Graphic designer Jason Huff takes the one hundred most downloaded copyright-free books and reduces them (pdf) using Microsoft Word 2008’s AutoSummarize 10-sentence function. Book Bench highlights several of the absurd – if occasionally poetic – results.
AutoSummarizing the Classics
What Does a Poet Know?
“Since his release, in 2005, he has graduated from the University of Maryland and Warren Wilson College’s low-residency M.F.A. program, been a Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard, received an N.A.A.C.P. Image Award, got married, and had two sons. ‘I’ve added some fancy stars … so now I’m like Felon Plus.’” Take a look at this fascinating New Yorker profile of Reginald Dwayne Betts: poet, memoirist, ex-convict-cum-lawyer, and family man.
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On Harm Reduction
Recommended Reading: Mary Addison Hackett reflects on heroin and harm reduction at n+1. “It is clear that no one — no neuroscientist, psychologist, psychiatrist, or physician — can explain what addiction is or account for its contradictions. Tobacco, cocaine, heroin, alcohol, MDMA, amphetamines — are they inherently addictive? Common knowledge suggests they are. But all around me I see exceptions more than the rule, my friends who use, have used, some or all of these drugs, including heroin, casually. I, too, am one of the exceptions.”
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Cash, Credit, or Barter?
Trader Joe’s, circa 1877: “It’s always the same complaint: ‘Joe, you don’t have any of the essential items that every other trading post has. Why don’t you have saddles? Or gunpowder? Or basic tools?’ Because I have soy chorizo, that’s why! Because I have chocolate-covered peanut-butter-filled pretzels!”
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100 Days that Changed Canada
Denise Donlon writes on the day MuchMusic rocked the tube. Peter Mansbridge details when baseball player Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. And Conrad Black outlines a train trip by Canada’s first prime minister. Those are but a few of the essays by well-known Canadian personalities in the new book 100 Days That Changed Canada (HarperCollins Canada), now in stores.
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Uncharted Story Space
How do we map our experiences? Where You Are (our review) attempts to answer this but ends up raising an interesting relationship between print and online story space. At Music & Literature, Reif Larsen traces the history of interactive books and contemplates the future of online story space. “Considering print books have been around for over five hundred years, online publishing is still in its infancy. Much of the map remains blank.” Pair with: Larsen’s essay on the power of the infographic.