"LM: Literary people, when they talk about books, tend to think of fiction first. But most people, when they think about books, are thinking about nonfiction, which lends itself amazingly well to some kind of enhanced e-book experience. As a piece of that, I’m skeptical of enhancing fiction e-books. The essence of narrative is this sense of causality and meaning, and when you introduce a lot of arbitrary or random branching things into it, it actually loses it’s core pleasure. It’s a tricky issue."

"That is one of the potential shifts in social reading: Can I create value for other people by saying that I found this passage by Bruno LaTour striking — even if I never look at it again? That’s an amazing act of what I called “frozen sharing” in my last book. Being generous about things when you are offering it out to the public, without it being either in a specific time frame or for a specific target."

"Maybe depressed isn’t quite the right word. “Cognizant of absurdity” captures it better (I’m sure the Germans have a good word for this). What I’m seeing on the Javitz Center floor plan is an effort by publishers to remove themselves once and for all from the people they perceive to be their customers–librarians and booksellers. And the people who actually buy the products…you know, actual readers? Of course, they continue to be completely shut out. Not invited to the party."

"Your third point, about the founders' vision of America, is something that has been a matter of keen interest to me most of my adult life. In fact, I even wrote a book about it, where I went back and read the founders' early writings about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. What a fascinating time to be alive! What astonishing minds! Here's what I learned: our whole system of government was based on the idea that the purpose of the state was to preserve individual liberties, not to dictate them. The founders uniformly despised many practices in England that compromised matters of individual conscience by restricting freedom of speech. Freedom of speech – the right to talk, write, publish, discuss – was so important to the founders that it was the first amendment to the Constitution – and without it, the Constitution never would have been ratified."

"One would be hard-pressed to disapprove of autodidacticism. Consider a list of notable alumni from the academy of the self-taught: René Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, William Blake. Michael Faraday apprenticed himself to a bookseller and read everything he could before going on to figure out electromagnetism. August Wilson schooled himself at the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh after dropping out of the ninth grade. Arnold Schoenberg claimed to be an autodidact, and who are we to dispute it? Frank Zappa advised, “Forget about the senior prom and go to the library and educate yourself, if you’ve got any guts.” Hear, hear. (Though if the prom band is playing Frank Zappa songs, we’re donning a powder-blue brocade tux and we’re going.)"

"Judging by the quality of much of the popular press, most of what gets published these days doesn't get edited in any meaningful way. Some of that is probably the fruit of cost cuts over the years, but I worry that some of it is a loss of the sense that it's supposed to happen at all."

Except, goddammit, that RealPlayer sucks.

"To that end, I’ve created—with the help of Mr. Rowe, Mark Teppo, and William Shunn—the Gene Wolfe Book Club. Our reasoning is that while the Solar Cycle books are fun to read on their own, discussing them with other people greatly enhances your reading. We also know that this book club is ambitious, but if we all pull together, I think we can do it. Even if you aren’t able to commit to all 12 books, but want to partake in the discussion, please come over and chat; the more the merrier."

"The Mechanics’ Institute sprang up in 19th century England for the ostensible purpose of imparting upon the working class mechanic knowledge of the sciences, literature, and arts. In actuality, a myriad of purposes shrouded the creation of these institutes, which were ultimately appropriated by the middle class when it became apparent that the working class was not as receptive as had been anticipated. ... As the middle class began to move in, the working class retreated to the Institute’s libraries and reading rooms, where they were free to discuss topics that interested them. One of the unintended consequences of the failed Mechanics’ Institutes was the aiding in the creation of a democratic infrastructure for working class access to printed materials.... In short, despite being borne from a desire to regulate, they were an important precursor to the establishment of public libraries and a liberated mass reading public."

"The elephant in the room is the movement from solitary studying to a collective, hivemindish mode of learning, where kids are shifting for questioning to answering, from learning to teaching all the time."

I wish Google bothered to punctuate. We're scanning another copy, and will send it through Distributed Proofreaders soon, but in the meantime read the page scans from Google if you like....

Matthew Berryman is citing some of what we should see.

I expect there were open-source vs. commercial control wars as well, with every stage of adoption of new tech....

Me, I do email and play word games.