power reading... with 2013 Man Booker Prize judge Natalie Haynes

"[...] slabs of plastic [...]"

The 1989 Atari Portfolio [...] "a marvel of miniaturization" (from: Retro Thing)

"[...] E-readers are uninspired. They're slabs of plastic with fiddly controls and display a badly-formatted, typographically impoverished rendering of a paper book. That's not the electronic book I want. I want a gorgeous physical object, with paper pages, that can transform into any story I choose, perfectly presented on the page. I want a device from a fairytale, not a bargain bucket. Although, sure, I'd like it to be affordable, too. And that will not happen if one company controls the market. Why should it?
     Digitization was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work. The putative business model of the internet age is the garage band, the plucky underdog cottage business that can, by canny use of information technology, compete with the big boys and win. What we're getting is the opposite, a great centralisation of access and, ultimately, control. It turns out that if you want to sell your garage-made product these days, you need a watering hole, a place with many visitors who may want what you're selling, because the hardest enemy is obscurity. Amid the babble of new voices, distinctive ones can be missed even by those looking for them."
― Nick Harkaway, The Guardian
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Don't buy a ticket to the Elora Writers' Festival 2012; spend the money here.

See earlier article here...

Read more about Worldreader here...

Books — Changing Minds and Brains

Photo: Michael Hale

"Neuroscientists have discovered that reading on computer screens or Kindle e-reader screens causes changes in white matter, the nerve strands which help different parts of the brain communicate with each other. [...]" — from The Digirata
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"[...] the physical side of reading depends not on the bad aspects of computer screens but on the brilliance of the traditional book — sheets bound on end, the “codex” — which remains the most brilliant design of the last several thousand years. Technologists have (as usual) decreed its disappearance without bothering to understand it. [...]" — David Gelernter (a professor of computer science at Yale University)
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