9 per cent of escorts surveyed by Columbia University sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh work in publishing during the day. (Click on pic to enlarge)
Oh dear. Is it too late to be a dentist?
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Wired.com has a selection of covers for e-readers that will make them look like real books. The DODOcase would be my pick.
Overwhelmingly, e-books and e-readers have emphasized — and maybe over-emphasized — easy reading of prose fiction. All of the rhetoric is about the pure transparency of the reading act, where the device just disappears. Well, with some kinds of reading, we don’t always want the device to disappear. Sometimes we need to use texts to do tough intellectual work. And when we do this, we usually have to stop and think about their materiality.
We care which page a quote appears on, because we need to reference it later. We need to look up words in other languages, not just English. We need displays that can preserve the careful spatial layouts of a modernist poet, rather than smashing it all together as indistinguishable, left-justified text. We need to recognize that using language as a graphic art requires more than a choice of three fonts in a half-dozen sizes. Some text is interchangable, but some of it is through-designed. And for good reason.
Tim Carmody, E-books are still waiting for their avant-garde, Wired
A fairly good article on the future of books and publishing. I’d hate the book industry to go the Hollywood blockbuster route, but it’s inevitable I suppose. Good movies are few and far between, but so are good books. We do have ways of filtering out most of the noise and hype and ensuring that the gems get recognized. But a big HOORAY to anyone who can get the bickering publishing industry to adopt a universal e-book format and ditch DRM.
