Link: Ebooks—What We Gain, What We Lose | doug toft Writer Doug Toft finished reading a big book on his Kindle, and noted the positives and negatives of ebooks, ending with a pensive quote from David Byrne. Byrne is right to be concerned about the persistence of ebooks. Ebooks and PDFs will last only as long …
Category Archives: Books
Robertson Davies on Useful Knowledge
In one of his early novels, a Robertson Davies character delivers a little speech that impressed me so much at the time that I’ve delightedly trotted it out whenever the subject of information management rears its tedious head.
Kindle for Mac
In late August, I had bought Timothy Pychyl’s e-book The Procrastinator’s Digest via Xlibris for use with Adobe Digital Editions. (I subscribe to Pychyl’s iProcrastinate podcast.) However, trying to get Adobe Digital Editions set up and registered on my MacBook was a pain, and then my credit card number was stolen suspiciously close to the …
David Markson
I can’t remember how I ran across Markson’s novel This Is Not A Novel, but I found it so fascinating an experiment that I scooped up and read his other novels that followed the same disconnected yet mosaic-like form. Colin Marshall has written an appreciation of Markson, who recently died, that takes in all of …
Links Harvest
Economic downturn hitting public libraries. Also, library fines. Another popularly focused article on the digital dark age; it proposes using open-source rather than proprietary file formats. The best suit for your body type. Proto-scholar learns the hard way to ask the right people for process advice. No one would blame her for feeling angry and …
Links Harvest: novels, narrative, BAE
Narrative and novels as models for social relations and as simulations of economic approaches. First in a series of BBC4 radio programs on what the novelist’s imagination can offer sociological research on place. Settings: the rural idyll, the city, and the suburb. “Once you’ve restricted yourself to information that turns up in Google searches, you …
Notes – The Book, The Internet, Literature
First heard of the “Is Google Making Us Stupid/Killing Literature” foomfahrah via this Mark Hurst post and this follow-up. Kevin Kelly was quite a player in the debate also, here and here, and all the above links will let you read all sides to your heart’s desire. Clay Shirky’s post questioning the “cult of literature” …
Continue reading “Notes – The Book, The Internet, Literature”
Links 18-Jul-08
Even a tech writer learns to use dashed lines for impromptu diagrams, but it takes a designer to delineate more of its uses. (I probably got this link from the essential xblog, which is a must-read in my RSS library.) Convenience and impermanence. But look at the size of that keyboard! And her happy smile! …
“Why you should throw books out”
That’s the title of today’s post from Tyler Cowen both at his blog and as a guest blogger at Penguin. His point seems to be that the book you’ve read is likely not the best book you could be reading, and by passing it down the line (via donation or BookMooch or leaving it somewhere …
Links 25-May-2008
Penelope Trunk has an excellent post on how she got her current favorite mentor, to complement her other posts on the topic. As a forty-odder among twenty-somethings, I find that my mentors are not just the professors, but my peers who have longer experience of being a student, being at SILS, being connected to many other students who …
Brownstudy's Blog 