"The first thirty seconds in a person’s
presence are the most important."

"There's another line in the story that's been zipping around my brain like a rocketship since I read it: "The appetite for actual light was at first appeased by symbols." It's a beautiful sentence, but what matters most is that that subtle little "at first"—and everything it implies about what's going to happen next."

"People who say print is going away aren’t looking at what is happening to the technology of printing books. Digital technology doesn’t just make it easier to move bits; it often makes it easier to move atoms, too."

"There’s a feeling of thinness that I believe many of us grapple with working digitally. It's a product of the ethereality inherent to computer work. The more the entirety of the creation process lives in bits, the less solid the things we’re creating feel in our minds.[3] Put in more concrete terms: a folder with one item looks just like a folder with a billion items. Feels just like a folder with a billion items. And even then, when open, with most of our current interfaces, we see at best only a screenful of information, a handful of items at a time."

Table of Contents is a Brooklyn-based storefront offering books, records, magazines and small editions. From electronic music to minimal design and experimental video, each collection spans the length of a single table in the store.

In addition to stocking media from assorted artists and labels, Table of Contents also features in-house publications via Media Catalog.

Also worth a discussion -- what doesn't help or boost sales. I hate to say it, but I'm gonna. My blog, my Facebook fan page and Twitter feed didn't help push the book beyond the confines of my regular following.

We know that former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was working on addressing learning and digital textbooks for some time, according to Walter Issacson's biography. Jobs believed that textbook publishing was an "$8 billion a year industry ripe for digital destruction."

Text lasts. It’s not platform-dependant, you don’t just get it from one source, read it in one place, understand it in one way. It is not dependent on technology: it is what we make technology out of. Code is text, it is the fundamental nature of technology. We’ve been trying for decades, since the advent of hypertext fiction, of media-rich CD-ROMs, to enhance the experience of literature with multimedia. And it has failed, every time.

The launch of artist Paul Chan’s publishing company, Badlands Unlimited, in 2010 could have been mistaken for a career non sequitur. His foray into book publishing felt at once completely futile and deliciously subversive—anachronistic in form, and yet prescient in its embrace of technology as a means of interrogating (and thereby furthering) that form. Given the perilous economic prospects for artists and publishers alike, why not simply take matters into one’s own hands? As an online distribution platform for works written by Chan and others, Badlands Unlimited does just that.

Publication is the creation of a public. It is an essentially political act.