futureofthebook.com

Random House Is Dropping E-Book Imprint

“The Random House Trade Group, one of the first publishers to announce the creation of a line of purely digital books last year, became the first to cancel that idea yesterday, quietly scuttling its AtRandom imprint in recognition of the scant consumer demand for books that can be read on screens. But the company will continue to publish electronic versions of books.”
(more)
(see also)

remember when Nick was fighting terrorism alone?

Acid in paper was not the real enemy of civilization afterall, it was the presumptive mobilization into battle. (a great summary
interview)

another national treasure

While Craig has been visiting with Nick Baker, I have been in Concord Michigan visiting with Tim Moore. Tim has a prototype built for the
vertical plow. This will be a component of a next generation of equipment for the repair of damaged adhesive bound books.

Tim Moore and Patty Scobey are magnificent characters. Come to think of it, Tim and Patty would be a great Presidents for this country.

Here is a shot of the Moore/Scobey White House in the early morning light.

blood, sweat and tears

A voice of leadership in times of crisis: Attorney General John Ascroft says that, in the absense of attacks, we should not be lulled “into a false sense of indifference”. As an option he urged Americans to “go about their lives.”

• This item has comments in the Manila discussion archive.

overt Stealth Press forecast

Roy Smith, vice president of Marketing at
Stealth Press:”Our expectations are that e-books will ultimately occupy a market share equivalent to audio books (roughly 5 percent),” he says. “The fact is that recreational reading does not work off of a screen (handheld or desktop). E-books are perfect for technical or reference works that need to be constantly updated. While we agree that the publishing industry is in need of a major overhaul, we do not agree that the ‘container’ of the literature is the problem.” from
“E-Books: Boom or Bust”

FotB hands off store items to UICB

Bookbinding kit revenues will now be directed to the benefit of the University of Iowa Center for the Book. A new and expanded kit line is in development.

FotB is power vacuume

The first 25 hits from a Google search for Future of the Codex Book came back FotB.

weblogs unite!

Piss on them both; both the USA and the Taliban they are both locked in some stupid struggle. Its time to do a new nation with folks that can manage themselves and information er, librarianbloggers.

“Our values, in practice, are not “freedom” and “self-determination” as some would believe, these supposed values are really a lifestyle, bought and paid for, in part, by our self-serving foreign policy.” Craig

zyBooks links to FotB

This London based book art
portal links to FotB twice and twice mentions our kits.

PDF blogger?

This
guy appears to have a totally wacky wired version of Walt Crawford’s “Cites & Insights”.

thread?

FotB is now getting exposed thong hits on reported exposed thong hits:
BookNews
BookNews. FotB mines referers. Pagan Library provides portal for Celtic
Web Art. FotB gets hit from google search for “exposed thongs”.
www.futureofthebook.com/ – 17k – Cached – Similar pages

going by the book

I went to a Mosque. It was not a very comfortable experience. I was comfortable, but the Muslim faith seems to be subjugated by its own books. The course of life is prescribed by them and even after death everyone must read again to realize the consequences. This last book is called the Book of Deeds and each person is given his own volume already written.

Books may not be good tyrants. Perhaps books should not assume the role of God. Islamic culture is advanced in perceiving the strength of the influence of books and the pursuit of the resulting discoveries of the mind and the Muslim faith has an elegant tinge of pride in its devotion to books and reading. But, perhaps, books are a companion of consciousness and not the equivalent. Removing shoes in a library is easy, but the Mosque was a library of behaviors.

FotB mines referers

Pagan Library provides portal for
Celtic Web Art.

***FotB gets hit from google search for “exposed thongs”

Timeless Tech
of the walking hammers, the technology is fully exposed. It is almost a natural technology skin
was dehaired and tawed to produce thongs and skin for covering.
www.futureofthebook.com/storiestoc/tech – 14k – Cachad – Liknande sidor

FotB defines terrorism

Terrorism is the destruction of a society using its own infrastructure. Gleaming cities, pervasive news media, technologically advanced military, efficient mail service are both assets and liabilities. They are liabilities as targets or tools of destruction and they can also be liabilities as contexts for response and resilience. Societies with different infrastructures have different vulnerabilities.

The Taliban are not vulnerable in terms of a shared infrastructure. We can not bomb their gleaming cities, instantly manipulate their resident populations, contest back and forth with toys of military technology or really junk up their junk mail. So as a society we feel abused and terrorized.

Now lets say that we turn around and use our infrastructure to really contest some ground with the Taliban. Lets say we create, in a small portion of Afghanistan, a gleaming city, a pervasive news media, a technologically advanced military and an efficient mail service. In terms of history, the Islamic cultures are experts at such infrastructures.

We should encourage the building of progressive, similar infrastructures in diverse societies. This strategy is working for us in contests with societies in Russia and China. These days we tend to be less terrorized by Russian and Chinese societies. er .maybe this approach will work.

weblogs: a history & perspective

“The blogger, by virtue of simply writing down whatever is on his mind, will be confronted with his own thoughts and opinions. Blogging every day, he will become a more confident writer. A community of 100 or 20 or 3 people may spring up around the public record of his thoughts. Being met with friendly voices, he may gain more confidence in his view of the world; he may begin to experiment with longer forms of writing, to play with haiku, or to begin a creative project–one that he would have dismissed as being inconsequential or doubted he could complete only a few months before.”
Rebecca’s Pocket

hands prompt the mind

This exposition of speed reading technique is a magnificent indication of the
role of the hands in the act of reading and comprehension. eBooks are not hard to read, just hard to comprehend.

this site keeps poping up

“Only the ‘divine’ can foresee the future, but the desire to envision the unknown future is always too tempting for human beings, particularly those species called scholars and fortune-tellers. The idea of ‘future’ is based on the unilinear concept of time. This linear way of thinking undoubtedly constitutes the writing system of a book. A book is structured like a pyramid of ideas, consisting of a hierarchy of thoughts, a dominant logical point of sequence: topics, subtopics, sub-subtopics, all of which culminate into the supremacy of a singular idea, like God. This is very much the writing culture which has been strongly developed in the West.” http://www.honco.net/9809/roundtable.html#TOPICS5

reading mode morphology

Roger Chartier on the death of the reader. see http://www.honco.net/100day/02/2000-0531-chartier.html

***smokin’ idea for book craft sales

The cigarette pack is also a classical small book size. See http://www.artomat.org/ (From Olivia Primanis, ABW)

October 8, 2001, world war four

This doesn’t seem like world war three. That scenario of the cold war lacked the strategic use of humanitarian aid. There was also a similarity of opposing forces that stymied engagement.

The opposing perspectives of this conflict are different. In the perspective of the opened societies, the world is a stage for events to be played out, while in the perspective of the trouble makers, the world is a book already written.

interplay of reading modes

Jeff Porter of the English department at the University of Iowa has won the 2001 President’s Award for Technology Innovation. He is recognized for his course
“Multimedia Writing: Radio Essays”.

In Radio Essays, students learn to explore the conceptual resonance between sounds and words, discovering how sounds change the way we experience words. Acording to Jeff Porter; “An aural text is quite different from its print-based counterpart, and that’s because sound permits us to experience in a text what we might not otherwise see or hear.”

As reported in FYI, UI Faculty & Staff News, 39/4, 2001.

Craig is in the October American Libraries magazine!

Walt Crawford started a series of three articles on electronic formats with a salute to the library weblogger community and to Craig Jensen’s BookNotes. BookNotes is a pioneer site of the genre as well as an exemplar of design and content quality. Craig is legendary for this kind of innovation and achievement!