Posts tagged books
It was tense.
Via.
Sometimes something is too provocative or too sexist or too racist but it will inspire a line of thinking that will help develop an image that is publishable.
Françoise Mouly, Art Editor, the New Yorker, on how she works with artists on the magazine’s covers. Secrets of the New Yorker cover.
Mouly’s just published a book called Blown Covers: New Yorker Covers You Were Never Meant to See, that shows rejected work and the sketches made in the process of arriving at the covers that ended being used.
“Moral: Even a well-bound book may be easily ruined at first opening.”
So you know, how to open a new book – usage tips from a legendary bookbinder. Complement with Mortimer Adler’s tips on how to read a book.
FJP: Interface pro tips. We like it.
The New Yorker’s answer to everyone pondering the future of reading.
FJP: The world needs more scrolls.
Colombia Brings Libraries to the Park
Via Bilingual Librarian:
Monday morning I was out walking around downtown Bogota when I happened upon this lovely little library in the park. This stand makes part of the Paradero Para Libros Para Parques (PPP), a program created about 10 years ago to help promote literacy across the country. The program is part of Fundalectura in association with city parks.
Currently there are 47 PPP in various neighborhoods of Bogota, and a total of 100 across the country. Each stand is staffed for about 12 hours a week by volunteer (they do receive a small stipend, but apparently it isn’t much).
The PPP are often open during the weekend and while in service they offer regular library services. Patrons can check books out, and the person staffing the PPP organizes activities (mainly for children), is available to answer questions, and often help children with their homework.
Designing books is no laughing matter. OK, it is.
In a recent TED talk, Chip Kidd walks us through the design process he used to produce iconic book covers over the last 20 years, from Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park to David Sedaris’ Naked.
His thoughts about digital books and tablets: “Much is to be gained by eBooks: ease, convenience, portability. But something is definitely lost: tradition, a sensual experience, the comfort of thingy-ness — a little bit of humanity.”
Bonus, Part 01: Has Kindle Killed the Book Cover? via The Atlantic.
Bonus, Part 02: Is the Book Cover Dead, via Technology Review
Years later, when I put together a book about those events in Liberia, I included a photograph of one of the people who had been killed outside of the beer factory. I thought it was an important picture but didn’t dwell on what it might mean for the mother of that boy to come across it printed in a book. My thoughts about this resurfaced recently as I put together a new book about a group of American soldiers I spent a lot of time with in Afghanistan. They reminded me a lot of the young Liberian rebel fighters, and yet, when I came to selecting a picture of one of their dead in the battlefield, I hesitated and wondered if printing a graphic image was appropriate. It was an image I had made of a young man shot in the head after the American lines had been overrun—not dissimilar from the one in Liberia. My hesitation troubled me. Was I sensitive this time because the soldier wasn’t a nameless African? Perhaps I had changed and realized that there should be limits on what is released into the public? I certainly wouldn’t have been in that questioning position if I’d never taken the photograph in the first place… but I did, and perhaps these things are worth thinking about and confronting after all.
Tim Hetherington, from a chapter in Photographs Not Taken, a new book of essays by more than 60 photographers about times when they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take a picture. Hetherington died from wounds suffered while covering the Libyan civil war in 2011. Via Time Lightbox.
If you’re in New York City there’s a panel discussion with the book’s editor and a few of its contributors at PS1 Sunday April 22 from 2-4pm.
The $14 Million Book
Via NPR:
The British Library in London has just paid about $14 million to purchase Europe’s oldest intact book, known as the St. Cuthbert Gospel. It’s a copy of the Gospel of St. John, thought to have been produced in northeastern England sometime during the seventh century.
“It is the earliest intact European book. So its pages, and the stitching that holds them together, and the covers that protect the pages are intact, as it was made at the end of the seventh century,” Claire Breay, the curator of medieval and early modern manuscripts at the British Library, tells NPR. “So it’s really the starting point of our evidence for the history of the Western book.”
In a bit of necrobiblia, the gospel was buried with the medieval missionary St. Cuthbert and then exhumed from his coffin a few hundred years later.
Click through to hear the full story about the book’s remarkable journey on Morning Edition.
If we are fixing prices for our benefit, we don’t seem to be very good at it.
Snoop Dogg’s Smokable Book
Filed under publishing innovation: Snoop Dogg is releasing Rolling Words: A Smokable Songbook.
The book contains Snoop’s lyrics printed on rolling paper and has a twine cover with a spine you can light a match on.
H/T: Time.
Remembering Dickens through advertising
Scholars at UC Santa Cruz launched an easier-to-use website yesterday dedicated to archiving the world of Charles Dickens’s last novel, Our Mutual Friend. They’ve digitized all sorts of things, including original manuscripts, all 40 original illustrations, and the advertisements that ran alongside the novel in its original serial publications.
via the New York Times:
Jon Michael Varese, the director of digital initiatives at the Dickens Project, said in an interview that the ads reflect the rising consumerism of Victorian England as vividly as anything in the novel itself. “More and more stuff was being made, and Dickens, four years after ‘Great Expectations,’ was the most famous man in England, if not the world,” he said. “Where better to advertise your goods?”
These are all major accomplishments, and we librarians have every right to be proud of them. But the world is moving on. Each of the services we’ve provided in the digital arena has been — or is being — superseded by new and better technologies or by other organizations better suited to deliver services electronically. And when Google has finished its scanning project, it will have no more use for us or our collections either. So after more than 50 years in the digital market, libraries have come right back to where they started. Our dream of an electronic library has been built, but others own and manage it. We are left with the tangible property we began with, our physical books, the thousands of buildings that house them, and the millions of people still coming through our doors to use them. In reality, those are not inconsiderable assets — especially in a world where it may become increasingly uneconomical to have physical bookstores or places where people can get together to listen to stories or discuss books and ideas. Figuring out how to exploit those assets in this new environment will not be easy. Perhaps we should turn our attention away from the electric library that others have built and focus on the real books and buildings that made us what we were to begin with. Perhaps that will continue to define us into the future. Or perhaps not. Perhaps we have new roles to play in the digital world or old roles to play but in a new way. Let’s think about that.
The day a virtual library becomes a legit place to hang out, or goof off with friends is the day physical libraries truly die. Information alone is only so valuable, after all.
How We Will Read: Clay Shirky
This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here. And check out our new homepage, a captivating new way to explore Findings.
This week, we were extremely honored to speak to Internet intellectual Clay Shirky, writer, teacher, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. Clay is a professor at the renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and author of two books, most recently Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.
Clay is one of the foremost minds studying the evolution of Internet culture. He is also a dedicated writer and reader, and it was natural that we would ask him to contribute to our series to hear what he could teach us about social reading. Clay is both brilliant and witty, able to weave in quotes from Robert Frost in one breath and drop a “ZOMG” in the next. So sit down and take notes: Professor Shirky’s about to speak.
How is publishing changing?
Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.
In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a Wordpress install.
The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet. But the publishing apparatus is gone. Even if people want a physical artifact — pipe the PDF to a printing machine. We’ve already seen it happen with newspapers and the printer. It is now, or soon, when more people will print the New York Times holding down the “print” button than buy a physical copy.
The original promise of the e-book was not a promise to the reader, it was a promise to the publisher: “We will design something that appears on a screen, but it will be as inconvenient as if it were a physical object.” This is the promise of the portable document format, where data goes to die, as well.
Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution. Now publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand. And that means that almost all innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text is coming from outside the traditional publishing industry.
What is the future of reading? How can we make it more social?
One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all that I didn’t like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn’t get your email on it. There was an old saying in the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can read email.
But a book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. 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!”
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