The process of knowledge acquisition.

Sara Lloyd has published a wonderful and informative manifesto about the place of publishers in a rapidly changing reading landscape. It’s an absolute “must-read” for anyone involved in the production of written content (bloggers, authors, publishers, and marketers alike). There’s enough information here to feed a lot of different blog posts so don’t be surprised if you see me turning back to this one with some frequency.

Publishers – and, importantly, authors - will need increasingly to accept huge cultural and social and economic and educational changes and to respond to these in a positive and creative way. We will need to think much less about products and much more about content; we will need to think of ‘the book’ as a core or base structure but perhaps one with more porous edges than it has had before. We will need to work out how to position the book at the centre of a network rather than how to distribute it to the end of a chain. We will need to recognise that readers are also writers and opinion formers and that those operate online within and across networks.

If you have a few minutes today, give it a read and then post a comment telling me what interested you or what you’d like for me to follow up on in more detail. I’ll be happy to dig down into anything here.

Easy Links to all 6 parts of the manifesto:

1. Part 1
2. Part 2
3. Part 3
4. Part 4
5. Part 5
6. Part 6

I just discovered the marvelous Spherical Cow website today, a collection of thoughtful and funny comics. There aren’t a ton of them but what there is, is great.

I really like this one on “Many Worlds.”

This comic is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.

“Johnny Got His Gun” was the first book I recall which made me weep. I read it during high school because I was infatuated with the music video for “One” by Metallica which pulled its inspiration directly from the story and the video from the film. At the time, I remember being so impressed with the premise of a boy shipping off to war and coming back missing any ability to communicate, losing all his limbs, and wanting to end it all. Powerful stuff. [click to continue...]

Note: Updated to a Hulu embed (on 05/21/2008) as the original video from DailyMotion was removed for copyright violation.

[Thanks to Jester on Faves for the pointer!]

[Discovered via a post on The Elegant Variation]

One of my favorite college literature professors used to make quite a point of telling us how unnaturally fast our reading behavior as students was (and then following that up with telling us we had to do it anyways). His classes required each student to read about one novel along with supplemental literary criticism every week. When he would hand out a course syllabus at the start of a quarter, he’d point out the big books in that quarter’s curriculum and tell us not to even try to read those ones in a week. “Get started on those ones early,” he’d say.

This professor told us that there was no way we would have anything close to the reading experience that most of these authors intended for us. “When you read Dostoevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment,’” he said, “it’s supposed to consume your life for months at a time.” [click to continue...]

John Gall is the vice-president and art director for Vintage and Anchor Books. He’s the designer of “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,” a personal favorite of mine. While the video’s a touch light on substance, you do get to see a bunch of nifty covers while learning the 5 rules , which are:

1. read the book
2. inspiration is everywhere
3. be thrifty with fonts
4. practice sound time management
5. rules are meant to be broken

I hate Bill O’Reilly and his toddler temper. Nice to see folks having some fun with his more classic moments over at College Humor. I feel my inner child being expressed every time the producer speaks in the video.

I know it’s a ways off (july 25th) but I find myself irresistibly drawn to this reminder of what it was like to be in High School.

This morning, it appears that Google has decided to honor the invention of the laser with another one of their nifty logo tributes.

On May 16th, 1960, Theodore Maiman demonstrated the first laser. At the time, he was quoted as saying, “A laser is a solution seeking a problem.” He had no idea that it would eventually be used for brain imaging, measurement, burning, etc.

Are they at least ill-tempered sea bass?

P.S. I always love these Google tributes. Last year I wrote a post one the Valentines Day logo that looked like it said “Googe”. That post melted down my server until I installed caching. I guess everyone else likes these things too.

Resources:

• Maiman’ s obituary article in the International Herald Tribune is the source of some of the info in this post. It’s worth a read.