If you read one thing today …

I’d suggest one of the following:

1. Publishing wunderkind James Bridle with his latest mindblowing project – a 12-volume historiography of the Iraq War on Wikipedia:

William Gibson spoke recently at BEA. He said this:

“If you’re fifteen or so, today, I suspect that you inhabit a sort of endless digital Now, a state of atemporality enabled by our increasingly efficient communal prosthetic memory. I also suspect that you don’t know it, because, as anthropologists tell us, one cannot know one’s own culture.”

Which struck me pretty hard, that bit about atemporality, and the flatness of digital memory, but particularly our lack of awareness of this situation. I talked about the Library of Alexandria, and the Yo La Long Dia, and the National Libraries of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq—all examples of cultural destruction caused in part by neglect and willful disregard for our shared patrimony.

These losses, despite their horror, will always happen: but what can we do to mitigate and understand them?

2. Carlin Romano on the place of the book within future academia: ‘Will the Book Survive Generation Text?’

My own peculiar worry about Academe 2020, offered with less than 20/20 foresight, may seem less catastrophic: the death of the book as object of study, the disappearance of “whole” books as assigned reading. Does that count as a preposterous figment of extreme academe, or is it closer than we think?

3. Andrew Pettegree posits that it wasn’t just the printing press that was invented, it was the publishing industry: ‘Cover story’

Inventing the printing press was not the same thing as inventing the publishing business. Technologically, craftsmen were ready to follow Gutenberg’s example, opening presses across Europe. But they could only guess at what to print, and the public saw no particular need to buy books. The books they knew, manuscript texts, were valuable items and were copied to order. The habit of spending money to read something a printer had decided to publish was an alien one.

Nor was print clearly destined to replace manuscript, from the point of view of the book owners of the day. A few fussy color-printing experiments aside, the new books were monochrome, dull in comparison to illuminated manuscripts. Many books left blank spaces for adding hand decoration, and collectors frequently bound printed pages together with manuscript ones.

“It’s a great mistake to think of an absolute disjunction between a manuscript world of the Middle Ages and a print world of the 16th century,” Pettegree said.

4. For a spot of pre-digital erudition, see Tim Carmody with 10 Reading Revolutions around before ebooks:

The phrase “reading revolution” was probably coined by German historian Rolf Engelsing. He certainly made it popular. Engelsing was trying to describe something he saw in the 18th century: a shift from “intensive” reading and re-reading of very few texts to “extensive” reading of many, often only once. Think of reading the Bible vs reading the newspaper. Engelsing called this shift a “Lesenrevolution,” lesen being the German equivalent of reading. He thought he had found when modern reading emerged, as we’d recognize it today, and that it was this shift that effectively made us modern readers.

History, of course, is rarely so neat, and other historians quickly found counterexamples of extensive premodern reading (Cicero and his letters) and intensive reading today (the way the Romantics brooded over The Sorrows of Young Werther, or our contemporaries over that very different contemporary Werther, Harry Potter). The future has always been unevenly distributed. But the framework of a reading revolution had been established. All that remained was trying to determine what the “real” revolution was.

5. And lastly, a spot of DIY ebooking: ‘How to publish an Apple iBook’

The process of publishing that book that is sitting on your computer in a word processor file suddenly is becoming easy to do with any Intel Mac and a bit of software. The process is likely to be streamlined soon.

I expect Apple to include the option of Exporting Pages files in EPUB format next time a new version of Pages is released. The format checking software is also likely to be included as well. This will streamline the process and perhaps allow you to upload your formatted book directly to Apple with an iBook application page that demands that every requirement is met.

And lastly lastly, from the NMA World Edition crew (the ones who offered the most accurate depiction of Australia’s election to date): the Wall Street Journal takes on the New York Times