A brief look at how text that can circulate through the web creates more value than text locked in boxes- the problem starts when we're limited in what we can circulate, whether by lack of copy and paste or rights restrictions. Starts with commonplaces books as web snippets and rests the argument on that practice. "A single piece of information designed to flow through the entire ecosystem of news will create more value than a piece of information sealed up in a glass box." "When text is free to flow and combine, new forms of value are created, and the overall productivity of the system increases. " The

Superb primer on designing text for devices - with links. Read it

End of year, communal reading of FW, social media.

"The purpose of this new set of notes is to expand the thinking beyond how a specific text is presented or interacted with. Reading (and writing) do not happen only at the level of the individual work. There is a broad ecology of behaviors, activities and micro-environments that surround each work and our relationship to it -- how things come to be written, how we choose what to read, how we make the purchase, how we share our experience with others. Currently (i.e. toward the end of age of print), that ecology is defined by agent/editor mechanisms of acquisition, sharp delineation between authors and readers, top-down marketing, heavy reliance on big mainstream media to get the word out, the bookshelves that make our books part of our daily life, bookstores and -- yes -- Amazon."

A few anecdotes about publishers malingering in the pre-digital age. Inky hubris. Makes the alternative of print on demand look good. "Publisher friends, I tell you this because I am your friend; I value your contribution and I like you. I want to work with you. But this is an intervention. You need to look at writers and illustrators as partners and collaborators and treat them as such. It’s time to step up in a spirit of partnership, "

From ordering to unboxing to reading. I saved the article to Instapaper so I can read it later, in leisure, on my iPhone.

"I squeezed no new joy from these great books, though. The Gluyas Williams drawings were gone from the Benchley, and even the wasp passage in “Do Insects Think?” just wasn’t the same in Kindle gray. I did an experiment. I found the Common Reader reprint edition of “Love Conquers All” and read the very same wasp passage. I laughed: ha-ha. Then I went back to the Kindle 2 and read the wasp passage again. No laugh. Of course, by then I’d read the passage three times, and it wasn’t that funny anymore. But the point is that it wasn’t funny the first time I came to it, when it was enscreened on the Kindle. Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words."

http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/3336451.0010.305. A consideratio of CommentPress and new practices in academic publishing

"the most tendentious part of Birkerts's argument has little to do with the Kindle or context. It's that he believes humanity would wittingly adopt deficient tools at the expense of effective ones. This fundamental cynicism is, to a point, understandable; much of marketing and advertising, after all, devotes itself to convincing us that what's new is necessarily superior ... But Birkerts underestimates, I think, the functional and aesthetic requisites of an average reader. If Heidegger is right, then the catastrophic, decontextualized info-culture of Birkerts's imagination is patently absurd -- readers won't, in the short- or long-term, shutter our libraries just because some novel, convenient alternative has asserted itself.

I see in the turning of literal pages—pages bound in literal books—a compelling larger value, and perceive in the move away from the book a move away from a certain kind of cultural understanding, one that I’m not confident that we are replacing, never mind improving upon.

"Dettmer's sculptures invite us to think about deeply-held taboos around the sanctity of books as objects; a conversation that recurs - especially in the context of e-readers - around discussion of digitized text."

The following is a set of notes, written over several months, in an attempt to weave together a number of ideas that have emerged in the course of the institute's work. I'm hoping for a lot of feedback. If there's enough interest, we'll put this into CommentPress so that the discussion can be more extensive than the blog's comment field.

Wiki of all published books. The idea is to create one wiki page/book, thereby weaving print and web closer together.

efore blogs allowed people to offer comment on everything they read and tediously deconstruct arguments paragraph by paragraph for the world to see, people like Adams wrote witty remarks in the margins of their books. Lots of them.

A perenial, this time frm the N Yorker. Your bio in 6 words on a nametag, twitter, gravatar

Borders, in partnership with Lulu.com, has launched a comprehensive personal publishing platform.

Commentary version of the Ithaka Report on Univerisity Publishing paper. Contains the original text of the paper and demos how CommentPress works.

The book interface revisited onscreen. "But nice as this looks, functionality is sacrificed for the sake of fetishism"

How looking through bookmarks is a lot like looking through bookshelves. We move from a materiality of books to a social network of bookmarks - both of which are rhetorical affordances of identity. "We arrange books not only for our own conceptual orient

Chapters and sections as chunks of the hypertext called "book.: "a big part of the consumer market that book publishers have owned for 200 years want the nuggets, not a narrative" If books go the way of albums and chapers are singles, then tagging and a f

critique of the Chasing Crusoe multimedia presentation: squanders the opportunity to really develop the text. But it looks like the project is supposed to be a mass media story rather than a deep text.

Journal of lit at Virginia

article on Warks' Gamer Theory. low theory and high theory