The Library as a Map. Great interview with the two people behind a very interesting library in San Francisco. I’ve really been enjoying the recent articles from Contents.
Tag: books
Status
Earlier today I started Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. I’m already half-way through reading it. A fantastic read with the right mix of tech, books, and intrigue.
I strongly believe digital books benefit from public endpoints. The current generation of readers (human, not electronic) have formed expectations about sharing text, and if you obstruct their ability to share — to touch — digital text, then your content is as good as non-existent. Or, in the least, it’s less likely to be engaged.
Word. Art Space Tokyo is a gorgeous site and I bet will drive a lot of digital sales, in addition to readers.
Hack the Cover
If digital covers as we know them are so ‘dead,’ why do we hold them so gingerly? Treat them like print covers? We can’t hurt them. They’re dead. So let’s start hacking. Pull them apart, cut them into bits and see what we come up with.
This is an essay for book lovers and designers curious about where the cover has been, where it’s going, and what the ethos of covers means for digital book design. It’s for those of us dissatisfied with thoughtlessly transferring print assets to digital and closing our eyes.
The cover as we know it really is — gasp — ‘dead.’ But it’s dead because the way we touch digital books is different than the way we touch physical books. And once you acknowledge that, useful corollaries emerge.
Craig Mod – Hack the Cover.
My recent reading list
Ian Beck’s post the other day inspired me to jot down some notes here about what I recently read. Similar to Ian, I am a binge reader of sorts. There are months that go by where I hardly crack open a book. Other months I will finish a half-dozen.
Before I moved this site to WordPress.com I had a custom post type that listed out which books I recently completed in a special page template. Since that is no longer, here is what has kept me interested recently.
Shop Class as Soulcraft
A relatively easy read but superbly interesting. Matthew Crawford writes about his experiences in life as a mechanic and at a think tank. The guiding philosophy behind the book is one I agree with.
Makers
I just finished this the other day and loved it. I had heard good things from others and the book did not disappoint.
The Dark Tower
This has the benefit of being a 7-part series. I have been a Stephen King fan since 5th grade but I really think this is his finest work. I started the series a couple times before but this time I finally have consistent time to finish it. Since August I read volumes 3-5 and am about halfway through volume 6 now.
The Dark Tower is a wonderful mix of futurism and western fiction with a few dark twists thrown in. Handily the first volume is short and easy to read. I would encourage anyone to give that a read. If it hooks you the series just gets better from there.
Steve Jobs
Fairly interesting. Extremely fast read. This was decent but not great. I would recommend reading it and then listening to John Siracusa tear it apart in “The wrong guy” (pt. II).
Cloud Atlas
Michael Pick recommended this to me at our Budapest meetup. It was fascinating. If you don’t mind non-linear fiction with a bit of imaginary world construction I cannot recommend it highly enough. Possibly the best piece of fiction I read this year.
The Effective Executive
If you are interested in ideas around managing teams this is a good one. Yes it is from the 1960s, but the advice is solid. Unlike some other business books it focuses on the concrete with digestible advice that actually gives you something to take back to your work.
The Future of the Book
If your book is 600 pages long, you are demanding more of my time than I feel free to give. And if I could accomplish the same change in my view of the world by reading a 60-page version of your argument, why didn’t you just publish a book this length instead?
The honest answer to this last question should disappoint everyone: Publishers can’t charge enough money for 60-page books to survive; thus, writers can’t make a living by writing them. But readers are beginning to feel that this shouldn’t be their problem. Worse, many readers believe that they can just jump on YouTube and watch the author speak at a conference, or skim his blog, and they will have absorbed most of what he has to say on a given subject. In some cases this is true and suggests an enduring problem for the business of publishing. In other cases it clearly isn’t true and suggests an enduring problem for our intellectual life.
Sam Harris – The Future of the Book.
The New Value of Text
Text lasts. It’s not platform-dependant, you don’t just get it from one source, read it in one place, understand it in one way. It is not dependent on technology: it is what we make technology out of. Code is text, it is the fundamental nature of technology. We’ve been trying for decades, since the advent of hypertext fiction, of media-rich CD-ROMs, to enhance the experience of literature with multimedia. And it has failed, every time.
Yet we are terrified that in the digital age, people are constantly distracted. That they’re shallower, lazier, more dazzled. If they are, then the text is not speaking clearly enough. We are not speaking clearly enough. Like over-stuffed attendees at a dull banquet, the mind wanders. We are terrified that people are dumbing down, and so we provide them with ever dumber entertainment. We sell them ever greater distractions, hoping to dazzle them further.
James Bridle – The New Value of Text.
Annual subscriptions are now available for The Manual. This was a Kickstarter project that I funded when it was live. The first issue was fantastic in every way. The design, writing, and feeling of the essays was well worth it.
The shape of our future book
The current surface forms for digital books are far from perfect, but they work and are getting better with each device and software iteration. So, in my opinion, many of the critical future questions digital books designers will have to address don’t directly involve pure content layout. Future-book design is not merely about font sizes and leading. Instead, our hardest (and possibly most rewarding) problems will involve the intermingling of content and data.
Craig Mod – The shape of our future book.
Is this the end for books?
So, even if they now seem natural, the lengths and formats of books are but cultural accidents.
Sam Leith – Is this the end for books?