time warp

I bought this book in 1965 for 50 cents (no tax). In today’s dollars that would be $2.83, give or take a dime or two to cover the exchange rate (the Canadian dollar was worth about 93 cents US in 1965). So let’s say the book really cost me $3.00 in today’s dollars.
     No wonder people are drawn to the bargain basement world of e-books.

they want it both ways...

"[...] Amazon and others are 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater' by removing too much of the self-published erotic content and complains that Amazon in particular is not giving authors sufficient explanation as to why their ebooks are being taken down. Another post at International Business Times reports on how readers of such content are up in arms, too, signing a petition to have content reinstated at their favourite ebook retailers. (Kobo seems to be at the centre of this scandal and has recently released a letter explaining its position and what it’s doing about it.)

     Each of these retailers have policies on what kind of content authors can publish and sell with them. [...] Barnes & Noble says in its content guidelines that it may remove any book that 'graphically portrays sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal.'
     Amazon’s policy is similar: 'We don’t accept pornography or offensive depictions of graphic sexual acts. What we deem offensive is probably about what you would expect.'
     That would mean Fifty Shades of Grey, last year’s mega-best-seller (and the fastest selling book of all time), could be removed, which begs the question, who gets to decide what is and is not sold in bookstores?"
— Jeremy Greenfield, Forbes
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hotchpotch (Chapter One)

From: ME Studio

The Canada Council for the Arts, announces finalists for the 2013 Governor General's Literary Awards.

"Tom Clancy, a celebrated author of crime fiction and military thrillers, died on Tuesday in a hospital in Baltimore. He was 66."

'Some Great First Lines in Literature"

"Bill O’Reilly wrote about Jesus because God told him to"

E-Books: "[…] we should stop using terminology like 'bestseller lists' — when it really should be 'most leased' lists"

relics

From: fuckyeahcraft

"Then a Barnes & Noble 'superstore' came to town. It anchored a mini-mall with a large parking lot. The bookseller already had a cloudy reputation; I knew that its steep discounts on best-sellers were putting pressure on smaller bookstores near its locations. The retailer was then making its big expansion push. Soon after the opening, I drove over to check it out. Look, Starbucks coffee! A magazine rack filled with alien titles such as Zyzzyva, Utne Reader, and Foreign Affairs. A 'Cultural Studies' section. An entire shelf full of Faulkner. Going to Barnes & Noble became a Saturday afternoon. It was as if a small liberal-arts college had been plunked down into a farm field."
— Michael Agger, The New Yorker
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"Publishers, fearful that selling to libraries will hurt sales to the general public, have thrown up roadblocks. Some major publishers jack up the price libraries pay for e-books compared to what they charge the public. Others make only a small number of titles available, delay their availability until weeks after the general release, or require libraries to buy another copy after lending it 26 times. Such policies actually mark an improvement over the recent past. Until earlier this year, some major publishers refused to sell to libraries at all.
     Public awareness that libraries lend e-books will play a key role in whether Amazon's digital book business erodes, Barclays said. As it is, relatively few people know about borrowing digital books, although their numbers are growing. A survey last year by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 31% of the public was aware that libraries lend e-books, up from 24% in 2011. Only 5% of people actually had checked out a digital book compared with 3% in the prior year, Pew found. 'E-books are becoming more important, and we do expect them to grow going forward,' said Christopher Platt, director of the joint technology team for the New York and Brooklyn public libraries. 'Digital is not a boutique service. It's part of the future of the library.'"
— Verne Kopytoff, CNN Money
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Amazon (rainforest)

Brazilian rainforest (from: The Guardian)

"According to survey research by the Codex Group, roughly 60 percent of book sales — print and digital — now occur online. But buyers first discover their books online only about 17 percent of the time. Internet booksellers specifically, including Amazon, account for just 6 percent of discoveries. Where do readers learn about the titles they end up adding to the cart on Amazon? In many cases, at bookstores.
     The brick and mortar outlets that Amazon is imperiling play a huge role in driving book sales and fostering literary culture. Although beaten by the Internet in unit sales, physical stores outpace virtual ones by 3-to-1 in introducing books to buyers. Bookshelves sell books. In a trend that is driving the owner of your neighborhood independent to drink, customers are engaging in 'showrooming,' browsing in shops and then buying from Amazon to get a discount. This phenomenon is gradually suffocating stores to death. If you like having a bookseller nearby, think carefully before doing this. Never mind the ethics of showrooming — it’s self-defeating. You’re killing off a local business you like. (If you prefer e-reading, many independent stores have agreements with Kobo and Zola Books that give them a cut of e-book sales.)…
     By defeating its competitors, Amazon is choking off some of its own air supply. Barnes & Noble and independents are in one sense competitors for Amazon, but in another sense they are functioning as unwilling showrooms and sales agents for the online giant. As David Carr has suggested, Amazon should want them to survive, if only out of self-interest."
— Evan Hughes, Salon
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Adapted for the Small Screen

Adapted from: "The Lost Weekend" movie poster

"Looking to transform Hollywood’s pile of unproduced scripts into publishable e-books, James West, a motion-picture industry entrepreneur, has launched Script Lit. The company licenses optioned, but never produced, scripts, to turn them into commercial fiction. At the end of April, Script Lit released its first e-book novella—Mom of the Year by screenwriter Denise Pischinger—and plans to offer three more titles later this year. It’s no secret that Hollywood studios option a lot of scripts that never become movies—scripts that may be quite good but are victimized by bad timing or arbitrary decisions of the studio, West said. West has been making his pitch to Hollywood studios since last fall, asking them to give him access to their scripts and hoping to sell the studios on the potential for finding bestsellers in an otherwise inert mound of content. “There are compelling stories in these scripts. The studios love the idea,” he said, though he acknowledged that some have been slow to act, adding, “there’s a lot of legal stuff to go through.”…

     West decided to launch Script Lit and publish the books himself as e-book original novellas, with POD [Print-On-Demand] paperbacks to come. West said he licenses the rights to each script directly from the writer’s agent or manager and hires a ghostwriter to create a narrative context for the story. He noted that screenwriters aren’t necessarily novelists, so he’s put together a staff with two in-house novelists who have experience writing in a variety of commercial genres.
      'We keep all the script’s original dialogue in the book—the dialogue is important—and take the setting and tone, and I have a staff of writers enrich the story and turn it into literary and narrative prose.' He emphasized that the original screenwriter is credited as the book’s author."
— Calvin Reid, Publishers Weekly
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"F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed there were no second acts in American life. Do posthumous ones count? If not, Fitzgerald himself would have been forgotten, his work being almost completely out of print by the time of his death in 1940. Charles Jackson has been forgotten, if contemporary readers ever knew him in the first place. Even his most famous work, the 1944 novel The Lost Weekend, is better known today for its film adaptation directed by Billy Wilder in 1945.

     I don't know that anything would have changed if Blake Bailey's new Jackson biography, Farther & Wilder: The Lost Weekends and Literary Dreams of Charles Jackson, hadn't prompted Vintage Books to release a new edition of The Lost Weekend and a slightly reordered version of Jackson's 1950 collection The Sunnier Side and Other Stories."
— Charles Taylor, The Phoenix
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Buy all of Charles Jackson's books here...

Paper Romance

From: Logie Books

"Why have Japanese consumers not fallen in love with digital reading? 'So far the Japanese have failed to be moved by e-readers from home or abroad, mostly owing to a paucity of content,' says editor and publisher of Japan's E-book 2.0 magazine Hiroki Kamata. Sony (SNE), for instance, has been in the market for more than seven years but has sold only 500,000 e-readers in Japan. Other manufacturers' tablets have begun to sell here, but overall the category is still way behind e-reader take-up in the U.S. or Europe. Tablet sales have tripled since 2011, with market research firm IDC estimating tablet sales in Japan to be 3.6 million units.

     Japanese consumers still seem dead set against adopting e-books, showing less interest in them than even the print-worshipping French. According to an R.R. Bowker study, 72% of Japanese consumers said they had not tried e-books and did not want to try them. That compares with 66% of French respondents polled. Overall adoption rates in Japan remain the lowest in the developed world. Only 8% of Japanese readers have downloaded and paid for an e-book compared with 20% in the U.S."
— Michael Fitzpatrick, CNNMoney
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The best-selling Japanese novel of all time has been Norwegian Wood (ノルウェイの森 Noruwei no Mori?) by Haruki Murakami, published in 1987. It has sold approximately 12 million copies. A similar English language best seller of the same period: The Pillars of Earth, by Ken Follett, has sold approximately 15 million copies since 1989.
     Neither compares to the all-time best-selling novel, A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Its sales to date — granted, it was published in 1859, but the numbers are still impressive — are approximately 200 million. (data and details from Wikipedia)

"The novel [Norwegian Wood] is set in Tokyo during the late 1960s, a time when Japanese students, like those of many other nations, were protesting against the established order. While it serves as the backdrop against which the events of the novel unfold, Murakami (through the eyes of Toru and Midori) portrays the student movement as largely weak-willed and hypocritical. […]
     Norwegian Wood was hugely popular with Japanese youth and made Murakami something of a superstar in his native country [...]. A film based on this novel and with the same name was released in Japan on 11 December 2010 […]."
— Wikipedia
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"Having a hardcover on my shelf is like having a print by one of my favourite artists on the wall." — Jack Cheng

From: UpHAA

"Measured en masse, the stack of 'books I want to read' that sits precariously on the edge of a built-in bookshelf in my dining room just about eclipses 5,000 pages. The shelf is full to bursting with titles I hope to consume at some indeterminate point in the future.
     It would be a lot easier to manage if I just downloaded all those books to an iPad or Kindle. None are hard to find editions that would be unavailable in a digital format, and a few are recent hardcover releases, heavy and unwieldy.
     But there's something about print that I can't give up. There's something about holding a book in your hand and the visceral act of physically turning a page that, for me at least, can't be matched with pixels on a screen."
— Josh Catone, Mashable
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Whither goest thou?

From: printingchoice

"Buoyed by the success of e-readers like Kindle and Amazon's direct publishing online system, budding authors are sowing a direct relationship with their readers and reaping better royalty payments in return.
     "Writers don't need publishers anymore," says Joel Naoum, publisher at Momentum, a digital-only part of Pan Macmillan Australia, launched earlier this year. "The new technology allows writers to distribute directly and I think it's a fantastic development for us all."
     "It means publishers have to try harder to provide value to writers and that publishers aren't accused of being 'gatekeepers' quite as often."
     Royalties for self-publishers are generally much more attractive for those selling an e-book directly to the reader. Percentages vary, but an author will typically earn $2.66 from a $25 hardback, 68c from an $8 mass market paperback, or $1.49 for a trade-published e-book."
— Matt Smith, The Sydney Morning Herald
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Bookishness

Interior of Colin Page Books, Brighton, UK

“'It’s the smell, I’ll miss.'
     'It’s the texture of the page, for me.'
     'It’s that reassuring weight they’ll never replace.'
     In the ongoing debates about the rise of the ebook, you generally don’t have to wait long until someone invokes the physical attributes of mouldering bookshelves as the missing ingredient from electronic texts. Yet you don’t have to make a fetish of physicality to notice that there are several ways in which the business of owning and reading an electronic book remains inferior to doing the same with a paper copy. And, ironically enough, the most significant of these involves something at which digital media allegedly excel: sharing. [...]
     If this sounds slightly utopian, well, that’s because it is. It shouldn’t stretch credibility too far, though, to note that belief in the very notion of 'books' enduring as a 21st Century form requires more than gathering together a certain number of words. If they are to maintain vigour and impact within the brutally Darwinian internet world, both textual aspirations of permanence and a corresponding density of cultural engagement are urgently required: the mutually invigorating embrace, in other words, of authors and audiences. One of the adages of digital media has long been that relationships matter more than mere purchases: between creators and consumers, but also within those communities of consumers who have an increasingly vocal impact on the creative process."
— Tom Chatfield, BBC Future
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Land Grab

From: digitalaudrey

Intellectual property is just that—the landscape of the mind subdivided and developed into something marketable. And for writers, especially fiction writers, tilling the soil of that "plot" of land, using the imagination to build fanciful constructs that readers enjoy inhabiting, is the only way we can earn a living.
     But the digital world has changed all that. Books are no longer tangible, frangible, (burnable too, as history has taught us) hefty lumps of pulped wood that smell good and bow the shelves of libraries... and like slow food, take longer to digest. To new generations of readers books are mere fleeting flickers of binary code; no more valuable (in terms of RAM) than a few seconds of a cell phone video recording of grandma playing with a kitten. It has changed the way we perceive books, read them, market them, and value them (a knock-off is no longer second best: it's a replica, indistinguishable from the original).
     And Amazon and e-readers like the Kindle have changed the way we publish books too; by blurring the boundaries between the professional and amateur writer they have compromised quality. The boomer bulge of retirees and unemployed computer-savvy twenty-somethings have turned the cliché ("If I had the time, I'd like to write a book too.") on it's head. Now everyone seems to have the time—the market is being flooded (a tsunami of wannabes and boomers eradicating fence lines, protocols: standards of all descriptions) with a deluge of product.
     And like any real estate bubble—even a virtual one—when supply exceeds demand, the bubble bursts.
— Michael Hale

"Ewan Morrison is an established British writer with a credit-choked resume and a new book out, Tales from the Mall, that the literary editor of the venerable Guardian newspaper hailed as 'a really important step towards a literature of the 21st century.' By his own account, Morrison is also being driven out of business by the ominously feudal economics of 21st-century literature, 'pushed into the position where I have to join the digital masses,' he says, the cash advances he once received from publishers slashed so deep he is virtually working for free. [...]
     The economic trajectory of writing today is 'a classic race to the bottom,' according to Morrison, who has become a leading voice of the growing counter-revolution – writers fighting fiercely to preserve the traditional ways. 'It looks like a lot of fun for the consumer. You get all this stuff for very, very cheap,' he says. But the result will be the destruction of vital institutions that have supported 'the highest achievements in culture in the past 60 years.'”
— John Barber, The Globe and Mail
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Buy Ewan Morrison's books here...

Write-By-Numbers

From: Above & Beyond

"In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them. For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and private act, an intimate exchange between the reader and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift in the way we read, transforming the activity into something measurable and quasi-public.
     The major new players in e-book publishing—Amazon, Apple and Google—can easily track how far readers are getting in books, how long they spend reading them and which search terms they use to find books. Book apps for tablets like the iPad, Kindle Fire and Nook record how many times readers open the app and how much time they spend reading. [...]
     Pinpointing the moment when readers get bored could also help publishers create splashier digital editions by adding a video, a Web link or other multimedia features [Jim Hilt, Barnes & Noble's vice president of e-books] says. Publishers might be able to determine when interest in a fiction series is flagging if readers who bought and finished the first two books quickly suddenly slow down or quit reading later books in the series. [...]
     Others worry that a data-driven approach could hinder the kinds of creative risks that produce great literature. 'The thing about a book is that it can be eccentric, it can be the length it needs to be, and that is something the reader shouldn't have anything to do with,' says Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 'We're not going to shorten 'War and Peace' because someone didn't finish it.'"
—Alexandra Alter, The Wall Street Journal
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"swaddled in diaphanous layers of multimedia"

"I recently bought a book about the future of books. It’s called The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books, and features twenty-six authors (including two n+1 editors) describing what they think might become of literature. Given the collection’s prophetic subtitle, and that I was reading it on my new, still-extraterrestrial-seeming iPad, I was surprised to find that very few of the authors mention e-books. Those who do tend to regard them with dread and disgust, like a farmhand studying a handful of fallen locusts. [...]
     The e-book is usually said to have been invented in 1971, when an undergrad at the University of Illinois, Michael S. Hart, decided to upload The Declaration of Independence onto an ARPAnet server. Sitting in the Materials Research Lab among hulking, warmly breathing Xerox Sigma V processors, Hart went on to input and share, with a quixotic singularity of purpose, text after text, from Peter Pan to The Tempest. Few saw the revolutionary implications of his actions until years later, when his Project Gutenberg—which by then had uploaded thousands of books—began to attract copyright lawsuits and became a figurehead for the fledgling hacktivist and open source movements. Today, more than two million e-books are available for free download on the internet. Pair this abundance with an increasingly cheap (and perhaps one day soon, free) Kindle, and you have some counterweight to the dwindling local library. If those noble institutions exist at all in thirty years, our children will probably know them as quiet places to use computers and read e-books. You can already walk into one of 11,000 public libraries, from Manhattan to Missoula, and have e-books loaned to your Kindle. [...]
     Those more skeptical of the expanded e-book model might be at least partly converted by the new, best-selling app version of T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, by Touch Press. Eliot’s poem comes swaddled in diaphanous layers of multimedia, which rise or recede upon command, including critical interpretations, Eliot’s own scribbled-upon drafts, and live readings by the author, Ted Hughes, Alec Guinness, Fiona Shaw, and Viggo Mortensen. Upon release, the app quickly topped the iTunes list of best-selling book apps, and for good reason. It is the best enhanced e-book yet devised, revivifying a text long buried under its own accumulated dust. And yet it still feels chimerical, incongruous—an old man with cyborg arms."
— Robert Moore, n+1 magazine
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Imprinted

From: Book of Joe

Some iconic titles are associated, in my mind at least, with certain colours. Apart from The Little Red Book ("The Quotations of Chaiman Mao") by Mao Zedong, the next book that comes to mind is the plain, dark red cover of the ubiquitous Signet paperback edition of J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye; followed by the blue of Joseph Heller's Catch 22 cover. My favorite red cover is the hardcover edition of The Stories of John Cheever.
     I remember picking a copy of Alvin Toffler's Future Shock from a display case of the paperback edition; it was available in four or five background colours. (Back in the Seventies all sorts of bestsellers were coming out with this option.) I picked the white one — I'm sure of that because it's still on my bookshelf.
     More recent titles seem to be lost in a swirling, blendered dazzle of the entire spectrum—print technology has turned the discipline of the fifties and sixties (design choices that maximized impact and minimized production costs) on its ear... or eye. And with the advent of e-books and digital publishing in general, the notion that the contents can forever be associated with the colour of the package, for books at least, will become a thing of the past.
— Michael Hale

The Man With the Golden Pen

From: Beattie's Book Blog

"[...] Amazon announced Tuesday that it has purchased the North American rights to Ian Fleming's James Bond books. James Bond, of course, is the debonair British superspy 007, whose bestselling books have become an iconic big-screen movie franchise. Under the agreement, Amazon will retain republication rights for 10 years, to both the print books, which have sold 100 million copies worldwide, and the e-books, which have not. Yet. [Not true: see article below]
     The 14 Bond books that fall under the agreement are, in chronological order (American publication dates): "Casino Royale" (1953), "Live and Let Die" (1954), "Moonraker" (1955), "Diamonds Are Forever" (1956), "From Russia with Love" (1957), "Dr. No" (1958), "Goldfinger" (1959), "For your Eyes Only" (1960), "Thunderball" (1961), "The Spy Who Loved Me" (1962), "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" (1963), "You Only Live Twice" (1964), "The Man With The Golden Gun" (1965), and "Octopussy and the Living Daylights" (1966)."
— Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
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"Ian Fleming Publications attracted attention when, in 2010, it announced it would publish the James Bond e-books directly instead of selling the digital rights to Bond print publisher. Two years later, Ian Fleming has changed its mind and sold the entire bundle of print and digital rights to Penguin competitor Vintage (part of Random House) in the UK.
     Penguin held the print rights to the James Bond novels for years, but at the time the original deal was signed digital rights weren’t on anybody’s radar. Ian Fleming Publications held onto the digital rights and published the Bond e-books in the U.S. in 2008, then in the U.K in 2010, Sarah Weinman reported at the time. She also noted, 'The estate may have some leverage because of the Bond’s popularity across many different forms of media, and most fans don’t automatically think of Penguin when they think of 007.'”
— Laura Hazard Owen, paidContent
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Buy them all (in pre-digital form) here...

Biting the Hand

From: Coverbrowser

"Late last week, the [United States] Justice Department warned Apple and five of the nation’s largest publishers that it was planning to sue them for price fixing. At issue is the agency model, a method of wholesaling e-books in which the publisher sets the retail price and the retailer takes a 30 percent cut. Most print and many e-books are sold under the traditional wholesale model, in which publishers sell books at a discounted price, and the retailer can resell them for whatever price it likes.
     The unnamed player in this drama is Amazon, which had been selling e-books at a loss until two years ago, when the iPad came along and publishers used the emergence of the new device to pressure the online megaretailer into adopting the agency model, too. If Amazon wanted to sell e-books from the Big Six (as the six largest book publishers are called), it could no longer sell those titles for $9.99.
     Publishers actually make less money with the agency model, so why have they insisted on it? The change was designed to limit the growing dominance of Amazon over American book retailing. On Monday, Scott Turow — the bestselling author of “Presumed Innocent” and other legal thrillers, and the president of the Authors Guild — posted a letter to members on the Guild’s web site. In it, he pronounced the Justice Department’s actions bad news for authors, 'grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture,' and (contrary to first impression) ominous for book consumers. I called him up to find out more."
— Laura Miller, Salon
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"[E-books] smell like burned fuel."—Ray Bradbury

Source photo from: Wikipedia

"At age 91, Ray Bradbury is making peace with the future he helped predict.
     The science fiction/fantasy author and long-time enemy of the e-book has finally allowed his dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 to be published in digital format. Simon & Schuster released the electronic edition Tuesday.
     First published in 1953, Fahrenheit 451 has sold more than 10 million copies and has been translated into 33 languages. It imagined a world in which the appetite for new and faster media leads to a decline in reading, and books are banned and burned.
     Bradbury himself has been an emphatic defender of traditional paper texts, saying that e-books 'smell like burned fuel' and calling the Internet nothing but 'a big distraction.' "
— The Globe and Mail
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"Scientists may not be able to tell a good book by its cover, but they now can tell the condition of an old book by its smell. In a report in ACS' Analytical Chemistry, a semi-monthly journal, they describe development of a new test that can measure the degradation of old books and precious historical documents based on their smell. The nondestructive 'sniff' test could help libraries and museums preserve a range of prized paper-based objects, some of which are degrading rapidly due to advancing age, the scientists say. [...]
     The new technique, called 'material degradomics,' analyzes the gases emitted by old books and documents without altering the documents themselves. They used it to 'sniff' 72 historical papers from the 19th and 20th centuries, including papers containing rosin (pine tar) and wood fiber, which are the most rapidly degrading paper types in old books. The scientists identified 15 VOCs [volatile organic compounds] that seem good candidates as markers to track the degradation of paper in order to optimize their preservation. The method also could help preserve other historic artifacts, they add."
— Michael Berstein, EurekAlert
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From: Breathing Books

Dirty Books

From: Wikipedia

"Why are there so many mistakes in the e-versions of print books?
[...] 'In the print book production process, typesetters work from an author's word processing files that have been electronically edited and are ready to proceed to the next stage: formatting and page layout. [says Maggie Dana]
     Typesetters strip the author's codes and import these word processing files into page layout programs, such as Adobe InDesign or Quark, and massage them into attractive book pages per the publisher's design specifications. At this point, all connection with the author's original files is lost. Any changes made from this point forward are made solely inside the page layout software, NOT in the Word document as well. It is not a parallel process.
     From these page layout documents, typesetters generate PDFs to send to the publisher as page proofs. The publisher and author mark their
 corrections on the PDFs and send them back to the typesetter, who makes the changes. There are often several rounds of proof corrections going back and forth before everyone is happy. Therefore the final PDF that goes off to the printer is often quite different from the author's original Word files.' "
— Karen Dionne, Huffington Post
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Words Are Not Enough

Photo: Michael Hale

"Some speculate that the move to reading off electronic tablets will force writers into shorter and more direct narratives. Others worry that the rush to add video will turn writers into screenwriters on creative teams that produce novels as a branch of filmmaking, and they wonder if the nifty interactivity of video games can ever be applied to serious writing to create a new digital literature. As for us faithful readers, will we be hard-pressed to ever find a writer who can still produce a good old-fashioned novel?" — Kate Taylor, The Globe and Mail
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Be. Quiet.

From: One Good Eye Antiques

"In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading — Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating — but then, a few years ago, he 'became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read.' [...]
The idea of keeping yourself on a digital diet will, I suspect, become mainstream soon. Just as I've learned not to stock my fridge with tempting carbs, I've learned to limit my exposure to the web [...]
And here's the function that the book — the paper book that doesn't beep or flash or link or let you watch a thousand videos all at once — does for you that nothing else will. It gives you the capacity for deep, linear concentration. As Ulin puts it: 'Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction... It requires us to pace ourselves. It returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise.'"
— Johann Hari, Huffington Post
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