technology

Robert Silvers: Toward a "New Form of Criticism"

Thursday, April 11, 2013

At New York Magazine, the great journalist Mark Danner talks at length with The New York Review of Books’ Robert Silvers. Here’s one bit about online publishing and social media, which strikes me not as fuddy-duddy, but very considered: To tweet or not to tweet. And not to tweet is to be left behind. And that raises a question: What is this? What are the kinds of prose, and the kinds of thinking, that result from the imposition of the tweet form and other such brief reactions to extremely complex realities?

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CoDesign on Editorially

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Excited to try this new online writing and editing environment, built by a few all-stars. 

FT and the "Finite Read"

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

From Folio’s “FT Relaunches Web App”: One of the biggest changes is offering readers both a static version of the morning paper along with a dynamically updated version that automatically updates throughout the day. “The big learning for us with the first app is how important the concept of a finite read is,” says Steve Pinches, FT.com’s group product manager. “Readers love the idea of starting with the FT in the morning and reading it all the way through, which is quite a different concept than on the web.

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The Ecosystem Known As Reading

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

Andrew Piper, writing in Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times: Books will always be there. That is what they are by definition: there. Whether in the classroom, the library, the archive, the bookstore, the warehouse, or online, it is our choice, however, where books will be. It is time to stop worrying and start thinking. It is time to put an end to the digital utopias and print eulogies, bookish venerations and network gothic, and tired binaries like deep versus shallow, distributed versus linear, or slow versus fast.

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Year in Review: 2012

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

This post is part of my Annual Favorites list I’ve been keeping for the past decade-plus. Favorite Books (Goodreads profile) The German Genius, by Peter Watson (choice passages) Journey to the Abyss: The Diaries of Count Harry Kessler, 1880-1918 (choicepassages) Life Sentences, by William H. Gass Nox, by Anne Carson A Hologram for the King, by Dave Eggers Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective Donald Judd Every Love Story is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, by D.

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Towards the Gass Interviews....

Sunday, December 9, 2012

I’m still at work editing The Ear’s Mouth Must Move: The Essential Interviews of William H. Gass. While I’d love for this to be published in a gloriously beautiful print version, I haven’t yet found an interested publisher. So it’s likely that, as with Abstractions Arrive, I will publish it myself as an iPad e-book using iBooks Author. Life is short, and I get restless waiting for traditional gatekeepers. We’ll see, though.

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Craig Mod: "Subcompact Publishing"

Sunday, December 9, 2012

An important and insightful essay. I hope Mod writes a part two that looks a bit more at how exactly (to continue his metaphor) the small vehicles would get made. Related: Mod’s round-up of coverage of his essay. This Jim Ray piece from the Mule blog isn’t on there, but I think it’s worth reading.

Andrew Piper on E-Reading

Thursday, November 15, 2012

The subtitle of this Slate piece is way too glib, but the essay from Piper — a literature professor at McGill — is worth reading. Thoughtful and thought-provoking. It’s excerpted from Piper’s book, Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times.

Marco's "The Magazine"

Thursday, October 11, 2012

Really looking forward to checking out this new iOS magazine from Marco Arment. From his announcement: But just as the App Store has given software developers a great new option for accepting direct payment, Newsstand has given publishers an even bigger opportunity with subscription billing and prominent placement. Yet most publishers aren’t experimenting with radical changes. They can’t — to fund their huge staffs and production costs, they can’t afford to deviate from yesterday’s model.

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"Lessons For Building A Tablet Magazine That's Actually Worth Using"

Friday, September 21, 2012

From Co.Design: The New Yorker has seen success with its relatively straightforward digital edition, but there’s nothing that really differentiates it from the print version, except maybe that it’ll save you the embarrassment of having a tower of unread issues on your nightstand. Aside from poet-spoken poems? Videos? Supplemental documents? Slideshows of artworks? Movie clips? This suggestion (even made in slight jest) — that only futuristic interactive material counts as worthwhile tablet content — gives me the blues.

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Popping Up in the New York Times

Friday, August 17, 2012

Hey, there’s The New York Times covering Abstractions Arrive! The piece, written by David Streitfeld, includes a new interview with Gass about books and technology. Thanks for the nod, Paper of Record!

Reporting on NMPS 2012

Tuesday, July 31, 2012

At the TOKY Blog, I offer five key take-aways from attending the National Museum Publishing Seminar last June.

"First of all, we don't publish slideshows"

Friday, July 27, 2012

Great email from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti to his troops about why the site’s succeeding right now.

Craig Mod: "Hack the Cover"

Tuesday, May 29, 2012

As ever, Mod offers smart, forward-looking thoughts on books and publishing. His central question: [I]f so much of what book cover design has evolved into is largely a brick-and-mortar marketing tool, then what place does a ‘cover’ hold in digital books? Especially after you purchase it? But, more tellingly, even before you purchase it?  If you’re interested in the questions, you’ll be interested in the entire essay. Recommended.

Paul Ford on Facebook and Instagram

Tuesday, April 10, 2012

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. 

Craig Mod on Building an App (and a Book)

Thursday, March 29, 2012

As thoughtful and personal as his previous pieces. 

"Good Things About Twitter"

Thursday, March 22, 2012

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.

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Dwight Garner: "The Way We Read Now"

Sunday, March 18, 2012

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.

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"Instapaper Placebo"

Thursday, March 8, 2012

Brilliant.

Mandy Brown:

Monday, February 27, 2012

Really like this post: Iteration in public is a principle of nearly all good product design; you release a version, then see how people use it, then revise and release again. With tangible products (hardware, furniture, appliances, etc.), that release cycle is long, just as with books. But when the product is weightless, the time between one release and the next can be reduced from months or years to days or even hours.

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Tim Parks Defends E-Books

Monday, February 20, 2012

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.

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John Gruber on Mountain Lion

Thursday, February 16, 2012

Apple’s next OS — highly informed by iOS — introduced to Gruber in a private briefing by Phil Schiller himself.

Evgeny Morozov: "The Death of the Cyberflâneur"

Sunday, February 5, 2012

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.

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Nicholas Carr: "Why publishers should give away ebooks"

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Kind of.  Readers today are forced to choose between buying a physical book or an ebook, but a lot of them would really like to have both on hand - so they’d be able, for instance, to curl up with the print edition while at home (and keep it on their shelves) but also be able to load the ebook onto their e-reader when they go on a trip. In fact, bundling a free electronic copy with a physical product would have a much bigger impact in the book business than in the music business.

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Franzen on Books, E-Books, and Permanence

Monday, January 30, 2012

Jonathan Franzen, regretting the rise (and, it seems, existence) of e-books:   Someone worked really hard to make the language just right, just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough. For serious readers, Franzen said, “a sense of permanence has always been part of the experience”.

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