breaking the page
“I’m thrilled to announce the release of the “preview edition” of Breaking the Page: Transforming Books and the Reading Experience (iBookstore, Amazon, O’Reilly). In this free download, I tackle one big-ticket question: how do we make digital books as satisfying as their print predecessors?” Peter Meyers
Peter Meyers (graduate of U of Iowa Writer’s Workshop) has a free sampler of his book Breaking the Page. He begins with consideration of an alternative title; Breaking the Book but he should also consider Hamady’s Breaking the Binding. The Meyer exposition investigates inherent screen format for books and how it will differ and not mimic the paper book.
The Page has become a cross-over topic in study of the comparison of screen and paper books, most recently with Mak’s book How the Page Matters or long ago in Keith Smith’s “punctuation of the page” of 1989, Text in the Book Format.
The Meyer book is excellent even if I was forced to read it on Kindle. Particularly fine are descriptions of attributes of the paper book. Three reading behaviors of browsing, navigation and search are defined that highlight the refinements of print.
Meyer then studies, surveys and proposes attributes of the screen book that could fulfill reader needs. Appraising the state of ebook delivery, he maps the opportunities for a more native, efficient, and satisfying screen book browsing, navigation and searching. I particularly appreciate his definition of distraction as a reading impediment. This is going to be a standard text for book futurists.
Futurist insights could be enriched by a larger book studies perspective. Peter does request information on development of the Table of Contents. This topic alone can advance both forward and backward into fundamental issues of reader prompted parsing.
thrilled
I’m also thrilled to announce the release of the “preview edition” of The Future of the Book: A Way Forward, Iowa Book Works, 2011. A useful evaluation of implications of dual – screen and paper – book delivery, this zany, and informative publication is readable.
Just $10 plus $3 shipping. Send no money. Your mailing address will trigger the order with invoice to follow with delivery. Pay only if dumbfounded. iowa.book.works(at)mchsi(dot)com
boson
A margin or perimeter of encounters of real and virtual is suggested by prohibition of cell phone use or other distractive connectivites while driving or performing surgeries. The two worlds are colliding and the overlaps can be destructive. Meanwhile, The Higgs Boson so called “God” particle has been purported to have been discovered just prior to the Christmas holidays by scientists at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Here as well, theoretic vies with observable. This sounds like such a fundamental confrontation that it must be timeless.