Historian. Author. Ranter. Idea Junkie.
This a blog. Sort of. I rarely use it anymore.
Thoughtful commentary on the Steven Johnson essay re the future of the book that I mentioned the other day. Including this notion:
There’s one thing to be pointed out here: in the history of search engine optimization (oh, that dirty phrase), content has driven the evolution of search engines as much as the other way round.
Oh, man, if you've ever been to college, or ever taught at the university level (poor you. Poor me!), this is for you. Hilarious. Also slightly sick/sad/scary, because how much anyone wanna bet me that some professor is out there right now creating a "real" course with a horrifyingly similar syllabus?
Tip o' the mug to Nicholas Carr at Rough Type. I just finished reading his book The Big Switch. Interesting and well-written and worth your time.
There's a terrific essay in today's Wall Street Journal about the future of the book, reading, and other related matters. Written by Steven Johnson, whose most recent book was The Invention of Air. Because it's the Wall Street Journal, there's no way to know if it's available as a free read, but it's worth tracking down. One focus of his essay:
There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?
That's a question I've asked here on many occasions. (See for example here and here or any of the entries under the category "Future of Print.") I don't know the answer, although Johnson takes a stab at it.
The essay also addresses another issue I've pondered: the disconnect between what people think is out there (eg, whatever shows up on Google), and what's actually out there (billions of undigitized books). Johnson also contemplates the act of reading itself:
Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading.
But unlike most essays of this sort, he also wonders what the e-book will mean for writers:
Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors. Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank. Just as Web sites try to adjust their content to move as high as possible on the Google search results, so will authors and publishers try to adjust their books to move up the list.
And now I'd better stop quoting before I end up violating copyright laws... Anyway, absolutely worth reading.
Today's Boston Globe puts the collapse of the newspaper-as-we-know-it into historical perspective --- the "history" in this case being the past fifty years. Definitely worth reading.
Tip o' the mug to Rebecca Skloot, via Twitter (@rebeccaskloot).
Our man on the beer beat in St. Louis, ace reporter Jeremiah McWilliams, is off-duty again, as part of his second company-imposed furlough. Second one in about a month. Not a good sign.
Quick quick catch-up here on non-beer related matters:
Last week, I mentioned David Nygren's self-described nutty idea --- using Excel to create a novel. Thousands of people have since downloaded his program.
And now, the New Yorker, that magazine beloved of the glitterliterati (which would not, ahem, be me) everywhere, mentions it. Although as David notes in a tweet, woulda been nice if they'd mentioned his name!
I can see it coming soon to a "bookstore" near you: A collection of short stories composed using the Nygren Method of Literary Genius.
In other news, yesterday the New York Times ran a story about a new e-publishing venture, Vook.tv. If you're interested in the future of the printed word (and if you read this blog regularly, you know that I am), take a look. It's an interesting idea, and I suspect sometime in the next two years it, or something similar, will begin to bear (profitable) fruit.
As I noted a few weeks ago, it's clear that the notion of the "book" is changing, and that soon (very soon!) a "book" will contain various digitized, embedded components of the kind being explored in the Vook project. I have to point out, however, that the Times article, like most of its ilk, focuses on fiction.
To which I say: WHY this obsessive focus on "books" as mainly fiction? In the U.S., 85% of the books published are non-fiction. You do the math: only 15% are fiction.
As I noted in that earlier blog entry, I'm intrigued the possibilities of non-fiction of the sort I write containing digital links to, say, Wikipedia or other external sources. Indeed, I can think of many ways in which an e-book is more suited to non-fiction than to fiction. (
Although there is a huge drawback to non-fiction in an electronic form, and I plan to explore that soon in one of my "Historian At Work" entries.)
Okay, enough of this Monday rambling. Need to get back to my chapter-in-progress (being created, I might add, by the Ogle System of Slog and Shuffle, rather than the Nygren System of Literary Genius.)
Website of Maureen Ogle, author and historian. Books include Ambitious Brew: The Story of American Beer; In Meat We Trust: An Unexpected History of Carnivore America; and Key West: History of An Island of Dreams.
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