracy as the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/transliteracy_research_group.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/transliteracy_research_group.html Tue, 13 Oct 2009 12:08:19 -0500 Ben Fry has made a wonderful visualization showing how Darwin changed the text of Origin of the Species over the course of six editions. It's more of a conceptual art piece at this point but an exciting indicator of the... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/katherinedanielscom.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/katherinedanielscom.html Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:05:46 -0500 The first Vooks (combination text and video) were published yesterday by Simon & Schuster imprint, Atria. I bought the iPhone app version of Jude Deveraux's Promises. Basically it's an ordinary romance novel with video clips interspersed in the pages. In... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/first_vook_--_utter_failure_hb.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/first_vook_--_utter_failure_hb.html Fri, 02 Oct 2009 06:18:16 -0500 Another innovative project from our colleagues at the London branch of the institute; this time in collaboration with the folks at CompletelyNovel.com. cross-posted from if:book London's blog, BookFutures. Something is growing in South London ... Spread the Word challenges writers... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/24_hour_novel.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/10/24_hour_novel.html Thu, 01 Oct 2009 10:01:21 -0500 The following is an article by Hyung Lee in yesterday's Daily Princetonian When the University announced its Kindle e-reader pilot program last May, administrators seemed cautiously optimistic that the e-readers would both be sustainable and serve as a valuable academic... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_kindle_gets_poor_grades_at.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_kindle_gets_poor_grades_at.html Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:12:08 -0500 Cross-posted from Kathleen Fitzpatrick's blog at MediaCommons Today I have the pleasure of unveiling MediaCommons Press, a project we've been working toward for several months now. MediaCommons Press is the second major project hosted by MediaCommons, and it is dedicated,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_launch_of_mediacommonspres.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/the_launch_of_mediacommonspres.html Tue, 29 Sep 2009 09:21:57 -0500 This note is from Chris Meade, director of if:book London IF:BOOK'S FIRST FICTIONAL STIMULUS - a digital boost to the book Apologies for any cross posting, but it's the end of week one in if:book's FICTIONAL STIMULUS and already visible... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/from_ifbook_london.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/from_ifbook_london.html Sun, 27 Sep 2009 15:40:44 -0500 Patrick Brown who writes a blog for Vroman's, LA's great independent bookstore, did a lovely riff off of yesterday's post, A Clean Well-Lighted Place for Books.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/branding_the_future_of_publish.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/branding_the_future_of_publish.html Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:30:12 -0500 The following started out as a set of notes to various colleagues suggesting that successful digital publishing involves much much more than coming up with a viable form for networked books. rather unexpectedly this led to the question of how... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/a_clean_well-lighted_place_for.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/a_clean_well-lighted_place_for.html Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:29:49 -0500 Henry Jenkins wrote an interesting three-part response to a post by his mentor, film scholar David Bordwell on the subject of transmedia storytelling. In addition to being thought-provoking it's a lovely example of how discourse can be thoughtful and meaningful... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/transmedia_storytelling_--_int.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/09/transmedia_storytelling_--_int.html Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:54:49 -0500 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/08/a_social_history_of_the_mp3.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/08/a_social_history_of_the_mp3.html Mon, 24 Aug 2009 10:17:08 -0500 Using Richard Feynman's famous series of lectures as a testbed, Microsoft Research has created a very impressive video presentation tool. yes, we've seen video annotation and linked transcript features before, but never executed so elegantly.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/08/project_tuva.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/08/project_tuva.html Wed, 12 Aug 2009 16:09:45 -0500 smart piece by Mike Cane enthusing on the increasingly talked about apple tablet.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/apple_tablet.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/apple_tablet.html Fri, 24 Jul 2009 16:37:46 -0500 thanks to Mike Lee, here's a YouTube version of the video described in the previous post.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/book_of_the_future_-_the_video.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/book_of_the_future_-_the_video.html Sun, 19 Jul 2009 08:26:19 -0500 this film loads very very slowly but i think it's the most exciting vision of the book of the future since Apple's Knowledge Navigator in 1987. interestingly, the film also includes an elegant solution to the question of how (at... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/the_book_of_the_future.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/the_book_of_the_future.html Sat, 18 Jul 2009 13:53:00 -0500 A few years ago, I found myself on a blind date with an English professor. At some point after the second drink, one of us mentioned a feature in the Times that day about a recent slew of steamy, pulpy... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/the_almighty_word.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/the_almighty_word.html Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:01:13 -0500 Michael Jensen, the always-ahead-of-the-curve Director of the National Academies Press gave a stunningly original speech at the recent AAUP (American Association of University Presses) which, in his words, "allowed me to talk about the two issues that matter most to... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/michael_jensen_the_always-ahea.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/michael_jensen_the_always-ahea.html Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:31:52 -0500 Newseek has published an idiosyncratic list of fifty books under the title "What to Read Now. And Why" which is different than last week's list of the "top 100 books." both relate to our inaugural post in 2004 in which... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/what_to_read_now_and_why_accor.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/07/what_to_read_now_and_why_accor.html Wed, 08 Jul 2009 03:33:34 -0500 jonathan harris, one of the most brilliant designer/thinkers around has just launched an awesome new project -- Sputnik Observatory.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/06/run_dont_walk.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/06/run_dont_walk.html Tue, 30 Jun 2009 15:13:55 -0500 In an as yet unpublished manuscript, historian Marshall Poe writes: "A book is a machine for focusing attention; the Internet is machine for diffusing it." I can see how he gets there, particularly if it's a P-book rather than an... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/06/please_discuss.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/06/please_discuss.html Mon, 29 Jun 2009 10:14:58 -0500 Web activist and filmmaker Brett Gaylor has created an open source documentary about copyright and remix culture. The entire film can be downloaded from here.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/06/rip_a_remix_manifesto.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/06/rip_a_remix_manifesto.html Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:36:30 -0500 this is cross-posted from Bookfutures, the blog of Chris Meade, the director of IF:Book London IF:BOOK ANNOUNCES ITS FIRST FICTIONAL STIMULUS At last an end to those bored bookgroup blues! You love books but are interested if sceptical about what... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/06/post_15.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/06/post_15.html Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:54:14 -0500 There's endless talk these days about ebook readers, Kindle and all its e-ink cousins, and future tablets from Apple and other phone makers. There's nothing wrong with the fact that these devices are all designed to emulate the experience of... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/06/trying_to_think_a_bit_outside.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/06/trying_to_think_a_bit_outside.html Tue, 02 Jun 2009 03:02:52 -0500 Noah Wardrup-Fruin has a book coming out from MIT Press this summer -- Expressive Processing. Together with Doug Sery, his editor at MIT and Ben Vershbow a former colleague at the Institute, Noah used CommentPress to conduct an open peer... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/05/noah_wardrup-fruin_sums_up.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/05/noah_wardrup-fruin_sums_up.html Wed, 13 May 2009 01:27:30 -0500 About two years ago, Dan Visel ended a thoughtful post on the New York Public Library's newly-installed Espresso Book Machine by proposing: "There's a discussion here that needs to happen." In light of the second version of the Espresso Book... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/05/the_presence_of_print.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/05/the_presence_of_print.html Thu, 07 May 2009 14:47:23 -0500 I am not a gamer. I do not consider myself a gaming enthusiast, I do not belong to any kind of "gaming community" and I have not kept my finger on the proverbial pulse of interactive entertainment since my monthly... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/04/gamers_anonymous.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/04/gamers_anonymous.html Sun, 12 Apr 2009 21:50:49 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/04/variously.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/04/variously.html Wed, 01 Apr 2009 16:54:39 -0500 The most prominent members of the Oulipo are making a rare descent upon New York this week; there are readings at the New School tonight and in Pierogi in Williamsburg on April 3rd. (A complete schedule of events can be... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/oulipo_in_new_york.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/oulipo_in_new_york.html Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:16:25 -0500 Here and elsewhere in the blogosphere, much ink has been spilled -- or rather, many pixels generated -- regarding Sven Birkerts's "Resisting the Kindle," which contends that the e-reader's rise augurs ill for our ability to contextualize information. The argument... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/design_and_dasein_heidegger_ag.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/design_and_dasein_heidegger_ag.html Thu, 26 Mar 2009 12:18:07 -0500 Brian Dettmer creates these extraordinary sculptures by amalgamating, modifying and mutating books. Looking at these images of the physical matter of books, remixed into sculptures, I'm reminded of the process that texts are increasingly going through once digitized: amalgamated, remixed,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/extraordinary_book_sculpture.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/extraordinary_book_sculpture.html Fri, 20 Mar 2009 06:11:28 -0500 OK, so first of all: this isn't an article about whether or not ebooks are a good thing. But I was thinking this morning about the now hackneyed idea that we're moments away from an 'iPod moment for ebooks', and... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/will_the_real_ipod_for_reading.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/will_the_real_ipod_for_reading.html Thu, 19 Mar 2009 10:00:43 -0500 The Atlantic just posted a short piece by Sven Birkerts, Resisting the Kindle, voicing his concerns over what is being lost when reading moves from page to screen. The challenge is to take the kernel of truth in what Birkerts... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/sven_birkerts_on_the_kindle.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/sven_birkerts_on_the_kindle.html Fri, 06 Mar 2009 13:30:46 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/various_things_around.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/03/various_things_around.html Wed, 04 Mar 2009 10:27:57 -0500 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,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/why_is_text_on_screens_so_ugly.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/why_is_text_on_screens_so_ugly.html Fri, 27 Feb 2009 11:09:49 -0500 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... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/briefly_noted_iphones_oreilly.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/briefly_noted_iphones_oreilly.html Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:31:30 -0500 In Mute, Tony D. Sampson reviews FLOSS+ART and Software Studies: A Lexicon, two books on software studies and digital art. At the Poetry Foundation, Stephanie Strickland a manifesto for e-poetry, which nicely defines how e-poetry might differ from traditional poetry.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/briefly_noted.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/briefly_noted.html Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:22:04 -0500 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/itin_film_on_sunday.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/itin_film_on_sunday.html Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:41:17 -0500 I've been reading Tom McArthur's Worlds of Reference: lexicography, learning and language from the clay tablet to the computer, a history of dictionaries, encyclopedias and reference materials published in 1986. The last section, titled "Tomorrow's World" is interesting in hindsight:... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/wikipedia_before_wikipedia.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/wikipedia_before_wikipedia.html Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:50:32 -0500 When Jaron Lanier disparaged the Wikipedia in his 2006 essay on "the hazards of the new online collectivism" I wrote an impassioned defense including our oft-mentioned point that the most interesting thing about wikipedia articles, especially controversial ones is not... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/getting_closer_to_the_truth_--.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/getting_closer_to_the_truth_--.html Fri, 06 Feb 2009 07:43:43 -0500 There's a post at the Harper Studio blog about Stephen King's recent denigration of Stephenie Meyer's talents as a writer. Meyer is, of course, the author of the Twilight books, a chaste vampire saga. The post asks: Can a book... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/judging_a_book_by_its_writing.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/judging_a_book_by_its_writing.html Thu, 05 Feb 2009 14:34:51 -0500 If:book certainly isn't an obvious venue for a John Updike remembrance. In 2006, his "The End of Authorship" vehemently misconstrued the ideals of digital publishing. At remix culture, he bristled; at collaborative reading, he balked; at the notion of books... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/on_john_updike.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/on_john_updike.html Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:42:04 -0500 Syndicated comics artists who are seeing their livelihood disappear as the newspapers their work appears in shrink from sight, are starting to look with more interest at the world of online webcomics. Unfortunately, they seem to misunderstand what they see... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/syndicated_comics_artists_who.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/02/syndicated_comics_artists_who.html Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:06:11 -0500 One of the most attractive books I picked up last year was a copy of Ben Greenman's Correspondences, a collection of short stories published by Hotel St. George Press. Strictly speaking, you could argue that Correspondences isn't a book: a... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/correspondences.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/correspondences.html Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:37:34 -0500 The Internet, coupled with the bad economic times, has the media industry in a flurry; Institutional newspaper papers are failing regularly, magazines are reconsidering everything, and reports showing that people are just not reading - or at least not the... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/can_books_and_the_web_play_wel.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/can_books_and_the_web_play_wel.html Mon, 26 Jan 2009 11:04:13 -0500 Peter Brantley points out what's now at http://www.whitehouse.gov/copyright/: Pursuant to federal law, government-produced materials appearing on this site are not copyright protected. The United States Government may receive and hold copyrights transferred to it by assignment, bequest, or otherwise. Except... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/a_step_forwards_for_creative_c.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/a_step_forwards_for_creative_c.html Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:24:06 -0500 After an autumn spent retooling, MediaCommons has returned in new and better form. Check out the blog for details. Over at the much improved In Media Res it's sports week. Congratulations to editors Kathleen FitzPatrick and Avi Santo for a... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/media_commons_returns.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/media_commons_returns.html Thu, 22 Jan 2009 08:09:32 -0500 Embarrassingly belated report on bookcamp (I've taken this long just to follow up on conversations). It was a delightfully un-stuffy unconference exploring bookish and net-ish tech-ish things, last Saturday, at the new Hub space in Kings Cross. I listened to... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/bookcamp.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/bookcamp.html Wed, 21 Jan 2009 15:21:35 -0500 A quick note to point out LittleSis, an "involuntary Facebook of powerful Americans," a project of the Public Accountability Initiative funded by the Sunlight Foundation. It's something like a networked telephone book of the rich and powerful: LittleSis aggregates publicly... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/social_networking_in_reverse.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2009/01/social_networking_in_reverse.html Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:24:35 -0500 We don't talk about games here as much as we have in the past, but this John Lanchester essay is worth a look on your way to the New Year. One paragraph stands out to me, a brief consideration of... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/the_economics_of_video_games.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/the_economics_of_video_games.html Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:10:35 -0500 The institute got a fantastic xmas gift last week -- the seven women reading The Golden Notebook together said they are now having such a good time discussing the book in the margin they've decided to keep the conversation going... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/a_book_is_a_place.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/a_book_is_a_place.html Mon, 29 Dec 2008 14:03:49 -0500 Helen DeWitt is a novelist who lives in Berlin. Her first novel, The Last Samurai, was published in 2002 to not inconsiderable acclaim, though it suffered, in this country at least, from having the same title as a Tom Cruise... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/an_interview_with_helen_dewitt.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/an_interview_with_helen_dewitt.html Sat, 27 Dec 2008 14:07:19 -0500 The end of the year is heaving into view with its ineluctable retrospective urge. Trying to put together some semblance of a list of things that I liked this year, I came back to two books from the past year... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/volumes.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/volumes.html Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:52:51 -0500 Wyatt Mason, the keenly observant Harper's literary critic, blogged last week about the difficulties inherent to film criticism. "[B]ecause film is a waterfall of particulars," he believes, a movie review "is the hardest place to get any serious critical footing."... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/what_we_talk_about_when_we_tal.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/what_we_talk_about_when_we_tal.html Wed, 10 Dec 2008 16:24:43 -0500 A screen is an extremely limited amount of space. We knew when we started The Golden Notebook Project that we could only fit about seven readers comfortably within the margins of the book. However, we are not interested solely... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/golden_notebook_update_even_mo.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/golden_notebook_update_even_mo.html comments Mon, 08 Dec 2008 12:51:56 -0500 I spent a day last week at MASS MoCA, touring Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective. (It was finally profiled in the New York Times this morning, and NPR reported it yesterday.) The exhibit takes up an entire building, wall... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/image_courtesy_of_mass_moca.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/image_courtesy_of_mass_moca.html art Fri, 05 Dec 2008 10:04:19 -0500 How valuable is metadata? Metadata was the buzzword of choice in the blogosphere back when if:book was started, somewhere between when everyone was talking about everything in terms of XML and when the hype moved on to social networking. You... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/music_is_metadata.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/music_is_metadata.html Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:00:16 -0500 Kenneth Goldsmith has launched a bold, full-throttle investigation into the nature of unpublishability over at Ubu. Introducing Publishing the Unpublishable, Goldsmith asks, "What constitutes an unpublishable work?" Authors sent in works that otherwise would have remained untouched, festering at... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/the_limits_of_unpublishability.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/the_limits_of_unpublishability.html Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:05:10 -0500 Almost forgot about this: if you're around New York this Sunday (December 7th), I'll be on a panel at the New York Center for Independent Publishing's Indie & Small Press Book Fair. The panel, at 2 p.m., is called "The... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/nycip_indie_small_press_book_f.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/nycip_indie_small_press_book_f.html Thu, 04 Dec 2008 10:05:30 -0500 Uh-oh. While if:book slept, the publishing industry was cast into a tumult from which it's unlikely to soon recover. Having weathered an increasingly turbulent economic downturn, the industry's already rickety business models look all the more enervated. The headlines are... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/while_we_were_out_a_publishing.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/while_we_were_out_a_publishing.html Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:35:00 -0500 (Thanks for your patience - the blog is back!) On Friday November 21st, we met with the American Social History Project and several historians to discuss the possibilities for collaborative learning in history. Attendees included Josh Brown, Steve Brier, Pennee... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/american_social_history_projec.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/12/american_social_history_projec.html history Tue, 02 Dec 2008 08:29:59 -0500 Something was going wrong somewhere in the Institute's archipelago of websites and NYU summarily turned off our server. We're slowly coming back to life - bear with us, we should have a lot of interesting things up here soon. Meanwhile,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/ifbook_on_the_way_back.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/ifbook_on_the_way_back.html Fri, 28 Nov 2008 13:05:39 -0500 The Golden Notebook Project is LIVE. If you want to read along with a print version, here are links to both the US and UK versions from Amazon.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/four_days_to_launch.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/four_days_to_launch.html Thu, 06 Nov 2008 03:56:42 -0500 We asked Rick Prelinger for permission to cross-post this provocative piece which originally appeared in Absent Magazine 1. Why add to the population of orphaned works? 2. Don't presume that new work improves on old 3. Honor our ancestors by... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/on_the_virtues_of_preexisting.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/on_the_virtues_of_preexisting.html Wed, 05 Nov 2008 07:29:33 -0500 Image inspired by Shepard Fairey. In case you prefer to get your news online, here are a variety of ways to follow the election coverage. Predictably, Twitter is following every second of the election. If you're into Twitter, maybe... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/following_election_coverage.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/following_election_coverage.html Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:17:13 -0500 We've got a small NEH grant to hold a couple of brainstorming sessions. the overarching goal of the sessions is to come up with a conceptual framework for learning spaces which combine the rich media attributes of the cd-rom era... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/an_invitation_1.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/an_invitation_1.html Mon, 03 Nov 2008 14:36:11 -0500 On a clear day, Guy Maddin might be my favorite living film maker. He's not to everyone's taste (The Heart of the World, complete on YouTube, is a good litmus test), and I won't attempt to convert the unbelievers. But... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/the_indeterminate_dvd.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/11/the_indeterminate_dvd.html media Sun, 02 Nov 2008 18:31:00 -0500 A quite note to point out that LACMA has announced that they've posted the long out-of-print catalogue for their 1971 Art and Technology show online in its entirety in both web and PDF format. It's worth looking at: Maurice Tuchman... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/art_and_technology_1970.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/art_and_technology_1970.html art Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:08:58 -0500 An engraving of The Turk from Karl Gottlieb von Windisch's Inanimate Reason, published in 1784. Image courtesy of Wikipedia. We had Lauren Klein, a graduate student from CUNY, over to lunch this afternoon. One of the pleasures of such... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/post_14.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/post_14.html history_of_interactive_media Tue, 28 Oct 2008 17:13:32 -0500 In addition to the demo books themselves, we've posted several movies demonstrating the capabilities of Sophie 1.0. At about a minute each, these clips provide a cursory glance at a variety of our books, complete with hopefully unobtrusive narration by... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/sophie_demo_movies_now_availab.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/sophie_demo_movies_now_availab.html Mon, 27 Oct 2008 10:34:03 -0500 I've just returned from a quick trip to India: with my brain yet furry from jetlag, I've yet to come to any understanding of what I experienced there, should such be possible. But while in Delhi, I picked up an... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/a_leap_into_the_postindustrial.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/a_leap_into_the_postindustrial.html literacy Wed, 22 Oct 2008 13:09:15 -0500 Image via Queen's University. Here is a little bit about the MIT communications forum on October 14, with respondent David Thorburn, moderator Diana Henderson, and lecturer Stephen Greenblatt. Greenblatt is the Cogen University Professor of Humanities at Harvard. He... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/greenblatt.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/greenblatt.html Tue, 21 Oct 2008 17:06:56 -0500 This Sophie book showcases several interesting, rare, or otherwise odd cookbooks from the collection of Kimberly Beeman. You can download it here (.zip, 60Mb). Make sure that you have Sophie or Sophie Reader installed. The title page, including a video... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/nine_curiosities_from_the_beem.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/nine_curiosities_from_the_beem.html Mon, 13 Oct 2008 09:50:27 -0500 Contrary to popular lore, Lincoln did not write the Gettysburg Address on the back of an envelope. Though given short notice that he was to speak at the dedication of the Soldiers' National Cemetery, he had enough time to write... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/the_five_drafts_of_the_gettysb.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/the_five_drafts_of_the_gettysb.html Thu, 09 Oct 2008 09:15:44 -0500 My colleagues at the Institute and i are busy making some interesting things with Sophie 1.0. We're going to start posting them on a new institute website devoted to Sophie 1.0. [They will also be available on the OpenSophie site]... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/meanwhile.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/meanwhile.html Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:31:44 -0500 An Experiment in Visualization: Presidential Nomination Acceptance Speeches from Truman through Obama and McCain. In addition to the wordle.net visualizations in which the size of the word is proportionate to the number of times it is used, we've also included... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/and_the_first_document_is.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/and_the_first_document_is.html Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:40:40 -0500 Last week the Mellon Foundation announced a $1.25 million grant to the University of Southern California for a java-based version of Sophie, which will be known as Sophie 2.0. In addition to improving on Sophie 1.0 in various ways, Sophie... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/mellon_announces_a_125_million_1.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/mellon_announces_a_125_million_1.html Mon, 06 Oct 2008 01:25:31 -0500 (Photo of Tom Stoppard's book case, made by T. Anthony, via The New York Times.) For the sake of travel and convenience, sure, even a Kindle is better than toting a book shelf with you on an airplane. But... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/how_do_you_want_to_read.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/10/how_do_you_want_to_read.html Thu, 02 Oct 2008 17:25:02 -0500 Beginning November 10th, seven women will begin a public conversation in the margins of Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook. The text of the novel and the readers' conversation will be in a nifty new format designed by Apt Studios in... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/the_golden_notebook_project_re.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/the_golden_notebook_project_re.html Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:52:16 -0500 With October just around the corner, American universities and high schools are gearing up for homecoming celebrations, those unabashed nostalgia fests. There's just one problem: the yearbook, one of nostalgia's favorite vessels, is obsolete. This summer, the Economist reported on... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/putting_the_book_back_in_faceb.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/putting_the_book_back_in_faceb.html Mon, 29 Sep 2008 09:37:59 -0500 Just came upon a Guardian piece looking at the underwhelming quality of 'e-lit'. In my comment on the discussion I found myself reviewing a number of themes that have recurred in my if:book research over the last couple of years:... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/elit_in_the_guardian.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/elit_in_the_guardian.html Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:41:49 -0500 On Thursday October 9th, National Poetry Day in the UK, 2008 if:book london is launching an exciting experiment in reading and writing, supported by Arts Council England. Over the next six months I will be working with artist and web... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/this_is_a_world_of_imagination_1.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/this_is_a_world_of_imagination_1.html uk Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:31:44 -0500 Views of Wikipedia are decidedly mixed in academia, though perhaps trending slowly from mostly negative to grudgingly positive. But regardless of your view of Wikipedia - ?or your political persuasion - ?you can’t help but be impressed with the activity... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/sarah_palin_crowdsourced.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/sarah_palin_crowdsourced.html Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:14:53 -0500 Natura Morta, Giorgio Morandi, 1956 (via The Met) There is little or nothing new in the world. What matters is the new and different position in which an artist finds himself seeing and considering the things of so-called nature... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/post_13.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/post_13.html Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:41:00 -0500 This morning, I went to Samuel Johnson's house (now a museum dedicated to 18th-century London) in the old City of London. Today is (or would have been) Samuel Johnson's birthday; the occasion was the launch of Wordia, a new startup... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/wordia_new_definitions_of_lite.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/wordia_new_definitions_of_lite.html Thu, 18 Sep 2008 20:05:42 -0500 Pardon me for plagiarizing Churchill, but the victors aren't the only ones writing history these days. At the Institute, we're re-imagining the American History Project's "Who Built America?", hoping to re-imagine the sort of information in this CD-ROM from 1991,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/history_is_written_by_the_read.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/history_is_written_by_the_read.html Thu, 18 Sep 2008 18:18:56 -0500 Microsoft Multimedia Schubert was published fifteen years ago, in 1993. Developed by the Voyager Company, the program was one of many in an early "Microsoft Multimedia Catalog." It allows users to engage in a close reading of Schubert's Trout Quintet,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/unearthing_a_multimedia_time_c.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/unearthing_a_multimedia_time_c.html Thu, 18 Sep 2008 11:39:24 -0500 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/books_and_control.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/books_and_control.html books Wed, 17 Sep 2008 17:26:49 -0500 Alex Itin, the Institute's artist-in-not-quite-residence, is having an opening soon. He says: I will be filling four walls with a floor to ceiling installation of images extruded over the last several years for the Art Blog: IT IN Place: http://www.futureofthebook.org/itinplace/... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/a_reading_room.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/a_reading_room.html events Wed, 17 Sep 2008 12:46:55 -0500 I came home from my first year at college, reeling from culture shock unrecognized until much later, to a job at the local natural history museum. I was in charge of their live reptile exhibit, a perennial summer attraction in... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/recognitions.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/recognitions.html reading Tue, 16 Sep 2008 16:44:22 -0500 The following is a set of notes, written over several months, in an attempt to weave together a number of ideas that have emerged in the course of the institute's work. I'm hoping for a lot of feedback. If there's... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/a_unified_field_theory_of_publ_1.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/a_unified_field_theory_of_publ_1.html Thu, 04 Sep 2008 11:29:15 -0500 One of our terrific summer interns, Rick Williamson, just sent a link to this 1976 TV interview of Marshall McLuhan in which he skewers the presidential debates for being completely the wrong form for the medium of television. It's interesting... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/macluhan_skewers_the_president.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/09/macluhan_skewers_the_president.html mcluhan Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:19:15 -0500 The Orwell Prize has recently unfurled their project to post George Orwell's personal diaries online, in blog form, and in real time, seventy years after each entry was originally written. Why they've elected the blog format and the seventy-year anniversary... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/08/remediating_orwells_diaries.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/08/remediating_orwells_diaries.html Thu, 14 Aug 2008 11:45:17 -0500 I thought that Terry Teachout made an unfortunate omission in his recent column, "Hearing is Believing: The Vanished Glories of Spoken-Word Recordings." After glimpsing into BBC's giant vault of sound recordings, Teachout bemoans the inaccessibility of most spoken-word albums: Why... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/08/i_heard_words_and_words_full_o.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/08/i_heard_words_and_words_full_o.html Tue, 12 Aug 2008 18:01:05 -0500 A couple of weeks ago, Sebastian Mary posted about experiments with sending out literature via Twitter. She found herself disappointed that DailyLit was neither "abridging the text savagely for hyper-truncated delivery, or else delivering the unabridged text 140 characters at... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/08/twittering_from_the_past.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/08/twittering_from_the_past.html twitter Mon, 11 Aug 2008 12:18:21 -0500 Emily Dickinson's poems weren't published during her lifetime- it was only after her death that her sister found Emily's manuscripts, tucked at the bottom of a trunk, and decided to publish them. In the translation from manuscript to printed page,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/08/emily_dickinson_in_sophie.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/08/emily_dickinson_in_sophie.html Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:23:19 -0500 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/07/do_you_remember_the_first_time.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/07/do_you_remember_the_first_time.html google Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:20:50 -0500 I got a note from someone at Britannica online telling me about a discussion prompted by Clay Shirky's riposte to Nicolas Carr's Atlantic article, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The conversation on the Britannica site, and the related posts on... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/07/post_12.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/07/post_12.html mcluhan Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:07:44 -0500 Zoomii, a new virtual bookstore that uses Amazon's prices and fulfilment, provides a nifty 'browse' interface that lets the viewer zoom in and out of 21,000 'books' - read cover thumbnails - arranged on 'shelves' according to category. It's the... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/07/now_you_can_judge_a_virtual_bo.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/07/now_you_can_judge_a_virtual_bo.html Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:36:05 -0500 I made a passing mention of email-me-chunks-of-book-to-read service DailyLitin my recent-ish post on writing less. Though I've not tried it, it's been picking up some press lately as a way to get your reading done via the network. The latest... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/dailylit_experiments_with_publ.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/dailylit_experiments_with_publ.html Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:15:53 -0500 A new project by HP Labs aims to make print-on-demand magazine publishing available to everyone. MagCloud uses a similar model toLulu for books, or Moo for stickers and cards: upload your digital content here and we'll deal with fulfillment.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/lulu_for_magazines_1.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/lulu_for_magazines_1.html Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:05:38 -0500 My last review post covered the debates around digitization of public domain archives, especially with reference to Google. Key to these debates are questions of access: who gets how much, what to, how is this controlled, and who by? And... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/ifbook_review_3_privacy_and_ne.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/ifbook_review_3_privacy_and_ne.html Mon, 23 Jun 2008 04:50:21 -0500 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/new_ways_with_words.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/new_ways_with_words.html london Mon, 23 Jun 2008 04:43:24 -0500 More fun with book metadata. Hot on the heels of Bkkeepr comes Booklert, an app that lets you keep track of the Amazon rank of your (or anyone else's) book. Writer, thinker and social media maven Russell Davies speculated that... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/the_long_tale_another_book_met.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/the_long_tale_another_book_met.html metadata Fri, 20 Jun 2008 11:00:39 -0500 if:book readers may remember my excited post from last October when Doris Lessing won the Nobel Prize. I had coincidentally re-read The Golden Notebook over the summer and when I realized that none of my younger colleagues had read it,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/readers_wanted.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/readers_wanted.html Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:50:39 -0500 In discussing with other Institute folks how to go about reviewing four year's worth of blog posts, I've felt torn at times. Should I cherry-pick 'thinky' posts that discuss a particular topic in depth, or draw out narratives from strings... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/google_digitization_and_archiv.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/google_digitization_and_archiv.html archive Mon, 16 Jun 2008 15:35:05 -0500 The period of extreme introspection is winding down. As you've seen over the last few days Sebastian Mary has embarked on a review of if:book's first four years. This will unfold over the next few weeks and will prepare the... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/were_on_our_way_back.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/were_on_our_way_back.html Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:17:08 -0500 In marked contrast to J K Rowling, whose battles against the publication of a fan-created Potter encyclopedia we've covered here, fantasy author Naomi Novik's website hosts a wiki in which fans of her writing help to co-create an encyclopedic guide... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/fantasy_authors_site_hosts_fan.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/fantasy_authors_site_hosts_fan.html fanfic Fri, 13 Jun 2008 02:55:41 -0500 Ecodazoo is a beautifully-animated if slightly inscrutable site created in Papervision, a real-time 3D engine for Flash. Scrolling around the page takes you to a series of animated 'pop-up books' that tell vaguely eco-educational stories. It's pretty, even if... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/virtual_popup_book_in_papervis.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/virtual_popup_book_in_papervis.html ecodazoo Thu, 12 Jun 2008 07:56:01 -0500 I was beginning to research an article about ARG genres when I came across this interesting tidbit. Without telling the client, an architect renovating an Upper East Side apartment included secret panels, puzzles, poems and artworks that - when they... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/fifth_avenue_apartment_encoded.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/fifth_avenue_apartment_encoded.html ARG Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:26:26 -0500 London-based creative studio and social think-tank Proboscis has put impressive effort into thinking through the incarnations and reincarnations of written material between printed and digitized forms. Diffusion, one of Proboscis' recent-ish ventures, is a technology that lays out short texts... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/printable_minibooks_revisit_ei.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/printable_minibooks_revisit_ei.html print_on_demand Wed, 11 Jun 2008 12:17:44 -0500 I've chosen 'game culture' as the theme for this first review post, for all that many of these posts could just as easily be tagged another handful of ways. But games have always hovered at the fringes of debates about... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/ifbook_review_1_game_culture.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/ifbook_review_1_game_culture.html archive Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:35:28 -0500 Whew. I expected my review of the if:book archive to take me a few days, and selecting/commenting on posts to be a quick job requiring at most a handful of posts. Wrong. It took me a week of digging to... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/ifbook_review_update.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/ifbook_review_update.html Wed, 11 Jun 2008 09:14:07 -0500 Popping out of review and archiving mode for a quick mention of bkkeepr, a new project recently out of stealth mode. Based around Twitter and ISBN data, it creates a timeline of who's reading what. The feed provides intriguing browsing,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/bkkeepr_1.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/bkkeepr_1.html Wed, 11 Jun 2008 07:20:25 -0500 Well, I don't want to give away much about what was a blindingly brilliant episode of Doctor Who, but suffice to say the library survived, though the whole collection had been backed up on the biggest mainframe in the universe.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/the_doctor_the_salon.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/the_doctor_the_salon.html readers Tue, 10 Jun 2008 11:30:21 -0500 We've now launched a website for if:book london, the British iteration of the Institute, at http://www.futureofthebook.org.uk, and that links both to this blog and one which will focus on UK activities and in particular our work with the literature sector... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/ifbook_london_tomorrow_the_sta.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/ifbook_london_tomorrow_the_sta.html uk Thu, 05 Jun 2008 11:10:04 -0500 It's been pretty quiet on the blog for the last few weeks. This is partly because there's a lot of work going on backstage. But it's also symptomatic of the fact that the research, writing and blogging element of the... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/ifjanus.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/06/ifjanus.html review Mon, 02 Jun 2008 22:23:53 -0500 sorry for the extended absence from these pages. we've been wonderfully busy at the first Sophie workshop (at USC) this week. news of that and much else next week.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/05/place_holder_2.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/05/place_holder_2.html Fri, 30 May 2008 13:51:35 -0500 We're taking ben's leaving as an opportunity to think about the institute's mission and the role of if:book within that context. and most importantly we're trying to figure out the best way to involve the readers of if:book in this... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/05/placeholder.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/05/placeholder.html Wed, 07 May 2008 11:08:57 -0500 A few weeks back though the auspices of TED, I paid a visit to a private library. The owner doesn't want publicity, and I won't reveal details, but it was a staggeringly beautiful (if idiosyncratic) collection, and I can't imagine... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/05/looking_at_libraries.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/05/looking_at_libraries.html libraries Tue, 06 May 2008 16:18:00 -0500 Two weeks ago the Instittue for Multimedia Literacy (IML) at USC held a ceremony for the first graduating class of students with honors in multimedia scholarship. two of the students wrote their theses in Sophie. Based on their experience, Holly... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/exciting_announcement.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/exciting_announcement.html Sophie Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:42:35 -0500 A new research paper by Bruce Mason and Sue Thomas on A Million Penguins, the controversial wiki novel created last year by Penguin Books makes fascinating reading. It includes amongst other delights an analysis of the activities of the contributor... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/fail_again_fail_better_have_fu.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/fail_again_fail_better_have_fu.html research Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:20:56 -0500 Longtime visitors to if:book have heard about Sophie, the reading/writing environment we've been working on since the inception of the institute in 2004. Version 1.0 of Sophie was quietly released last month. We'll make a number of Sophie-related posts over... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/sophie_vs_powerpoint_and_keyno.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/sophie_vs_powerpoint_and_keyno.html Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:12:38 -0500 I found this new site, 217babel.com set up by Brighton based journalist and writer William Shaw, to be a nice example of an online fiction that actually gets you reading rather than admiring it awhile and then glazing over or... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/stories_and_places.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/stories_and_places.html web Thu, 24 Apr 2008 05:55:01 -0500 "While businesses based on the sale of paper may or may not be in crisis, those of us with a wider responsibility for ensuring our literary culture thrives have wonderful new tools with which to encourage participation and communication. The... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/floing_again.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/floing_again.html literature Thu, 24 Apr 2008 04:43:32 -0500 The future has only been a topic of interest for a relatively short while. For most of time the future was likely to be pretty much like the past except we'd be dead then and replaced by replica offspring -... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/tomorrow_and_tomorrow.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/tomorrow_and_tomorrow.html future Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:34:10 -0500 Omnisio, a new Y Combinator startup, lets people grab clips from the Web and mash them up. Users can integrate video with slide presentations, and enable time-sensitive commenting in little popup bubbles layered on the video. MediaCommons was founded partly... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/interface_culture.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/interface_culture.html interface Mon, 21 Apr 2008 10:43:01 -0500 Sebastian Mary and i were talking last week about the need to re-conceive the format of if:book so that interesting posts which initiate lively discussions don't get pushed to the bottom. a few days later i met with Rene Daalder... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/a_new_blog_format_avoids_the_t.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/a_new_blog_format_avoids_the_t.html design Fri, 18 Apr 2008 14:10:36 -0500 I've been making my way through Robert Bringhurst's The Tree of Meaning: Language, Mind and Ecology, which came out a couple years ago in Canada, but which is now getting an American release from Counterpoint. Bringhurst is probably best known... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/a_return_to_orality.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/a_return_to_orality.html bringhurst Fri, 18 Apr 2008 13:14:12 -0500 You've probably noticed that things have been relatively quiet around here lately. I haven't been on vacation or anything like that. Rather I've been figuring out the future, not of the book, but of me. After much personal consideration, and... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/changes.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/changes.html thefuture Thu, 17 Apr 2008 09:37:16 -0500 Kyle Bean, student at the University of Brighton sent me this nice example of his work. More hybrid books on his site http://kylebean.co.uk... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/illumination.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/illumination.html art Wed, 16 Apr 2008 17:04:56 -0500 I was on the underground making my way to the London Book Fair yesterday, hoping to stand out from the crowds of frantic publishers jostling there by carrying over my shoulder the fabulously pretentious "Proust Society of America" book bag... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/a_la_recherche.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/a_la_recherche.html proust Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:43:01 -0500 J.K. Rowling went to court today to try to stop someone from publishing a lexicon of Harry Potter characters. She says she wants to do it herself, but even if that gave her the right to stop others from doing... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/old_school_1.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/old_school_1.html jkrowling Mon, 14 Apr 2008 18:51:22 -0500 Wouldn't it be great if textbooks were published online with dynamic comment fields so that students like Matthew LaClair could raise these sorts of issues directly in the margin of the book. imagine what a terrific conversation might unfold and... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/daydreaming_about_a_better_tex.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/daydreaming_about_a_better_tex.html textbook Thu, 10 Apr 2008 16:39:35 -0500 Chances are that unless you're a mathematician or a physicist you don't know anything about TeX. TeX is a computerized typesetting system begun in the late 1970s; since the 1980s, it's been the standard way in which papers in the... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/thinking_about_tex.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/thinking_about_tex.html tex Fri, 04 Apr 2008 14:36:11 -0500 This is the narrative text for an NEH Digital Humanities Start-UP grant we just applied for. Narrative With the advent of the cd-rom in the late 80s, a few pioneering humanities scholars began to develop a new vocabulary for multi-layered,... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/where_minds_meet_new_architect.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/where_minds_meet_new_architect.html scholarship Thu, 03 Apr 2008 22:49:26 -0500 Hence the quiet around here.... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/writing_grants.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/writing_grants.html grants Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:26:03 -0500 The announcement this morning of the launch in the UK of a new waterproof laptop looks like another nail in the coffin of the traditional paper book, as the new device at last makes it possible to read a downloaded... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/ereads_iwash.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/ereads_iwash.html e-books Tue, 01 Apr 2008 02:33:17 -0500 "Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parceque je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte." Pascal, Lettres provinciales, 16, Dec.14,1656. I used to co-edit Pick Me Up, a cult London digital newsletter. After some years perfecting... http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/03/on_writing_less.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/03/on_writing_less.html brevity Mon, 31 Mar 2008 09:52:32 -0500 http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/03/against_reading.html http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/03/against_reading.html mikitabrottman Thu, 27 Mar 2008 22:50:47 -0500