I had not thought about this until just now, that all the information in books may be close to rising back from the ashes to join the hyperlinked world. How amazing that will be. Will it be the same experience? Will it be better or worse?
This link has been bookmarked by 407 people and liked by 2 people. It was first bookmarked on 20 Apr 2009, by someone privately.
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09 Sep 13
michael hermreckThe Wall Street Journal on book's being written for the internet.
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29 Apr 13
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21 Apr 13
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the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again.
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30 Jan 13
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Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.
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26 Oct 12
Stephen BlythAuthor Steven Johnson raises concerns about the impact that digital text will have on the commitment and concentration of readers.
Wall Street Journal article, 20 April 2009.-
In our always-connected, everything-linked world, we sometimes forget that books are the dark matter of the information universe.
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06 Jun 12
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01 May 12
BE ESAHArtigo de opinião de Steven Johnson sobre as alterações a nivel da escrita e leitura provocadas pelo aparecimento dos ebooks.
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10 Jan 12
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03 Dec 11
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13 Nov 11
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10 Nov 11
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My impulsive purchase of "On Beauty" has another element to it, though -- one that may not be as welcomed by authors
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09 Nov 11
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--><!-- DISPLAY-NAME: --><!-- PUBLICATION: The Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition --><!-- DATE: 2009-04-20 23:59 --><!-- COPYRIGHT: Dow Jones & Company, Inc. --><!-- ORIGINAL-ID: --><!-- article start --><!--<br/>CODE=DJII-COMPANY SYMBOL=goog<br/>CODE=DJII-COMPANY SYMBOL=amzcom<br/>CODE=DJII-COMPANY SYMBOL=barnob<br/>CODE=DJII-INDUSTRY SYMBOL=i4753<br/>CODE=DJII-INDUSTRY SYMBOL=i3246<br/>CODE=DJII-INDUSTRY SYMBOL=i47563<br/>CODE=DJII-SUBJECT SYMBOL=gbook<br/>CODE=DJII-INDUSTRY SYMBOL=i32<br/>CODE=DJII-INDUSTRY SYMBOL=i475<br/>CODE=DJII-INDUSTRY SYMBOL=i4756<br/>CODE=DJII-INDUSTRY SYMBOL=imed<br/>CODE=DJII-INDUSTRY SYMBOL=ipubl<br/>CODE=DJII-SUBJECT SYMBOL=gcat<br/>CODE=DJII-SUBJECT SYMBOL=gent<br/>CODE=SUBJECT SYMBOL=OBTE<br/>CODE=SUBJECT SYMBOL=OLBO<br/>CODE=SUBJECT SYMBOL=OLEM<br/>CODE=SUBJECT SYMBOL=OTEC<br/>CODE=STATISTIC SYMBOL=FREE<br/>--><br/><h5>MOBILITY</h5></div></div></div>
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2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.
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newspapers with extinction.
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The Wall Street Journal Technology
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08 Nov 11
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There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?
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Amazon's Kindle e-book reader,
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Google Book Search service
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2009 may well prove to be the most significant year in the evolution of the book since Gutenberg hammered out his original Bible.
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Amazon's early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it's not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you're at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and -- voilà! -- you own it.
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print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading.
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old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.
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As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
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In this world, citation will become as powerful a sales engine as promotion is today.
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A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written
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we need to have a technological standard for organizing digital books. We have the Web today because back in the early 1990s we agreed on a standard, machine-readable way of describing the location of a page: the URL.
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Right now, introductions are written with the assumption that people have already bought the book. That won't be the case in the future, when the introduction is given away. It will, no doubt, be written more to entice readers to buy the whole book.
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a la carte pricing will emerge,
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03 Nov 11
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The magic of that moment in Austin ("I'm in the mood for a novel -- oh, here's a novel right here in my hands!") also tells me that e-book readers are going to sell a lot of books, precisely because there's an impulse-buy quality to the devices that's quite unlike anything the publishing business has ever experienced before
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Nobody will read alone anymore
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(One geeky side note here: Before we can get too far in this new world, we need to have a technological standard for organizing digital books.
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For centuries, we've had an explicit system for organizing print books in the form of page numbers and bibliographic info. All of that breaks down in this new digital world.
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This sounds like a question only a librarian would get excited about
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02 Nov 11
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. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them
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The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you're at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and -- voilà! -- you own it.
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Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them.
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You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.
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Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.
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just as the serial publishing schedule of Dickens's day led to the obligatory cliffhanger ending at the end of each installment. Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors
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23 Oct 11
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02 Oct 11
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The magic of that moment in Austin ("I'm in the mood for a novel -- oh, here's a novel right here in my hands!") also tells me that e-book readers are going to sell a lot of books, precisely because there's an impulse-buy quality to the devices that's quite unlike anything the publishing business has ever experienced before.
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28 Sep 11
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27 Sep 11
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09 Sep 11
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Credit goes to two key developments: the breakthrough success of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader, and the maturation of the Google Book Search service, which now offers close to 10 million titles, including many obscure and out-of-print works that Google has scanned.
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06 Jun 11
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Every genuinely revolutionary technology implants some kind of "aha"
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I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia;
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The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone i
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on a server in Australia; using Google
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new forms, such as blogs and Wikipedia.
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two key developments: the breakthrough success of Amazon's Kindle e-book reader
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Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship.
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Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship.
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The magic of that moment in Austin ("I'm in the mood for a novel -- oh, here's a novel right here in my hands!") also tells me that e-book readers are going to sell a lot of books, precisely because there's an impulse-buy quality to the devices that's quite unlike anything the publishing business has ever experienced before.
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Mr. Johnson is the author of six books, most recently "The Invention of Air,"
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You'll read a puzzling passage from a novel and then instantly browse through dozens of comments from readers around the world, annotating, explaining or debating the passage's true meaning.
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Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.
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Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes.
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We all know the story of how the information-wants-to-be-free ethos of the Web threatened the newspapers with extinction. Wouldn't it be ironic if books turned out to be their savior?
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05 Jun 11
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something that tells you in an instant that the rules have changed forever.
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watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.
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There is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course?
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Think about it. Before too long, you'll be able to create a kind of shadow version of your entire library, including every book you've ever read -- as a child, as a teenager, as a college student, as an adult. Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet.
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You're Never Alone
Putting books online will also change how we find books -- and talk about them.
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Writing for Google
A world in which search attracts new book readers also will undoubtedly change the way books are written,
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Clearly, we are in store for the return of the cliffhanger.
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I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia;
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I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia
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I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia;
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04 Jun 11
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02 Jun 11
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A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you're at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and -- voilà! -- you own i
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In other words, an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.
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But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.
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As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.
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01 Jun 11
Jean BosworthA view into how technology may affect the way we read books.
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27 May 11
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After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I'd bought and downloaded Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty." By the time the check arrived, I'd finished the first chapter.
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26 May 11
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using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.
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23 May 11
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Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader
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28 Apr 11
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26 Apr 11
Jonathan Key"I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.
The latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was sitting alone in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, dutifully working my way through an e-book about business and technology, when I was hit with a sudden desire to read a novel. After a few taps on the Kindle, I was browsing the Amazon store, and within a minute or two I'd bought and downloaded Zadie Smith's novel "On Beauty." By the time the check arrived, I'd finished the first chapter." -
21 Apr 11
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It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years.
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Think about it. Before too long, you'll be able to create a kind of shadow version of your entire library, including every book you've ever read -- as a child, as a teenager, as a college student, as an adult. Every word in that library will be searchable. It is hard to overstate the impact that this kind of shift will have on scholarship. Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet
-
The magic of that moment in Austin ("I'm in the mood for a novel -- oh, here's a novel right here in my hands!") also tells me that e-book readers are going to sell a lot of books, precisely because there's an impulse-buy quality to the devices that's quite unlike anything the publishing business has ever experienced before
-
Amazon's early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it's not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you're at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and -- voilà! -- you own it
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Amazon's early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device, and it's not hard to understand why: The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go. A friend mentions a book in passing, and instead of jotting down a reminder to pick it up next time you're at Barnes & Noble, you take out the Kindle and -- voilà! -- you own it.
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In other words, an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention
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Because they have been largely walled off from the world of hypertext, print books have remained a kind of game preserve for the endangered species of linear, deep-focus reading. Online, you can click happily from blog post to email thread to online New Yorker article -- sampling, commenting and forwarding as you go. But when you sit down with an old-fashioned book in your hand, the medium works naturally against such distractions; it compels you to follow the thread, to stay engaged with a single narrative or argument.
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As a result, I fear that one of the great joys of book reading -- the total immersion in another world, or in the world of the author's ideas -- will be compromised. We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
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Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity -- a direct exchange between author and reader -- to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.
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Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention
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The economics of digital books will likely change the conventions of reading and writing as well. Digital distribution makes it a simple matter to offer prospective buyers a "free sample" to entice them to purchase the whole thing. Many books offered for the Kindle, for instance, allow readers to download the first chapter free of charge. The "free sample" component of a book will become as conventional as jacket-flap copy and blurbs; authors will devise a host of stylistic and commercial techniques in crafting these giveaway sections, just as Dickens mastered the cliffhanger device almost two centuries before
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For nonfiction and short-story collections, a la carte pricing will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music. Readers will have the option to purchase a chapter for 99 cents, the same way they now buy an individual song on iTunes. The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.
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This fragmentation sounds unnerving -- yet another blow to the deep-focus linearity of the print-book tradition. Breaking the book into detachable parts may sell more books, but there are certain kinds of experiences and arguments that can only be conveyed by the steady, directed immersion that a 400-page book gives you. A playlist of the best chapters from "Middlemarch," "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Beloved" will never work the way a playlist of songs culled from different albums does today.
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23 Mar 11
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16 Feb 11
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10 Jan 11
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15 Dec 10
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06 Nov 10
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27 Oct 10
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23 Oct 10
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24 Sep 10
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13 Sep 10
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the Kindle
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13 Jul 10
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26 Apr 10
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20 Apr 10
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15 Apr 10
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25 Mar 10
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23 Mar 10
Kay CunninghamAuthor Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions -- and the end of reading alone.
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22 Mar 10
pedro_daltroThere is great promise and opportunity in the digital-books revolution. The question is: Will we recognize the book itself when that revolution has run its course? ... In our always-connected, everything-linked world, we sometimes forget that books are th
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21 Mar 10
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14 Feb 10
Petri Tonteri"I knew then that the book's migration to the digital realm would not be a simple matter of trading ink for pixels, but would likely change the way we read, write and sell books in profound ways. It will make it easier for us to buy books, but at the same time make it easier to stop reading them. It will expand the universe of books at our fingertips, and transform the solitary act of reading into something far more social. It will give writers and publishers the chance to sell more obscure books, but it may well end up undermining some of the core attributes that we have associated with book reading for more than 500 years."
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26 Jan 10
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Now, the ability to digitally search millions of books instantly will make finding all that information easier yet again. Expect ideas to proliferate -- and innovation to bloom -- just as it did in the centuries after Gutenberg.
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Every word in that library will be searchable.
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Entirely new forms of discovery will be possible. Imagine a software tool that scans through the bibliographies of the 20 books you've read on a specific topic, and comes up with the most-cited work in those bibliographies that you haven't encountered yet.
-
Amazon's early data suggest that Kindle users buy significantly more books than they did before owning the device
-
The bookstore is now following you around wherever you go.
-
In other words, an infinite bookstore at your fingertips is great news for book sales, and may be great news for the dissemination of knowledge, but not necessarily so great for that most finite of 21st-century resources: attention.
-
We all may read books the way we increasingly read magazines and newspapers: a little bit here, a little bit there.
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With books becoming part of this universe, "booklogs" will prosper, with readers taking inspiring or infuriating passages out of books and commenting on them in public. Google will begin indexing and ranking individual pages and paragraphs from books based on the online chatter about them.
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Think of it as a permanent, global book club.
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Imagine every page of every book individually competing with every page of every other book that has ever been written, each of them commented on and indexed and ranked. The unity of the book will disperse into a multitude of pages and paragraphs vying for Google's attention.
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Writers and publishers will begin to think about how individual pages or chapters might rank in Google's results, crafting sections explicitly in the hopes that they will draw in that steady stream of search visitors.
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Individual paragraphs will be accompanied by descriptive tags to orient potential searchers; chapter titles will be tested to determine how well they rank.
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If you want to write a comment about page 32 of "On Beauty," what do you link to? The Kindle location? The Google Book Search page? This sounds like a question only a librarian would get excited about, but the truth is, until we figure out a standardized way to link to individual pages -- so that all the data associated with a specific passage from "On Beauty" point to the same location -- books are going to remain orphans in this new world.
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Many books offered for the Kindle, for instance, allow readers to download the first chapter free of charge. The "free sample" component of a book will become as conventional as jacket-flap copy and blurbs; authors will devise a host of stylistic and commercial techniques in crafting these giveaway sections,
-
For nonfiction and short-story collections, a la carte pricing will emerge, as it has in the marketplace for digital music.
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The marketplace will start to reward modular books that can be intelligibly split into standalone chapters.
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The online marketplace will have established an easy, one-click mechanism for purchasing small quantities of text.
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If the Kindle payment architecture takes off, it may ultimately lead the way toward the standardized micropayment system whose nonexistence has caused so much turmoil in the news business -- a system many people wish had been built into the Web's original architecture, along with those standardized page locations.
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11 Jan 10
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06 Jan 10
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01 Dec 09
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Add Sticky NoteBut there is good reason to believe that this strange imbalance will prove to be a momentary blip, and that the blip's moment may be just about over.
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24 Nov 09
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19 Nov 09
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17 Nov 09
Juli LortonAuthor Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions -- and the end of reading alone. (See the full report)
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16 Nov 09
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15 Nov 09
Tobías FeijooAuthor Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions -- and the end of reading alone.
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13 Nov 09
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24 Oct 09
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21 Oct 09
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17 Oct 09
Janice Stearnsan example cited by Will Richardson in his New Reading, New Writing post : http://weblogg-ed.com/2009/new-reading-new-writing/ That shows the power of conversation around text.
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13 Oct 09
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11 Oct 09
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06 Oct 09
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03 Oct 09
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30 Sep 09
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28 Sep 09
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good reason to believe
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22 Sep 09
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01 Sep 09
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29 Aug 09
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23 Aug 09
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18 Aug 09
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17 Aug 09
furnisseAuthor Steven Johnson outlines a future with more books, more distractions -- and the end of reading alone
books reading technology culture Future publishing for:sarspri
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06 Aug 09
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29 Jul 09
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further and further away
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and that the blip's moment may be just about over. C
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A playlist of the best chapters from "Middlemarch," "Gravity's Rainbow" and "Beloved" will never work the way a playlist of songs culled from different albums does today.
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technology implants some kind of "aha" moment
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the rules have changed forever.
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14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.
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28 Jul 09
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27 Jul 09
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- See the complete Technology report.
The Journal Report
I still have vivid memories of many such moments: clicking on my first Web hyperlink in 1994 and instantly transporting to a page hosted on a server in Australia; using Google Earth to zoom in from space directly to the satellite image of my house; watching my 14-month-old master the page-flipping gesture on the iPhone's touch interface.
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Mindy HansonMINDY ALONG WITH BOOK HISTORY TALKS AT START OF SCHOOL SHARE THIS ARTICLE AND THE OTHER ON READING ADN DISCUSSS
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23 Jul 09
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he latest such moment came courtesy of the Kindle, Amazon.com Inc.'s e-book reader. A few weeks after I bought the device, I was si
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I still have
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Public Stiky Notes
Fortunately for now the comments have some substance – but how does one filter, sift the comments when they become inane?
Kevin
But is it a problem when one form transforms into another, possibly giving us new capabilities? I think we want to be careful about not losing some of what is so great about the book (late 20th century definition of "book"), but that doesn't mean the book as we know it is the ultimate expression of the form.
So many of the ideas we hold about books currently are an accident of technology - the technology that existed at the time that books became mainstream. Just as many folks argued that the written word would be the downfall of the oral traditions and would isolate people, locked away with their "books" instead of gathering together, people will now argue in defense of books (again, late 20th century definition of the form).
Source: Mark Weiser as cited in Teaching and Learning in a Ubiquitous Environment by Annette Kratcoski, Karen Swan, and Deborah Campbell.
For some of my favorite movies I sometimes watch in the standard presentation, other times with a commentary track from the writer or director. After listening to the commentary I sometimes go back and watch a scene again to see it with new eyes.
The television show LOST is a great example of this new type of reading. Some people watch the episodes and enjoy the show - and that's all. There is also a community of viewers that engage in ongoing debate, discussion, and dialogue about each episode and the unfolding story. I see the same happening for books.
After reading this article, I'm putting on Kindle on my mother's day wish list - maybe one of my kids will show my husband my post - do you think they can take a hint???
Not sure if the math works out or not, but I bet it's a model that somebody is going to try very soon. Perhaps Amazon themselves? Hmmm . . .
"The New York Times Company reported a first-quarter loss of $74.5 million on Tuesday, compared with a loss of $335,000 in the period a year ago, as it joined the roster of newspaper companies recording the steepest advertising declines in generations," maybe we'd better think seriously about how the Kindle — or something like it — could change everything.
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