Browsing Books: Chattering Incunabula
In Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame, Claude Frollo looks from a book to the cathedral and says, ‘Ceci tuera cela.’ (‘This will kill that’). Apparently we’ve never been all that good with pluralism (witness the seemingly endless moaning that digital is killing print, regardless of how little hard evidence emerges to support such a position).
The reference to Hugo comes via Books in Browsers speaker, Corey Pressman, who naturally begged to differ when it comes to print and digital books. This does not replace that. This actually does a pretty crappy job of replacing that, because paper and screens do subtly different jobs: one houses fixed text and images, the other is fluid.
Read MoreBrowsing Books: Social Reading
I recently returned from San Francisco and the fabulous Books in Browsers 2011 conference therein.
I tried hard to keep live tweeting from the event (via the @ifbookaus account), but alas I’m no @ebookish (forever now known as The Thumbs of Fury). I was reduced to desperately taking notes and occasionally copy-and-pasting in the Twitter app.
The event itself is organised by the awesome Peter Brantley and hosted at the Internet Archive. Books in Browsers is a small event attended by some of the finest people at the techie end of publishing (and me). Because of its size and the quality of its attendees, there was no need to waste time arseing around discussions of paper versus screen or on the relative merits of digital workflows. It was like a welcome homecoming.
Read MoreThe Books
