Reamde

Sep 302011
 

Very nice review of new Neal Stephenson novel Reamde by Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives:

Neal Stephenson, on the other hand, shows up smelling vaguely of weed, with a bunch of suitcases. Maybe he can crash for a couple of days? Two weeks later he is still there. And you cannot get rid of him. Not because he is unpleasant but because he is so interesting. Then one morning you wake up and find him gone. You are relieved, a little, but you also miss him. And you wish he’d left behind whatever it was he was smoking, because anything that allows a human being to write six 1,000-page novels in 12 years is worth the health and imprisonment risk.

The Wall

Sep 232011
 

I love this graffiti. There’s more to it than just an opinion about Facebook. There’s Pink Floyd and there’s The Wall. The idea of a wall is confronted in a form of a written word and it’s immediate physical presence. It calls to mind all the walls ever encountered, with emphasis on those right above our keyboards. One thing they have in common is that they remain impenetrable.

Matrix or Marx?

Sep 222011
 

“Something went wrong around the start of the 21st century.” It sounds like something Morpheus might have said to Neo, no? It’s actually from the back cover of the book I am reading right now.

Something started to go wrong with the digital revolution around the turn of the twenty-first century. The World Wide Web was flooded by a torrent of petty designs sometimes called web 2.0. This ideology promotes radical freedom on the surface of the web, but that freedom, ironically, is more for machines than people.

It’s early in the twenty-first century, and that means that these words will mostly be read by nonpersons – automatons or numb mobs composed of people who are no longer acting as individuals. The words will be minced into atomized search-engine keywords within industrial cloud computing facilities located in remote, often secret locations around the world. They will be copied millions of times by algorithms designed to send an advertisement to some person somewhere who happens to resonate with some fragment of what I say. They will be scanned, rehashed, and misrepresented by crowds of quick and sloppy readers into wikis and automatically aggregated wireless text message streams.

Reactions will repeatedly degenerate into mindless chains of anonymous insults and inarticulate controversies. Algorithms will find correlations between those who read my words and their purchases, their romantic adventures, their debts, and soon, their genes. Ultimately these words will contribute to the fortunes of those few who have been able to position themselves as lords of the computing clouds.

All that free stuff on the net is making it really difficult for us to concentrate on what might be missing. Yet, it is no longer enough to be a happy user. The soft stream of novelty and convenience is turning us into living batteries. We think we are users, yet we are already products. It’s happening fast and it’s not easy to notice. Revolution might be overlooked.

I warmly recommend Jaron Lanier’s book. If you would like an appetizer, here is an one hour video of Jaron Lanier explaining some of the things he’s been thinking about lately.

Library of Amazon

Sep 152011
 

Anything that touches internet becomes free, right?

In the near future we’ll hopefully get a free online access to all the books ever published in English language.

Good. I have no problem with that.

The problem was never not having enough good books to read. The problem always was and always will be that in a lifetime one can only read a very small fraction of these. A tiny, nearly insignificant number.

Tim Carmody writes about Amazon negotiating with major publishers for the price of their backlists.

Let’s assume that Amazon convinced one or more major publishers, or a handful of mid-level ones, to sign on with this plan. One of two things could happen:

1) The service doesn’t get traction with customers, for whatever reason — bad implementation, the catalog is too small/big or poor-quality, readers would rather own than rent — and it crashes and burns. The publisher just went through a ton of work to pore over its giant catalogs, digitize more back content, figure out author compensation for this weird new thing. And now they look like idiots.

2) The service is a smash hit. A big free catalog of books helps Amazon sell its next generation of tablets and e-readers faster than Foxconn can make them. Book clubs are binging on your back catalog and your content has more visibility and relevance than ever. A year into the deal, Random House CEO Markus Dohle (or whoever) is on stage with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. They clasp hands, and raise them over their heads to thunderous applause. As Dohle’s smile widens and flashbulbs pop, only one thought is on his mind, which he fights to keep off his lips: “I should have asked for a lot more money.”

It seems that Amazon has decided to push the limits of what we understand as a library. No wonder publishers are perplexed.

Guessing game

Sep 132011
 

Would anyone like to play a guessing game on Behemot’s Facebook page?

Couple of days ago I took a picture of an interesting detail from one of newly arrived books. I posted it on Behemot’s Facebook page and asked if anyone would like to guess from which book it is. David was first with correct answer so now he posted a new question.

We are currently trying to figure out from which book is this:

Would anyone like to guess? As a reward you post a new photo question from one of your books.

Books in Books and in Other Places

Sep 112011
 

For all lovers of books and of reading, signandsight.com‘s translated and uploaded a brilliant article by Bora Cosic on reading books no one else reads, where books in all their manifestations can be found, and on how complex and all-encompassing the act of reading is.

Personally I require many hours of reading, because I usually read tremendously thick books, and also notably boring ones; I am always convinced that at the core of an abstruse sentence lies the magnificence of a discovery just waiting to be made.

In a time of  book’s wavering on the stage of the world, these confessions of an eager book-eater really soothe a bookworm’s battered heart.

I read my fill at various times, not only of printed texts, I was also a careful reader of book covers, bindings, and what is printed on the dust jacket. I would say that one finds an entire culture of the written word in abbreviated form, if one only looks at the narrow column printed on the inner flap of the book jacket, where there is a description as succinct as a dictionary entry telling what the book is about. If all the books in the world were to disappear, (as in “Fahrenheit 451″) and only the book covers remained, perhaps one could reconstruct human thought in this way.

I highly recommend reading the whole article. It’s a breath of fresh air. A subtle smile from a foggy distance, from someone who shares your peculiar convictions.

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