The Codex Foundation exists to preserve and promote the hand-made book as a work of art in the broadest possible context and to bring to public recognition the artists, the craftsmanship, and the rich history of the civilization of the book.

My books are better thought about than read.

In this age of changing habits, if print is the stairs and screens the elevator, then what could the escalator be?

There's talk nowadays
in publishing circles about a new device for books, called a
ReadMan. Like a Walkman only you carry it in your hands like
this.... Has a very nice little graphics screen, theoretically,
a high-definition thing, very legible.... And you play your
books on it.

Between Page and Screen, a ground-breaking collaboration between poet and book artist Amaranth Borsuk and programmer Brad Bouse, is truly a first: a book that only can be read when simultaneously using a codex book and a computer’s webcam. When placed in front of a webcam, the black shapes printed on the pages, sans words, trigger animated text on the screen, revealing a correspondence between characters P and S.

The Back Cover Book Club is a social project that encourages people to talk to each other in public spaces by using the shared activity of reading to facilitate the conversation.

When I taught at Harvard in the Art History department, and the students asked the faculty to talk about their favorite work of art, I said - the alphabet.

Very few people ever hold language in their hands.

Writing for format.

Lo and behold: footnotes, marginalia, commentary. I suddenly understood. A text is not a thing. It is a site of contention, debate, and social exchange, in a snapshot moment.

[W]e tend to look at static media as if they were fixed, final, and self-evident things. They are not. They are not self-evident. They are provocations for performance. Every act of reading performs a work. It makes the work. It constitutes the work.

Text *is* visual.

My focus here, on this site, is on ebooks and epublishing. I’ve been returning back to some of the ideas I worked on during my PhD research (which was on the subject of eBooks and interactivity) and doing a bit of work with the epub format.

Books have memories attached to them, the occasional forgotten slips of paper, and sometimes even an earnest childhood signature.

All those lights burning in bathrooms late at night in large and small cities must indicate someone is doing much more in them than just answering the call of nature.

Literature isn’t alien to technology, literature is technological to begin with.

Their eyes will photograph fields rather than, as ours do, or did, follow tracks.

From a Book is a jonathan soma/brooklyn braineryweekend project. We were bummed that you couldn't tweet about books very well. Now you kinda can!

I’m an active reader, and I mostly read to write.

I’m so far onto the left of the copyright issue. I believe that the natural home of all creation is in the public domain.

Money follows attention. Wherever attention goes, money will follow.

And what a book is, in my kind of formulation, is a coherent, sustained long argument or narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end.

I’m not a born writer. I’m a natural editor.

A website does not want to be a book.

A book was a very powerful device because it did so many different things. We’re taking some of those apart.

There’s no reason in my mind that you can’t make an e-book that’s a sheaf of flexible electronic pages that resemble a book that you turn.

Books should not be celebrated. Words, ideas, and concepts should be celebrated.

At the risk of stating the obvious, if your goal is to get a written idea in front of as many human beings as efficiently as possible, you shouldn't be publishing dead tree books at all. You should be editing a wiki, writing a blog, or creating a website.

Sometimes the medium is part of the message.

@CaseyG Plus, I keep staring at this: https://t.co/sB3pVkOw SO CLOSE SO CLOSE. / @justincharles @kissane @maxfenton @rogre

Like, only the spear that made this wound can heal it.

Depuis 1971, et le premier texte numérisé par Michael Hart, nous sommes entrés dans ce que j’appelle : “la période des e-incunables”. Le problème est que les définitions nous enferment dans des cadres. Qu’est-ce qu’un livre?

Comics are one of the few printed formats whose interaction may have actually improved (or at the least didn’t diminish) when they moved to the iPad.

Comics have always been a very social thing for me. I read some, talk about them with others, and we share mutual recommendations for other comics.

I’m buying more than I did when I only bought in print (which isn’t bad for the industry), but now I’m less concerned with figuring out where to keep them.

The bigger issue — and perhaps the only issue — is that the Audit Bureau of Circulation only considers an app to count among a magazine's circulation numbers if it qualifies as a "digital facsimile." This is why we have an abundance of print PDFs on the iPad, and a paucity of smartly designed native experiences. It's the organizations that are brave enough to give the finger to ABC numbers, and create the apps that people actually love.

In this paper we demonstrate a new methodology that can be used to measure aesthetic differences by examining the cognitive effects produced by elevated mood. Specifically in this paper we examine the benefits of good typography and find that good typography induces a good mood.

Robin, imagine Matt, Tim, and you read the same book, highlighting your favorite passages. Now imagine scanning through the book with all of your highlights overlapping in different colors.

As I see it, Readability has no obligation to return any revenue to publishers. Unless I’m missing something, they are even within their rights to help individual users make offline, ad-free versions of articles for personal use per the same principles in the Betamax case. A VCR allows me to watch a show later, in another context, while skipping the ads, so why shouldn’t Readability allow me to do the same thing?

The anger about the financial side of Readability seems to come from the opinion that the company is “keeping publishers’ money” unless they sign up, but I guess I look at it differently: I don’t think it is the publishers’ money. I think it is Readability’s money. Readability invests the time and resources into developing their service and they are the ones who physically get users to pay a subscription fee. It’s hard to get users to pay for content and they are the ones who are actually doing it. They realize that the popularity of their service is a direct result of content creators’ efforts so they are voluntarily redistributing 70% of it back to publishers in the only way it is feasible to: based on pageviews from publishers who register themselves.

Traditional pagination is not particularly user friendly, but endless pagination isn't without its own faults and pitfalls, either.

[T]his is mainly an interface problem. That is to say — printing stuff out isn't the only way to draw edges, combat the feeling of thinness, or help us keep digital data in perspective. Collating and printing is just one kind of interface with which to attack this problem. Higher resolution screens with smarter design solutions can and should also help us solve this problem.

Why the emphasis on literature? By playing with language, plot structure, and images, it challenges us cognitively even as it entertains. It invites us to see the world in a different way, demands that we interpret unusual descriptions, and pushes our memories to recall characters and plot details. In fact, as Annie Murphy Paul noted in a March 17 New York Times op-ed, neuroscientists have found plenty of proof that reading fiction stimulates all sorts of cognitive areas—not just language regions but also those responsible for coordinating movement and interpreting smells. Because literary books are so mentally invigorating, and require such engagement, they make us smarter than other kinds of reading material, as a 2009 University of Santa Barbara indicated

This isn’t so much a review of the new iPad as it is a collection of notes about evolutions and changes in my behavior with what I do with both my new iPad and iPhone 4S now that they both have retina screens. The first observation is that I see the two devices more as one connected system than ever before.

Because I use programs like Photoshop, Illustrator and inDesign with a mouse still, I don’t think I could stop using my normal workstation. If I could make everything that I design in pure code with the only graphics being photos shot from my iPhone and iPad, it’s not so far fetched of an idea. Maybe, maybe not.

What I like about the iPad is that there’s no cursor. This opens up the ui in a million new ways. It flattens the need for external production (extraneous tactile buttons) which saves time. Design for gestures and ignore the plastic production and circuitry of buttons. The speed of both the network and ability to navigate faster without worrying about making a mistake.

I want the iPad to be lighter. I want more people to understand the power of saving a web site to the home screen from their iPad. Once this becomes a habit for people things are really going to take off.

I believe apps are a completely different form. One that requires slightly different thinking to build, create, and market.

Apps provide niche experiences.

We wanted to give people a calm place to read.

I’m interested in the iPad. Native apps. Designing for touch. Because like everything that comes before whatever will come next, they create a bridge.

What strikes me about the iPad, coupled with some native apps, is that this combination presents one of the first compelling examples of what Mark Weiser calls “calm computing.” Native apps can embody certain attributes of experience — calmness, focus, edges, playfulness — that I don’t necessarily expect when I’m viewing a site in a browser.

Although you might think it's a given, previous studies have suggested that the voice you speak with and the voice you think with might not be pronouncing words quite the same. This newer study, published in PLOS last fall, found the opposite—that there is at least some level of match between audible and silent pronunciation.

A futurist (in Marinetti's original sense) wants to burn down libraries. A bookfuturist wants to put video games in them.

Now, as the whole industry's moved towards multimedia tablets and touch interfaces, I find myself thinking, "you know, maybe just focusing on text, and making that experience as useful and enjoyable as possible, is a really good idea.”

Bookfuturism turns out to be not just about books as such, but a kind of aesthetic and culture of reading, literacy, history, in connection with (only rarely in opposition to) other kinds of media culture. And reading here would also obviously include newspapers and magazines, and even things like maps and advertisements and data visualizations, plus whatever's displayed on the different screens most of us look at all day at home or work.

We're tinkerers. We look to history for analogies and counter-analogies, but we know that analogies aren't destiny.