Reviews

Hi Nick,

one question, one observation.

When will the book be available in the UK?

I had a first look at a friend's ipad today, like me she is an academic with a media and journalism background.

I had been wondering if the ipad was a shallows device or if it might a computer that might encourage deep reading. I started to talking to her about this and mentioned your role as provacatuer in the 'Is the Internet changing the way we think?' debate while I was looking at Wired.

As I was reaching an intial conclusion that the (delightful) ipad rewards the bits of the brain that are genetically programmed to process sight and sound more than reading connections I turned the page and there was an article about the Shallows.

I don't what this is really says, other than serendipity can be an amazing thing.

cheers
andy

Hi Nick, congratulations on "shipping" :-)

Will there be an iBooks edition of "The Shallows"?

Nick,

Will your book tour be hitting Southern California anytime soon?

Hi Nick,

Why no Kindle or iBook? I promise not to click away— but I am tired of killing trees and hauling their waste around with me.

Thanks for the questions. Answers:

UK edition: should be out soon (I just received copies, so it has been printed)

iBooks edition: I honestly don't know (it's a matter between WW Norton and Apple Inc.)

Kindle edition: in the works; should be available soon

Southern California appearance: I'll be presenting at the Armand Hammer Center on July 19

Nick

First off, nice work Nick, I loved the book.I'm a writer myself and reviewed your last book, The Big Switch, in Processor Magazine. This one was a little further afield of the IT industry and so far, I haven't been successful in convincing my editorial contacts to run a review (if anyone has any leads, please let me know :).

I thought the NYT review largely missed the point...it almost seemed like he came into the book with preconceptions and then picked, choosed and selectively omitted parts of your work to make his point, which was the opposite of yours.

Case in point is the section when he cites the research on brain activity while reading (a book) versus Web browsing. You point out that the frontal (presumably most 'advanced', most interconnected, part of the brain lights up much more while browsing than reading, but the NYT reviewer misses your (apparently too subtle) argument that this isn't necessarily a beneficial or positive response. It could well be that when we are more engaged with a text that we're using neurons that are more well travelled and thus more atuned to the deep and reflexive thought we're doing while reading versus the reactionary 'fly swatting' our brain does while in the midst of a browsing session.

If I was still in the business of writing Wiki articles such as the one about "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", I would scour through all these reviews looking for patterns and nuggets, and then synthesize and categorize whatever I found in appropriate sections in a Wiki article dedicated to The Shallows. Thanks for providing this stub for the hopefully forthcoming Wiki article about The Shallows: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shallows

I'm looking forward to reading this book.

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