Posts tagged books
E-Books Must Be Accessible, and That Means Audio
As people and institutions move away from print and toward electronic books, publishers are making more and more books available in electronic formats, using devices like Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader, digitization services like Google’s, and downloadable books such as Adobe Digital Editions. The technology is becoming more user-friendly, and readers welcome the new options. E-books offer benefits for all readers, including reduction of damage to the environment, portability, light weight, and improved reference capabilities. But for some readers, e-books offer even more: their first opportunity to enjoy reading.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)
Web Standards for E-books
The internet did not replace television, which did not replace cinema, which did not replace books. E-books aren’t going to replace books either. E-books are books, merely with a different form.
» via A List Apart
The Oxford Companion to the Book
Books cannot compete with Internet speed and connectivity. “The Oxford Companion to the Book” becomes, in this contest, obsolescent on publication day. It has an essay on electronic readers but no entry for the Kindle, nothing about Google’s assault on authors’ rights. It is full of information on fonts and printing processes, on philologists and collectors, on colophons and entrepreneurs.
The “Companion” cares not for missed opportunities. Its focus is on the glory of the book manifest. It is a fount of knowledge where the Internet is but a slot machine. It refreshes where Google merely sates. We will always need books for depth of memory, the free association of random thoughts. This dangerous two-tome sits on my living-roomshelf, an irresistible distraction.
» via The Wall Street Journal (subscription may be required)
People who reject e-books often say they can’t live without the heft, the texture and — curiously — the scent of traditional books. This aria of hypersensual book love is not my favorite performance. I sometimes suspect that those who gush about book odor might not like to read. If they did, why would they waste so much time inhaling? Among the best features of the Kindle, Amazon’s great e-reader, is that there’s none of that. The device, which consigns all poetry and prose to the same homely fog-toned screen, leaves nothing to the experience of books but reading. This strikes me as honest, even revolutionary.
» via The New York Times
Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. I think that there is nothing, not even crime, more opposed to poetry, to philosophy, ay, to life itself than this incessant business.
FOR TOO LONG, the act of printing something in and of itself has been placed on too high a pedestal. The true value of an object lies in what it says, not its mere existance. And in the case of a book, that value is intrinsically connected with content.
Let’s divide content into two broad groups.
Content without well-defined form (Formless Content)
Content with well-defined form (Definite Content (Fig. 2))
Formless Content can be reflowed into different formats and not lose any intrinsic meaning. It’s content divorced from layout. Most novels and works of non-fiction are Formless.
When Danielle Steele sits at her computer, she doesn’t think much about how the text will look printed. She thinks about the story as a waterfall of text, as something that can be poured into any container. (Actually, she probably just thinks awkward and sexy things, but awkward and sexy things without regard for final form.)
Content with form — Definite Content — is almost totally the opposite of Formless Content. Most texts composed with images, charts, graphs or poetry fall under this umbrella. It may be reflowable, but depending on how it’s reflowed, inherent meaning and quality of the text may shift.
» via @craigmod » via Zeldman.com
Making the Case for iPad E-Book Prices
In the emerging world of e-books, many consumers assume it is only logical that publishers are saving vast amounts by not having to print or distribute paper books, leaving room to pass along those savings to their customers.
Publishers largely agree, which is why in negotiations with Apple, five of the six largest publishers of trade books have said they would price most digital editions of new fiction and nonfiction books from $12.99 to $14.99 on the forthcoming iPad tablet — significantly lower than the average $26 price for a hardcover book.
But publishers also say consumers exaggerate the savings and have developed unrealistic expectations about how low the prices of e-books can go. Yes, they say, printing costs may vanish, but a raft of expenses that apply to all books, like overhead, marketing and royalties, are still in effect.
All of which raises the question: Just how much does it actually cost to produce a printed book versus a digital one?
» via The New York Times
A Universal BookA Universal Book! The naive ambition of such a project is amazing. According to the article, what is left of this is a small exhibit in a museum in Belgium.Mundaneum : A visionary precursor to the Internet made of index cards
“When the Mundaneum opened in 1910, its purpose was to collect all of the world’s knowledge on neatly organized 3 x 5 index cards. The brainchild of Belgian lawyer Paul Otlet and Nobel Peace Prize winner Henri LaFontaine, the vast project eventually totaled 12 million cards, each classified according to the Universal Decimal Classification system developed by Otlet.
Le Corbusier was one of many prominent figures enthralled by Otlet’s scheme of a “Universal Book.” He described it as a panorama of “the whole of human history from its origins,” and signed on to design an international “city of the intellect,” centered around the Mundaneum.”
When It Comes to Content, Amazon’s Kindle Won’t Be Undersold
On Jan. 27, Steven P. Jobs was still standing on a stage in San Francisco, presenting Apple’s new iPad, when the phones started ringing. Senior managers from Amazon.com were calling newspaper, magazine and book publishers trying to glean any information possible about the deals Apple was offering them to supply content for its new reading device.
Amazon, which pioneered the e-reader category with its Kindle devices, is determined not to be out-priced by Apple or any other rival.
» via The New York Times
Book Cell: Octagonal Building Made Entirely From Books - Inhabitat
Architecture is knowledge, history, research and trend. This is literally evident in Book Cell, an octagonal building made entirely from books that was installed in the Modern Art Center in Lisboa. Slovakian artist Matej Kren built an octagonal framework, filled it with books and removed it, leaving a symmetrical, enclosed room of stacked literature.
Macmillan’s DynamicBooks Lets Professors Rewrite E-Textbooks
Readers can modify content on the Web, so why not in books?
In a kind of Wikipedia of textbooks, Macmillan, one of the five largest publishers of trade books and textbooks, is introducing software called DynamicBooks, which will allow college instructors to edit digital editions of textbooks and customize them for their individual classes.
Professors will be able to reorganize or delete chapters; upload course syllabuses, notes, videos, pictures and graphs; and perhaps most notably, rewrite or delete individual paragraphs, equations or illustrations.
» via The New York Times
Books Are Becoming Fringe Media
I just finished a book — Richard Price’s excellent “Lush Life” — hardly a noteworthy feat except it’s the first book I’ve read cover to cover in several months. It languished for years on my reading list, which has itself grown longer by the week. In fact, of all the books I’ve read in my life, a shockingly small percentage have been read in the past several years.
This has a lot to do with the people who write, publish and sell books. The big threat to Amazon’s Kindle isn’t people reading e-books on the iPad or the Nook. It’s that books are becoming fringe media.
» via GigaOM
The image of the Washington County (Maryland) Free Library’s first motorized bookmobile shown above is from the Wisconsin Historical Society’s International Harvester Company digital collection.
Who's afraid of digital book piracy?
A Guardian article on the rise of digital books and ereaders, speculating on the possibility of pirated books. A good overview of the complications of going digital.
Original Content — Copyright © 2010
Christopher D. Barth.
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