And in the news we have …

Jonathan Safran Foer has reinvented the book. See:

Foer took his favourite book, The Street Of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz, and gave it new life by cutting out sections and parts of pages so it became a kind of ‘sculptural object’ – and a wholly new story.

‘On the surface, Tree of Codes looks like a Foer volume. But inside — well, it’s revolutionary.’

So sayeth the New York Times. Perhaps the project does deserve the accolades being bestowed upon it, but I have my reservations. Artists (and even other writers, like Tom Philips, as Foer himself admits) have been working with text and textual objects in similar fashions for many a century now.

So what’s so ground-breaking about the concept behind Foer’s book? What does it imply about the limitations, possibilities and reimagining of ‘the book’ (save for again bringing Schultz’s work into the present day, which is a win for readers everywhere)?

Beyond the obvious – books can exist as objects or art; texts are open to a multiplicity of readings and experiences, and can, in fact, be re-experiences – very little, in my opinion. Though it does make for an attractive coffee table gift.

But don’t only take my word for it, see for yourself: Foer at Huff Post and at the Guardian.

It’s hard this week to avoid speculating about the latest WikiLeaks release, Cablegate, and Assange – the myth and the man – or the future of the ‘only stateless news organisation’. Indeed, why would you want to? Here’s a couple of interesting perspectives on the subject.

Mark Pesce, the writer and Virtual Reality innovator, has a few interesting things to say over at Drum:

This is one of those rare moments during which you can feel your stomach drop as the future suddenly becomes the present.

The first – and by far the most widely known – is the massive dump of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks. The whinging of diplomats, politicians and the mainstream news media sounds eerily similar to the kind of bray you hear from children at play when they’re told it’s bedtime. The rules have changed: nothing is secret anymore, at least, not as it was. If a state wants the benefits of digital culture – its instantaneity and ubiquity – it must now accept that anything it does can be copied and shared. Governments are learning the same lesson the recording industry stumbled into a decade ago. The old ways of doing business – and power politics – simply won’t work.

[…]

We have been very busy connecting to one another, without much thought of what it feels like to live in such a hyperconnected world. We treasure the fact that we can be a continent apart yet moments away, but connection comes with a cost. It’s not all win. When you connect, you give over some part of yourself. When states connect, they create new passages through which information can flow – in and out. When news organisations connect, they participate in a multilateral dialog which they no longer substantially shape or control. When individuals connect, they can find themselves suddenly swept up by forces beyond their understanding. This is the price that comes with the capability, and it’s absolutely inescapable.

Coinciding with Amazon’s decision to stop hosting WikiLeaks on its servers, the Guardian is now reporting on Senator Joe Lieberman’s ‘latest victory in trying to remove the leaked US embassy cables from the internet’:

The company that provided visualisations of the contents of the leaked US embassy cables has admitted it removed them from the net at the request of Senator Joe Lieberman, the chair of the Senate homeland committee who has made angry denunciations of the leaks.

The removal of the visualisation came as the US Social Security Agency warned its workers that looking at the leaked cables could constitute a criminal offence.

Writing on the blog for Tableau Software, which offers free public visualisations for data, Elissa Fink writes that: “Our terms of service require that people using Tableau Public do not upload, post, email, transmit or otherwise make available any content that they do not have the right to make available. Furthermore, if we receive a complaint about a particular set of data, we retain the right to investigate the situation and remove any offending data, if necessary.”

She adds: “Our decision to remove the data from our servers came in response to a public request by Senator Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee, when he called for organisations hosting WikiLeaks to terminate their relationship with the website.”

As always, the Guardian has the most comprehensive coverage of the US embassy cables. You can also get an idea of the two camps – old media versus new, post-WikiLeaks media – in this square off between journalist Jeremy Scahill and journalism professor Peter Beinart:

Finally, the eReader–ebook market is rapidly expanding, even in Australia. While eReader ownership isn’t as common here as in the States, where 5.9 million people own a reader and a purported 31% of 6–12 year olds want an iPad, the market is noticeably expanding. Check out Benjamin Solah’s overview of being a plucky electronic reader in the southern hemisphere, Sorry, this title is unavailable: the state of digital book selling in Australia.

Still, there are exciting developments. For instance, this morning Sleepers Publishing announced that Things we didn’t see coming is available on Kobo. If you’re intrigued but reader-less, take a look at CNet’s list of readers available in Australia.