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.
Actually, there has been a session on the SHARP 2008 conference on the History of the Future of the book : http://ah.brookes.ac.uk/conference/panel/is_there_a_history_of_the_future_of_the_book
All three lectures were published as papers in Logos: http://www.brill.nl/brochures/journals/LOGOS-10.pdf
Maybe it could also be “a history of the future of the personal bookshelf”.
In the sense that maybe more than the paper/ereader thing(but as a clear side effect of it, or as an increased side effect started with paperbacks), what is happening with books(or published texts), is more the explosion of the number of them being published, together with the other explosion regarding journalism and “personal journalism” texts. This leading to a transition from a bookshelf for every person, to something being more a collection of “point of publishing flows”.
But not to forget that our time is also a lot about the end of cheap energy, and not sure how all this will evolve, regarding this, call to Fr residential candidates below published in lemonde March 22nd:
http://tribune-pic-petrolier.org/
signed by :
Pierre René Bauquis – Former Director of Strategy and Planning at Total
Jean-Marie Bourdaire – Former Director of Economic Studies at Total, former Director of Studies at WEC
Yves Cochet – European Deputy, former Environment Minister.
Jean-Marc Jancovici – Consultant in energy
Jean Laherrère – Former Chief of Exploration Technologies at Total
Yves Mathieu – Former Hydrocarbon Reserves Project Manager at the Institut Francais du Petrole (French Petroleum Institute)
Philippe Labat – Oil Consultant
Jean-Luc Wingert – Consultant, ASPO France
Bernard Durand – Former Director of the Geology Division at the Institut Francais du Petrole
Jacques Varet – Former Director of Prospecting at BRGM, former President of Eurogeosurveys
Translations coming soon, signatures in English welcomed !
“We must burn all the book. All the books, Montag!”
–Farenheit 451