New Project: iPad E-Book Featuring William H. Gass & Michael Eastman
I am happy to announce that a personal project I’ve been working on for a few months is ready to meet the public: Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time (iTunes link), an iPad-only book pairing a previously unpublished 15,000-word essay by William H. Gass with a series of abstract photographs by Michael Eastman. I am the book’s editor and publisher, and I’m honored to have had the enthusiastic participation of both Gass and Eastman. The price we are charging for this interactive book: $6.99.
Bill and Michael have long hatched creative plans together, and back in 2009, one of them was this book. But in print form. I helped edit a version that was made privately, for a small group of people. Earlier this year, I proposed to both of them that we make an e-book version for the larger reading public, using Apple’s new iBooks Author software. They were game. (Yes, Gass authored the famous “In Defense of the Book” essay in Harper’s, but, well, he was still game.)
I realize I’m limiting the audience for this project by using iBooks Author, making a book that’s readable only by owners of the iPad 2 or later. But it’s the route I wanted to go in this publishing experiment, particularly since it afforded full-screen images and multi-photo galleries.
I’ll be posting next month a bit about my experience using iBooks Author Itself — there were both ups and downs. For now, though, here’s the book’s official description, as well as some screenshots taken on my own iPad:
This iPad-only volume pairs a penetrating 15,000-word essay on modern art and photography by William H. Gass — a writer Bookworm’s Michael Silverblatt has called “our greatest living writer of prose in America” — with the “Abstractions” series of photographs by internationally collected photographer Michael Eastman. Gass and Eastman are friends, neighbors, and collaborators, having partnered on, among other projects, Auguste Rodin (Archipelago Books, 2004). The writing in Abstractions Arrive is quintessential Gass — erudite, playful, probing, fun. Eastman’s images, which iPad users can tap to isolate and make larger, are some of the most striking in his decades-long oeuvre.
The book, as it appears in the Apple Store
A table of contents-like view for Chapter 3
A representative spread
The Notes page
Portrait mode
Made it all the way here? Yes, I will happily provide you with the link to buy, preview, or download a sample of the book. Questions? Comments? Write me at stephen @ stephen schenkenberg dot com. Thanks for your interest!
Simple, the banking alternative, previews its iPhone app. I’ve been in the beta queue since early fall of 2010. According to Simple’s Facebook page, those who signed up back then can expect an account by the end of this summer. Can’t wait.
Really enjoyed all three of these “Future of the Book” videos by IDEO. Especially “Coupland,” the second one. Details from IDEO:
Meet Nelson, Coupland, and Alice — the faces of tomorrow’s book. Watch global design and innovation consultancy IDEO’s vision for the future of the book. What new experiences might be created by linking diverse discussions, what additional value could be created by connected readers to one another, and what innovative ways we might use to tell our favorite stories and build community around books?
(Via Rachel Craft)
At NYMag.com:
First, to understand this deal it’s important to understand Facebook. Unfortunately everything about Facebook defies logic. In terms of user experience (insider jargon: “UX”), Facebook is like an NYPD police van crashing into an IKEA, forever — a chaotic mess of products designed to burrow into every facet of your life.
As thoughtful and personal as his previous pieces.
Paper, a new iPad app by Fifty Three. Looks sharp, innovative, and potentially useful for both work and leisure.
I was actually in the early stages of writing a post about this same subject — that, contrary to what intelligent people like Jonathan Franzen and Tyler Brûlé have been saying or implying about Twitter (which they don’t use, and therefore don’t really know), it’s often not a replacement for reading, say, long-form journalism or high-quality fiction. It’s an enabler of it. I have those I follow on Twitter to thank for many meaty essays and recommended books I’ve now taken in. It was on Twitter where I learned about (and then supported on Kickstarter) Distance, a new quarterly journal with ”long essays about design.” And it’s where I learned of Offscreen, “a new periodical with an in-depth look at the life and work of digital creators — captured in enduring print.” Neither of those two new long-form publications, efforts Brûlé would surely champion, would exist without Twitter as the network that brought its contributors, investors, and readers together.
So, as I was saying, I was going to write a post about all this. But then The New Yorker’s Sasha Frere-Jones wrote one, and his is sharper than mine would have been. I recommend you read it. And, if so inclined, share it on your social network of choice.
A strong piece, as expected.
Great piece in The New York Times, with clear-eyed (and entertaining) commentary from a writer and book critic about how technology has improved his reading life. This bit comes from his section on the smartphone:
Keep an audio book or two on your iPhone. Periodically I take the largest of my family’s dogs on long walks, and I stick my iPhone in my shirt pocket, its tiny speaker facing up. I’ve listened to Saul Bellow’s “Herzog” this way. The shirt pocket method is better than using ear buds, which block out the natural world. My wife tucks her phone into her bra, on long walks, and listens to Dickens novels. I find this unbearably sexy.
A Reminder
A brief note, to myself as much as anyone, to say that increasingly my Let’s Absorb This mind is being met far too early by my How Could I Share This mind. So that, for instance, three sentences into reading an article or essay, a shift takes place and my mind’s job is now to decide how this interesting, attention-worthy material just might be shared — here on this or another blog, or on Twitter or Facebook, or to co-workers. All before I have fully absorbed the piece in front of me. So I am reminding myself: Do your best to focus on absorbing — just you and the material, just like the old days — and later, when you’ve finished, when appropriate, share, share away.
Brilliant.
Kara Swisher’s technology-focused interview with New Yorker editor David Remnick at D: Dive Into Media last month. I admire Remnick a tremendous amount, not just for his editorial and writing muscle but for his sharp humor and candor. (Enjoyed his comment during this interview about the “evangelical smugness” of those younger dinner-party companions who would tell him his magazine content had to be free.)
At the New York Review of Books blog, a refreshingly contrarian post:
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. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.
Apple’s next OS — highly informed by iOS — introduced to Gruber in a private briefing by Phil Schiller himself.
An interesting piece published in today’s NYT:
As the popular technology blogger Robert Scoble explained in a recent post defending frictionless sharing, “The new world is you just open up Facebook and everything you care about will be streaming down the screen.”
This is the very stance that is killing cyberflânerie: the whole point of the flâneur’s wanderings is that he does not know what he cares about.
Reminded me a bit of the “serendipity” exchanges from 2006.
