May 2008

While not the typical Puget News fare, this was just too good to pass up and was making the rounds of some of my climbing friends.

I’ve done quite a bit of climbing throughout the years but I’ve never risked my life just getting to the climbing area. This video shows a completely hairball path to a famous climbing area in Spain. Billy goats and rock climbers only!

If you’ve been waiting for the price to lower on Kindle before you pick one up, wait no longer. Amazon has just dropped the price from $399 to $359 (and it still ships to you free via 2-day air). It may be a while before you see any further price drops…

I picked up a Kindle about a month and a half ago. While I have not yet written a comprehensive review, suffice it to say that I love mine so far. I’ve read a couple of books, peruse the New York Times daily, and have downloaded a couple of samples from new authors I may try out. It’s all integrated quite nicely and reading is very pleasant.

As I sat organizing hundreds of books at home yesterday, I actually decided to get rid of the vast majority of them since I could always get them for the Kindle; inexpensive much of the time and free for others. Any book that’s part of the public domain, and most of the older classics are lumped in that category, I can get for free via Project Gutenberg.

Any of you folks planning on purchasing a Kindle? What’s it going to take for you to switch?

Just what you’d expect from Weezer, catchy and fun to watch. The video plays with a ton of your favorite YouTube memes.

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