I've played around with, a few different e-books from one of the first prototypes 9 years ago (when I worked in publishing) to Sony Reader to the Kindle. I haven't bought one yet mainly due to the cost factor. I get most of my books for free at the library. Or I download them and read them on my computer or Blackberry. But whichever way I get my information, and why I choose to read what I read is nobody's business but my own.
This week has been a big shake-up in digital privacy. Google is pushing to radically redefine how we get and use digital content. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Google wants to monitor what you read, when you read it, and even how long you stay on any given page. The info on what you choose to read could possibly be combined with other personal information from Google apps you've used in past. It's a virtual library of who you are and what you do. The outcome? A bunch of people having knowledge about you that's none of their business.
One word: creepy. For more information on what's happening,visit EFF.org.
By Liz Suman
I spent the last two and a half hours in the Columbia School of Journalism (on the sixth floor in a really uncomfortable chair). Had I thought to tweet, the message I would have shot into cyberspace would have read something like: “Listening to the Director of the Institute for the Future of the BookBob Stein tell a room of 100 aspiring book editors, writers, publicists and agents that the print publishing industry as we know it is dead or at least will be soon.” After over two hours of lecture and discussion, half the audience wanted to run and the other half wanted to stay and fight.
* Traditional print book publishing should move away from the printed page and onto the screen in an online, subscriber-based community of readers.
* “A book is a place where readers (and sometimes authors) congregate” (Stein).
* Authors should be paid not for selling physical copies of books, but for turning on their monitors and engaging with readers about their work via online comment boards and paragraph-by-paragraph annotations.
These are some of the new roles Stein envisions for readers, writers and books within Comment Press, a user-based reading concept he has developed at the Institute for the Future of the Book, “a small think-and-do tank investigating the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens.”
Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, one of the Institute’s reading projects, in which seven readers discussed a digital text with one another online. Photo Courtesy of Apt.
Stein’s ideas are timely and provocative as well as jarring and controversial. We all know that the Kindle, Sony Reader, eBooks, and other eReaders are quickly catching on with consumers (Stephen King’s latest novel was originally released straight-to-Kindle), but no one who loves books wants to be told that their tattered copies of James and the Giant Peach and Where the Wild Things Are aren’t sacred let alone obsolete. Stein’s argument that his online, interactive book publishing model will replace the book as a physical object is fundamentally at odds with the traditional, definitive reading experience of sitting down (alone) to read a book (that we can hold in our hands), an experience tonight’s audience was quick to defend with a sea of hands right around the time Stein prophesized that, “Our great grandchildren will think of reading as a social experience.”
Comment Press isn’t the only project Bob has pioneered. Click here for a sample of Comment Press and visit the Institute’s website to learn more about what is probably the most complex, nerdy, and sophisticated set of alternatives to traditional printed matter out there ("Sophie", for example, includes multiple versions of the same text (i.e. The user can view original and revised drafts of the Gettysburg Address just by clicking different links).
I don’t believe physical books will ever become obsolete, whether digital books come to dominate the marketplace or not - The experiences are simply too different. But while online books may not have won the populist reader vote, they definitely give book nerds a lot to think about.
Bob Stein, Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book. Photo Courtesy of New York Magazine.
I recently began a summer graduate program at Columbia called the Columbia Publishing Course, so for the next couple of months I’ll be living uptown in Morningside Heights and writing some posts on books, magazines, electronic readers, the Institute for the Future of the Book, and anything else that’s geeky in the world of printed and digital matter.
The course is divided into three parts: books, magazines, and online publishing. Each day begins with a guest lecture; this week alone I’ve had the fortune to hear a slew of book publishing legends, from Alfred Knopf Editor-in-Chief Bob Gottlieb to Grove Atlantic PublisherMorgan Entrekin. With seminars, workshops, and three speakers a day up to seven days a week, I’ve already learned more about the book publishing industry than anyone who isn’t a book nerd would want to know. Lucky for me, I am!
For all the other book nerds out there, here’s the inaugural post in this Nerdabout mini-series on the publishing industry:
Top 10 Things You Probably Didn’t Know about Book Publishing
• The printing press was invented in 1454; page numbers were not invented until 1500.
• In 1740, Samuel Richardson published Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, often cited as the first English novel.
• According to Little Brown Publisher Michael Pietsch, 275,000 new trade titles were sold in the US in 2007. This means that an emerging author had to compete with over a quarter of a million other titles upon the release of his or her first book. Pietsch notes that in 1937, the books that made the bestseller list involved losing weight, acquiring wealth, and “getting right with God” – many of the same themes that create best sellers today.
• Twilight sold 45 million copies in the first 18 months and the series has sold over 53 million copies since the first book was released in 2005. It is now selling faster than Harry Potter. In the original manuscript, Edward and Bella get married towards the beginning of the story. Little Brown Editor Megan Tingley convinced author Stephanie Meyers to delay the marriage until the end of the series.
• Sessalee Hensley, the national fiction buyer for Barnes & Noble, is widely considered the most powerful woman in publishing. Her responsibilities, which include deciding which novels the chain will carry, how many copies it will buy, and where the books will be displayed in the stores, in many ways determine whether or not a book is successful. Last week she made an appearance at the Columbia Publishing Course during the program’s infamous 7-day book workshop, where she purchased different titles from the students’ faux publishing companies.
• Grove Atlantic Publisher Morgan Entrekin made the deal for the Sex and the City book with Candace Bushnell at midnight at a dinner party at Bowery Bar, which Candace attended with her then-boyfriend Ron Galotti (The real-life inspiration for “Mr. Big”).
• Salacious but unconfirmed publishing rumor: Faulkner received a mere $700 for The Sound and the Fury.
• The New York Times established a “Bestsellers” list dedicated only to children’s books after complaints that Harry Potter was taking four of the ten slots on the general list.
• Ted Kennedy received an $8 million advance for his memoirs in 2007; Sarah Palin’s recent deal is rumored to be at $11 million, and Clinton received a whopping $15 MILLION advance for his 2004 autobiography, My Life, one of if not the highest non-fiction book advances in history.
• The Bible is not only the best-selling book in history; it is also the best selling book each year, according to The New Yorker. Annual sales average at least half a billion dollars, and between two and six billion copies have been sold overall. While the range is huge, it’s status as the highest selling book of all time is indisputable.
Last week at Ajax World, I was psyched to stumble across John Sundman, blogger for Wetmachine, science fiction author, former truck driver, and former Silicon Valley guy. His self-published books, Acts of the Apostles, Cheap, Complex Devices, and The Pains deal with the complex relationships between humans and technology. You can download any or all of them for free. However, since the art is awesome we suggest you buy one for yourself. John's work has been described as "immoral and deeply ugly" and he was the recipient of Brazil's Rei do Lixo award and the Society for Technical Communication's Award of Distinguised Technical Communication.
Can science be informative, funny AND accessible to non-nerds? I answer with a resounding “yes!” thanks to Mary Roach.
Author Mary Roach comes from a non-science liberal arts background and uses her science naïveté to OUR advantage when she goes exploring the macabre, the strange and most especially the taboo while investigating how science has historically approached topics that fall under those categories!
I hung around with Mary at Ohio State University’s Injury Biomechanics symposium just last week. In order to perform studies on how injuries occur and how best to understand impact tolerance in various situations such as car accidents, it is important to use models which are numb to pain, compliant and quiet; in other words, cadavers, (or rather, Post Mortem Human Subjects -PMHS). As gruesome as that sounds, it would be unethical to recreate those injuries on live humans. Test dummies are useful to an extent and do provide information, but tissue damage is impossible to recreate in rubber and metal. As Mary had extensively researched various uses for human cadavers for Stiff, she has inadvertently become the spokesperson on behalf of the benefits of respectfully using cadavers for research. At the symposium she specifically addressed the importance of dealing with media reaction and the public perception of using PMHS in research.
I had taken full-body human dissection as I began my PhD coursework. This experience gave me a unique perspective with which to approach Mary’s first book, because I was able to come to it with an appreciation of the generosity of the donor and his/her family. In addition, having handled a dead body from top to bottom and from outside to inside had steeled my senses for what I would encounter in Stiff.
Stiff addresses the many different ways that cadavers have been used in the past and are STILL being used to this day to train surgeons, to study crime, to understand what really happens upon impact in vehicular and airplane crashes, and even what happens when a body experiences a bullet or bomb. Other questions Mary pursued include the curiosity of what happens during crucifixion? What is the appeal of cannibalism? Can we really do a head transplant? All fairly gruesome but as each has been approached scientifically, they were fair topics for this book.
Sounds pretty serious, huh?
Not quite. While she wrote Stiff with respect for the cadavers and sensitivity to readers not acclimated to the gruesomeness that accompanies death, Mary’s books have the wry wit and quirky observations of an outsider trying to make sense of it all. I love the fact that I laughed so hard while reading her books in coffee shops that I spit tea out of my mouth. I loved this book.
And if science of the dead isn’t cool enough for you, Bonk is sex from start to finish made sexier by being about the SCIENCE of it all. It’s neither pornographic nor libido killing, and it is hilarious.
Enjoy the interview, and be certain turn up your volume because I am resolving microphone issues. My favorite portion starts in the second half when I ask Mary the question submitted by science writer Carl Zimmer and we learn “What science can Mary NOT make funny?”
Mary was a charm, a joy, and oh so fun! There’s more details of my visit with her on my site: joannelovesscience.com
Rather than working I was combing through the fabulous tweets we get on twitter. Sciencegoddess reminded me how much I love Mary Roach, author of the beloved Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook, Science Tackles the Afterlife and Bonk,The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, which I have yet to read. Sciencegoddess will be sharing the interview she did with Mary. Stay tuned.
Based on a closely guarded Nerdabout algorithm involving sales
figures, countercultural clout, unhinged fanaticism, belated yet
expanding mainstream influence, smarty-pants humor, over-the-top
cleverness, and prodigious world-building prowess, our Nerdabout
computers have come up with this highly subjective, unapologetic and,
some dare to say, controversial list of great reads. Agree? Disagree?
Our Comments Department says, "Bring it."
Here at Nerdabout.com, we hear from a lot of folks who are nervous about revealing their inner, nerdier selves. After all, what will the neighbors think?
But fear no longer! This is the place to celebrate your geeky, nerdy inclinations ... whatever they may be. So far we've heard from sports nerds, Powerpoint nerds, Rubik's Cube nerds, and even 18th century pirate nerds. And we're sure there are many more out there just waiting to step forward.
If you want to declare your nerdiness to the world (and hook up with other followers), submit your deep dark geeky secret in the Comments here - we may choose you to be featured on Nerdabout.com and ScienceChannel.com.
I was privileged this weekend to have a couple of minutes to talk on video with Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons. I was able to ask him a few questions about the influence of Watchmen on information design, and about the future of comics as a medium.
A few weeks back we posted a clip of Esther K. Smith's launch for her latest publication Magic Books & Paper Toys. Esther liked the clip so much she invited me to come down to their studio in Tribeca and watch her husband Dikko Faust work on their limited edition 2009 Date Book (at $200 a pop, they're already, or are about to be, sold out!). Having nearly gone the way of the dodo
with the advent of digital publishing, letterpress printing began a revival in the 90s in no small part to Martha Stewart's affection for wedding invitations. Today, letterpress artists like Dikko Faust from all corners of the world are bringing the medium into the new millennium. Check out the master at work!
Ten Things You Might Want to Letterpress
Business Cards
Invitations
Greeting Cards
Postcards
Manifestos
Chapbooks
Art Prints
Posters
Date Books
Your Memoir
There’s a certain stereotype of a Nerd that includes skinny, wears glasses and likes to read a lot. Pierre Greene of Adaptation Wars—the newest club on the Lower East Side—has brought this stereotype to life through a new kind of book club.
The premise is basic and brilliant: Read books with cinematic counterparts; meet and discuss (The first book was
American Psycho
). The process is democratic: Each meeting, members nominate and vote on the following month’s selection (The next meeting will feature
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
). The environment is pleasant: Books, beer and pizza in a bar on a Sunday afternoon, followed by a screening of the film on the bar’s massive projector (The
Skinny
opens the bar up early for the book club. The 3pm start time means you can make it even after a late Saturday night). The crowd is casual: Smart and participatory but unpretentious.
The best part—all you have to do is read the book (or not), and show up and watch a movie (or not) while drinking beers on a Sunday afternoon. There are no pretentious, intellectual, hipster, “I only see films-not-movies at the Film Forum” airs anywhere near the club or it’s mission—The reason for this is because the club doesn’t really have a mission other than to provide a setting for people who like books and movies to talk about books and movies. Literary theorists argue that the purpose of adaptation is to fill a void or re-imagine an element from the original work—If you’re into it, discussing the disparities between the book and the movie is exciting. And the big screen projector is awesome.
I went to the December meeting without having read the book or seen the movie and enjoyed the hair of the dog
while watching Christian Bale toy with Chloë Sevigny
and the others and then passionately engaged in the post-film discussion before voting on Cuckoo (My impassioned nomination for
Gone With the Wind
was violently shot down).
How does the adaptation of the classic book club fit the aforementioned stereotype of a nerd?
Next Meeting:
January 4th, 3pm
Book: One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey The Skinny
174 Orchard Street (btwn Stanton and Houston)
Dropped by the launch for Esther K. Smith's ("the Betty Crocker of bookmaking") latest book--Magic Books & Paper Toys at Cooper Union downtown. As the Kindle and Sony Reader begin to take off, it's nice to see the book and its medium still have some tricks up their sleeves. Or as Marshall McLuhan said in Understanding Media, "As technology advances, it reverses the characteristics of every situation again and again. The age of automation is going to be the age of 'do it yourself.'" Here's a little clip to take you along for the ride. (Esther very kindly invited me to her and her husband Dikko Faust's Purgatory Pie Press letterpress studio to watch some their work in process. Look out for that video in an upcoming post.)
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