Unable to sleep, I am reminded by Miriam of the Poem on Your Blog idea. Today is the last day of National Poetry Month.
Check out “Luminous Blue Variables,” by my colleague Michelle Boisseau.
Author Archives: ghw
independent bookstores, kansas city
If you’ll look at the bottom of the sidebar on the right, gentle reader, you’ll notice a little banner ad for Booksense, “a family of independent-bookseller websites.” I am now a Booksense affiliate because, as I discussed earlier, I’d like to be able to encourage sales at places other than Amazon.com, even while recognizing that the Amazon site provides some very useful features. The publishing ecosystem needs diversity. Hmmm, maybe I should provide links to both. Becoming an affiliate allows me to link directly to a listing for a book on Booksense rather than on Amazon. Kathleen’s done it, and you should consider getting on board, too.
Below the fold are the Booksense search results for independent booksellers in close proximity to my zip code.
it’s the content, stupid!
Via Slashdot: Sony, Phillips, and E-Ink have teamed up to produce a reading device — christened the LibriÈ — with a display that mimics the features of paper.
The hardware technology that makes such a display possible is amazing, but really, the key details as to why this device is a bad idea are to be found in this story from The Guardian:
To keep a tight rein on the flow of ebooks, 15 major publishers and newspapers, including Kodansha, Asahi Shimbun and Yomiuri Shimbun, have teamed up with Sony to form a company called Publishing Link and to provide content through a website known as Timebook Town.
[T]he sting in the tail is that each title is really only borrowed. Thanks to Open MG protection, the content is unreadable after two months, so it’s best to think of the LibriÈ experience as a library of sorts.
Okay, let’s review.
| LibriÈ | Library book |
| The size of a paperback book. | Often the size of a paperback book. |
| Reading surface almost captures all the desirable features of paper. | Reading surface captures all the desirable features of paper because it is paper. |
| You can read the book (which you have paid for) for up to two months. | You can read the book (which you’ve checked out for free) for up to two months. |
| The device costs almost $400. | Library privileges usually free. |
There are billions of pages of information available for free on the Internet, but with this device, you get to pay for the privilege of reading material in a proprietary format that makes the content disappear after two months. More expensive then paper books and less durable? Where do I sign up!?
Oh yeah, this product is sure to be a big success!
The history of reading teaches us that readers engage in a wide array of complex and unpredicatable behaviors. Rare book rooms the world over are filled with evidence of this fact. One of the strengths of the “old-fashioned” book format is that it supports a wide array of complex and unpredicatable behaviors. Digital media present an opportunity to widen that range of possible behaviors even further: build your own concordances of your favorite works in seconds, search your personal library for other occurences of an interesting word or phrase, make your own literary “smash ups” by slicing and dicing plots, create an electronic commonplace book.
How sad that these possibilities have yet to be made available in a dedicated reading device. Any reading format that attempts to put absolute boundaries upon reading behaviors is bound to fail because attempts to make readers submit will breed resentment. Either someone will hack the LibriÈ, or it will flop.
See also these stories on the LibriÈ: NY Times,
Forbes,
C|NET.
lasting wounds of war
Via the Washington Post:
While attention remains riveted on the rising count of Americans killed in action — more than 100 so far in April — doctors at the main combat support hospital in Iraq are reeling from a stream of young soldiers with wounds so devastating that they probably would have been fatal in any previous war.
More and more in Iraq, combat surgeons say, the wounds involve severe damage to the head and eyes — injuries that leave soldiers brain damaged or blind, or both, and the doctors who see them first struggling against despair.
Numbers tell part of the story. So far in April, more than 900 soldiers and Marines have been wounded in Iraq, more than twice the number wounded in October, the previous high. With the tally still climbing, this month’s injuries account for about a quarter of the 3,864 U.S. servicemen and women listed as wounded in action since the March 2003 invasion.
Meanwhile, as the president of the United States asks young men and women to make sacrifices he never made in support of a questionable-at-best war, the Bush campaign’s flying monkeys have the audacity to try to make Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry’s service in Vietnam an issue. It’s not that I think only war vets should be president, but if you weasel your way out of the draft and then embroil your country in the kind of conflict you were avoiding, then the word “hypocrite” only begins to capture what kind of person you are.
ellen ullman, the bug
I’ve just finished Ellen Ullman’s The Bug. I’m considering teaching the novel next spring in my honors section of English 225, the second course in the composition sequence at UMKC. Ullman describes the interaction between human and machine with a remarkably poetic voice, such as this passage where programmer Ethan Levin reads an email from a technical consultant and then ponders a software bug he’s trying to solve:
It all presented itself as a continuum: hardware at the bottom, with all its miniature mechanics and electronics, becoming at each step upward more abstract, becoming software. It produced in him a certain vertiginous pleasure–this glimpse into the slip-space between the hard and soft, the physical and mental worlds, layer upon layer of human thought turned into chips, circuit boards, programs. And it struck him, as it sometimes did these days, how briefly physical the computer was. All software on the top, then just a small layer where it was only dumb wire and plastic and silicon–beneath which everything immediately turned abstract again: the intelligence of the circuits, “logic gates” designed with software and etched into chips, through which moved the bits of stuff human beings had named “electrons.” (45)
Coincidentally, I’m dealing with my own bug as the university’s “Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access” email server is only letting me log in about one out of every twenty attempts. The very patient folks in the university IT department can’t find anything wrong. As for me, I miss telnet and pine, and I’m very tired of Microsoft. Apple is selling 12″ iBooks for under a thousand bucks, and I’m very tempted. I’m using OpenOffice for my office-related tasks, GIMP for my image editing, MovableType for most of my website management tasks lately, and jEdit for my text encoding. Hmm. If only I could remember why I decided to go with this laptop running m$.
Matt first piqued my interest in The Bug, btw.