Brain Busted. Have Some Links.
I haven’t had toast with butter and jam for breakfast in years, so today I decided to give it a whirl again. It’s still just as good as I remember. The rain has stopped for a little while, the sky is bright behind its lens of clouds, and yesterday I finished the line edits and read-through for the second YA book.
As usual after a massive revisions push, my brain feels busted in a big way. (And the copyedits for Flesh Circus are due soon. Waaah!) So, today is for grocery shopping (big fun) reading the current issue of BITCH magazine (oh, my God, I am loving it; the “Bug Sex” article alone is insanely awesome,) and just generally laying on the floor and drooling while my gray matter recovers.
So, here’s some links, because I have no real content to give today other than moaning about my poor head. And that’s not interesting to anyone.
* Evgeny Morozov on why we don’t need to reinvent the book for the Web age. Ten points for proper use of the word “fungible,” and the paragraph that made my toes tingle and curl run thus:
This may also explain why sales of serious books haven’t plummeted in the age of free and ubiquitous content. With so many free resource materials available on the Web, it does seem strange that anyone would still want to pay 20 bucks for “a compilation of links” that most non-fiction books are (at least, according to O’Reilly). But the likely explanation here is quite simple: compiling links in meaningful and readable ways is exactly the kind of premium value that we are willing to pay for when we buy a book. It’s becoming obvious that in the age of information abundance the value of curation rises dramatically. As the number of available resources that writers and readers could consult rises, it’s actually quite normal that we would place more and more value on the process of synthesizing rather than simply aggregating information. From this perspective, if I want to read a book on a subject that is slightly more complex than the world of Twitter, I expect that authors would actually read all the available resources (rather than just a sampling of a few hundred 140 “best” Twitter status updates), take a principled stand, and actually try to compress the very boring 30,000 pages they read while researching the book to much more readable 300 pages – precisely “so that I don’t have to”.
I thought about this yesterday, too. Right next to the sensual experience of paper, this is why I think traditional books will not go out of style. They are an efficient and durable way of transferring information and context.
And as an added bonus they do not depend on an electric outlet. (Note that I don’t say ebooks are bad, I just personally prefer paper.) Ebook editions are all very well and a lot of people love them, but they do depend on that electric outlet, which we take for granted…
* Awwwww. This is so cute. They both look so young (cranky old Lili smiles fondly.) And I love how he says, “I would have felt bad, because I don’t want to mess anything up for anyone. But more important to me is I want her to know just how much I love her — I don’t care what kind of fool I have to make of myself.” And he’s a guitar-playing fireman, she’s a speech therapist, and they were childhood friends. All together now, again: AWWWWWWW!
* The Nation on torture. The Nixonian defense just plain makes me sick. Nuff said. (Though his last line doesn’t have quite the ringing I’d prefer.)
* And Jenna Black’s latest Deadline Dames post made me cry.
* Last but not least, Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice To All Creation. I want this DVD so bad. And the book doesn’t look half bad either. Gonna hafta find it used, though. Oh, the agony.
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Tags: books, deadline dames, fellow weirdnesses, galley/proof, slight pause for station identification
May 5th, 2009 at 11:28 am
you can drop a paper book and it still works too, and if by the odd chance you get lost in the woods, you can use it to keep warm, and you can get a replacement for less than 300 dollars when you get rescued.
May 5th, 2009 at 7:09 pm
What is more, paper books don’t become obsolete when technology changes.
The oldest paper book I own was printed in 1875. The oldest book I ever handled (in the university library) was a bound collection of newspapers from the 17th century. The typeface took some getting used to, but otherwise those almost 400 year old newspapers were still perfectly readable. How many ebooks will still be accessible and readable 40 let alone 400 years from now?