This week, I have Steven Johnson to thank for gratifying my ego with Future Perfect: The Case For Progress In A Networked Age (public library) — an absorbing, provocative, and unapologetically optimistic vision for the society we have the capacity to build if we use the remarkable tools of our age intelligently and wisely.
A book published earlier this year by an Argentine firm raises questions about the desirability of indelible ink and trackable data
Wikibooks is a Wikimedia community for creating a free library of educational textbooks that anyone can edit.
The National Academies Press (NAP) was created by the National Academies to publish the reports issued by the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, all operating under a charter granted by the Congress of the United States. The NAP publishes more than 200 books a year on a wide range of topics in science, engineering, and health, capturing the most authoritative views on important issues in science and health policy. The institutions represented by the NAP are unique in that they attract the nation’s leading experts in every field to serve on their award-wining panels and committees. The nation turns to the work of NAP for definitive information on everything from space science to animal nutrition.
The project will create open content electronic textbooks that will be freely available from a website. Distribution will also be possible via paper, CD, or DVD. Our goal initially is to focus on content development and Web distribution, and we will work with relevant authorities to facilitate dissemination by other means when bandwidth is unavailable or inadequate. The goal is to make textbooks available to the many who cannot afford them.
We are the world's largest publisher of free and open college textbooks. With our ever-expanding catalog of top quality books by expert authors, now is your chance to be a hero and help your students save thousands of dollars. Get started today and join the textbook affordability movement.
Christoph Niemann - LEGO-lover, dispenser of irreverent wisdom on creativity, author of the excellent Abstract City and That's How! - is one of my favorite illustrators. In this short video from Gestalten, Niemann discusses his philosophy on design, the state of visual language today, his creative process, his adorable non-neuroses, and more.| Brain Pickings
How their design will evolve in the age of the Kindle. - Slate Magazine
"A digital book has no cover. There's no paper to be bound up with a spine and protected inside a sturdy jacket. Browsers no longer roam around Borders scanning the shelves for the right title to pluck. Increasingly, instead, they scroll through Amazon's postage stamp-sized pictures, which don't actually cover anything, and instead operate as visual portals into an entire webpage of data."
interview with Jonah Lehrer about how to be more creative
The image of the 'creative type' is a myth. Jonah Lehrer on why anyone can innovate-and why a hot shower, a cold beer or a trip to your colleague's desk might be the key to your next big idea.- WSJ.com
This article reviews the responses from the second ebrary informal survey of students concerning their experience with information resources.
Why the popular tool can't be used to analyze the publishing performance and impact of researchers
"The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience."
Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and an argument for re-conceiving that future in more communally-oriented ways. Facing these issues head-on, Kathleen Fitzpatrick focuses on the technological changeso especially greater utilization of internet publication technologies, including digital archives, social networking tools, and multimediaonecessary to allow academic publishing to thrive into the future. But she goes further, insisting that the key issues that must be addressed are social and institutional in origin. Confronting a change-averse academy, she insists that before we can successfully change the systems through which we disseminate research, scholars must re-evaluate their ways of workingohow they research, write, and reviewowhile administrators must reconsider the purposes of publishing and the role it plays within the university. Springing from original research as well as Fitzpatrick's own hands-on experiments in new modes of scholarly communication through MediaCommons, the digital scholarly network she co-founded, Planned Obsolescence explores all of these aspects of scholarly work, as well as issues surrounding the preservation of digital scholarship and the place of publishing within the structure of the contemporary university. Written in an approachable style designed to bring administrators and scholars into a conversation, Planned Obsolescence explores both symptom and cure to ensure that scholarly communication will remain vibrant and relevant in the digital future.
This remix essay by Gary Hall is in response to Mark Amerika's remixthebook. Hall writes: "Force of Binding: On Liquid, Living Books (Version 2.0: Mark Amerika Mix)" addresses the subject of the unbound book. Specifically, it does so from the viewpoint of the question: "What do we have the right to bind as a book, legally, materially, economically and conceptually; and just as importantly, what do we have the right not to bind as a book?"
Digital text is ushering in an era of perpetual revision and updating, for better and for worse
- WSJ.com
"You can't really pay much attention to anything else while you're reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you're enjoying what you're reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you're not engaged by the story, they aren't enough on their own to win you over." - Books - Salon.com