Is Barnes & Noble in trouble and the remaining private bookstores in a better position to handle physical books in the age of e-books? See what the New York Times thinks.
Posts Tagged ‘New York Times’
New Uses for Old Books?
Monday, August 9th, 2010The New York Times Magazine gets cute with an essay called “Creative New Uses for Books.”
Plagiarism versus Sampling
Monday, August 2nd, 2010Today’s New York Times has a piece about students who don’t know that they should, according to university standards and custom, credit Wikipedia for quoted paragraphs even though Wikipedia is a group written source. The piece ends with more conventional cases of students who simply, in order to get their degree and get on with life, use papers written by others– old fashioned plagiarism and paper buying.
But much more interesting to me is the first group, the ones accustomed to “saving” images off the web (I do this) and to downloading music and movies– a whole host of materials from the web that we consider fair game for fair use.
The piece suggests that young people raised in this world, themselves perhaps participants in the great group writing project of Wikipedia, really see quotation from sources in a different way from a previous generation with perhaps a different view of self and individuality.
Our Brains on Multi-Task
Monday, June 7th, 2010According to today’s New York Times, our brains are being reformatted (our vocabularies too) by our devices, gadgets and, especially, our propensity for multi-tasking: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?ref=todayspaper . For the record, I read this on large sheets of dead tree material at my kitchen table over coffee and Crispix.
Reading More into the Future of Reading
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010Riding the train into New York last evening to teach my NYU novel writing class, I was wishing for an e-reader, as I often do (I was already carrying my little Acer netbook so I could check email later). Then– as I even more often do, I drifted into a nap, so I don’t know if the desire for all the books in my library in my hand at every moment was just part of a pleasant dream or a real plan.
The irony of course is the hundreds of people who want to write novels, and are they reading novels? The National Book Critics Circle blog Critical Mass has a nice meditation on the difference between reading blogs and really reading, and Shelley Ettinger pointed me toward an article in the blog on the state of publishing, Moby Lives, about who is actually using e-books at the present time (more men than women, higher income than lower).
She also gave me the link to an article in Poets and Writers magazine about the Espresso Book Machine . This hundred thousand dollar plus machine will print a digitalized book instantly– they’ve been in development for a couple of years, and this article touches on several issues about the future of reading: the instant hard copy books but also e-books (and the fascinating fact that one of the developers of the Espresso is Jason Epstein who was also part of the development of paperback books in the early 1950′s!). I like the possibility of small independent bricks-and-mortar stores around the world that have access to all the books– I’m visualizing a little coffee shop place with only a few hard copy books, but free wifi and one of the Espresso Book Machines, and people reading and writing, and maybe even looking at shelved books. Nice, don’t you think? Or at any rate, not bad.
Universities have been picking up on the possibility of instant books much faster than the dinosaurs I mean the publishing industry, which is busy justifying their high prices as in an article in the March 1, 2010 New York Times. They don’t mention that part of the overhead for their books is not just underpaid editorial staff but also the corporate CEO’s Lear Jet. See my article reviewing The Business of Books.