The Future of the Book

October 12, 2009

Bringing Book Scanning Home 10

by Robin Sloan

Dan Reetz built a book scanner, in two days, from old digital cameras, cardboard, and scrap parts; a friend wrote the page-processing software.

October 7, 2009

Adventures in Machine Translation 1

by C. Max Magee

Using Google to create a passable translation of the blog posts of a Spanish or German blogger is one thing, using it to translate a work of literature is quite another.

August 27, 2009

The Post-Kindle World 3

by Garth Risk Hallberg

The woman reading BolaƱo switched halfway through my ride to a Kindle. I’m not making this up.

July 27, 2009

Revisiting a Literary Throwdown: Zombie Books for Free 1

by C. Max Magee

It was a battle between an evangelizing visionary and a sage defender of the past, perhaps the first big tussle in the great sorting out of publishing’s new look in the digital age.
This was 2006, when Wired Magazine technology evangelist Kevin Kelly wrote about the helter skelter future of books in the digital age. [...]

July 20, 2009

Amazon’s Orwell Repo an Orwellian Move 3

by M. Ryan Calo

M. Ryan Calo is a residential fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet & Society. He frequently appears in radio, press, and online to discuss new technology.
Everyone knows Ray Bradbury’s book Fahrenheit 451. First published in 1953, Bradbury imagined a world in which government “firemen” could enter your home at any time [...]

June 2, 2009

Ether Between the Covers: Gifting Books in a Digital Age 13

by Edan Lepucki

I.The other day, while looking for books to buy my future nephew, I recalled The Real Mother Goose, a classic I had loved as a kid. I could conjure the cover, with its illustration of a witch and a baby, riding a giant, flying bird (a goose, I guess). And the border was [...]