{reading and writing in} The Age of Sand

On the occasion of being a publisher for 40 years - The words of David R. Godine:

Fri, 21 May 2010 14:00:25 -0700

We're working hard double time to get everything ready for David R. Godine's 40th Anniversary Retrospective Lecture on May 6th at the Boston Public Library, and hope to see all of you at the talk. Until then, here is David's “Letter from the Publisher” which appears in our 2010 Catalog.
~~
WHEN I STARTED this company, some forty years ago in an abandoned cow barn, I was only twenty five and had no idea what the word “publishing” meant, much less how to do it. We were then, all six of us, primarily printers, producing fine books for others, and, when the presses were unoccupied, occasionally issuing a title for ourselves. As the years went by, I decided to concentrate on publishing and, like many deluded capitalists, dreamed of growing what clearly is — and should remain — a cottage industry into a major international player. This wasn’t entirely hubris; all houses were much smaller then, the capital required to produce books was modest, government support (even to tiny houses) was flowing, and the cost of mistakes was small. The narrow, personal world of trade publishing was still run by opinionated individuals, whose names were often eponymous with their companies, and who more or less published what they liked and did their crying in private. Company policy was dictated by editors, not by marketing departments. (It was Edwin Land who taught me that the size of a company’s marketing department is always in inverse proportion to the quality of its products.) It was still possible to dream of becoming a general trade publisher whose list would cover a variety of subjects and whose books could be produced to high standards, and to do it all with a minimum of fuss and compromise.
Looking back, and knowing a little more about my own temperament, it was foolish (almost delusional) to have thought that this company could ever become larger than it is. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, and the pleasure I derive from working year in and year out in this ship of fools comes from the hands-on experience with the books themselves, not in being a manager or an administrator, for which I have little talent and less interest. If you pay attention, close attention, to every book you publish, and if you publish or reprint — as we do — close to sixty titles a year, it is all you can do to read the manuscripts that come in, oversee the design and production, and take an active part in the selling. So, for better or worse, this will always be a small company involving a few fanatics, selling to a relatively small lunatic fringe who still care about the niceties of a well-turned phrase, a neatly produced book, and an eclectic list. This is not exactly the recipe America prescribes for achieving commercial success.
In the sixteenth century, there was a small group of engravers known as “The Little Masters,” so called not because they were stunted, but because their work was small. Their motto was Multum in Parvo: a great deal in a small compass. I have always identified with these artists who were content to create miniscule masterpieces on their own terms and scale. If you believe, as I do, that your work is the footsteps you leave in the sands of time, then every book you publish should contain the proof of that devotion and promise. It is, I think, what Conrad had in mind when he wrote, in his Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, “A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justifications in every line.”
For forty years, and admittedly with varying degrees of success, we have tried to make good on that promise. Not every book carries Conrad’s justification, but more have than not. And the mere effort of trying to come close, to engage in the process, to yet again take a sheaf of manuscript pages and turn them into something as miraculous and as workable and as permanent as a printed book seems tome worth any amount of trouble. As another of our favorite writers, Montaigne, observed, “It’s the journey, not the arrival, that matters.”

via drgodine.blogspot.com

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Saying information wants to be free does more harm than good | Doctorow at the guardian.co.uk

Wed, 19 May 2010 07:55:00 -0700

So what do digital rights activists want, if not "free information?"

They want open access to the data and media produced at public expense, because this makes better science, better knowledge, and better culture – and because they already paid for it with their tax and licence fees.

They want to be able to quote, cite and reference earlier works because this is fundamental to all critical discourse.

They want to be able to build on earlier creative works in order to create new, original works because this is the basis of all creativity, and every work they wish to make fragmentary or inspirational use of was, in turn, compiled from the works that went before it.

They want to be able to use the network and their computers without mandatory surveillance and spyware installed under the rubric of "stopping piracy" because censorship and surveillance are themselves corrosive to free thought, intellectual curiosity and an open and fair society.

They want their networks to be free from greedy corporate tampering by telecom giants that wish to sell access to their customers to entertainment congloms, because when you pay for a network connection, you're paying to have the bits you want delivered to you as fast as possible, even if the providers of those bits don't want to bribe your ISP.

They want the freedom to build and use tools that allow for the sharing of information and the creation of communities because this is the key to all collaboration and collective action — even if some minority of users of these tools use them to take pop songs without paying.

IWTBF has an elegant compactness and a mischievous play on the double-meaning of "free," but it does more harm than good these days.

via guardian.co.uk

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Art in the Age of Sand: Jorge Colombo

Tue, 18 May 2010 13:01:00 -0700

via 20x200.com

I bought this print at 20x200. Why?
I've admired Jorge Colombo's iSketches since I first saw them;
I love Fanelli Cafe (I even have my own photograph of the sign) and have been going there for years;
Colombo's work is representative of tradition (his sketches evoke an older, sometimes noirish New York and at the same time a medium that didn't exist at all just a few years ago.

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Cory Doctorow: 'It Is Impossible to Monetize Obscurity' - mediabistro.com: GalleyCat

Tue, 18 May 2010 08:41:10 -0700

Between Amazon's soon-to-be-divided Kindle "bestseller" list to debates about literary freemiums, the free eBook has been a controversial topic around the publishing Internets.

Today's guest on the Morning Media Menu was novelist and blogger Cory Doctorow, author of the new book For the Win--talking about online currency, book promotion, and if worker unions are feasible in digital culture. Doctorow (pictured via Joi Ito) discussed his controversial strategy of releasing a free eBook edition of his book alongside the print book.

Press play below to listen.

Here's an excerpt: "I make the books available as free downloads under a Creative Commons license that encourages my readers to share them and remix them, provided they are doing so non-commercially. That means one reader who loves the book who knows another reader who would love the book can put the book in that reader's hands ... Tim O'Reilly says: 'The problem with writers isn't piracy, it's obscurity.' It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity."

Doctorow concluded: "I've been doing this since 2003, and every time there is just a rush--hundreds of thousands of downloads in just a few days. People go crazy for it, sharing it with friends...What you start to see really quickly is [people writing online] 'I've never heard of this Doctorow guy, but a friend sent me a link to this.' Over and over again I see that. That's the thing that makes me really excited, finding new readers who will be readers for life. All the writers that I truly love (who I would buy their shopping list), for the most part, I didn't buy the first book of theirs--those writers you discover by a librarian giving you the book or by a friend pressing the book in your hand."

via mediabistro.com

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Ubiquity is the new exclusivity

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 13:50:32 -0700

Good piece on Digital Book World on an author's use of social media. There are lots of these, but Rubin puts it into clear terms and emphasizes that there's no magic bullet and that it takes time... digitalbookworld.com

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Seamus Heaney Reading in NYC Tomorrow

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 11:01:00 -0700

I don't often post about events (I don't often go to events), but this one is special: Seamus Heaney will be reading in New York tomorrow night. I'll be there, of course.

Here are the details: Hunter College Distinguished Writer Series.

His latest book is a translation of Robert Henryson's The Testament of Cresseid and Seven Fables, but I have to imagine he'll be reading from more than that.

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Faulkner reading from "As I Lay Dying"

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:07:48 -0700

060694_harp_01_ITH.gsm Download this file

From HarperCollins (and Open Culture) via Condalmo

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Happy Birthday Tennessee Williams

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:12:00 -0700

One of my favorite literary photographs is this one of Tennessee Williams by Yousuf Karsh, whom if you don't know by name you do by his portraits of Hemingway, Kruschev, Pablo Cassals, and many others.

The writer at his typewriter, cigarette in hand. Classic right?

Today is Williams' birthday (1911 to 1983) and the OUP blog has excerpted a piece from his biography. Here's an interesting bit.

Williams’s best works are brilliant poetic projections of his own obsessions. His greatest characters are eccentric outcasts usually because their sexual desires put them at odds with conventional society. “Desire” is the central word in Williams’s work, but desire is not simply lust; it is a yearning to attain, through sex, some psychological and spiritual state that is always unattainable. “The opposite of death is desire,” Blanche Dubois cries in A Streetcar Named Desire. When Williams’s heroines and heroes yearn for “life,” they mean a union of physical and spiritual fulfillment. It is apt that the object of desire of one of his heroes is named Heavenly (Sweet Bird of Youth). What leads to the often violent destruction of Williams’s central characters is not merely the agents of social and sexual order, but a violent cosmology, most cogently defined in the imagery of Suddenly Last Summer, in which the vision of birds of prey rapaciously feeding on baby turtles in the Galapagos Islands becomes the face of God. Williams’s plays are filled with violence–castration, cannibalism, various forms of physical and psychological mutilation–and in his best work it gives form to his lurid, highly personal vision of experience.

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A Jazz Lexicon - "A unique and rebellious way of speaking..."

Mon, 22 Mar 2010 06:02:00 -0700

Another find while packing (see my previous post on Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable) is Bob Gold's A Jazz Lexicon from 1964. My copy is signed "To the Richardson All-Stars - Richie, Johnnie, Jon & Brooke - with love, Bob Gold 7/23/64" A quick look on the internet and some of my other jazz books gave me no clue to who those guys were but the inscription gives it a nice sense of authenticity and begs the history of the book; how it might have found it's way from someone in the Richardson All-Stars to a used bookstore in Brookyn, where I bought it.

This dictionary is for 20th Century slang from the jazz set. I found a letter to the editor of the New York Review of Books by the author on the use of the word "hep:"

Your recent correspondent, Cal Kolbe Nossiter, in attempting to correct Philip Rahv's nominal use of "hip" merely proliferates the error by identifying the term "hip" as a variant of "hep." Anyone familiar with the jazz scene (or anyone familiar with my recent dictionary of jazz slang, A Jazz Lexicon) knows that the word has always been "hip," and that "hep" is hopelessly square.

For instance, "pork chop"

[prob. from jazzman's approval of both; according to jazzmen, current c. 1900-c 1917, obs. since; see also BARRELHOUSE, GULLY-LOW, LOWDOWN] Slow, earthy blues music. Oral evidence only.

To "collar the jive" was a phrase used by Cab Calloway and part of general slang earlier in the century to mean "to understand and fee rapport with what is being said; to be in the know; to be hip. c1935 jive term."

Like the Brewer's Dictionary, it's tempting to write these words off as quaint, particularly much of the drug-culture related slang, but here especially they represent a history, one with sociological resonance, as Gold points out in his introduction: "...So we get a people in rebellion against a dominant majority, but forced to rebel secretly, to sublimate, as the psychologist would put it--to express themselves culturally through the medium of jazz, and linguistically through a code, a jargon..."

And because much of the language from the early jazz era was spoken, its presence here is all the more remarkable. As much as I love my lovely found hardback copy, if there were ever a case for the digitization of books, having this now out-of-print history of a special set of words is an acute one.

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"Take the scenic route to knowledge" - On Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:20:00 -0700

Packing my books away for our move, I keep running into great things I've not looked at in a while. One of them is Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase & Fable. I love dictionaries and reference books in the first place--have quite a few--but this one is truly unique. My edition is from 1970, the "Centenary Edition" as it was first published in 1870. To its credit, it's never been out of print, but truth is, even though there's a newer edition out this year even, it doesn't matter to me because the old dictionaries show words to be something of an artifact and etymologies don't really capture how meaning evolves (or devolves!, as the case may be).

The definition for "screw" goes like this:

"Slang for wages, salary; possibly because in some employments it was handed out in 'screwed up on paper' or because it was 'screwed out' of one's employer; it is also slang for a prison warder, from the days when the locks were operated from a screw-like movement."

Modern definitions, while much more thorough, are, needless to say, nothing like this one. Likewise, "Screwed" is defined here as "intoxicated. A playful synonym of tight." Of course in a modern context these definitions seem merely quaint, but there are tons of things here that just don't exist now either.

You'll find entries, for example, with stories like that of "John o' Groats":

"The site of a legendary house 1 3/4 miles west of Duncansby Head Caithness, Scotland. The story is of...three Dutch brothers, came to this part of Scotland in the reign of James IV. There came to be eight families of the name and they met annually to celebrate. On once occasion a question of precedency arose, consequently John o'Groat built an eight-sided room with a door to each side and placed an octagonal table therein so that all were 'head of the table'. This building went ever after with the name of John o' Groat's House."

At any rate, Dr Ebenezer Cobham Brewer was, as far as I can tell from his biography in the "Centenary Edition," a man who did little besides read, write and garden. The list of books he wrote or edited is astounding, beginning in 1841 (Brewer was born in 1810) with A Guide to Science, which went into 47 editions and sold more than 319,000 copies by 1905. He wrote books on accounting, scripture, Greek, Roman, French history, as well as a Political, Social, and Literary History of Germany, and near the end of his life, A Dictionary of Miracles.

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Adam Kirsch on Derek Walcott's White Egrets

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 10:56:00 -0700

Adam Kirsch writes so elegantly about Derek Walcott's White Egrets that I think I'd rather direct you to his review rather than attempt my own:

Ironically, though, death has triumphed over Walcott's work in another sense -- by moving to the center of his imagination. It could scarcely be otherwise, for a poet entering his ninth decade. The only choice facing a great writer at Walcott's stage of life is whether to approach the end philosophically, by seeking or at least pretending to seek wisdom and composure, or to rage against the dying of the light. It is hard to know which choice demands more of a writer: Apollonian calm requires the overcoming of the spirit's fear, as in the mystic assurance of Eliot's Four Quartets, while Dionysian fury requires a defiance of the body's weakness, as in the savage late poems of Yeats.

The poignancy of White Egrets lies in Walcott's continual vacillation between these two poles. At times he will write with apparent resignation, naming his ailments and forgiving them:

…the drumming world that dampens your tired eyes

behind two clouding lenses, sunrise, sunset,

the quiet ravages of diabetes.

Accept it all with level sentences,

with sculpted settlement that sets each stanza,

learn how the bright lawn puts up no defences

against the egret's stabbing questions and the night's answer.

via bnreview.barnesandnoble.com

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Anna Livia Plurabelle

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 08:09:00 -0700

02 Anna Livia Plurabelle_v2.m4a Listen on Posterous

The story I've heard about this reading is that Joyce was nearly blind by this time and couldn't see the text, so someone else was dictating the text to him while he read. It's a remarkable reading and for me the key to approaching the Wake because the rhythm brings it to life, as with all of Joyce's readings, the music is everything.

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Enjoying Sotère, the Computerless Blogger

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:24:45 -0800

The Poetry Foundation has a blogger, Sotère Torregian, who seems to not have a computer. He phones in or records his blog posts and has transcripts of comments printed out and sent to him. Soterre is a poet in his 70s now who helped establish the Afro-American studies program at Stanford in the sixties. He was associated with the "New York School" of poets (think Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch among others), which puts him in some pretty interesting territory, historically and poetically.

But what's truly interesting is not that he is a part of this massive media machine (that is, the blogging phenomenon) without even having a computer, but it's his blog posts, such as they are. He's very conversational and generous and speaks with an even, confident flow, chatting about life and poetry. Recent topics include why Finnegans Wake is the best thing since Shakespeare, his cat Esmerelda, and Racquel, oh, Racquel.

Here's the link to Sotère's posts at the Poetry Foundation Website.

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E-book Confusion

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 07:29:50 -0800

Why should I, a reader, have to think about this? While the book industry gnashes about with pricing and "agency models" and such, I sit here dazed with indecision over buying a simple book. I'm up to my gills with physical books and some just seem right for electronic format, but I'm not sure what that means in a practical sense.

Here's the problem: I want a book. Every vendor wants to sell me their version of the book that's only good on Their reader and I feel limited about whether or not I own it, what I can do with it and how I'm allowed to go about reading it. So, I'm left to have a bunch of different reading devices (or at the least software) and have to store and read my books based upon the store I bought the book from. Absurd and stupid and a non-starter.

While the nostalgia for print books fades away for many, this issue - one that technological early adopters are used to, but not readers - will be a major factor in hobbling growth of e-books.

So maybe those of you who know more about this world can advise me about how to go about buying a book. I would have thought it'd be more simple.

p.s. Note to makers of e-book readers: geeks want the ability to swap for their own dictionary because yours is lame.

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le Carré Backstory

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:02:33 -0800

When The Tailor of Panama was released in 1996, le Carré came to the States and told this story at a talk at the 92nd St. Y about how he created the character Alec Leamas:

I was sitting at the bar of the departure lounge in London airport — flights were delayed — when an Englishman of about 40 with a drained, travelled face appeared beside me and ordered himself a large Scotch, neat, no ice. Spotty fawn raincoat, scuffed suede shoes, a bronzed, beat-up face, dog-tired, dark Celtic eyes. Officer-class, as we used to say in those days, and a soldier’s back despite the hunched shoulders. It wasn’t till he came to pay for his Scotch that I knew I’d found him. He dug a hand in his raincoat pocket, slammed a bunch of loose change on the counter, and barked “help yourself” like a challenge at the barman. The coins were in half-a-dozen different European currencies: French francs, Deutschmarks, Lire, whatever. Far too many. The barman thought of quarrelling, then changed his mind, in my opinion wisely, and instead set to work quietly sorting his way through the coins until he had what he needed. By the time he’d finished, my sharer had drunk off his Scotch in a couple of gulps and without a word swung away, leaving the change on the counter. And for all I shall ever know, he was just a weary travelling salesman down on his luck. But for me he was Alec Leamas, a burnt-out British Intelligence agent who had just seen the last of his East German spies shot down at the newly erected Berlin Wall.

It's a great story and as great stories go, it's still getting worked. I was fairly well unimpressed with The Tailor of Panama, but according to an article mentioned in Wikipedia, le Carré says that was one of his best. What do I know. I'm saving the old Cold War books for my kids though. My personal favorites are The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, The Looking Glass War, and A Small Town in Germany, all published in the sixties. le Carré says that The Looking Glass War is the most realistic he's written about the intelligence world. Although my memory is freshest of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, probably because of the film, I seem to recall these books being particularly downcast and gritty instead of sensationalist and heroic, firmly setting themselves in the era as part of it's history at its height.

There's more backstory from le Carré at the Times and as well as another great story about a Russian mafia boss.

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The Jazz Loft Project

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:15:00 -0800

From 1957 to 1965 legendary photographer W. Eugene Smith made approximately 4,000 hours of recordings on 1,741 reel-to-reel tapes and nearly 40,000 photographs in a loft building in Manhattan's wholesale flower district where major jazz musicians of the day gathered and played their music. Smith's work has remained in archives until now. The Jazz Loft Project is dedicated to uncovering the stories behind this legendary moment in American cultural history.

The exhibition evokes the jazz loft through more than 200 images, several hours of audio, and 16mm film footage of Smith working in the loft. Setting the scene are Smith’s gritty photographs of the loft and his pictures of the flower district below his fourth-floor loft window. Viewed alongside his master prints, Smith’s 5x7-inch work prints further indicate the breadth and depth of the loft story. Listening stations give access to remastered selections from Smith’s reel-to-reel tapes, which caught everything from rousing jam sessions to historic radio and TV broadcasts, loft conversations, and street noise. Concerts and other programming will supplement the exhibition experience.

via jazzloftproject.org

Posting this as much a reminder to myself as anything, this is an exhibit at the NY Public Library for the Performing Arts through May, 22nd, then traveling.

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A day in the life of New York City, in miniature

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 05:25:00 -0800

I'm on my way... This video is too great not to share. It's all real. The guy who who made it said it's entirely shot with a still camera, thousands of shots.

The Sandpit from Sam O'Hare on Vimeo.

A day in the life of New York City, in miniature.

Original Music: composed by Human, co-written by Rosi Golan and Alex Wong.

Please view in HD and full screen for best effect. For a description of the shoot, camera, lenses and workflow, please see here: http://bit.ly/aFmaPZ

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History is the blood...

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 10:15:00 -0800

This quote rings true... "History is the blood running through the river while life goes on on the banks."

I've been reading -- at the rate of about 10 pages per day -- Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Civil War, a book I've had since I began reading on the war either thematically or as a subject about five years ago. I hadn't ventured into it because it's thick and dense; about 950 pages of history, it's not my usual reading. But I realized when recently reading Bolaño's Monsieur Pain that there were still huge gaps in my understanding of the Spanish Civil War (in that particular instance it was something about the Falangists that piqued my interest) .

I've only gotten into the period prior to the war so far, a large swath covering the last quarter of the 19th Century and early 20th, but one would gather that in this time there was nothing going on but violence and murder, riots, anarchy. I don't doubt that it was like that -- look at parts of modern Mexico or Colombia for but two examples-- but in light of the discussion going on around David Sheilds' Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (which I haven't read, but have been following the discussions) about the move to "nonfiction" I'd say that the true story, the "truer than" true story that is well written and well imagined fiction, is what happens on the banks and that's where we get understanding.

I'd go as far as saying that reading history is incomplete without reading the fiction, if it exists, around a period or events. It's well known that Tolstoy's War & Peace is itself a history and while that novel may be an exception for its reading as an historical text it supports the idea that the sensitivity of a novelist who brings facts to life might be more valuable than the historian for the purposes that history serves, that is, not repeating our mistakes or inferring a better way to act.

However, the facts, which we know evolve over time, at least many of them, are merely guideposts or backdrop in my view. If you've ever been in a catastrophe reported in the news you know that the experience for most is far from the reality reported in the press. I recently read a blog post from a woman in Chile during the earthquake. Her report was more mundane than the press reports, but more human in my view and probably good fodder for a story (please understand that I'm only talking about story telling here and not trying to be unsympathetic to those lives affected by the tragedy).

But back to Spain.

While I'm not naive enough to think that life in Spain was just like Trueba's romantic conception in the movie "Belle Epoque," it's shocking how the political upheaval in the Spain of that period permeated this otherwise cute film (in particular the priest's suicide on the couple's wedding day). I suppose that may have been the director's intent. History is served through art. The thesis behind Javier Marías's novel Your Face Tomorrow is that we don't really know people we think we know. We can't see what they will be like in the future, which is why the thread of the Spanish Civil War is so important to that book. A civil war is a war of betrayal and no where does that become more apparent or real than in a story, which in this case is a fictionalized remembrance of actual events.

For what it's worth, my Spanish Civil War reading list is a mix of fiction and nonfiction. These are books that I've read, am reading, or intend to read, but far from comprehensive and not necessarily meant to be as it's just one of those things that has taken up its own life in my reading.

Here's the list. While I'm probably not interested in adding any more history books to this list because I think Thomas's is particularly comprehensive, I'd love to hear any other reading suggestions you might have.

Hugh Thomas: The Spanish Civil War

Javier Cercas: The Soldiers of Salamis

Roberto Bolaño: Monsieur Pain (this is on tangentially about the SCW)

Javier Marías: Your Face Tomorrow, Vols 1, 2 and 3

Camilo Jose Cela: San Camilo, 1936

Bernardo Atxaga: The Accordianist's Son

Ian Gibson: The Death of Lorca

George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia

Ernest Hemingway: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Ernest Hemingway: The Fifth Column... (not sure about this one because I can't find it now)

Stephen Koch: The Breaking Point - Hemingway, Dos Passos, and the Murder of Jose Robles

Russell Martin: Picasso's War: The Extraordinary Story of an Artist, an Atrocity and a Painting That Shook the World

Various poetry from the period.

I've seen mention of Raymond Carr's The Spanish Tragedy and I'd be interested to know if you've read it.

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My Trip from Moscow to Vladivostok

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 06:45:42 -0800

This is great. Watch the Russian countryside go by from your desk while you listen to Gogol's Dead Souls read in Russian. I of course don't speak any Russian, but I listened to this for a while last night and somehow really enjoyed the evocativeness of it all. If you don't want to listen to a book (they also have War and Peace) you can merely listen to the "rumble of wheels." Here's the description from Google:

The great Trans Siberian Railway, the pride of Russia, goes across two continents, 12 regions and 87 cities. The joint project of Google and the Russian Railways lets you take a trip along the famous route and see Baikal, Khekhtsirsky range, Barguzin mountains, Yenisei river and many other picturesque places of Russia without leaving your house. During the trip, you can enjoy Russian classic literature, brilliant images and fascinating stories about the most attractive sites on the route. Let's go!

Moscow-Vladivostok: virtual journey on Google Maps

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Loose [Tools of] Change #toccon

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 08:35:00 -0800

I didn't make it the Tools of Change conference, but I went to an after-party and watched videos from the conference online. I likened this to going to a museum's shop without going to the museum. You get the gist, but it's not quite like being there.

Among the videos I enjoyed Peter Collingridge's most. His Enhanced Editions are mobile version of books with lots of extra features like integrated video and audio that reads along with the text and some other features that he highlights in the video below. While some of those features may cheapen the text (and will be sure to be used by some to compel readers when the text is, uh, lacking), I also think that there are opportunities there in the future, particularly for making difficult texts more accessible, and if I'm certain of anything it's that what we're seeing here is just the beginning.

I also like some of what Peter talks about regarding the traditional publishing model vs what I think is being called the disintermediation model.

See all the videos at the OreillyMedia Youtube Channel and be sure to check out some of the TOC iGNiTe vids and my amigo Richard Nash who is never without an interesting take on the future of publishing.

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