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April 21, 2009
Beautiful Pictures of Libraries & Bookstores
Thanks to Dan Colman, of Open Culture for pointing out the beautiful pictures of bookstores at Mirage Bookmark. Some of these places should be put on your list of 100 places to see before you die. My favorite? El Ateneo, in Buenos Aires. Another great one is the Lello bookstore in Portugal.
All the pictures from the Mirage site were taken from Flickr. It might be worth your while to just do a search on these names within Flickr. I found some amazing images tagged as "El Ateneo."
This same Mirage site also has some images of libraries around the world. Take a look. Somehow I wasn't as impressed.
Posted by swortman at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)
April 20, 2009
Wall Street Journal on the Future of Books
Yet another article predicting the end of the book, or at least predicting some interesting changes in the ways we interact with books. This one is called How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write and it actually quite interesting.
Steven Johnson, author of the article describes his vision of potential changes to reading and information as a result of e-books and Google. He suggests e-books will bring about a new surge of innovation. People will be carrying their libraries with them wherever they go and will be able to access every word, sentence and paragraph with a search. Citation analysis will be easier, leading researchers to sources previously unknown. The main changes according to this author will be:
* Books will become more ubiquitous
* There will be changes in how we talk about books
* Books will be written differently to take advantage of this new technology
* The economics of books will change
The Ubiquitous Book
By carrying around a Kindle, books will constantly be at our fingertips. Sitting in a doctor's waiting room with nothing to do? Order up a book on your Kindle and start reading. Here an interview of an author promoting what sounds like an interesting book? Order it up on your Kindle and start reading.
The down side to this is that people will be much more impetuous about what they read. They may start reading one book which cites another books so they'll jump to that one. Reading won't be the sequential exercise it has traditionally been.
How We Will Talk About Books
Because people will be able to comment about the texts they read, whole new conversations about books will develop in the future. People will annotate texts on e-readers and talk to other readers from around the globe.
This leads me to wonder about the future of research as it relates to e-books. Even now we can see how blogs have made everyone an "expert." Information is becoming less and less static and harder to cite, since it can be updated and changed without warning. Kindle books don't have page numbers, since pagination can vary, depending on the size of the font you are reading so research citations will have to change. This leads to the third change that Johnson mentioned in his article.
Books Will Be Written Differently
Book content will be written with e-books in mind in the future. It will be shorter and more modular so it can be broken up in chunks and sold like individual songs are currently sold on iTunes.
Changes to the Economics of Books
Perhaps book introductions and first chapters will be offered for free so authors and publishers will make sure these first chapters do a good job of inciting people into wanting to buy the rest of the book. Publishers may become aware of the most popular search terms used to find specific content and liberally sprinkle these terms judiciously into books so they are easier to find.
None of these ideas are particularly new to use involved in the distribution and dissemination of information through libraries but it brings a number of ideas together succinctly. It made me wonder more about the future of research and how much more difficult it may be to follow the trail of thought and knowledge. How will students be able to recognize, let alone stop and think about what is truth? Even now librarians complain about how students use Google and Wikipedia for their research and are clueless about vetted sources. If e-books become sources for conversations about research will students be able to glean a finite message from a source that has no end? Like today's blogosphere, will there be no experts when everyone has the ability to comment on e-research? Will the squeakiest wheel or the person with the most time on their hands become the most prolific e-book commenter and by default also become the "expert?"
Each new technology has had it's own detractors and it's own promoters and yet looking back on the history of other innovations related to information the sky has never fallen and things have worked out. I'm sure e-books and Google will be the same.
(As an aside to the changes in reading, I found this article in the print version of the WSJ and was annoyed that they mentioned the author but did not give his background. Since Steven Johnson is a common name it made it difficult to figure out who this was for sure. All I really had to do was go to the online version of the article which gave some brief background on the author. The print copy neglected to supply this information. So-long newspapers as we used to know them!)
Posted by swortman at 07:56 AM | Comments (0)