Tag: books

February 2, 2009

Google and Digitizing Books (again)

There’s another article on the New York Times concerning Google’s effort to digitize books and the recent class-action settlement that fell in their favour. From the article:

Like the oil barons in the late 19th century, Google is thirsty for a vital raw material — digital content. As Daniel J. Clancy, the engineering director for Google Book Search, put it, “our core business is about search and discovery, and search and discovery improves with more content.”

He can even sound like a prospector when he says Google began its effort to scan millions of books “because there is a ridiculous amount of information out there,” he said, later adding, “and we didn’t see anyone else doing it.”

The idea that all of these books will be searchable is certainly appealing to me, but personally a digitized book will never replace a physical copy for me. With the medium of technology as it is now I can enjoy reading newspapers and short to medium articles digitally, but reading through something like Foucault or Aristotle on a screen would simply be intolerable for me. With that said I have yet to try some of the newer forms of digital books (e.g. the Kindle and Classics for the iPhone). Maybe it’s just a computer screen that I can’t handle reading a book on, but until something proves to me otherwise I will not be convinced of a digital presentation for books.

Link via Link By Link – In a Google Library, Millions of Books, but No Card Catalog – NYTimes.com.

February 1, 2009

More on the future of books and publishing

There’s an interesting article that is featured on The Atlantic right now by Andrew Sullivan concerning the problems with and future of book publishing. In the short posting he writes that:

My own view is that the publishing industry deserves to die in its current state. It never made economic sense to me; there are no real editors of books any more; the distribution network is archaic; the technology of publishing pathetic; and the rewards to authors largely impenetrable. I still have no idea what my occasional royalty statements mean: they are designed to be incomprehensible, to keep the authors in the dark, to maintain an Oz-like mystery where none is required.

The future is obviously print-on-demand, and writers in the future will make their names first on the web. With e-distribution and e-books, writers will soon be able to put this incompetent and often philistine racket behind us. It couldn’t happen too soon.

I couldn’t agree with him more. Particularly in an economy that is becoming increasingly poor it only makes economic sense for writers to explore means of making an income that does not require the overhead that the current publishing system does. Furthermore, what Sullivan suggests here would allow writers to create and define themselves as a brand online and then move to print when they know that there will be a significant demand for their works.

Link via The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan (February 01, 2009) – Self-Branding And Writing .

January 31, 2009

Michel Foucault – Discipline and Punish

I’m currently reading and enjoying Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. Taken from Wikipedia is the summary/main information:

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison is a book written by the philosopher Michel Foucault. Originally published in 1975 in France under the title Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison, it was translated into English in 1977. It is an examination of the social and theoretical mechanisms behind the massive changes that occurred in western penal systems during the modern age. It focuses on historical documents from France, but the issues it examines are relevant to every modern western society. It is considered a seminal work, and has influenced many theorists and artists.

Foucault challenges the commonly accepted idea that the prison became the consistent form of punishment due to humanitarian concerns of reformists, although he does not deny those. He does so by meticulously tracing out the shifts in culture that led to the prison’s dominance, focusing on the body and questions of power. Prison is a form used by the “disciplines”, a new technological power, which can also be found, according to Foucault, in schools, hospitals, military barracks, etc. The main ideas of Discipline and Punishcan be grouped according to its four parts: torture, punishment, discipline and prison.

Read the full Wikipedia article.

January 29, 2009

A critique of Morrison

Finally, another human on this planet that does not think that Toni Morrison is the greatest writer alive. B.R. Myers writes of Morrison’s new novel A Mercy that:

How shallow and vague that is; how glibly it breezes through the life of the mind. A Mercy is eked out with a few set pieces, but even they rush us through; the book never seems to settle into narrative “real time.”

For all its cheerlessness, the novel is anything but grittily realistic. Some scenes, such as one in which a character gets out of her bath “aslide with wintergreen,” evince an effort to make even these miserable lives picturesque. But Morrison’s failure to evoke the period is more the fault of her all-too-contemporary prose style: “1682 and Virginia was still a mess.” No one likes an archaizer, apart from a million Cormac McCarthy fans, but a novelist writing of the 17th century should at least avoid language that is jarringly inconsistent or out of place. Reminiscing, the slaves vacillate between would-be-poetic English and an equally improbable sort of Hollywood Injun: “Shadows of men sat on barrels, then stood. They said they were told to break we in.” Anachronisms abound, from New Age lingo like “She gives off a bad feeling” to the dialect of the postbellum South: “her borning young.” We are even told that our Anglo-Dutch trader had “gone head to head with rich gentry.” What, and not drunk their milk shake?

For the one required class on campus Freshman year we were required to read Beloved which I found to be a self-indulgent and arrogant piece of literary crap. I have never been able to understand why Toni Morrison gets the praise that she does for her novels while other American writers simply get overshadowed.

Link to the original article.

January 27, 2009

Foucault and Punishment

In “Discipline and Punish” he writes:

It was as if the punishment was thought to equal, if not exceed, in savagery the crime itself, to accustom the spectators to a ferocity from which one wished to divert them, to show them the frequency of crime, to make the executioner resemble a criminal, judges murderers, to reverse roles at the last moment, to make the tortured criminal an object of pity or admiration.

Just found that interesting in light of all of these discussion concerning the closing of Guantanamo Bay and the United States’ role in extradition and torture.

January 27, 2009

More from A Thousand Plateaus

Another interesting quote I found while reading the first chapter of Deleuz and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateaus”:

Even when linguistics claims to confine itself to what is explicit an to make no presuppositions about language, it is still in the sphere of a discourse implying particular modes of assemblage and types of social power. (page 7)

I simply found this interesting because I found it to be quite relevant to my feelings toward the teaching and learning of languages like Ancient Greek or Latin. I’ve always been troubled by the way that we do not fully comprehend the structure or construction of these languages, but yet we still make assumptions about language usage and meaning. I believe that we do this by breaking the languages down into a single realm of meaning that may or may not have been applicable or relevant for the general populous of the time.

January 24, 2009

A Thousand Plateaus

For a class on Contemporary Theory (more properly modern French thought) I am in the midst of reading A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In the translator’s foreword to my edition Brian Massumi writes:

A concept is a brick. It can be sued to build the courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window. What is the subject of the brick? The arm that throws it? The body connected to the arm? The brain encased in the body? The situation that brought brain and body to such a juncture? All and none fo the above. What is its object? The window? The edifice? The laws the edifice shelters? The class and other power releations encrusted in the laws? All and none fo the above “What interests us are the circumstances” Because the concept in its unrestrained usage is a set of circumstances, at a volatile juncture.

Just thought that was interesting and worth sharing. Enjoy.

January 23, 2009

Obama’s Speech Writer

From a story posted a little while ago on The Guardian about Obama’s chief speech writer:

When Barack Obama steps up to the podium to deliver his inaugural address, one man standing anonymously in the crowd will be paying especially close attention. With his cropped hair, five o’clock shadow and boyish face, he might look out of place among the dignitaries, though as co-author of the speech this man has more claim than most to be a witness to this moment of history.

Jon Favreau, 27, is, as Obama himself puts it, the president’s mind reader. He is one of the youngest chief speechwriters on record in the White House, and, despite such youth, was at the centre of discussions of the content of today’s speech, one which has so much riding on it.

For a politician whose rise to prominence was largely built upon his powers as an orator, Obama is well versed in the arts of speech-making. But today’s effort will tower over all previous ones.

Reading about the people that President Obama has surrounded himself with just fascinates me. His ability to find talent and surround himself with it is just astounding. Regardless of how the next four years go I do hope that someone composes a book a la “Team of Rivals” about his campaign and his presidency.

Link via Barack Obama’s inauguration speech … crafted by 27-year-old in Starbucks | World news | The Guardian .

December 28, 2008

Containing Appetites

From Don DeLillo’s “Underworld”:

“So what do you do? Punch the guy in the mouth or resist the urge?”

“Point well taken. I don’t have the answer. You have the answer,” he said. “But how serious can a man be if he doesn’t experience a full measure of the appetites and passions of his race, even if only to contain them or direct them, somehow, usefully?”

It’s for passages like this that I read DeLillo. His dialogue can be difficult to adjust to and at times seem very self-referential and disconnected; however, there are many quotes like the above in every book that make you (or at least me) stop and think for a second.

Update: Perhaps a point of clarification is needed here in order for the quote to make any real sense. The first line is said by a young man studying under the Jesuits. The second portion of the quote are the words of a Jesuit priest at the school. I simply found it interesting because it’s not really a typical conversation that one would expect to read between a student and a priest. Anyway, hope that helps.

December 24, 2008

Ebooks?

Gregory Cowles has a post today over on the New York Times website about how 2008 might be remembered as the year that ebooks finally caught on. He references the popularity (or is it a really low supply?) of products like Amazon’s Kindle as part of the reason behind his thinking this. He concludes by writing of a shift to ereaders:

I think I would have a hard time adapting to that — I live too much in my head already, and enjoy the solid physicality of ink on paper — but then, I’m the kind of guy who would have complained about the end of parchment or chiseled stone too. There’s no stopping the future. “When you get right down to it,” a publisher told me, “the story you’re delivering is always more important than the delivery system you use.”

I’m with Cowles here; no matter how tech-savvy I am and no matter how many wonderful uses I find for technology in my life I will never be able to pick up an electronic copy of a book with the same kind of enthusiasm and feelings as a traditional print copy. I look at apps like Classics for the iPhone and iPod Touch and think that if something this well-designed still can’t make reading books on a display a suitable replacement then I’m not sure anything really will.

Also, I think I disagree with the publisher quoted above. I think that an intriguing story becomes inherently less interesting to me if the medium of presentation is one that I cannot accomodate. I just relate it to whenever I try to edit a friend’s college paper on my computer. No matter how good the paper is it simply does not hold my attention and I don’t read it as thoroughly as I do when I print out a copy. Just my two cents.

Thanks to Andrew Sullivan for the tip on the article.