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 MoreColumn Inches
I’ve started a regular column in Brisbane newspaper the Courier-Mail pointing to cool or interesting things in the booky-technology area: apps, audiobooks, webby things, and so on.
It appears to be a print-only experience thus far, but locals can check it out in Saturday’s LIFE section.
Each column includes links so, if you can’t get a copy of the paper, you can at least see what’s piquing my interest this week via the link timeline.
Read MoreThe Karinthy Connection
Few people know of Hungarian writer and poet Frigyes Karinthy, but you would know the phrase he coined, “six degrees of separation”.
Every Tuesday after 5.30pm, a music lover is invited onto Drive with Bernadette Young to continue a musical chain called The Karinthy Connection.
Yesterday was my turn. I had to pick up from where Brendan Gallagher left off last week with B.B. King. So here’s my six degrees.
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Recent scribbles
I recently wrote a couple of pieces for The Book Shed and for the Small Press Underground Networking Community (or SPUNC to you and me). I’ve only just noticed that both of them contain the word ‘dead’ in their titles. What’s interesting about that is that I submitted both pieces untitled. The titles were chosen by the published blog editors.
Does that mean anything? Probably not, except that any mention of dead things in discussion of digital publishing will likely make the headline.
Read MoreThe Books
