Moby Dick every week
04/28/10 10:29 Filed in: reading
Hugh McGuire says:
Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, estimates that the average American consumes about 36,000 words of text per day, during leisure hours. That number includes print, email, the web, and text messaging. That’s a lot of text. At that rate the average American could read Moby Dick every week.
Roger Bohn of UC San Diego, estimates that the average American consumes about 36,000 words of text per day, during leisure hours. That number includes print, email, the web, and text messaging. That’s a lot of text. At that rate the average American could read Moby Dick every week.
Paul Theroux on fiction in the age of eBooks
04/27/10 10:28 Filed in: publishing
| ebooks
TA:
What does the advent of the e-reader mean for
reading—for the health of narrative storytelling as a
form, for the market for fiction, for the future of
books? E-readers certainly make it easier to tote
lots of novels and other texts while traveling. But
don’t we lose something—in sustained concentration,
or in a sense of permanence, or in the notion of a
book as an art object—in the migration away from the
codex?
PT: Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me. I started my writing life in the 1940s as an elementary student at the Washington School in Medford, Massachusetts, using a steel-nibbed pen and an inkwell, so I have lived through every technology. I don’t think people will read more fiction than they have in the past (as I say, it’s a minority interest), but something certainly is lost—the physicality of a book, how one makes a book one’s own by reading it (scribbling in it, dog-earing pages, spilling coffee on it) and living with it as an object, sometimes a talisman. Writing is one of the plastic arts, which is why I still write in longhand for a first draft. I can’t predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive—no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
More of the interview here
PT: Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me. I started my writing life in the 1940s as an elementary student at the Washington School in Medford, Massachusetts, using a steel-nibbed pen and an inkwell, so I have lived through every technology. I don’t think people will read more fiction than they have in the past (as I say, it’s a minority interest), but something certainly is lost—the physicality of a book, how one makes a book one’s own by reading it (scribbling in it, dog-earing pages, spilling coffee on it) and living with it as an object, sometimes a talisman. Writing is one of the plastic arts, which is why I still write in longhand for a first draft. I can’t predict how reading habits will change. But I will say that the greatest loss is the paper archive—no more a great stack of manuscripts, letters, and notebooks from a writer’s life, but only a tiny pile of disks, little plastic cookies where once were calligraphic marvels.
More of the interview here
The giant book sorter
04/26/10 10:27 Filed in: books
The New York Public Library's new book sorter - a cross between an airline baggage carousel and a FedEx box sorter.
More here....
eBooks and pBooks?
04/25/10 10:25 Filed in: ebooks
Steven Levy on Kindle errors:
Before a recent trip, I downloaded the latest Stephen Hunter novel to my Kindle. Hunter writes about shooters, so it’s not surprising that the name of the book is I, Sniper.
Not that you’d know it from the title screen. The only words on that e-ink page were “I, Snipper.” Snipper! I thought I was about to nestle into a tale of tough guys who take out human targets from hundreds of yards away. But this promised to be the autobiography of a mohel....
I thought “snipper” was a pretty big snafu, so I decided to play a little joke on my buddy, an editor at Simon & Schuster, which published the book. I took a picture of the misspelled title page and emailed it to him. The next day he emailed me back: “Because of your eagle eye, Amazon is fixing today, even correcting existing Kindle purchases.”
So why is my title page still wrong? According to Amazon.com’s Drew Herdner, “When we find a copyediting or formatting error in a book, we ask the publisher for a new file and replace the one in the Kindle Store so that new purchases of the book do not have the error. We will update the file for a book a customer has already purchased only when the customer asks us to.”
My Kindle purchase “was treated just like an error in a normal p-book,” says Simon & Schuster’s senior publishing manager, Leah Wasielewski, using a term that will be increasingly useful as the e-variety approaches the norm. The publisher’s belief that Amazon had automatically changed sold versions, too, was “a miscommunication,” she adds.
More here. P-books is now the phrase?
Before a recent trip, I downloaded the latest Stephen Hunter novel to my Kindle. Hunter writes about shooters, so it’s not surprising that the name of the book is I, Sniper.
Not that you’d know it from the title screen. The only words on that e-ink page were “I, Snipper.” Snipper! I thought I was about to nestle into a tale of tough guys who take out human targets from hundreds of yards away. But this promised to be the autobiography of a mohel....
I thought “snipper” was a pretty big snafu, so I decided to play a little joke on my buddy, an editor at Simon & Schuster, which published the book. I took a picture of the misspelled title page and emailed it to him. The next day he emailed me back: “Because of your eagle eye, Amazon is fixing today, even correcting existing Kindle purchases.”
So why is my title page still wrong? According to Amazon.com’s Drew Herdner, “When we find a copyediting or formatting error in a book, we ask the publisher for a new file and replace the one in the Kindle Store so that new purchases of the book do not have the error. We will update the file for a book a customer has already purchased only when the customer asks us to.”
My Kindle purchase “was treated just like an error in a normal p-book,” says Simon & Schuster’s senior publishing manager, Leah Wasielewski, using a term that will be increasingly useful as the e-variety approaches the norm. The publisher’s belief that Amazon had automatically changed sold versions, too, was “a miscommunication,” she adds.
More here. P-books is now the phrase?
Archiving Twitter
04/16/10 10:22 Filed in: search
Not everyone would think that the actor Ashton
Kutcher’s Twitter musings on his daily doings
constitute part of “the universal body of human
knowledge.”
But the Library of Congress, the 210-year-old guardian of knowledge and cultural history, thinks so.
The library will archive the collected works of Twitter, the blogging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, all that contain 140 or fewer characters.
Library officials explained the agreement as another step in the library’s embrace of digital media.
Twitter, the Silicon Valley start-up, declared it “very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.”
Read more at the NYT.
But the Library of Congress, the 210-year-old guardian of knowledge and cultural history, thinks so.
The library will archive the collected works of Twitter, the blogging service, whose users currently send a daily flood of 55 million messages, all that contain 140 or fewer characters.
Library officials explained the agreement as another step in the library’s embrace of digital media.
Twitter, the Silicon Valley start-up, declared it “very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history.”
Read more at the NYT.
This is hysterically funny
04/14/10 10:19 Filed in: miscellany
iPad's books application
04/12/10 10:18 Filed in: ebooks
got to play with an iPad yesterday, so of course I
immediately went to the books application. And
directly to the non-fiction - and then directly to
the index. There were page numbers in the index, but
when you pressed on them, you were taken to someplace
completely unrelated. There is a simple search in the
app, but when you pressed on words in the index to
search them, they didn't work.
So yet another app with a dead/useless index.
This has to change!
So yet another app with a dead/useless index.
This has to change!
Annual Peep Contest!
04/02/10 08:10 Filed in: silliness
April Fools!
04/01/10 08:07 Filed in: silliness
Best
April Fools list selection from the
Museum of Hoaxes:
#5: San Serriffe 1977: The British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement devoted to San Serriffe, a small republic said to consist of several semi-colon-shaped islands located in the Indian Ocean. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian's phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Only a few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer's terminology. The success of this hoax is widely credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that gripped the British tabloids in subsequent decades.
#5: San Serriffe 1977: The British newspaper The Guardian published a special seven-page supplement devoted to San Serriffe, a small republic said to consist of several semi-colon-shaped islands located in the Indian Ocean. A series of articles affectionately described the geography and culture of this obscure nation. Its two main islands were named Upper Caisse and Lower Caisse. Its capital was Bodoni, and its leader was General Pica. The Guardian's phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. Only a few noticed that everything about the island was named after printer's terminology. The success of this hoax is widely credited with launching the enthusiasm for April Foolery that gripped the British tabloids in subsequent decades.