Usula K. Le Guin: "As for books themselves, the changes in book technology are cataclysmic. Yet it seems to me that rather than dying, “the book” is growing — taking on a second form and shape, the ebook." "It looks to me as if people are in fact reading and writing more than they ever did. People who used to work and talk together now work each alone in a cubicle, writing and reading all day long on screen."

"The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names."

Maria Popova: "Affirmation sells a lot better than information. Who wants to hear the truth when they can hear that they're right?" http://t.co/eD3ZOwQx

Clay Johnson: "When you click on that article about Kim Kardashian over on the right-hand sidebar of that other website, your boss may not see you reading it, but you've made it more probable that she will read it. Your click is a vote, and with that vote, you're not just saying to your media companies that you want to read it, but other people like you want to read it too. Clicks have a significant, and immediate social consequence. As our obesity epidemic challenges our healthcare system, our poor information diets are challenging the fabric of our democracy."

"Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all." On reading, scrolls, codexes, and ebooks.

Key quotes: <br />
"Mr. Chen added “There are a lot of services trying to solve the information discovery problem, and no one has got it right yet.”" <br />
"“I signed up in 2005 and I didn’t use it again until 2011,” Mr. Chen said with an embarrassed laugh." <br />
"Some of the early users are still fiercely protective of the service. Mr. Chen and Mr. Hurley said they planned to invite the earliest users to test a version of the new site and solicit feedback about the designs and features." 

A thoughtful, nicely-illustrated post on the design (in general terms) of ebooks, primarily for the two dominant iPad reader applications. Well worth a read (in particular, I liked the aggregate / heatmap idea; once I was thinking of doing something similar for delicious, and may yet).

Subtitled "on reading in the digital age", this is an interesting (opinionated) piece by John Siracusa on why ebooks haven't taken off yet.

This is a really good, long, comment, which boils down to "because speech is far more natural than writing". Really, it's worth going and read the whole thing.

In constrast to yesterday's news story about a 3D virtual high street, Phil Gyford's look at ebook interfaces on the iPhone has some sensible suggestions for using 3D to give useful cues, without going too far down the road of pointlessly recreating the real.

"The situation is undeniably bad. What’s going to happen next?" Adrian Hon talks about the future of books.

As a counterpoint to my wibblings of earlier today, here's a (well written, unlike mine) piece arguing that television doesn't decrease literacy. I don't think TV makes us stupid, but I'm far from convinced it helps us be better at reading books.

An interesting piece on the retreat of reading. There's some good stuff about literate vs graphical thinking in the middle (I'm kind of obsessed since reading The Alphabet vs The Goddess).

"Christopher Winn's historic guide to London will not fail to enhance months, even years, of gentle urban exploration" Possibly a successor to the likes of Geoffrey Fletcher, but I already seem to know a bunch of his factoids.

Not read this yet, but came across it via letters in this week's review.

Lots of stuff about Strange and Norrell, if I ever get time

Short story by Susanna Clark

with Susanna Clarke

I'm enjoying Strange and Norell, so here are the obvious interviews