Now this is pretty cool: The U.K. band I Like Trains has a new album coming out called The Shallows, which was inspired, at least in part, by my book of the same name. The album is an eerily propulsive work – heavy and light at the same time – and it’s one that’s easy to get lost in.

The record comes out on May 7, but if you order a physical copy now – from here – you can download a digital copy immediately.

And take a listen to the first single, “Mnemosyne”:

Clay Shirky says:

The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, “I’m going to stare out the window. I’m going to schedule some time to stare out the window.” The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do.

“Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment”: that’s well put. We don’t like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus, but boredom is valuable because it requires us to fill that absence out of our own resources, which is process of discovery, of doors opening. The pain of boredom is a spur to action, but because it’s pain we’re happy to avoid it. Gadgetry means never having to feel that pain, or that spur. The web expands to fill all boredom. That’s dangerous for everyone, but particularly so for kids, who, without boredom’s spur, may never discover what in themselves or in their surroundings is most deeply engaging to them.

Perpetual boredom is an unattractive state. So is perpetual nonboredom.

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 14, I will be giving a talk, “The Book as Gadget: The Rise of E-Readers and E-Reading,” at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The lecture is part of the Newberry’s History of the Book series. It’s free and open to the public, but you have to register in advance. Details are here.

One thing I’m going to miss about the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, now that it’s been consigned to the dumpster of history, is the spines – all 45 of them, ranked across the shelf like stoic beefeaters.

They’re handsome things, somehow managing to be imposing and inviting at the same time. But the best part is that each one is branded with a pair of index words, there to tell you where the volume begins and where it ends. You thus get a bunch of almost-random two-word phrases to conjure with. Some don’t rise above their functionality: India Ireland, for instance, or Accounting Architecture. But others open up new and unexpected territory to wander in. Here, for the record, are some of my favorites:

Freon Holderlin (a man I’d like to meet, despite his reputation for coldness)

Menage Ottawa (a perfect oxymoron)

Chicago Death (Jack White’s new side project)

Light Metabolism (what the Theory of Everything, once discovered, will be called)

Excretion Geometry (a field understood by only seven people in the world)

Arctic Biosphere (Freon Holderlin lives here, according to rumor)

Krasnokamsk Menadra (when I take up meditation, this will be what I chant)

And my favoritemost of all:

Decorative Edison

“Facts are collected indiscriminately by the naive empiricist, who lives in fear of missing the one fact that will give meaning to the rest. His fear is justified; that fact will never be found.” -Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel

I realize that Larry Page is on a crusade to dumb down Google in order to compete more effectively with Facebook (exhibit 1: Google Search Plus Your World), but was it really necessary to remove Google Scholar, one of the company’s most useful services, from the search-options drop-down menu on search results pages? A couple of months ago, Google actually expanded the choices appearing on that menu, in a ham-fisted attempt to promote more of its services, but it deleted the Scholar option:

The menu is now a confusing mishmash of options to refine searches (e.g., Books, Photos) and links that whisk you over to landing pages for Google services (e.g., Wallet, Offers). But to get to Scholar, you have to click on the Even More link, then scroll down through a dog’s breakfast of obscure Google products, click on the Google Scholar link, and then (since Google doesn’t bother to remember what you were searching for in the first place), retype your keywords into the Google Scholar search box. What a kludge.

In addition to the drop-down menu, Google also lards its search results pages with two other search-options menus – the one that runs across the top, in that funereal black band, and the one that runs down the left margin – but you won’t find a Scholar option in those places, either. (I’ll also point out, just to emphasize the dumbing-down point, that the Images option now appears in all three places, though in the drop-down menu it’s called Photos and instead of bringing you to the real Image results it brings you to some lame-ass Picasa Image results. This is exactly the kind of of self-serving bloat that Google used to make fun of Microsoft for. We become what we hate.)

Promote Google Offers, and demote Google Scholar: if you’re looking for a symbol of the way Google has changed, you couldn’t do better than that. And, for the record, I’m not the only one whining about this. It’s a doggone donnybrook.

Larry, I beg you, put Google Scholar in one of those freaking menus. I don’t care which one. If you’d like, you can even add a fourth options menu down at the bottom of the page and stick Scholar there – alongside, perhaps, “Picasa Cat Photos” and “Google+ Celebrity Posts” and “Google Offers Daily Deals.”

I had the pleasure recently of being interviewed, by Alec Ash, for The Browser’s excellent “Five Books” series, in which one writer talks about five books written by other writers. The theme of my interview was the Information Age, which I think had its origins back in the fifteenth century, with the arrival of the mechanical clock and the invention of the printing press, and the five books I chose to talk about were Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet, James Gleick’s The Information, Tim Wu’s The Master Switch, Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft, and Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. You can read the interview here.