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Writing Without Words is a project that explores methods of visually representing text and visualizes the differences in writing styles of various authors.

London-based artist Stefanie Posavec has a gift for words. Or for the lack thereof, to be exact. Her latest project, Writing Without Words, explores the literary world when its most important building blocks are removed by visually representing text.

2011 treats for young readers, ranging from the classic to the quirky to the impossibly charming.

The git-scribe tool is a simple command line toolset to help you use Git, GitHub and Asciidoc to write e-books. This provides tools for setting up the structure, collaborating with co-authors, doing technical and copy-editing, handling translations, taking errata, as well as publishing online, pdf, mobi (Kindle) and epub (iBooks, Nook) versions.

This leading textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the fields of pattern recognition and machine learning. It is aimed at advanced undergraduates or first-year PhD students, as well as researchers and practitioners. No previous knowledge of pattern recognition or machine learning concepts is assumed. This is the first machine learning textbook to include a comprehensive coverage of recent developments such as probabilistic graphical models and deterministic inference methods, and to emphasize a modern Bayesian perspective. It is suitable for courses on machine learning, statistics, computer science, signal processing, computer vision, data mining, and bioinformatics. This hard cover book has 738 pages in full colour, and there are 431 graded exercises (with solutions available below). Extensive support is provided for course instructors.

This interface allows you to search the Google Books data in many ways that are much more advanced than what is possible with the simple Google Books interface. You can search by word, phrase, substring, lemma, part of speech, synonyms, and collocates (nearby words). You can copy the data to other applications for further analysis, which you can't do with the regular Google Books interface. And you can quickly and easily compare the data in two different sections of the corpus (for example, adjectives describing women or art or music in the 1960s-2000s vs the 1870s-1910s).

Pandora for books: NoveList Plus is a comprehensive online readers' advisory tool. Using NoveList Plus, you can search among hundreds of thousands of popular fiction and readable nonfiction titles, and also retrieve author read-alikes, book lists, book discussion guides, and more. All of this rich editorial content is crafted by librarians and reading authorities who are experts in the field

In Getting Good With Git, Nettuts+ Associate Editor Andrew Burgess will guide you through the sometimes-scary waters of source code management with Git, the fast version control system.

The mission of the International Children's Digital Library Foundation (ICDL Foundation) is to support the world's children in becoming effective members of the global community - who exhibit tolerance and respect for diverse cultures, languages and ideas -- by making the best in children's literature available online free of charge.

The Myth of Digital Democracy, Matthew Hindman, Princeton University Press  2009

The last sentence of Matthew Hindman's The Myth of Digital Democracy is "It may be easier to speak in cyberspace, but it remains difficult to be heard". The book is about collecting and analyzing the following large data sets on the way to this conclusion:

The links among 3 million American political web pages together with data showing how Google leads its users to political sites. Hindman concludes that "link structure is an effective proxy for audience share" and that "communities of Web sites on different political topics are each dominated by a small set of highly successful sites". The scale of online concentration is so profound, he argues, that claims the Internet "democratizes" politics are misleading. For example, when it comes to blogs, "the top blogs are now the most widely read sources of political commentary in the United States", but these widely-read bloggers are very few in number (a few dozen) and they are "overwhelmingly.. well-educated white male professionals". The kind of voices that get heard in political discussion are the same kind that were heard through offline media, only perhaps more so. "The vigorous online debate that blogs provide may be, on balance, a good thing for US democracy. But as many continue to celebrate the democratic nature of blogs, it is important to acknowledge that many voices are left out."
Data from Hitwise of search-engine-directed traffic show that online politics is a tiny sliver of Internet traffic, and that "Scholars, public officials, and journalists have paid a great deal of attention to online politics. Citizens themselves, though, have directed their attention elsewhere." Not too surprising perhaps.
Data from Hitwise and other sources, of patterns of concentration in [American] online and traditional news media. He concludes that online media is much more concentrated (a few outlets get a larger share of the traffic) than many offline industries, particularly radio. The biggest story is what he calls "the missing middle":From the beginning, the Internet has been portrayed as a media Robin Hood - robbing audience from the big print and broadcast outlets and giving it to the little guys. But the data in this chapter suggest that audiences are moving in both directions. On the one hand, the news market in cyberspace seems even more concentrated on the top ten or twenty outlets than print media is. On the other, the tiniest outlets have indeed earned a substantial portion of the total eyeballs... It is the middle-class outlets that have seen relative decline in the online world. Moreover, it is overwhelmingly smaller, local media organizations that have lost out to national sources. [p100]

It is a refreshing change to read a book about the cultural and political impact of the Internet that actually looks closely at Internet traffic (what people read) rather than at the number of sites (what people write), and it's this perspective that leads Hindman to his myth-busting conclusions. The main flaw of the book is that it falls between two stools: it's clearly an academic work that started as a set of papers or a thesis, but it is looking for a wider, popular audience. To reach that audience, Hindman should have got rid of many technical details and written a book with more narrative, but if you don't mind reading technical studies, this is a good one, and I recommend it.

The Myth of Digital Democracy has been out for a year or so now, so after I finished it, I looked at some reviews, and got a surprise. The books detractors argue that no one claimed the Internet democratizes politics, and if they ever did then they don't any more, and if they still do then they mean something different.
So here are links to some critiques of Hindman's book, and some words in defence of The Myth of Digital Democracy:

Charlie Beckett of the LSE's think tank POLIS writes that the idea "that the Internet is innately democratic and that it will have revolutionary political consequences" is "a straw man". He goes on: "I always struggle in lectures or talks when I have to find quotes from these digital utopians. I can always cite lots of people (like me) who argue that the Internet has given us great tools and that it offers huge potential for civic engagement and public self-expression. I can even find examples, from Mysociety to Iran and Twitter that show concrete cases. But I don’t know many serious people talking about a revolution."This is a little cheeky from someone whose own book is called SuperMedia, and which is publicised as a "manifesto" for a "radical new relationship between the media and the public", and which apparently "explores the potential for an entirely new type of journalism... and makes the case that journalism could be the catalyst for change needed to solve many of the world's problems." All sounds pretty revolutionary to me. Beckett is getting hung up on the title, which was probably the publisher's idea anyway, and needs to read the book more closely.As for actually finding quotes about the Internet's innately democratic and revolutionary (or at least radically disruptive) nature, well there's always Google's description of its own PageRank search algorithm as "drawing on the uniquely democratic nature of the Internet" and its recent claims that in Iran, citizen video reporting via YouTube "appears to have become an essential part of their struggle". Or there's Lawrence Lessig in Remixed: "The neutral platform of the Internet democratized technical and commercial innovation. Power was thus radically shifted." Or Yochai Benkler at the very beginning of his influential The Wealth of Networks: "Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passe today to speak of 'The Internet revolution.' In some academic circles, it is positively naive. But it should not be." And that's ignoring all the talk of Twitter Revolutions in Moldova and Iran, and Egypt's Facebook Revolution. Discussion of the Internet's impact on all aspects of our society is routinely cast in a revolutionary light, with a strong dose of "power to the people", and if such language is usually kept out of academic journals, that's no reason to ignore it.
For Mark Bahnisch of Inside Story, Hindman "narrows down the possible targets for his myth-busting to the claim that the internet will bring about 'democratisation.' But it's unclear who's actually making this claim, and Hindman ignores most of the more nuanced and specialised scholarship on the topic. If what he has to say when he gets down and dirty with the blogs later on is any indication, the real target is a nuch of journos and op-edders writing in the New York Times circa 2004." Bahnisch is saying Hindman should ignore "journos and op-edders" with audiences of millions and focus instead on "nuanced and specialised" scholarship that general readers like me will never read. Rubbish. The real debate about the role of the Internet is a public one, and Hindman has done exactly the right thing to tackle this perception that's out there among the unwashed masses like myself. If the nuanced and specialized among us have good things to say, they should get out there in public and say them.
When it comes to the concept of democratization, Bahnisch and others people bring up "Michel Bauwens' concept of equipotentiality" as an alternative meaning interpretation of "democratization". Equipotentiality is a fancy word for speculations about how peer-to-peer networks function: no one said that democratization means a wider set of voices are heard, simply that anyone can potentially reach an audience of millions, and if only a few do, well good for them.The whole point Hindman's approach makes is that concepts, whether they coin new words or not, need to be grounded in reality. Is the loose world of blogs equipotential? Who knows, given the vagueness of the concept? But that potential is certainly not equirealized and that's a point worth making.
Allison Hayward writes that "to observe that 'digital democracy isn't always and everywhere the rule is not the same thing as saying that the Internet hasn't 'democratized' politics... For the Internet to be 'democratizing' we shouldn't require that it be revolutionary, only that at the margins it provide a broader population with more opportunities to contribute, volunteer, engage, and advocate, and make changes that are sustainable over time."Sigh. Hindman has demonstrated that many of these functions are not accessible to a broader population in any meaningful way. The book challenges those who believe the Internet is "democratizing" in whatever way to show there is some substance to these claims, and the rebuttals are wishful thinking based in, well, nothing much really.
Matt Bai argues that Hindman's data is old, and "the political impact of the Internet is spreading so quickly that it's almost impossible to capture and quantify": he disparages Hindmans's graphs and equations and prefers anecdotes about internet activists from modest backgrounds. By the time I'd read this review I was feeling pretty sorry for Matthew Hindman, because it is clear that he just can't win. Bai has a belief in the power of the Internet that borders on the mystical ("spreading so quickly that it's almost impossible to capture and quantify"), so what would it take to persuade him otherwise? Nothing short of careful, detailed data I'm sure. But when someone does the work, well it takes time, and so it is dismissed as "old" and full of obscure graphs and equations. There is little point entering such an argument.
Along these lines Henry Farrell, in the Times Highe[…]

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In The Pirate's Dilemma Matt Mason claims to speak from the perspective of rebellious and subversive youth culture while he promotes the worst kind of corporate astroturfing which is too bad because his message that many new ideas emerge from outside the mainstream and from outside the market is important and his message that pirates who skirt the edges of the law to bring culture to new audiences have done much to improve our society also matters, but when an author wants us to believe he is anti-establishment while he praises the vitamin water company Glacéau for "keeping it real" in its advertising campaigns with 50 Cent while telling us that it was sold to Coca Cola for $4.1 billion in 2007, praises Procter & Gamble for its viral video campaign, is entranced by the way that Nike's Air Force One sneaker owes its success to the "remix" well where do you start? Mason loves the idea that youth culture, existing in spaces outside the mainstream and outside the commercial world, has had a huge impact on our modern world and I am with him 100% but the lives of many idealistic, left-wing youth become enmeshed in compromise as we get older and we stoke the fires of capitalism during the day while trying to throw a little water on those same fires in the evening and I understand how this happens because like many middle-aged people I wrestle with the contradictions and compromises involved, and I admire those few who have stuck to their principles, often at a real cost to their careers and personal lives, which is why the few people who really piss me off, whom I actively scorn and who get my blood boiling, are those like Matt Mason who don the mantle of rebellion and anti-corporate politics while consulting for Disney, Pepsi, and P&G and who claim that selling YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion is a form of rebellion and who babble about the benefits of sharing because "it's not all about the money any more" while giving presentations to the people who brought you McDonald's "I'm Loving It" campaign and who place themselves on the romantic side of the battle between graffiti and advertising in "a turf war that has raged for centuries between the establishment and a secretive, loose-knit network that doesn't like the top-down, one-way flow of information in public spaces" [103] only to step slickly into approvingly quoting advertising agency Droga5 on creating "a dialogue between advertising and graffiti" which really means using graffiti for commercial ends and making a buck and if that's not selling out to the man then what the fuck is really? because the punk spirit Mason loves so much has nothing to do with business models or change agents or entrepreneurial spirit or building a brand or even combining altruism with self-interest because the spirit he writes of was defiantly and nihilistically anti-corporate and Matt Mason lives in a corporate world however much he'd like to think otherwise and when he claims that pirates are those who are "pushing back against authority, decentralizing monopolies, and promoting the rule of the people: the very nature of democracy itself" well I see what he means but then when he goes on to claim that the anti-authoritarian ideals of youth culture are becoming ... a new more extreme, invigorated, and equitable strain of the free market--the decentralized future of capitalism [171] then I just want to shake him by the neck and shout at him that you're obviously not stupid Matt Mason so why don't you do what you know you should do and follow the fucking money before making pronouncements about sharing and decentralization when it's still the case that money is not shared and money is not decentralized because sharing is one thing but if I share and you get the money then I'm not being altruistic I'm just being a sucker and you're not promoting community you're exploiting the good intentions of those who are spending their time and talent on your venture and if you want to impress me with the subversive role of DVD bootlegging don't quote billionaire Mark Cuban and Disney co-chair Anne Sweeney and billionaire Steve Jobs at me because if they have found a way to co-exist with piracy it doesn't mean that these companies stand for a more democratic and equitable form of capitalism it just means they've found ways of using or co-existing with piracy in a way that promotes their own interests over those of their rivals and I end up not taking him seriously at all which is unfortunate because he has many entertaining stories of hip-hop, pirate, and punk culture although I end up not knowing whether to trust them because where the book overlaps with things that I know anything about he is often ludicrously wrong like when he repeatedly refers to Linux as a company [148, 150, 238] or when he quotes Courtney Love saying that record companies "figured out that it's a lot more profitable to control the distribution system than it is to nurture artists... They own the plantation" while completely failing to notice that big chunks of the Web 2.0 world he loves work on exactly the same model, that owning the platform gives control of the distribution system and that's where the money is or when he gives us a canned history of Wikipedia [149-150] which is derived from one interview with Jimmy Wales so it's no surprise that it gets several key facts wrong or when he identifies Steve Jobs with openness and sharing [145] and claims that the notoriously secretive and proprietary Apple won the music wars because it "truly understood sharing" [158] when the fact is that the only thing Apple really wants to share is the music they don't own and not the technology that they do own you can ask Palm about that who can't sync their own phones with iTunes or you can ask the developers who have left the iPhone App Store over Apple's arbitrary and opaque approval process, so Matt Mason in the end sits for me with people from an earlier generation like Kevin Kelly who claims to be a maverick while working for Conde Nast or Chris Anderson who claims to be on the side of small and scrappy businesses against big companies while promoting Amazon or Stewart Brand or John Perry Barlow who strive to combine activities like consulting for senior management at large corporations with statements like "I'm an anti-company man" if you can believe it I mean do you have any self-awareness at all? I want to ask them I think it's the ego that gets to me and the fact that they have been successful in leading people and particularly young idealistic people with good intentions into activities that they think are progressive and politically anti-establishment but which end up just feeding money into the pockets of Silicon Valley venture capitalists and the lucky guys who get to sell their startups to Google for a nice billion or so as if that's a triumph of the little guy give me a break.

Welcome to the Public Index, a site to study and discuss the proposed Google Book Search settlement. Here, you can browse and annotate the proposed settlement, section-by-section.

Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations, Hayagreeva Rao, Princeton University Press 2009
For decades, economists have extended their intellectual reach beyond mere money in an attempt to encompass all the social sciences in their analytical framework. But now the boot is on the other foot and it looks like even core economic observations may be better explained by other social sciences. Robert Solow apparently said that attempts to explain differences in economic growth across countries typically end in "a blaze of amateur sociology". The focus on psychology in explanations of the banking crash shows that growth is not the only area of economics where the discipline runs out of steam before reaching its destination. The rise of behavioural economics, surely a last-gasp attempt by economists to match their models to the real world without changing departments, suggests that the condition goes deep.
Despite its title, Hayagreeva Rao's Market Rebels (Open Library link, publisher's page) challenges the economic analysis of innovations. At 180 pages and full of case studies it's easy to read quickly, but I was so taken by it that I went through it a second time and found much that I had missed. Rao does not hammer the reader over the head with the implications of his case studies, but for me as a non-sociologist and non-economist the implications are huge and I'll be thinking about the book for a long time.
The case studies are diverse, but are centered around a single claim: the "joined hands of activists" play an important part in the creation, diffusion, and blocking of innovations. Collective action matters. Rao describes how hobbyists were key to the cultural acceptance of the car and the development of the personal computer; how microbrewers brought diversity back to beer; how nouvelle cuisine grew from the rebellious student movements of Paris 1968; how shareholder activism has pushed large companies to change behaviours; how community activists attempted to stall the spread of chain stores and then of big-box stores; how the green movement blocked the development of biotechnology in Europe. These studies, many based on his own research, help to bring activist groups and their campaigns out from the wings and into the spotlight as we think about innovation and social change, and by doing so Rao is performing a valuable service.
The book is not strong on systematic analysis. The closest he gets to describing what determines whether movements succeed or fail is that successful movements must create "hot causes" and "cool mobilizations". Both concepts are tied in to the concept of "identity", which for Rao is the underlying motive that causes people to join with or against social movements. A "hot cause" is the spark that successful activists use to light a fire. It's a lightning-rod incident or issue that arouses strong emotions such as pride or anger. Examples include the frustrated demonization of "big beer" by real ale enthusiasts; the outrageous bonus paid to Home Depot CEO Robert Nardelli which crystallized the shareholder rights movement. But "hot causes" by themselves are not enough for a prolonged campaign. "Cool mobilizations" are actions that keep a movement going forward by "engaging audiences in new behaviors and new experiences that are improvisational and insurgent". Examples include setting up a microbrewery or formulating shareholder resolutions. The concepts are useful, but it's a shame Rao doesn't have a stronger turn of phrase. Naming concepts can be key to owning them, and "hot cause" and "cool mobilization" are too literal and clumsy to take on the weight they need. But this is a detail (and I don't have better ideas).
For someone who has spent most of their non-fiction reading time reading economics and economics-inspired books in recent years, Rao's is a welcome and refreshing change. Economic analysis too-often reduces the political left-right split to the false dichotomy of market vs state, but this reduction maps badly on to the real experience of political activism. Those who protest Monsanto's private-sector use of genetic engineering are often the same as those who protest state-driven wars. Many of those who oppose new Wal-Mart stores also oppose the extension of surveillance powers by the state. Where do such activists see themselves in a market vs state debate? For many, they don't: market vs state is not what it's about. So it's not surprising that economists have a blind spot when it comes to social movements, and that the discipline systematically minimizes their impact. By putting social movements at the centre of his stories, Rao shows that they can and do have an influence, and that they deserve a place in any serious look at institutions that shape social change.
Although he says almost nothing about the Internet and digital collaboration, Market Rebels' focus on innovations makes the book obviously relevant. Rao's analysis is a welcome alternative to the usual focus of widely-read writers like Yochai Benkler and Clay Shirky. These writers take the economics point of view and focus on issues such information as a public good, lowering transaction costs for online exchanges, and the vanishingly small marginal cost of reproduction of digital information. Rao's unspoken counterargument, which convinces me, is that group formation is not a problem of information, it's a problem of identity. If he is right then although we can expect to see many examples of successful groups in the online world, we won't see not a huge flowering of groupiness compared to the information-starved analogue world.
What's more, if Rao is right and initiatives such as Wikipedia, blogging and the Open Source movement really are social movements, then they may have a limited lifespan. Digital activist identity is a rebellious and anti-establishement stance, but such a stance can only be maintained while the movement is oppositional. Open Source, with a longer history behind it than Wikipedia or blogging, has changed its identity to being more professionalized, more establishment. Its participants are less likely to be the radicals of yesteryear. Once Wikipedia is established as a success for a few years, rebellion becomes irrelevant as a motive and one may wonder whether the activists will find the "cool mobilizations" to maintain involvement and participation.
If there is an economics tie-in with Rao's analysis, it's with the analysis of identity pioneered by Rachel Kranton and Robert Akerlof (and which I sketched in the final chapter of No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart). Rao does little to pick apart the concept of identity and it looks to me like the K&A analysis would have been helpful to him. For Kranton and Akerlof, identity is a set of social categories (car enthusiast, green activist), a set of prescriptions that go along with those categories, and a set of costs and benefits associated with following or not following these prescriptions. We each choose an identity from the range that society provides ("environmentalist", "conservative", etc). Forcing this choice is the object behind Rao's "hot cause": the lightning-rod issue that polarizes participants into supporters and opponents ("which side are you on, boys, which side are you on?", as the greatest living American sings). Once you have chosen an identity, you must affirm it by following the prescriptions associated with that identity (shopping at independent stores, eating nouvelle cuisine, etc) or you pay the price of dissonance if you take actions that go against those prescriptions (shopping at Wal-Mart, eating classical cuisine). Creating a strong set of such prescriptions is the essence of Rao's "cool mobilizations", which serve to maintain a sense of solidarity and identity among movement members.
One of the more common criticisms of No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart was that, although I argued in favour of collective action as a corrective force to free markets, I had little to say about what forms that action should take. It's a fair knock, and I'm happy that I can now point such readers to Rao's book. Not only does he take on several of the issues that I cover (Wal-Mart and big-box stores, biotechnology, real ale) but he takes them much further than I could ever had done, and in a wonderfully specific and constructive way that provides concrete guidance to activists. I take my hat off to him.

AWESOME.

The New York Times recently asked: Do We Need a New Internet?:At Stanford, where the software protocols for original Internet were designed, researchers are creating a system to make it possible to slide a more advanced network quietly underneath today’s Internet. By the end of the summer it will be running on eight campus networks around the country. The idea is to build a new Internet with improved security and the capabilities to support a new generation of not-yet-invented Internet applications, as well as to do some things the current Internet does poorly — such as supporting mobile users.
The Stanford Clean Slate project won’t by itself solve all the main security issues of the Internet, but it will equip software and hardware designers with a toolkit to make security features a more integral part of the network and ultimately give law enforcement officials more effective ways of tracking criminals through cyberspace. Ed Felten of Princeton University responds with an orthodox hacker-purist line: [The first misconception] is the notion that today's security problems are caused by weaknesses in the network itself. In fact, the vast majority of our problems occur on, and are caused by weaknesses in, the endpoint devices: computers, mobile phones, and other widgets that connect to the Net. The problem is not that the Net is broken or malfunctioning, it's that the endpoint devices are misbehaving -- so the best solution is to secure the endpoint devices... It's an appeal to ye-olde Internet mythologie, complete with deferential references to "the founders" and their foresight, as if the Internet were some real-world Seldonian Foundation.Neither position is good enough, and Jonathan Zittrain's wise book The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It [home page, Open Library entry] does a great job of explaining why and of providing some better ways of thinking about the problem. Yes, designing security into the Internet will inevitably cripple the very flexibility and permissiveness that has made the Internet a continuing source of unpredictable and surprising innovations. But sentimental idealization of the Original Internet and its "end-to-end" design won't do either [p165]. [U]sers are not well-positioned to painstakingly maintain their machines against attack, leading them to prefer locked down PCs [as Felten appears to advocate, ed], which carry far worse, if different, problems. Those who favor end-to-end principles ... should realize that intentional inaction at the network level may be self-defeating, because consumers may demand locked-down endpoint environments that promise security and stability with minimum user upkeep. This is a problem for the power user and consumer alike....When endpoints are locked down, and producers are unable to deliver innovative products directly to users, openness in the middle of the network becomes meaningless. Open highways do not mean freedom when they are so dangerous that one never ventures from the house. The passage shows the strengths and weaknesses of the book. Zittrain takes an unusually and refreshingly pragmatic, realistic view of the Internet, rejecting old approaches as and when needed. On the other hand, you can see from the first two sentences that his prose can be repetitious and dry. You have to work your way through some dense thickets to get to through this forest - but if you are ready to make the effort, it's a worthwhile journey: one of the best Internet books I've read.Zittrain's central concern is a dialectical contradiction at the heart the Internet:
The Internet's success comes from its remarkable ability to repeatedly generate new and unexpected uses.
This "generativity" (yuck, what a clumsy word), comes in turn from the deliberate dumbness of the Internet protocols themselves; they were deliberately designed to permit any kind of traffic, for any purpose, to pass between end points of the network.
But the more the Internet becomes "prime time", the more it attracts spammers, virus writers and information thieves to prey on the online population, and the Internet's dumbness is free for them to use as well.
The more these highway predators threaten our online experience, the more we seek to retreat to the safety of a closed and protected world.
A closed and protected world may give us safety, but will spell the end of the Internet as a fount of innovation.

The Internet, like capitalism, contains the seeds of its own destruction. But Zittrain is a digital reformer, not a revolutionary. Inspired by the continuing success of Wikipedia in the face of similar problems, he favours a combination of light regulation (like health and safety standards for the Net) and popular community action (neighbourhood watch). He believes that these, combined, can preserve the creative spirit that has led to so many innovations, while staving off the worst of the security and other problems. And he makes a solid case, buttressed by broad research (50 pages of notes and references) and a careful, undogmatic and pragmatic attitude.The book is in three parts. Part I is a history of the Internet, told to highlight two design principles that were present right in the original TCP/IP architecture. The first is the "procrastination principle", which says the "the network itself should not be designed to do anything that can be taken care of by its users" [p31]. Most features of a network should be implemented at its computer endpoints (the end-to-end principle) rather than "in the middle". The second principle is trust; the Internet is "a bucket-brigade partnership in which network neighbors pass along each other's packets", and the assumption of co-operation and fair dealing is present in its design. So the Internet has no built-in security or identification mechanism; anyone can join the network; and there is no quality of service guarantee for packets it delivers. These two principles have led to what Zittrain calls the "generative dilemma" [36]. "The idea of a Net-wide set of ethics has evaporated as the network has become so ubiquitous" [45]. So how do we regain security while maintaining the ability to be creative?Part II outlines what Zittrain sees as some of the dangers facing the Internet. One danger is the rise of Internet appliances, such as many of today's mobile phones, X-boxes, and Kindles. These devices promise a secure environment, but at the cost of restricting the ability of programmers to be creative. The second is at the other end of the network, where "Web 2.0" platforms such as Google Maps, Facebook, Salesforce and other hosted environments offer "contingent" environments for programming, where the prospect of unilateral changes to terms of service or agreements inhibits creativity.Zittrain is enthusiastic about much of what the Internet has wrought, but he parts company from current digital orthodoxy on these issues. When it comes to Web 2.0, influential commentators from Shirky to Lessig to Tapscott and even to Benkler gloss over the differences between commercial web sites and non-profits, in an attempt to highlight a unified Internet culture. Lessig, for example, talks optimistically of a hybrid economy in which these motivations muddle along next to each other, and while Benkler does see an opposition of interests between the market economy and the collaborative network economy, he never makes much of it. I haven't seen as clear-minded an analysis of why commercial Web 2.0 platforms threaten creativity as Zittrain provides and I agree with him wholeheartedly.The mobile Internet is only beginning to get the kind of attention that Web 2.0 has received. Today's smartphones and yesterday's desktop computers are similar in terms of computational power (see this claim of Windows 3.1 running on a Nokia N95 if you don't believe me). But whereas Microsoft got hauled in front of the courts to keep the desktop computing environment open for non-Microsoft applications and opposing the bundling of Internet Explorer, there are no such worries for mobile phone vendors as they keep their proprietary app stores and their managed devices in the name of security. There are layers of the iPhone, the BlackBerry - yes, and Android devices too - that are open only to the operating system, and which third-party applications cannot access.A natural response to Zittrain's worry that we face an Internet of closed appliances (or, as Margo Seltzer calls them, "gizmos") and closed services is that these can exist in parallel with open, "generative" devices and communications. But Zittrain rejects this particular compromise: even in a world of locked-down PCs there will remain old-fashioned generative PCs for professional technical audiences to use. But this view is too narrow. We ought to see the possibilities and benefits of PC generativity made available to everyone, including the millions of people who give no thought to future uses when they obtain PCs, and end up delighted at the new uses to which they can put their machines. And without this ready market, those professional developers would have far more obstacles to reaching critical mass with their creations.[165] The end-to-end principle, argues Zittrain, has had its day, as "'middle' and 'endpoint' are no longer subtle enough to capture the important emerging features of the Internet/PC landscape" [167].  In its stead he advocates a more general principle that seeks explicitly to maintain "generativity", so that ISP filtering of viruses may be worth considering, for example.Zittrain sees an inspiration in Wikipedia, whose shambolic, after-the-fact, bits-and-pieces way of fixing problems has been one of its strengths. Zittrain gives two initiatives he has been involved with, that could drive a similar approach for security while maintaining generativity. One is herdict, a browser plugin that collects the input of people from around the world to assess web site accessibility. Another is stopb[…]

While Lessig is incensed at the raising of a generation of criminals, he is unfazed at the thought of raising a generation of commodities, whose attention and interest is a source of revenue for some venture capitalist. At a time when advertising directly to children is under increasing scrutiny, and for good reason, the commodification of friendship and of home videos should make a parent of young children concerned. But it does not.

I hope that these recommendations will prove equally appealing to those who think that Google can do no evil and those who think it does only evil. Perhaps they will prove equally frustrating. The settlement is good as it stands, but it could stand to be better.

This Google/AAP settlement has hit my brain like a steel ball in a pinball machine, careening around and setting off bells and lights in all directions. In other words, where do I start?Reading the FAQ (not the full 140+ page document), it seems to go like this:Google makes a copy of a book.Google lets people search on words in the book.Google lets people pay to see the book, perhaps buy the book, with some money going to the rights holder.Google manages all of this with a registry of rights.Now, replace the word "Google" above with "Kinko's."Next, replace the word "Google" above with "A library."TILT! If Google is allowed to do this, shouldn't anyone be allowed to do it? Is Jeff Bezos kicking himself right now for playing by the rules? Did Google win by going ahead and doing what no one else dared to do? Can they, like Microsoft, flaunt the law because they can buy their way out of any legal pickle?Ping! Next thought: we already have vendors of e-books who provide this service for libraries. They serve up digital, encoded versions of the books, not scans of pages. These digital books often have some very useful features, such as allowing the user to make notes, copy quotes of a certain length, create bookmarks, etc. The current Google Books offering is very feature poor. Also, because it is based on scans, there is no flowing of pages to fit the screen. The OCR is too poor to be useful to the sight-impaired. And if they sell books, what will the format be?
TILT! Will it even be legal for a publicly-funded library to provide Google books if they aren't ADA compliant?
Ping! This one I have to quote:
"Public libraries are eligible to receive one free Public Access Service license for a computer located on-site at each of their library buildings in the United States. Public libraries will also be able to purchase a subscription which would allow them to offer access on additional terminals within the library building and would eliminate the requirement of a per page printing fee. Higher education institutions will also be eligible to receive free Public Access Service licenses for on-site computers, the exact number of which will depend on the number of students enrolled."TILT! Were any public libraries asked about this? Does anyone have an idea of what it will cost them to 1) manage this limited access and pay-per-page printing 2) obtain more licenses when demand rises? Remember when public libraries only had one machine hooked up to the Internet? Is this the free taste that leads to the Google Books habit?Ping! The e-book vendors only provide books where they have an agreement with the publishers, thus no orphan works are included. So, will Google's niche mainly consist of providing access to orphan works? Or will the current e-book vendors be forced out of the market because Google's total base is larger, even though the product may be inferior?
Ping! We already have a licensor of rights, the Copyright Clearance Center, and it was founded with the support of the very folks (the AAP) who have now agreed to create another organization, funded initially by Google and responding only to the licensing of Google-held content.
TILT! Google books gets its own licensing service, its own storefront... can anyone compete with that? And what happens to anything that Google doesn't have?
Ping! It looks like Google will collect fees on all books that are not in the public domain. This means that users will pay to view orphan works, even though a vast number of them are actually in the public domain. Unclaimed fees will go to pay for the licensing service. Thus, users will be paying for the service itself, and will be paying to view books they should be able to access freely and for free.
Ping! We have a copyright office run by the US government. I'm beginning to wonder what that Copyright Office does, however, since we now have two non-profit organizations in the business of managing rights, plus others getting into the game, such as OCLC with its rights assessment registry, and folks like Creative Commons. Shouldn't the Copyright Office be the go-to place to find out who owns the rights to a work? Shouldn't we be scanning the documents held by the Copyright Office that tell us who has rights? (Note: the famed renewal database is actually a scan of the INDEX to the copyright renewal documents, not the full information about renewal.) Even if we had access to every copyright registration document in the Copyright Office, would we know who owns various rights? I think not. And how much of this will change with the Google opt-in system? I get the feeling that we'll maybe resolve some small percentage of rights questions, somewhere in the order of 2-5%. And it will, in the end, all be paid for by readers, or by libraries on behalf of readers.
TILT! Rights holders can opt-out of the Google Books database. If (when) Google has the monopoly on books online, opt-out will be a nifty form of censorship. Actually, censorship aimed directly at Google will be a nifty form of censorship.
GAME OVER. All your book belong to us.

In the face of confidence that the system is assumed to be self-healing, it is difficult to discuss systemic limitations or how they might be fixed.

The main aim of this task is to explore how hardware or software tools for reading e-books can provide support to users engaged with a variety of reading related activities, such as fact finding or learning.

Carl Malamud: Suggesting that students interested in furthering the public domain... start harvesting documents from the public taxpayer-financed web sites at UMich and re-injecting them into the public domain?

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, Clay Shirky, Penguin, 2008.
"We are living", says Clay Shirky, "in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action, all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations" [p. 20]. Digital technologies are now part of our social fabric, and all "the phones and computers, the e-mail and instant messages, and the webpages are manifestations of a more fundamental shift. We now have communications tools that are flexible enough to match our social capabilities and we are witnessing the rise of new ways of coordinating action that take advantage of the change" [20].

Here Comes Everybody is an accessible and challenging introduction to these changes - to the many ways every Shem, Shaun and Issy can now share, collaborate, and act together. It combines some great stories with non-technical introductions to some of the key ideas (a little game theory, a little network theory, a few power laws) and is well worth reading -- but it should be read with caution.

The reason for this mixed verdict is the dual nature of the book itself. Here Comes Everybody has two voices. One (let's call him 'Shirky') is a perceptive and creative interpreter of the ways that digital technology is changing society. I like and respect Shirky. He is blunt and provocative enough to cut through the mess of questions that come up when tackling something as far-reaching as the Internet, while being even-handed and reserved enough to respect the complexity of his subject. Here is Shirky on the erosion of journalism and photography:
There is never going to be a moment when we as a society ask ourselves, "Do we want this? Do we want the changes that the new flood of production and access and spread of information is going to bring about?" It has already happened; in many ways, the rise of group-forming networks is best viewed not as an invention but as an event, a thing that has happened in the world that can't be undone. As with the printing press, the loss of professional control will be bad for many of society's core institutions, but it's happening anyway. [p73]
I've struggled with this message for a few days because I don't like its determinism, but he has convinced me. Shirky separates what is happening from what is desirable (not that everything digital is undesirable) and that's an important separation to make if we are to be at all clear-headed.

Shirky is not a techno-inevitabilist in a broad sense. Nuclear power, for example, "is a technology that society can, for the moment, make a decision about" [299]. As with driving a car, we "have a good deal of control over both the route and the speed with which nuclear power progresses, including the option to simply pull over" [299]. But when it comes to digital technologies we are steering a kayak: "We are being pushed rapidly down a route largely determined by the technological environment... Our principal challenge is not to decide where we want to go but rather to stay upright as we go there." [300]

The other voice (let's call him 'Clay') is a techno-enthusiast and an inveterate story-teller. When Clay looks at the Internet he sees no reason for worry - he sees freedom and unlimited potential. It's "the largest increase in expressive capability in the history of the human race" [106], bringing with it a world in which, when "people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of a scope and longevity that were previously impossible; they can do big things for love." [142] Shirky may warn that there are losses from social changes, but Clay is breezily dismissive: "The spread of cheap and widely available creative tools is sad for people in the advertising business in the same way that movable type was sad for scribes -- the loss from this kind of change is real but limited and is accompanied by a generally beneficial social change." [209] This is the logic of The Lottery - the short story in which one person is stoned so that others can be better off.

I blame Clay and his enthusiasms for the two major flaws of this book.

The first is a fallacy of composition. Clay looks at the Internet and sees lots of groups forming (and things are easy to see on the Internet because even our most casual utterances get stored on someone's servers for posterity to investigate) and he concludes that the world is alight with a new groupiness, the likes of which we have never seen. From time to time Shirky pipes up to remind his alter ego that this is not enough, that "treating the internet as some sort of separate space... was part of the problem" [194]. "The internet augments real-world social life rather than providing an alternative to it" [196]. One implication of Shirky's caution is that, to evaluate the state of groups in our world, we also have to look at how our use of the Internet may have displaced other forms of group building. But while Shirky knows all about Bowling Alone, Clay is too busy running off to tell us a story about Meetup.com to take a really close look at how those positives and negatives are adding up.

While Clay is telling us all about the use of digital technology to spark innovative forms of protest in Belarus, which is a fascinating story, we really need Shirky to ask why, with all these group-forming tools at our disposal and despite the documented disillusionment with the war in Iraq, there is so little coherent protest happening compared to previous wars? Is it really the case that society now is becoming, thanks to the internet, more democratic, more collaborative, and more cooperative than before? I am not convinced. Clay is in danger of making the same mistakes that William Greider made in One World, Ready or Not, and which Paul Krugman demolishes - of finding lots of examples of groups and inferring that the world must have more groups in it than it used to - but that logic is flawed.

Now Shirky is far too well-informed to fall into this kind of trap. Shirky recognizes that, just as removal of a bottleneck at one point in a highway may prompt a new bottleneck to form a few miles down the road, so the "removal of technological limits has exposed a second set of social ones" [91]. But Clay's enthusiasms mean that the book is unbalanced, and this second set of limits never really gets investigated closely. Clay the enthusiast wins out over Shirky the dispassionate observer. If you are going to argue that groups are forming as never before, and if you are going to use minor events like angry airline passengers protesting about being trapped on runways to claim that "Consumers now talk back to businesses and speak out to the general public, and they can do so en masse and in coordinate ways" [179] then you really have to think about consumer activity before digital technology. Here is "talking back to business" with a vengeance:
August [1800] - Notwithstanding that the last day of this month was a Sunday, it was marked as the commencement of a serious riot. A great increase in the price of provisions, more especially of bread, had roused the vindictive spirit of the poorer classes to an almost ungovernable pitch. They began late in the evening, by breaking the windows of a baker in Millstone Lane, and in the morning proceeded, with an increase of numbers and renewed impetuosity, to treat others of the same trade in the same unwelcome manner. Granaries were broken into at the canal wharfs, and it was really distressing to see with what famine-impelled eagerness many a mother bore away corn in her apron to feed her offspring. [link]
Do consumers have a stronger voice now than in the past? I don't know, but I do know that a story or two about American Airlines passengers is not going to convince me. If Clay wants to tell us about a student group using Facebook to protest about British Bank HSBC's cancellation of interest-free loans then perhaps he should think about the longstanding student boycott of Barclays Bank during the 1970's and 1980's that contributed to the end of apartheid. But he doesn't, and that's disappointing.

The second flaw - also a common one - is a reluctance to follow the money. Between them, Clay and Shirky convince me that the Internet marks a change; that a society with an Internet is different from a society without one. Also, they convince me that the Internet is not a single model of sharing/collaboration/collective action; it's many models. So let's talk about these models, about which ones have legitimacy and longevity and which don't. To do so requires Shirky to take the broad brush that Clay is using and to start to make smaller, more detailed points.

Perhaps we no longer need books telling us that the Internet is a big thing. It is time to treat that fact, as Shirky sometimes does, as the starting point for a discussion rather than the conclusion. The questions then become ones of what kind of structures will form and persist in the online world, and if you are going to talk about these questions then you have to address the economics of the problem.

Money matters.

People's willingness to contribute to Wikipedia, Shirky points out, is tied to the non-profit status of Wikipedia. A threat from Spanish participants to start an alternative version convinced founder Jimmy Wales to "formally forgo any future commerical plans for Wikipedia, and to move the site from Wikipedia.com to Wikipedia.org, in keeping with its nonprofit status. Similarly, he decided to adopt the GNU Free Documentation License for Wikipedia's content [which] assured contributors that their contributions would remain frerely available" [274]. There is an ongoing tension between contributors to sites and the "owners" of those sites that is visible on MySpace (see Billy Bragg's efforts to gain musicians rights over their content), on Facebook (the failed "Beacon" program as one example) and […]

Thanks to lifehacker I discovered that Read an Ebook Week is in early March. The Epublishers Weekly blog has a post which covers “30 Benefits of Ebooks,” which while containing some bits of truth, if you will, is mostly IMHO made of up bad logic and spurious reasoning.

I will not waste my time deconstructing all 30 reasons but will comment on a few of them.

1. Ebooks promote reading. People are spending more time in front of screens and less time in front of printed books.

Uh, how does this follow? We (even I) may be spending more time in front of our screens but we might just be looking at photos on Flickr, watching YouTube videos, surfing for porn or any of 1000s of possible activities which have absolutely nothing to do with reading an ebook. And while much of our online activity does involve reading it may not include reading books.

2. Ebooks are good for the environment. Ebooks save trees. Ebooks eliminate the need for filling up landfills with old books. Ebooks save transportation costs and the pollution associated with shipping books across the country and the world.

And the manufacture of all these electronic devices and the electricity to power them, including all of the many highly toxic components and manufacturing processes do no damage to the environment at all?

3. Ebooks preserve books. … Ebooks are ageless: they do not burn, mildew, crumble, rot, or fall apart. Ebooks ensure that literature will endure.

Ha ha ha ha ha. This is one of the funniest, utterly stupid comments I have ever heard. Digital preservation issues anymore? Format migration?

7. Ebooks are portable. You can carry an entire library on one DVD.

So those books I carry with me pretty much everywhere are not portable? Certainly ebooks are more portable in quantity is the point but make it more clearly then!

14. Ebooks are free. The magnificent work of Project Gutenberg, and other online public libraries, allow readers to read the classics at no cost.

“Right!” said with a proper Bill Cosby accent cause my public library charges me $5 just to walk in the door. Not!

21. Ebooks, with their capacity for storage, encourage the publishing of books with many pages, books that might be too expensive to produce (and purchase) in paperback.

Perhaps true, but it goes against any and all conventional wisdom that I’ve heard or read about the length of electronic materials read by people. I guess one could make a 2500-page PDF but who the hell is going to read it?

27. Ebooks defeat attempts at censorship. All these works were banned: Analects by Confucius. Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Ars Amorata by Ovid. Pro Populo Anglicano Defensio by John Milton. The Scarlet Letter by Hawthorne. Wonder Stories by H.C. Andersen. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Ulysses by James Joyce. … Many of these books were confiscated, burned, or denied availability in libraries, bookstores and schools. Ebooks guarantee that readers maintain their right to read.

All I can say to this one is “Seriously WTF are you on about?” I bet I can find everyone of those at both my public and academic library. And censorship certainly exists on the Internet.

Now clearly there is some value in this list. Some of the author’s points seem perfectly valid, although there are more I could pick on. But the ones I did highlight seem egregiously spurious to me.

I would like to see the proliferation of more widely available ebooks that are cross-platform, free of DRM, and in formats that are easily migratable to new formats when required. I would also like to see some of the possibilities that the author says may come to pass do so.

Nonetheless, this silly list will do nothing to change my reading habits. I read both online and in print and I print a lot of stuff that came to me electronically. Both have various affordances even now, but many of the affordances that the author claims for ebooks are nonexistent for most ebook formats at the moment.

I despise most marketing and spurious marketing really gets my goat!

So read ebooks if they work for you. If they don’t then don’t worry so much about some of these reasons.

To the extent it or other search engines limit access to parts of their index, their public-spirited defenses of their archiving and indexing projects are suspect.

Sander so refined the art of portraiture that his moving images of his fellow countrymen have been heralded both as an important sociological document and a photographic masterpiece.

Comic art press located in Oakland.

Can we say it was a mistake? For it was a mistake.

He was in the vanguard of a relatively small group who fervently, indeed religiously, believed in the curative power of good design when applied to all aspects of American life.

The editors would need good tools to create and manage all of the bibliographic and personal relationships, and the users would need a navigation and visualization system that gave them customizable views of the information.

Pulp fiction cover art with the text removed.

Using Library of Congress Authorities, you can browse and view authority headings for Subject, Name, Title and Name/Title combinations; and download authority records in MARC format for use in a local library system.

Fischer, Claude S. America Calling: A Social History of the Telephone to 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Zak, Albin J., III The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records. Berkeley: University of California Press, c2001.

Oldham, Gabriella. First Cut: Conversations with Film Editors. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1992.

The eScholarship Editions collection includes almost 2000 books from academic presses on a range of topics, including art, science, history, music, religion, and fiction.

Open source e-book reader that creates a community of readers with embedded forums, discussion groups, polls, and shared annotations.

What I hope to provide in the following page is a few of the Stupid Academic Tricks [tm] about reading that I've learned over the years.

Here are some good articles on how to write a book review.

Meet Wimbledon Green, the self-proclaimed world’s greatest comic book collector who brokered the world’s best comic book deal in the history of collecting.

Cartoonist Guy Delisle found himself in North Korea's capital of Pyongyang on a work visa for a French film animation company.

Turkey is a pretty good place to shop for old books, old maps and old prints.

Googlebombing as literature/art: Kenji Siratori is "a Japanese cyberpunk writer who is currently bombarding the internet with wave upon wave of highly experimental, uncompromising, progressive, intense prose."

The 360 Audiophiles Project is an idea proposed to explore the world of Amateur Audiobook reading using the various voices of the friends on Yahoo 360.

Box of 70 Pocket Penguins.

Written by Micah Dubinko, a member of the W3C XForms working group and an editor of the specification, the book explains the how and why of XForms, showing readers how to take advantage of them without having to write their own code.

Suitable for use as a textbook or for self-study by professionals, it concentrates on undergraduate-level fundamental concepts and techniques that will enable readers to proceed with building applications on their own.

An annotated bibliography on media anthropology.

A Digital Talking Book (DTB) is a multimedia representation of a print publication, where the rendering of the audio is in human voice.

Movies in Fifteen Minutes, a book by Cleolinda Jones, began life as a wildly popular Livejournal project.

Westerbeck, Meyerowitz, Barthes, Cartier-Bresson, Friedlander, Sontag, Misrach, Szarkowski, Evans, Arbus, and Goldin.

Starting at $15.95 for a perfect-bound book or $9.99 for a poster, turn your images into great gifts.

By holding texts in a horizontal fashion, the design can accommodate up to 70 small and large books in a very compact footprint.

The Open Content Alliance (OCA) represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia

i could not put this book down...

For someone like me, a programmer interested in creating better user interfaces, this is a really good book...

Fair Use--"a privilege in others than the owner of a copyright to use the copyrighted material in a reasonable manner without his consent, notwithstanding the monopoly granted to the owner...

"Perhaps late this year, we will publish a true multimedia e-book [text, sound and video] completely distinct from a printed book."

This collection brings together almost all of Gogol's notable short stories, from his first surviving piece, St. John's Eve, to his last and most acclaimed short piece, The Overcoat.

An ironic tale of love and betrayal in which the sins of a father come back to visit his son.

Alarming psychological insights, a study of the profoundly disturbing connections between technology and the human condition, and an intriguing plot masterfully executed.

Dhalgren is a brilliant novel about sex, gender, race, class, art, and identity.

Date presents what you might call a "clarification" of a relational database usage.

I suppose it's unreasonable to expect the world's first so-called hypertext novel to have a compelling plot.

Devastating satire of how human societies exploit and assimilate new technologies--in this case, a race of intelligent salamanders. Highly recommended.

Collectively, the world's billions of poor people have immense entrepreneurial capabilities and buying power.

Although the title of this book may seem a bit abstract, here is a work that can be appreciated by most anyone, from the most techno savvy industry guru to the mildly technology curious among us...

Edward Burtynsky surely has a keen eye for unnatural landscapes and features that have been scarred by man, and his stunning and thought-provoking photos of such matters are the focus of this book...

Photographs of both remnant and newly established zones of Chinese industrialization.

In 1980 southwest Texas, Llewelyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles across several dead men, a bunch of heroin and $2.4 million in cash.

I've just made my way through each of the individual books that make up this outstanding collection, and then decided to go back and buy a copy of Maps in a Mirror - just to simplify my collection...

By Soojin Jun, information designer.

It contains books illustrating examples of collaboration (e.g., biographies of Wordsworth and Pound) with sources on collaborative learning, software engineering, social psychology, and law.

A book about how the new phenomenon of digitally connected communities are emerging as a force to counterbalance the power of the big brands and advertising.

Meditates on the boundary between performer and audience, environmental sound and music, improviser and composer, and the role of digital technology in mediating or enhancing these distinctions.

His famous works for film titles or end credits includes "Psycho", "Vertigo", "Bonjour Tristesse", "North by Northwest", "Around the World in 80 days", etc.

A book that looks into the psychology and philosophy of the experience of listening to music on records.

An H2O Playlist is a series of links to books, articles, and other materials that collectively explore an idea or set the stage for a course, discussion, or current event.