Ed Note: one of Boingboing's three current guest bloggers, Steven Johnson is the author of six books, most recently The Invention Of Air: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution and the Birth Of America. (You can see a video interview introducing the book here.) He's also the co-founder of the hyperlocal community site outside.in.

In part because my books have had a habit of weaving multiple disciplines together, and in part because I've written quite a bit about technology, I'm often asked about the tools I use to research and write my books. Given that Boingboing has its own wonderful multi-disciplinary sensibility, and of course a major obsession with DIY movements, I thought it might be fun to say a few words about the writing system I've developed over the past few books.

A collection of books that anyone interested in the intersection of software developers and systems administrators should enjoy.

Fortyish, newly divorced, searching and longing for something different. Something fulfilling and exciting, somewhere far outside my ordinary comfort zone.

Come with me on my journey of discovery. Explore with me. Touch, taste and feel with me.

Lots more to come following my introduction to you in this first volume of a multi-part True Romance / Erotica series.

“Perhaps I was being picky, but I really didn’t think being able to spell orgasm without being spotted a vowel was asking too much.”

Approximately 6,000 words – this first volume introduces the main characters and how they met.

This first volume of my sexual self-discovery is the mere beginning of a sensual, sultry love affair with life, and with all the joys of being a woman.

GoodReader® is the super-robust PDF reader for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. Its iPad version was the #1 selling non-Apple app for iPad in 2010 in USA! Mashable describes it as “a Swiss Army knife of awesome!” Reviews worldwide hail it as “essential,” “the best,” “magnificent” and “the killer app”. With GoodReader on your iPad/iPhone, you can read virtually anything, anywhere: books, movies, maps, pictures. Use it once and you’ll be hooked. If you work with documents, soon you'll be wondering how you ever managed to use your iPad or iPhone without GoodReader.

Writing is a muscle. Smaller than a hamstring and slightly bigger than a bicep, and it needs to be exercised to get stronger. Think of your words as reps, your paragraphs as sets, your pages as daily workouts. Think of your laptop as a machine like the one at the gym where you open and close your inner thighs in front of everyone, exposing both your insecurities and your genitals. Because that is what writing is all about.

Welcome to The Literature Network!
We offer searchable online literature for the student, educator, or enthusiast. To find the work you're looking for start by looking through the author index. We currently have over 3000 full books and over 4000 short stories and poems by over 250 authors. Our quotations database has over 8500 quotes.

Have a question about literature? Why not ask it in our Literature Forums. Thousands of members are waiting to talk to you!

Inspiring stories and practical advice from America’s most respected journalists
The country’s most prominent journalists and nonfiction authors gather each year at Harvard’s Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. Telling True Stories presents their best advice—covering everything from finding a good topic, to structuring narrative stories, to writing and selling your first book. More than fifty well-known writers offer their most powerful tips, including:
• Tom Wolfe on the emotional core of the story
• Gay Talese on writing about private lives
• Malcolm Gladwell on the limits of profiles
• Nora Ephron on narrative writing and screenwriters
• Alma Guillermoprieto on telling the story and telling the truth
• Dozens of Pulitzer Prize–winning journalists from the Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and more . . .

The essays contain important counsel for new and career journalists, as well as for freelance writers, radio producers, and memoirists. Packed with refreshingly candid and insightful recommendations, Telling True Stories will show anyone fascinated by the art of writing nonfiction how to bring people, scenes, and ideas to life on the page.

Reading list
Inspired in part by Apprenticeship Patterns, I’ve decided to maintain a public reading list. The goals are pretty simple:

Be honest about what books I’ve read, partially read, and plan to read.
Write a few sentences about each book – mostly for myself but also for anyone who might be interested.
Only include books related to development, user experience design, and entrepreneurship.
Include screencasts as well since that’s how I do much of my learning.
Note that many of these entries were written long after having read the actual book. I apologize for any inaccuracies. Also, the completion dates are often rough approximations.

Die Buchwelt verändert sich grundlegend – und ermöglicht damit zahlreiche neuartige digitale Konzepte rund um Social Reading, das gemeinschaftliche Lesen und Diskutieren der Lektüre. Branchenkenner Alexander Vieß gibt einen umfassenden Überblick.

Dancing with the absurdity of life, or what symbolism has to do with the osmosis of trash and treasure.

As far as New Year’s resolutions go, hardly anything does one’s mental, spiritual, and creative health more good than resolving to read more and write better. Today’s reading list addresses these parallel aspirations. And since the number of books written about reading and writing likely far exceeds the reading capacity of a single human lifetime, this omnibus couldn’t be — shouldn’t be — an exhaustive list. It is, instead, a collection of timeless texts bound to radically improve your relationship with the written word, from whichever side of the equation you approach it.

Wait. I lied. I didn’t make eight books. I made n books. Or rather: I wrote a piece of software to ingest an XML file of all my Pinboard links (easily available from the Pinboard API by anyone – you just need to know your username and password). That software then generates a web page for each book, which is passed into the incredible PrinceXML to create a book. Prince handles all the indexing, page numbering, contents-creation, and header-creation. It’s a remarkable piece of software, given the quality of its output – with nothing more than some extended CSS, you end up with control over page-breaks, widows and orphans, and much more.

The software is a small Sinatra application to generate the front-end, and a series of rake tasks to call Prince with the appropriate arguments. It’s on Github right now. If you can pull from Github, install Prince, and are comfortable in the terminal, you might find it very usable. If you don’t, it’s unlikely to become any more user-friendly; it’s a personal project for personal needs, and whilst Prince is free for personal use, it’s $4800 to install on a server. You see my issue.

So there you are. I made a machine to generate books out of my Pinboard links. Personal archiving feels like an important topic right now – see the Personal Digital Archiving conference, Aaron and Maciej’s contributions to it, not to mention tools like Singly. Books are another way to preserve digital objects. These books contain the reference to another point in the network (but not that point itself) – but they capture something far more important, and more personal.

Have a stack of books to read? Having trouble finding motivation? ReadMore may be for you. It’s a reading log, a diary to show you your reading habits and motivate you with relevant feedback. It helps break large books into more manageable pieces and keeps track of your progress. Want to look back over what you read by the end of 2010? Plug in it here.

Books have a big future
Readmill is a curious community of readers, sharing and highlighting
the books they love. Welcome to a world of reading.

On January 19th, Apple apparently plans to roll into The Guggenheim in New York City and announce plans to disrupt the textbook market. Big news? Maybe. But let’s not lose sight of another Guggenheim digital initiative.

In recent days, the museum has made 65 art catalogues available online, all free of charge. The catalogues offer an intellectual and visual introduction to the work of Alexander Calder, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt & Egon Schiele, and Kandinsky. Plus there are other texts (e.g., Masterpieces of Modern Art and Abstract Expressionists Imagists) that tackle meta movements and themes.

Now let me give you a few handy instructions to get you started. 1.) Select a text from the collection. 2.) Click the “Read Catalogue Online” button. 3.) Start reading the book in the pop-up browser, and use the controls at the very bottom of the pop-up browser to move through the book. 4.) If you have any problems accessing these texts, you can find alternate versions on Archive.org, which lets you download books in multiple formats – ePUB, PDF and the rest.

For more good reads, don’t miss our collection of Free eBooks.

Der ERSTE ECHTE Barcode-Scanner für iOS - DAS ORIGINAL SEIT 2010.

iCody scannt und sendet Barcodes per WiFi direkt auf Ihren Computer (Mac, PC, Linux, …) oder scannt sie direkt in Websites. Mit der eingebauten Callback-Funktion wird iCody zum externen Scanner für andere Apps.

Just a quick list of the books I managed to plow through in 2011. After browsing this list, if there’s a book you think would interest me, please let me know, or just gift it to me.  ;)  Relatedly, you also may want to have a look at my book wish list.

★★★★★

Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud by Peter Watson
★★★★☆

Welcome to Writers’ Uni-Verse-City (or WUVC for short because every university has an acronym), a place where writers/bloggers can meet to discuss the craft of writing in the Internet age. I  want to learn what it takes to make it in the world of writing and publishing and nowadays there is a wealth of information on the web. WUVC will involve independent research, setting a curriculum and hopefully finding other participants (like you – readers/bloggers/writers) to: chip in, give tips, suggest books and other materials for study, teach me the ways of the warrior writer, and offer to guest post here at Uni-Verse-City (contact: annotationseditorial@gmail.com).

So I think I need more official self-determined course material for Writers’ Uni-Verse-City. I have been picking up a craft book every now and then usually based on the buzz I’ve seen about it on the web. Hey, its a great way to pick books. So now that I’ve finished reading Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell, which I’m currently reviewing, it will soon be time to crack open another one.

Kaum ein Land in Europa weist so viele fundamentale Einschnitte in einem relativ geringen Zeitraum auf wie Deutschland im "kurzen 20. Jahrhundert". Umso mehr erstaunt es, dass die vier Systemwechsel 1918/19, 1933, 1945/49 und 1989/90 bisher kaum miteinander verglichen worden sind – dabei drängt sich dies doch geradezu auf: Was waren ihre Rahmenbedingungen und Ursachen? Wie verliefen sie und zu welchen Ergebnissen führten sie? Der Politikwissenschaftler Eckhard Jesse hat sich der wichtigen Aufgabe angenommen, die politischen Umbrüche in der jüngeren deutschen Geschichte vergleichend zu analysieren. Er arbeitet in seiner Darstellung Charakter, Gemeinsamkeiten und Unterschiede der vier Zäsuren heraus.

Do people who read constantly assume that those who have never bothered to read anything other than a school text book know less, have closed minds, and are generally uninteresting people? Why or why not?

Here at 99%, we have a serious penchant for books that really dig into the nitty gritty of the creative process, productivity strategies, and/or the future of technology. Now, with our tastes fully disclosed, here's a highly subjective list of our favorite new(ish) nonfiction titles that would make great gifts for the brainiac in your life.

Tinderbox is a tool for notes, a personal content assistant. The Tinderbox Way takes a close look at Tinderbox and its underlying ideas, exploring not just the program's mechanics but also its design and its spirit.

From the elements of writing more effective notes to the frontiers of information farming, from the classroom and conference hall to the research laboratory, The Tinderbox Way explores a new approach to working with and representing interlinked ideas.

From Chapter One:

Tinderbox is designed to help you write things down, find them, think about them, and share them. Tinderbox is an assistant. Its meant to help, to facilitate. Its not a methodology or a code. Its a way to write things down, link them up, and share them. Its a chisel, guided by your hand and your intelligence.

Tinderbox is personal in another sense, as well; unlike most corporate software today, Tinderbox was designed and implemented by a person not by a committee, a corporation, or a focus group. That person is me: Mark Bernstein. I designed Tinderbox, and wrote just about every line of the tens of thousands of lines that make Tinderbox run. Tinderbox is the product of an individual vision. It wasnt written to meet requirements or specs or to adhere to business rules. Along the way, there have been thousands of decisions engineering decisions, artistic decisions, operational decisions. In the end, I made the choices.

Whether books line every wall of your house or barely fill one shelf, Bookpedia is the perfect application to help you keep track of them. Entering the information for each book is fast and easy because the program retrieves all the information from the Internet for you. So you can sit back and relax with a good book.

Bookpedia ist ein gemeinschaftlich erstelltes Literaturlexikon im Internet. In erster Linie sollen hier die Inhalte von Büchern zusammengefasst, nicht aber rezensiert werden. Bookpedia ist nicht festgelegt auf bestimmte Themenbereiche, Genres, Gattungen oder Ähnliches. Unsere Definition von Literatur lautet: alles, was zwischen zwei Buchdeckeln steht.

If you're like us, you have managed to create your own mini-library of books, magazines, games, CDs, software titles, and movies. It is difficult to sort through all of them to see which ones you have on file, or to find where you last shelved a particular one. Librarian Pro is a complete personal inventory system!
Organize items into smart collections, add them to the in-program Amazon shopping cart, mark them as lent out to friends, and even export for the web or your iPod! Librarian Pro also supports importing from other cataloging applications like Delicious Library and DVDpedia.
Search for items in-program on Amazon by author, artist, title, and keyword. Details will automatically fill into new items — including product images! Additionally, up to five Amazon reviews are also retrieved for your reading pleasure. Afterward, even add your own reviews!
Librarian Pro's databases are fully compatible with both the Mac OS X and Windows versions. Additionally, one license will grant activation for both copies of the application. Download the free fifteen day trial and have serenity return to your media collections.

The ultimate DIY project guide for techie dads raising kids in their own geeky image, in the spirit of The Dangerous Book for Boys

Today's generation of dads grew up more tech-savvy than ever. Rather than joining the Little League team, many grew up playing computer games, Dungeons and Dragons, and watching Star Wars. Now with kids of their own, these digital-age dads are looking for fresh ways to share their love of science and technology, and help their kids develop a passion for learning and discovery.

Enter supergeek, and father of two, Ken Denmead. An engineer and editor of the incredibly popular GeekDad blog on wired.com, Ken has created the ultimate, idea-packed guide guaranteed to help dads and kids alike enjoy the magic of playtime together and tap into the infinite possibility of their imagination. With illustrations throughout, this book offers projects for all ages to suit any timeframe or budget. With Denmead's expert guidance, you and your child can:

•Fly a night-time kite ablaze with lights or launch a video camera with balloons

Your iDevice holds all of your important data. Why not also use your iPhone and iPad to keep track of your book collection? With these book cataloging apps you can keep track of your growing library, track your reading habits, and keep tabs on those books that disappeared when you lent them out to a friend. Even if you are moving your bookshelf to the Kindle and iBooks, these apps can track all of your literature in one place.

AUSTIN, Texas—The archive of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008), author of "Infinite Jest" (1996), "The Broom of the System" (1987), "Girl with Curious Hair" (1989) and numerous collections of stories and essays, is now open at the Harry Ransom Center. A finding aid for the collection can be accessed online.

The Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum at The University of Texas at Austin, acquired Wallace's archive last year. The collection is made up of 34 document boxes and 8 oversize folders and is divided into three main sections: works, personal and career-related materials and copies of works by Don DeLillo. The works section covers the period between 1984 and 2006 and includes material related to Wallace's novels, short stories, essays and magazine articles. The personal and career materials section covers 1971 through 2008 and includes juvenilia, teaching materials and business correspondence. Most of the correspondence in the collection is between Wallace and his editors and is related to his work. The third, and smallest, section includes photocopy typescripts of three works by Don DeLillo, one of which, "Underworld," contains extensive handwritten annotations by Wallace. DeLillo's archive also resides at the Ransom Center.

Life, living, can be complex. There's work, family, and that big bucket of everything else. Hectic doesn't come close to defining the pace of modern life. And yet within this whirlwind it's often the simple things that bring us the greatest joy — if we could only find them in the clutter of our lives. It may not be necessary to give it all up and live in a cave, but it can sometimes seem like a good idea.

Practical data design tips from a data visualization expert of the modern age

Data doesn?t decrease; it is ever-increasing and can be overwhelming to organize in a way that makes sense to its intended audience. Wouldn?t it be wonderful if we could actually visualize data in such a way that we could maximize its potential and tell a story in a clear, concise manner? Thanks to the creative genius of Nathan Yau, we can. With this full-color book, data visualization guru and author Nathan Yau uses step-by-step tutorials to show you how to visualize and tell stories with data. He explains how to gather, parse, and format data and then design high quality graphics that help you explore and present patterns, outliers, and relationships.

Presents a unique approach to visualizing and telling stories with data, from a data visualization expert and the creator of flowingdata.com, Nathan Yau
Offers step-by-step tutorials and practical design tips for creating statistical graphics, geographical maps, and information design to find meaning in the numbers
Details tools that can be used to visualize data-native graphics for the Web, such as ActionScript, Flash libraries, PHP, and JavaScript and tools to design graphics for print, such as R and Illustrator
Contains numerous examples and descriptions of patterns and outliers and explains how to show them

Visualize This demonstrates how to explain data visually so that you can present your information in a way that is easy to understand and appealing.

n the last ten years the Ruby programming language has gone from an obscure open source project to the expansive technology behind some of the world’s most visible web properties. In this article Russ Olsen points out some of the Ruby ‘must reads’, web sites and books that will help the new Ruby programmer get started.

This is the website for the Pro Git book, written by Scott Chacon and published by Apress. Here you can find the full content of the book, a blog with tips and updates about Git and the book and open source projects related to Git or referenced in the book. Read the book now!

Die besten Einführungsbücher

Technical Blogging is the first book to specifically teach programmers, technical people, and technically-oriented entrepreneurs how to become successful bloggers. There is no magic to successful blogging; with this book you’ll learn the techniques to attract and keep a large audience of loyal, regular readers and leverage this popularity to achieve your goals.

Guter Artikel von @rands über das schreiben eines Buches: http://bit.ly/cS5tZc
– Luca Hammer (Luca) http://twitter.com/Luca/statuses/17473536943

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