It started back in February. One line of Ulysses every 15 minutes. It took 257 days. On November 13 the last of the 24765 lines was published.For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it is a social networking service that only allows 140 characters per message. Some call it micro-blogging, on one hand it seems like blogging ADD style while on the other it presents a fresh, new template for expression.The folks at Booktwo.org deserve a ton credit for this project. This is Literature 2.0 as much as it is Book 2.0. Booktwo.org says the core of their mission is "to explore...
Is the Kindle the Ultimate Reading Machine?
Evan Schnittman, vice president of business development at Oxford University Press, has an interesting, positive take on Amazon's Kindle that is worth a read.One thing to keep in mind argues Schnittman is that us book-focused news types are not the target audience for this product. This one is for the pure readers. Not the book collectors, the booksellers, not for the book as an object gang but "for folks like my sister-in-law Laurie, a voracious reader of print books" as Schnittman says.He goes on:"Immersive reading has always been the bane of electronic content. As extractive content such as reference has...
DRM Drama: The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)
Mark Pilgrim has created a clever little piece, The Future of Reading ( A Play in Six Acts), about the inherent dangers of Digitial Rights Management (DRM).Using sources like Steven Levy's Newsweek article The Future of Reading, Kindle's Terms of Service, Jeff Bezos 2002 letter to the Author's Guild and George Orwell's 1984, Pilgrim adequately conveys some of the pitfalls of the DRM approach.The six acts are:1. The act of buying2. The act of giving3. The act of lending4. The act of reading5. The act of remembering6. The act of learningHere is Act 1:When someone buys a book, they are...
New York Booksellers Ask Spitzer to Reconsider Online Sales Tax
Last week, 29 New York State bookstores all members of the American Bookseller Association (ABA), signed on to a letter sent to Governor Spitzer asking him to revisit his recent decision not to "enforce sales tax laws" or more precisely to start collecting sales tax from online retailers (ie. Amazon).Somehow they believe this will help level the playing field in the bookselling world. Do they not realize that many of their customers buy books online too? and that even if they had to pay sale tax the book will still be cheaper when purchased online!Also, the 'independent businesses are vital...
William Blake at 250
Today is the 250th birthday of the Romantic poet, artist and engraver William Blake.How important was Blake. A 2002 poll by the BBC of the 100 Greatest Britons has Blake coming in at 38. Not bad for someone who was pretty much unrecognized during his lifetimeTerry Eagleton honors the occassion with a commentary in The Guardian titled The original political vision: sex art and transformation"Politics today is largely a question of management and administration. Blake, by contrast, viewed the political as inseparable from art, ethics, sexuality and the imagination. It was about the emancipation of desire, not its manipulation."The Tate...