Posts Tagged ‘books’
Is the Writing Revolution About Process, Not Product?
We have Blurb Mobile, Cowbird, Broadcastr, Slideshare — storytelling tools built by digital designers for creative expression. And yet, we craft our compositions first for the page. Perhaps this is correct. Perhaps these tools are meant to augment, not replace, writing, to extend the way we craft and shape our texts. Something similar has happened in publishing. Print books are alive and well, in spite of the headlines, but the way we make them is a long way from Gutenberg, his printing press, and moveable type. In 2010, Polity Books published professor John B. Thompson’s 432-page volume,
Destined for Ink? A Call to Action: Let’s Think Beyond the Book
Humans have for millennia created tools that augment and improve our lives. From the weapons of the Bronze Age to bartering beads and paper currency, each tool changes how we interact with our world. As these tools become commonplace, they are harder to deconstruct, but it is important to remember that we made them; we designed them to help us know more, see more, achieve more. From virtual libraries to virtual reality, from the codex to the digital book, the tools we have created to transmit information make it possible for more people to make more astounding discoveries. But technologist …
Should We Write Books? Writing and Publishing in the Digital Age
We have lived so long with the book that it’s easy to forget that it, like the iPad, was once a cutting-edge technology. From Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible to William Blake’s The Book of Thel, many of literature’s most sublime texts were offered as elegantly bound volumes, crisply printed, their pages illuminated by intricate illustrations. In this way the container for an author’s writing became an extension of his words, quietly enhancing the meaning of the text. Over centuries, publishers refined the format into a near-perfect content delivery system, a pinnacle of achievement in information technology, and in arts and …
