http://www.roughtype.com/ Copyright 2012 Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:05:42 -0500 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.15 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss After I wrote, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, about the malleability of text in electronic books, a reader asked me to flesh out my thoughts about the different ways that "typographical fixity" - to again borrow Elizabeth Eisenstein's term - can manifest itself in a book. I've been thinking about that and have come up with four categories of fixity or stability - not all of which are typographical in nature - that influence the permanence of a book (or other written work) and that change, sometimes radically, as we shift from print publishing to electronic publishing. I'm sure this isn't a complete list, but I hope it's a useful start: Integrity of the page. At the simplest and most fundamental level, typographical fixity means that when you have a page printed in ink, you're able to trust that the page will maintain its integrity; when you pick it up tomorrow, or twenty years from now, its contents will be the same as what you see today. The printing press didn’t create this type of fixity - it was there with the scribal book, the scroll, and certainly the stone tablet - but it did extend it into... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/02/words_in_stone.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/02/words_in_stone.php Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:05:42 -0500 "Facebook was not originally created to be a company," writes Mark Zuckerberg at the start of his letter to would-be shareholders in the company's IPO filing. "It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected." Hosanna! One of the great things about our newly transparent world is that we can peer into people's pasts - I mean, their timelines - and see what they were doing and thinking way back when. And when you scroll Zuckerberg's timeline back to Facebook's formative days, you do indeed see a young man filled with philanthropic fervor, a man without worldly desires who is putting his heart and his soul into a grand social mission. Just look at what Zuckerberg was doing, as a sophomore at Harvard, in the days just before he created Facebook. Working selflessly at his computer in his dorm, he created a site called Facemash. It pulled photos of Harvard undergrads from other campus sites, put two of the photos side by side on a web page, and allowed people to vote for which of the two was the "hottest." It then tallied the votes to create lists ranking students by their... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/02/saint_zuck.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/02/saint_zuck.php Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:58:33 -0500 The wisdom of Pudge Fisk, channeled through Jon Udell: Somewhere in the 2000s, [Roger] Angell asked [Carlton] Fisk to reflect on what had most altered the game of baseball since his playing days. The salaries? The drugs? No. The game-changer, Fisk said, was instant replay. His game-winning 1975 home run is one of most-remembered moments in all of sports. The video of that event is one of the most-watched clips. You might think that Carlton Fisk has seen that clip a million times. But in fact, he told Roger Angell, he never watches it. That’s because he doesn’t want to overwrite the original memory, which is his alone, recorded from a point of view that was his alone, with a memory we all share that was recorded by a camera up in the stands.... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/the_camera_in_t.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/the_camera_in_t.php Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:19:00 -0500 I used to buy a lot of MP3s. I don't anymore. That's not to say I don't listen to MP3s. I have about 10,000 of the little guys squeezed like vienna sausages into my iTunes music folder, and I listen to them a lot. But when I buy music today I buy it on vinyl. I'm no audiophile, no retro hepcat, but my ears tell me that music sounds better on vinyl - warmer, more nuanced, less shrill - and I make it a point to listen to my ears. Also, I've rediscovered the pleasures of looking at the art work on record jackets. Thumbnail images are pretty weak substitutes. In fact, they suck. But the decisive factor in the transformation of my purchasing behavior, as a marketer would say, wasn't aesthetic. It was the decision by record companies to start giving away a free digital copy of an album when you buy the vinyl version. Hidden inside the sleeve of a new record, like a Cracker Jack prize, is a little card with a code on it that lets you download the digital files of the songs, often in a lossless format, from the record company. So I no... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/why_publishers.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/why_publishers.php Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:45:48 -0500 Seth Finkelstein, a long-time crusader against online censorship, made what seemed like a jaundiced comment on my recent post Piracy and Privacy. I had raised the possibility that online activists, fresh from their SOPA fight, might now come to the support of efforts to give people more control over the personal information that companies collect and trade online. Will the activists rise up again? I wondered. To which Finkelstein replied: No. Or maybe, they will rise up AGAINST privacy, because they will be fed a line that this is going to Censor The Net. Turns out Finkelstein wasn't being jaundiced. He was being prescient. Shortly after he made his comment, a Harvard Law School blog posted a lathery rant, under the judicious title "More Crap from the E.U.," by Jane Yakowitz, a professor at the Brooklyn Law School. Yakowitz blasted the European Commission's new proposal to strengthen online privacy protections. Europe, she wrote, has been "flailing around" with internet regulation. It has enacted "miserable" policies. The EC's reasoning is "complete and utter hogwash." Its actions are "regressive." Its proposed new directive represents "a misguided attack on the information economy." Goodness. I think Professor Yakowitz must have eaten a bad mussel... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/power_to_the_da.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/power_to_the_da.php Fri, 27 Jan 2012 14:21:03 -0500 In an intriguing article at The Millions, Guy Patrick Cunningham wonders whether fragmentary writing may prove a cure for fragmentary reading: [David Shields's] Reality Hunger and [Masha Tupitsyn’s] Laconia are very different books, but they share this desire to use fragmentary writing to dramatize the act of thinking through culture (in Shields’ case mostly books, in Tupitsyn’s mostly films). Even this desire has its roots in the digital world, where culture is constantly being repackaged and analyzed. If neither work achieves the majesty of Beckett’s Texts — to be fair, an obscenely high standard — both find an approach to fragmentary writing that pushes the form in a new direction, rather than just rehashing modernism’s innovations. They manage this by drawing on digital forms — Shields by creating a “collage” that mimics the mash-up culture that dominates online media, Tupitsyn by writing her book via Twitter. In so doing, they suggest an interesting new path for both writers and readers, one that takes the clutter of the digital world and transforms it into something quieter and more thoughtful.... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/pieces_of_mind.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/pieces_of_mind.php Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:12:54 -0500 Stanley Fish discusses the coming of the digital humanities, and what it portends, in two nicely circuitous longforms: Longform #1 and Longform #2.... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/words_as_number.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/words_as_number.php Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:08:37 -0500 Internet activists flexed some impressive muscle over the last couple of weeks in working to block Congress from enacting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA), which would have put legal restraints and restrictions on search engines, advertising networks, internet service providers, and other online sites and services as a means of stemming the unauthorized trade of copyrighted works and other forms of intellectual property. The activists were joined in the cause by many large internet companies, including Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The motivations of the corporations and the activists overlapped to some degree, but there were also important differences. The activists were fighting for the cause of freedom; they worried that the bill would impede the flow of information online, to the detriment of people using the net. The corporations had business interests to protect. They feared a wave of litigation and other operational and legal headaches, as well as the possible rise of obstacles to the development of new products and services. It will be interesting to watch how internet activists will deploy their considerable power in the future, and it will be particularly interesting to watch how much muscle they'll flex when their opponents on an issue are... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/piracy_and_priv.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/piracy_and_priv.php Tue, 24 Jan 2012 14:07:33 -0500 "Before the printing press," writes Lawrence Summers in the Times's Education Life section today, "scholars had to memorize 'The Canterbury Tales' to have continuing access to them." That has to be one of the most dunderheaded sentences ever written by a former Harvard president and former Treasury secretary. The bound book was invented more than a thousand years before the printing press came along, and people were writing stuff down - on scrolls, tablets, blocks of wood - long before the book was created. In the 100 or so years between the writing of Chaucer's masterpiece and the establishment of a printing trade in England, handwritten copies of "The Canterbury Tales" were fairly abundant, particularly for those who would qualify as scholars. It was one of the most popular books of the time. If you wanted "access" to the work, you didn't have to pull Chaucer's lines from your memory; you could read them from pages that looked like this: Maybe Summers was confusing Chaucer with Homer, and the printing press with the alphabet. Anyway, Summers' historical howler comes, amusingly, in the service of an argument that students don't need to learn stuff anymore: "in a world where the entire... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/the_summers_tal.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/the_summers_tal.php Sun, 22 Jan 2012 11:53:35 -0500 To mark its 21st birthday, Vintage Books has released a collection of essays on reading called Stop What You're Doing and Read This! Contributors include Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Tim Parks, and Blake Morrison. I also have a piece in the book, "The Dreams of Readers," in which I mull over my own experience as a reader and try to connect it with some of the interesting new research, by scholars like Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto, that's being done on the psychology of literary reading. Here's a short excerpt from my essay: When we open a book, it seems that we really do enter, as far as our brains are concerned, a new world — one conjured not just out of the author’s words but out of our own memories and desires — and it is our cognitive immersion in that world that gives reading its rich emotional force. Psychologists draw a distinction between two kinds of emotions that can be inspired by a work of art. There are the “aesthetic emotions” that we feel when we view art from a distance, as a spectator: a sense of beauty or of wonder, for instance, or a feeling... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/thinking_about.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/thinking_about.php Tue, 03 Jan 2012 12:02:42 -0500 It dawns on me that there may be a correspondence between Steven Johnson's vision of serendipity as the output of a properly manipulated digital mechanism and Nick Bilton's belief in the scheduling of units of daydreaming as a means for the optimization of problem-solving. The Like button seems to be part of the same trend. Let's call it the Industrialization of the Ineffable.... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/the_industriali_1.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/the_industriali_1.php Tue, 03 Jan 2012 00:04:38 -0500 The future, it seems, is too much for Nick Bilton. The New York Times's in-house webstud, and author of the book I Live in the Future & Here's How It Works, had something of a Joycean epiphany last week. Perched atop a rocky cliff, watching the sun dissolve majestically into the Pacific, he immediately did, he writes, "what any normal person would do in 2011": he whipped out his iPhone and started farting around with it, eager to come up with something "to share on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter." But then a wave of self-doubt broke upon his consciousness: Here I was, watching this magnificent sunset, and all I could do is peer at it through a tiny four-inch screen. “What’s wrong with me?” I thought. “I can’t seem to enjoy anything without trying to digitally capture it or spew it onto the Internet.” [the guy even talks to himself in stilted prose! -snarky blogger] That gave him pause. It was like one of those moments when Pandora stops the music stream and asks you if you're still listening. And so, "after talking to people who do research on subjects like this," Bilton made a resolution for 2012: he will,... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/to_tweet_percha.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/01/to_tweet_percha.php Mon, 02 Jan 2012 13:55:15 -0500 The Review section of tomorrow's Wall Street Journal includes a brief essay by me on what I think will prove to be one of the most radical consequences of the rise of electronic books: the ability to perpetually revise a book even after it's been published. We take for granted the fixity of text in a printed book. But on a Net-connected digital reader, fixity disappears, replaced by endless malleability. Here's how the piece begins: I recently got a glimpse into the future of books. A few months ago, I dug out a handful of old essays I'd written about innovation, combined them into a single document, and uploaded the file to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing service. Two days later, my little e-book was on sale at Amazon's site. The whole process couldn't have been simpler. Then I got the urge to tweak a couple of sentences in one of the essays. I made the edits on my computer and sent the revised file back to Amazon. The company quickly swapped out the old version for the new one. I felt a little guilty about changing a book after it had been published, knowing that different readers would see different... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/12/from_movable_ty_1.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/12/from_movable_ty_1.php Fri, 30 Dec 2011 20:26:10 -0500 Stumbled on this while surfing the web today: I suppose it was inevitable.... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/12/sign_of_the_tim.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/12/sign_of_the_tim.php Thu, 22 Dec 2011 17:41:56 -0500 Fetch.... http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/12/the_curious_cas.php http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2011/12/the_curious_cas.php Wed, 21 Dec 2011 17:34:40 -0500