booktwo.org

I’ve been thinking about covers for a while now. One of the many great debates around the ephemeralisation of music has been the lamentations for the loss of cover art: now, we are reaching the same point with books.

I say ephemeralisation rather than digitisation because it’s not just a physical transformation we’re going through, it’s a cognitive one. I’ve been repeating Walter Pater’s famous quote in my head a lot: “all art aspires to the condition of music”. Pater argued that “For while in all other works of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form,…

Read the rest of this post →

I was at a symposium some years back with my friends Joseph Heller and William Styron, both dead now, and we were talking about the death of the novel and the death of poetry, and Styron pointed out that the novel has always been an elitist art form. It�s an art form for very few people, because only a few can read very well. I�ve said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. [Laughs.] To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and

…

Read the rest of this post →

Too long and too important for a Stop Press post:

Google is throwing away information that is fundamentally characteristic of books—metadata that describe and even determine what books are, as simple and trivial as volume numbers, or artifacts of type design, editing, and artistic production. Books are not, in other words, mere bags of words, but vehicles in which ride a wide sundry of other passengers—metadata, artistic expression, whimsy, and error. Books are born and produced in a rich organizational and information-rich social and economic context, and the willing discard of that context carries with it a loss whose

…

Read the rest of this post →

So, what a surprise. Amazon has announced that it’s starting a Lulu-type POD system, through its wholly-owned subsidiary CreateSpace, which has been churning out self-published CDs and DVDs for several years now. The difference to Lulu being that products of said service will be searchable and buyable through the mighty Amazon.com, making them much more discoverable than stuff on Lulu, which is mostly only linked to from authors’ homepages.

There’s a bigger story here though, and it’s linked to this announcement:

The National Archives and Records Administration, the federal government�s official archivist,

…

Read the rest of this post →

Citing the crucial need to access records on nuclear waste storage, or census returns, in five, 10 or even 100 years’ time, [Natalie Ceeney, chief executive of the National Archives] said: “This is a critical issue for us, and for UK society as a whole. We assume our personal records are secure, we expect our pensions to be paid, but anyone with a floppy disc even three or four years old is already having a hard time finding a computer that will open it.” [Source]

This is undoubtedly one of the most interesting and pertinent articles I’ve seen…

Read the rest of this post →

I’ve written about Google Book Search before, but it’s time to do so again – particularly after their PR barrage at the London Book Fair, some aspects of which I wrote up at the time.

For a while now, I’ve been broadly in favour of GBS, at least in as much as it’s forcing publishers to look seriously at digitisation strategies and becoming the driving force for change within the industry. Google’s PR drive has also stepped up a notch, with their flacks becoming increasingly informed about the book trade, a number of high-profile panels at book…

Read the rest of this post →

One of the subjects touched on in the fascinating talk by Brewster Kahle which I linked to yesterday was the Bookmobile, an on-demand books service in the back of a van connected to the Internet Archive’s hundreds of thousands of free, digitised texts.

The set-up, which cost around $15,000 including the car (breakdown below, no pun intended), consists of a mobile satellite connection, a couple of laptops, a laser printer, a guillotine and a book binding machine. It can produce books anywhere in the world that can see a satellite, in minutes, for a cost price of $1 a…

Read the rest of this post →

Via Quentin Stafford-Fraser�s Status-Q blog, I came across this fascinating talk by Brewster Kahle, Digital Librarian, Director and Co-founder of the Internet Archive, which has been working to provide universal access to all human knowledge for more than fifteen years.

Play audio file

It’s a couple of years old, but Kahle’s major point – that libraries are not important simply as repositories of knowledge, but that they make it available for research, thus expanding the sum total of that knowledge in the world and improving it – is anything but redundant. If you’ve wondered how Google…

Read the rest of this post →