The Revolution at Your Local Library

The New Republic takes a look at libraries in our digital age.

From the piece...

Around the globe, a handful of innovative architects are forging a new building type with a deceptively familiar name. These libraries offer something found nowhere else in the contemporary city: heavily used, not-for-profit communal spaces that facilitate many and various kinds of informal social interactions and private uses. Ranging in size from five thousand square feet, a smallish McMansion in Westchester, to thirty thousand square feet, the size of Derek Jeter’s home near Tampa, some of these community libraries are neighborhood branches of an urban library system,  and others stand alone. These buildings look nothing like one another, yet they all offer exemplary moments of architectural innovation. Collectively, they make the case that excellent design is no luxury, certainly not for the civic buildings and lives of people and their communities.

Community libraries have been around for centuries. Andrew Carnegie did not invent them, but recognized in them the means to socialize the cost of knowledge, building nearly 1,700 public libraries across the United States in twenty-eight years. Across the country, local philanthropists built countless others, recognizing that the community library was often the only place to which people had sustained and repeated access simply by virtue of their residence. Even today, to become officially recognized as a borrower at your local library, no more than a recent electric bill is needed—no passport, no green card, no social security number, no purchase necessary. To use the library to sit and read and rest, you need only to want to sit and read and rest.

Off Book - The Art of Creative Coding

What Does the Future Hold for Printed Books?

That's the question recently posed in the New Criterion.

From the piece...

For books, whose disappearance the digitization of La lyre exileé seemed to presage, have played an immense part in my life. It would be vain to suggest that I valued them only for their content, as a rationalist might say that one ought; I valued them as physical objects and have accumulated thousands of them. I am not a bibliophile in the true sense, that is to say someone who finds excitement in a misprint on page 278 which proves that the book, which he might or might not ever read, is a true first edition. Nor am I a bibliomaniac in the true sense, the kind of person who will eventually be found lying dead under a pile of books that he has incontinently or indiscriminately collected because of some psychological compulsion to accumulate. No, I am something in between the two (as a physician put it when I was a student, as he tried to explain to a patient that he had myeloma, which was neither cancer nor leukaemia, “but something in between the two.”) I prefer a good edition, physically as well as literarily speaking, to a bad one; I buy more books than I read, though always with the intention of reading them; I am not an aficionado of rarity for rarity’s sake, though I have some rare things, upon which the eye of the avaricious bookseller called in by my relict will immediately alight as he offers her yardage, $5 a yard of books.

For the moment, however, I derive a certain comfort from looking over, and being surrounded by, my laden shelves.

The Talking Comic Book Cover

A Taste of TED Books

LeVar Burton Brings "Reading Rainbow" to the Digital Age

Your E-Book is Reading You

Digital-book publishers and retailers now know more about their readers than ever before. How that's changing the experience of reading.

From an article in the Wall Street Journal...

For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public. 

The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. Retailers and some publishers are beginning to sift through the data, gaining unprecedented insight into how people engage with books. 

Publishing has lagged far behind the rest of the entertainment industry when it comes to measuring consumers' tastes and habits. TV producers relentlessly test new shows through focus groups; movie studios run films through a battery of tests and retool them based on viewers' reactions. But in publishing, reader satisfaction has largely been gauged by sales data and reviews—metrics that offer a postmortem measure of success but can't shape or predict a hit. That's beginning to change as publishers and booksellers start to embrace big data, and more tech companies turn their sights on publishing.

 

Shakespeare for the Smart Phone

There's a new iPad app that features 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets alongside filmed performances of those sonnets done by some theatrical and movie greats. Learn more about the app, here.

Twitterature

mammy mammy r u up

The texts of Scarlett O'Hara.

The Art of Travel

Collectors and dealers are preparing for Europe’s biggest antiquarian map fair. But what does the future hold for printed maps in the digital age?

From a story in the Financial Times...

It’s a big year for antique maps. This is the 500th anniversary of the birth of the world’s most celebrated mapmaker, Gerard Mercator, who created the world’s first atlas. I have to reveal an interest here. In the 1990s I spent thousands of hours writing a biography of the great man. There were moments, hunched over one of his original prints in the Map Room of the British Library, when I could feel his breath on the back of my neck. Visiting the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, I almost burst into tears when the archivist brought me his extraordinary globe of 1541. I’d read every paper published about the globe but I was so unprepared for its craftsmanship that I found myself immobilised by bewilderment. It was Mercator who devised the unique “projection” that allows the spherical globe to be flattened into a map in such a way that compass bearings remain constant. Today, Mercator’s Projection is used by the Ordnance Survey to map Britain, by Nasa to map the solar system, and for numerous other applications besides.

What Will Become of the Paper Book?

How will the design of books change in our digital age?

From a story in Slate...

This is one future for the paper book in the age of digital proliferation—a select group of design-conscious authors will continue to address their creations specifically to the printed medium. Their themes, like Plascencia’s and Foer’s, will likely revolve around the history and practice of writing books, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary—one of literature’s greatest themes has always been itself.

Other writers go even further, making over the entire paratextual edifice, as Anne Carson does for her recent New Directions publication, Nox. “When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book,” she writes on the back cover. “This is a replica of it, as close as we could get.” The book is indeed a facsimile of a handmade original, bound accordion-style and boxed. Verso pages “translate” a Catullus elegy by offering long Latin-English dictionary entries for each word in the poem. Recto pages tell the story of Carson’s relationship to her brother through fragments of lyric essay and primary materials like photographs and letters.

The Reader and Technology

Toby Litt, in Granta, discusses the future of books and reading as it continues to converge with technology.

From the piece...

Literature depends on technology – a society needs to be able to do more than subsist before it produces a literature. An oral culture, yes, that is possible – but I am referring specifically to words on the page, words on the screen.

The internet connection offers all of us the constant temptation of snippets, of trivia. We don’t live, as other writers did in the past, without these particular temptations. They had their own temptations: Byron wasn’t undistracted. Yet there were greater acres of emptiness, surely. Travel took forever. Winters isolated. Boredom was there as a resource for daydreaming, trancing out.

I think writers will continue to occur but technology and its trivia will cause us to lose something, just as we lost something when we lost the classical education. We write worse because we cannot write classical prose. Yet classical prose is useless for describing the world of 2012, the world that is there – ready to buzz – in your pocket or bag.

Our perceptions outrun the sedentary sentence by much too much; just as we listen to mp3s to hear what an album would sound like were we actually to sit down and listen to it, so we skim-read the classic books to get a sense of what they would be like were we to sit down and dwell on them.

Marvel Comics' 3D App

Good Writing Isn't Enough

The digital revolution is not only changing how books are read—it is also changing the how they are written, produced, and promoted.

From an article in the Atlantic...

The overriding message in the articles is that books are an entrepreneurial exercise, combining the selection of a subject, the self-confidence to stay with it through the reporting and writing ordeal, and a commitment to marketing the results, which for many authors is an especially unfamiliar process. Among the multiple subjects covered, one of the most informative is how traditional sales strategies are adapting to the digital age. Here's one example: William Wheeler is a freelancer who has endured frustration in landing a book contract, but has the persistence and a resume (a recent New York Times story about Libya was supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting) that should eventually lead to success. "What transforms journalists into nonfiction authors," he writes, "is the heft of their voice, the narrative arc of their idea and its marketability. These aren't lessons that tend to be reinforced on the way up the newspaper ladder... Marketing the idea—and selling you as its author—is everything in getting to write a book." With the support of an agent, Wheeler circulated a conventional proposal about environmental crises and collected rejections from publishers who said they liked the idea but felt that the genre was too crowded. Recovering from the disappointment, Wheeler then sold an expansion of another Libya story to Byliner, an innovative new e-book publisher whose founder, John Tayman, writes in his Nieman Reports article that "our idea was to create a new way for writers to be able to tell stories at what had always been considered a financially awkward length."

Press Pause Play

The digital revolution of the last decade has unleashed creativity and talent in an unprecedented way, with unlimited opportunities.

But does democratized culture mean better art or is true talent instead drowned out? This is the question addressed by PressPausePlay, a documentary film containing interviews with some of the world's most influential creators of the digital era.

PressPausePlay from House of Radon on Vimeo.

Ansel Adams

There's an app for that.

Care to Walk in the Footsteps of Charles Dickens?

There's an app for that.

Getting Saved - There's an App for That

The New Yorker explores how churches are incorporating digital technology in their communities.

From the piece...

The question of how, exactly, digitized texts will change religious practice has been a pressing one in religious communities for at least a decade. (A recent article in Christianity Today wondered whether the People of the Book shouldn’t be rechristened the People of the Nook.) But the era of digital religion is only now poised to begin in earnest, ushered in by technological advancements—the widespread adoption of tablets and smartphones—and by religious leaders eager to harness the power of that technology to inspire and instruct their flocks.

Last week, I contacted leaders of several religious institutions in New York and asked about how the digital was being used in their communities. Cregan Cooke, the director of communication and media at Redeemer Presbyterian, Manhattan’s best-known megachurch, told me that parishioners use mobile devices during services to look up Bible verses; that pastors like having multiple translations of the Bible on their tablets to refer to “whenever they’re away from their physical libraries”; and that the church has recently developed its own app, which contains a sermon podcast and community news. It’s been downloaded more than twenty-five thousand times.

This isn’t surprising at a church whose senior pastor, Tim Keller, is an Internet video star with his own publishing imprint. But more traditional congregations have also eagerly embraced digital technology. Kevin Gabriel Gillen, a Dominican friar at the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village, wrote me that iBreviary is in common use in the church. “Walking into a chapel with an iPhone may raise the eyebrow of another friar, because they may think you are about to make a phone call or text, but the iPad seems to be accepted.”

The Genius at Apple

11 definitive profiles of Steve Jobs can be found, here, at Byline.