The Paper-Reader’s Dilemma

The Future of the Book
October 22, 2010 | 4 books mentioned 19 3 min read

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coverIn a new commercial for the Amazon Kindle, a man and a woman lie on beach chairs, glazing beneath the sun.  The tragically average man is trying to read his iPad; due to the glare, he can no longer follow his Patterson.  The woman, Kindle in hand, has no problem with the sun; by the looks of her, she has no problems at all.  The man’s shortcomings are plain, and the message is equally clear: the Kindle will make you sexier and resist the sun.

I find the ad faintly comical.  In an effort to fend off Apple—which builds sex straight into its products—Amazon is grasping at whatever straw lies near.  But for me, the fun ends there.  After years of rising dread—the prophesied End of Books, the Bezos Newsweek cover—“it” is finally here.  No longer are books being pitted against pixels; pointing out that paper isn’t reflective either seems very 2007.  The war is now between tablets, as if the book never existed at all.

coverIn recent years, grief for such losses—music stores, newsrooms, this tradition or that—has become so common and compressed that it’s become a cultural given.  We now swallow our objections, lest they later seem absurd.  A few years ago, I stood in Tower Records, praising its stock to a friend: You can hold a compact disc; buying an album is a genuine act.  And just look at Bitches Brew: don’t you want to have it?

Of course, that Tower Records—along with most of its kind—is gone now; a jazz Pandora station is playing as I write.  The transition was far less wrenching than I’d previously expected; in fact, there was really no pain at all.  While I may miss aimless browsing, thoughts consumed by music, the process now seems needless, like baking bread from scratch.

I might say we’re at a moment when we face this choice as readers—the decision to climb into the boat or stay on familiar shores.  But the decision is not truly ours.  Time and again, these choices are made for us, by a collective sweep and push.  One day, everyone holds an iPod, and the next day, so do you.  Those who resist—the pipe smokers and vinyl hounds, stubborn to the end—come to seem affected, or possibly insane.  The rest of us seem modern, and eventually commonplace.

coverThe prospect of our wonders used to bring excitement.  In the early nineties, after seeing Dick Tracy, I dreamed of his two-way radio.  How cool would that be?  I thought.  Incredibly, I found out: as two-way radios came to market, then gripped every inch of our lives, they became not cool at all.  Awe gave way to grabbiness: digitize everything, please.  Books are the latest items to be forced into the hole.

So I should probably shrug at progress and enjoy a digital Roth.  But—and at this stage, I know the pointlessness of saying it—books feel different to me.  Everywhere I’ve lived, they’ve surrounded me; nearly every night since childhood, I’ve held one in my hands.  My mother was a librarian; my father sat me on his lap and read Tom Sawyer aloud.  I now do the same with my son, though he isn’t quite ready for Twain.  Everyone, to some degree, has a variation of this history.

So here is the dilemma: you love your books, with their meaning and their warmth, but you’re not some weepy sap.  You find romance in the object, yet none in being an outlier, unreasonably clinging to relics.  Do you get on the boat—with its gorgeous women and glare-free screens—or ignore it and hold on?  Had I asked myself this question around the time of my Tower trip, I would have flared out my response: I’ll never switch, you Logan’s Run drone.  Books are too vital to trade for some overmarketed whim.

But in the time since, I’ve given myself over to plenty of similar whims—and against all odds, they haven’t ravaged my soul.  Electric books hold no appeal to me; they feel like viral death.  But so did music taken from a set of coiled wires.  The sounds were what was important.  So my answer now, however reluctant, is this: I’ll hold on to books for as long as I can.  I’ll read them, lend them, fall asleep with them.  I’ll hope they hold their own, that novelty will wane.  And if it doesn’t—when it doesn’t—I’ll find myself among a crowd that I’d never hoped to join.

(Image: circuit board, from botheredbybees’s photostream)

is a staff writer for The Millions and an associate editor at MAD magazine. Find links to more of his work and follow him @Jacob_Lambert.

The Future of the Book

Fighting Over Deck Chairs: Print Vs. Online

The Future of the Book
September 5, 2007 | 4 books mentioned 2 5 min read

The sky is falling. The king is dead. And, oh, by the way, the barbarians are at the gates. Or at least, that’s what a recent spate of opinion pieces bemoaning the increasing morbidity of literary criticism would have you believe. Although the whinging and general hand wringing has been going on for years now, the trend seems to have picked up steam in the last few weeks (perhaps as a result of blogs celebrating their ten year anniversary?), with a panoply of blustering critics and journalists thundering to decry the downfall of civilization as they know it.Are the reports of literary criticism’s death an exaggeration? There is no question that the space devoted to book coverage in traditional print media is in decline. With a number of papers, including such stalwarts as the Los Angeles Times and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, reducing or entirely eliminating their book sections, it’s understandable that the old guard would set up a hue and cry about the fate of literary culture in the modern age. But the recent comments by critics Morris Dickstein at Critical Mass and Richard Schickel in the LA Times, rather than confront the real problems facing book reviews, amount to little more than a bitter rearguard action against the rise of literary culture on the Internet.The problems faced by book reviews are not unique. Rather, they are a manifestation of a problem confronting all forms of traditional media: the Internet as Shiva, creator and destroyer of business and cultural paradigms. Is it any coincidence that the recent spate of articles bemoaning the loss of book reviews across the country is paralleled by articles bemoaning the death of the music industry? As uber-producer Rick Rubin points out in a piece in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, “…the world has changed. And the industry has not.”Of course, old guard naysayers will continue to say their nays, unwilling, or unable, to accept the fact that the world is moving on without them. And no doubt, manufacturers of the horse-drawn buggy had a hard time coping with the advent of the automobile. But their objections didn’t serve to stay the tide of transformation, for better and worse, that cars brought with them.What the book review Cassandras, with their predictions of the death of American literary culture, seem to forget is that it is the traditional newspaper itself, not just the book review, that is fighting for its very existence. When complaining about the diminishing coverage of books in print media, book critics and reviewers (and writers) are simply fighting over the deck chair with the best view of the iceberg. As Max pointed out in an earlier post, it’s not what readers want that matters to today’s newspapers, it’s what shareholders want; and book reviews, for all of their merits, don’t add much to the bottom line.To the critics, however, this isn’t a sign of a changing economic reality, but an omen of literary apocalypse. Book culture in freefall. But writing on books has not dried up or disappeared. It has simply pulled up its stakes and moved to greener, electronic pastures. And this, to the critics, is precisely the problem. The Internet, as a medium for written expression, is in their minds inferior to the printed word.One would think that critics would welcome the advent of a medium where the cost of publication was not proportional to the amount of paper used. Yet many find it impossible to separate journalism, whether literary or otherwise, from the physical artifact of the newspaper or magazine. The success of popular online magazines like Slate and Salon (both of which publish frequent and useful book reviews) should prove that one can exist without the other, yet many critics see themselves locked in a Manichean struggle between “print journalism,” and the “Web.” On one hand, they concede the need for newspapers to find a new business model (and almost invariably insist this model must be electronic – although if not Web-based, then what, telegraph?), but on the other they see journalism as “mortally threatened by the Web.” How can the average person brook such cognitive dissonance? One can almost see the smoke billowing out of their ears as they write.Many old-guard critics, like Dickstein and Schickel and even writers (Richard Ford, with his dismissal of bloggers as “sitting in a basement in Terre Haute,” comes immediately to mind) don’t have much patience for new media. Shickel, for his part, declares blogs are not true writing, but mere “speech”:The act of writing for print, with its implication of permanence, concentrates the mind most wonderfully. It imposes on writer and reader a sense of responsibility that mere yammering does not. It is the difference between cocktail-party chat and logically reasoned discourse that sits still on a page, inviting serious engagement.What, I wonder, does he make of US Weekly? Or the book reviews in Maxim? Surely even a mind as “superior” and possessed of “disciplined taste” (and those quotation marks aren’t just for show) as Shickel’s can conceive of an online world where, as in the print world, good writing exists alongside bad. And what claim to permanence, I wonder, do his movie reviews for Time – Does Time even publish legitimate criticism? – and other print venues really have? No more, I would hazard, than the immortality conferred on a blogger’s writing by Google.These objections, however, only serve to direct attention away from the critics’ real complaint: the increasing democratization of criticism and the accompanying arrival of a new generation of literary gatekeepers. The problem for them is not that literary discourse has disappeared – if anything the Internet has served to deepen and expand it – but that anyone can participate. Certainly, as critics are quick to assert, all opinions are not equal (although one does wonder who has anointed their opinions superior), but it is unwise to mistake humble origins for lack of merit. Although not everyone has had the luxuries of upbringing and education that might have allowed them to become professional literary critics, humble origins do not necessarily denote a lack of discerning taste or cultivated knowledge. Content, as Steve Wasserman, former editor of the LA Times Book Review, very rightly points out in an excellent article about the mystery of the disappearing book reviews, is king. The beauty of the Internet, and the threat that it poses to the professional establishment, is that it allows readers access to that content regardless of whether it was written by a trained literary critic on paid assignment or by an auto mechanic who has developed an encyclopedic knowledge of Proust.And who serves as the gatekeepers to this kingdom? Increasingly, the answer is bloggers, who have come to serve as the Internet’s editors, directing readers to original content of note and, yes, importance. It would seem to go without saying that all blogs, as with newspapers, are not created equal, but many of the critics who are so quick to criticize them, seem to be under the mistaken impression that readers have no means of distinguishing one from the other and assign equal value to the ramblings of the proverbial subterranean Terra Hautean and a post by, oh, I don’t know, Morris Dickstein.Of course, critics will criticize. It is, as with Aesop’s fabled scorpion, in their nature, if not their best interests. By insulting web savvy consumers, after all, they only risk driving away potential readers, hastening that which they fear most: the waning importance of their own contributions to a conversation that is rapidly leaving them behind.

The Future of the Book
| 4 books mentioned 2 5 min read
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The Future of the Book

The Book Scanner

The Future of the Book
November 10, 2005 | 4 books mentioned

In the midst of all the controversy surrounding digitizing the world’s books did you ever stop to wonder how all these books are getting scanned? It turns out it’s just regular folks making a few bucks an hour sidled up to some high-tech scanning machines. The job doesn’t sound half bad, actually. Here’s a profile of one book scanner in Toronto from the Wall Street Journal.(via)

The Future of the Book
| 4 books mentioned
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In Person The Future of the Book

Report from the Future of Reading: The Books in Browsers Conference

In Person The Future of the Book
October 29, 2010 | 4 books mentioned 8 6 min read

Does a reader who lists all the books he reads on the internet still care about privacy? Should an ebook be an app on its own or one of many books available through an ebookstore? Do readers also want to be writers? And what, if anything, is the publisher’s role in all of this? These and many more questions were the subject of discussion at the second annual Books in Browsers conference at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. Sponsored by O’Reilly Media and planned by the IA’s Peter Brantley, the event brought together publishing and technology professionals from around the world (presenters flew from as far as Japan, Singapore, and Australia to speak) to discuss the consequences and opportunities of books becoming digital.

The talks ranged from the highly conceptual to the very specific. Some presenters discussed the history of publishing stretching back before the industrial revolution while others more or less demonstrated their software. This kind of dual-personality is a product of the confusing landscape those of us in the book business face today.

Nowhere was this more evident than when the IA’s founder Brewster Kahle gathered those of us in attendance together to take a group photo. Wanting to take a sort of general census of attendees, he asked anyone who considered himself or herself a publisher to raise his or her hand. When someone asked for clarification of what a publisher was, he more or less said “anyone who facilitates production and distribution of the written word.” As an employee of Goodreads, I felt compelled to raise my hand. Then he asked those of us who were authors to raise our hands. As a blogger, both here and elsewhere, I felt I should raise my hand again. I also claimed the title of bookseller, as Goodreads does sell ebooks. If I’d wanted to, I might even have been able to claim I was a librarian, but I didn’t. Lastly, every one of us was, of course, a reader. Nevertheless, clearly the old lines of demarcation in the publishing industry don’t really apply anymore.

If there was an overarching theme to the conference it was “social reading,” so much so that several presenters, including Goodreads founder Otis Chandler, who was there to announce the Goodreads Social Reading API, apologized for discussing the topic yet again. Michael Tamblyn from Kobo books proudly announced that his speech was free of any and all things social. “Hell is other readers,” one of his slides proclaimed. But sharing the reading experience was clearly on many people’s minds.

In presentation after presentation, speakers discussed their vision for what a social reading experience – and in some cases, a social writing experience – might be. In Thursday’s dazzling keynote address, Brian O’Leary of Magellan Media Partners urged publishers to move beyond the “container model of publishing” and to look instead to create context first:
[B]ook, magazine and newspaper publishing is unduly governed by the physical containers we have used for centuries to transmit information.  Those containers define content in two dimensions, necessarily ignoring that which cannot or does not fit.

Worse, the process of filling the container strips out context – the critical admixture of tagged content, research, footnoted links, sources, audio and video background, even good old title-level metadata – that is a luxury in the physical world, but a critical asset in digital ones.  In our evolving, networked world – the world of “books in browsers” – we are no longer selling content, or at least not content alone.  We compete on context.
But moving from containers to something infinitely less contained creates problems, as well. Nicole Ozer of the Northern California ACLU spoke eloquently on the dangers of gathering data on what people read. “If you build it, someone will come calling, asking for information.” Other speakers, though, argued that many readers will trade some amount of privacy in exchange for more features and greater possibilities. If a website helps you find the next book you want to read, perhaps giving it your reading history or some portion thereof is a price worth paying.

Day two of the conference kicked off with back-to-back talks from two publishing iconoclasts – Bob Stein from the Institute for the Future of the Book and Richard Nash, former editor of Soft Skull Press and founder of the publishing start up Cursor. Stein presented a call to create a Taxonomy of Social Reading. Stein aims to provide a framework to discuss all the various ways in which we do read socially in the hopes that the publishers might band together to create an open platform for sharing notations and comments across all texts. It’s only through seizing the social reading moment, so to speak, that the publishers can hope to wrestle some measure of control back from the tech companies that have come to dominate their industry.

Stein’s taxonomy is well worth examining in depth, and at the risk of simplifying a complex idea, I will summarize it here. He breaks social reading into four main categories: category one: in-person informal discussion of a book; category two: discussion of a book online; category three:  formal discussion of a book in a classroom or book club; and category four: online, synchronous discussion of a book in the margins of the book itself (A few examples of this are the Commentpress platform in which Stein’s piece appears and the website BookGlutton).

This concept – of group annotation and community reading – was arguably the most controversial idea of the conference. Does the average reader even want to mark up a text, much less share their annotations with others? Would this idea apply equally to fiction and non-fiction? Or would people prefer to keep the actual reading experience private, to remain immersed in a narrative rather than constantly checking the margins of the text?

Richard Nash followed Stein’s presentation with a thought-provoking talk about the ways in which authors are also readers and, perhaps more importantly, vise versa. His new venture Cursor aims to cultivate a community of writer-readers. Whether he is successful or not will not hinge on whether many readers also fancy themselves writers — that much seems self-evident — but instead on exactly what people are willing to pay to be a part of a community of like-minded folks.

Both Stein and Nash argued that the way most of us read now – alone with the text – has only been the way we read for the past two hundred or so years, a product of the industrial revolution. Prior to that, reading was something done in a small group, typically the family, and discussion was a natural and essential component of it. Whether that desire – to experience a text as a part of a group – has been thwarted by the past couple hundred years and consequently liberated by the connectivity of the net is at the very heart of the matter.

Fittingly, the debate about the issue spilled out from the conference itself and onto the Read 2.0 email list, which discusses issues pertinent to the future of the book business. Skeptics argued that shared marginalia was innovation for innovation’s sake, or that it might be applicable to academic environments and certain kinds of book clubs, but that it had little future as a commercially viable project for commercial publishers.

While it’s easy to see why many are skeptical, one can’t help but wonder how many people knew ten years ago that they wanted to write a blog? How many could have explained their desire to connect with other readers on sites like Goodreads? And yet there are millions of bloggers and Goodreads has four million members and counting. The text has been an isolated thing for so many years and decades that it’s difficult to imagine it as something different, as one part of a community and a conversation, rather than a thing unto itself. We want to interact with some texts, it seems, but whether we want that to extend to our long-form narratives remains somewhat in doubt.

Another thing very much in doubt is the publisher’s role in this changing world. It is telling that at a conference so focused on the future of reading, there was only a single representative of any of the six major publishers in attendance. The leadership, it seems, comes not from New York, but from the startups and thinkers on the fringes of the industry proper. People like Eli James, whose website Novelr has been covering the world of online fiction for some time, and Matthew Bernius from RIT, who closed the conference with the presentation of a canon of publishing, continue to lead a vanguard that increasingly has less and less to do with what’s happening in Manhattan.

Leaving the conference, I couldn’t help but be excited for the future. Simply being at the Internet Archive – one of the few places on earth actually digitizing books – was an exhilarating experience. On the second day of the conference, the attendees all banded together to form a “box brigade” to help the Internet Archive move a few dozen boxes from the first floor of their building to the second. The boxes contained hard drives capable of storing 2.8 petabytes of data, or 2 billion books.

This is an incredible time to be a reader, even if it’s a terrifying time for traditional publishing. I will admit to getting chills thinking about what the 2020 meeting of Books in Browsers will be like. The only things I’m comfortable predicting that far in the future are that people will be writing long-form narratives, people will be reading them, and they will be dying to talk about it.

In Person The Future of the Book
| 4 books mentioned 8 6 min read
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19 comments:

  1. I don’t understand the need to choose one form of books over the other. I picked up the “real” version of To the End of the Land and a digital copy of Darkness Visible last weekend. Switching between the two, I don’t sense any kind of let down or plastic experience. When it comes to the written word I say, the more the merrier.

  2. Thanks for the essay Jacob. I find myself playing a subtle “I can’t hear you” game with all references to the wonders of the Kindle. I’m sure I wouldn’t turn one down, but me and my books? We’re feeling pretty content just the way we are.

  3. I second the comment from Foster J. Pinkney. When I travel I read on my kindle and when I’m in my home I read from print books. Both have their purpose and I am a happier reader with both print and digital words at my fingertips.

  4. When publishers no longer print on paper, and libraries have gone fully digital, it will be the used bookstores of the land that are the last places were we can find our tangible books.

  5. I’m 51, and have read about 40 books a year since I was 20. I love physical books, and when I bought my iPad earlier this year, I gave e-books a try. It was the easiest format switch I ever made.

    There’s no need to apologize for wanting to stick with the paper model. But there’s no need to wear your preferences like a badge of honor, either.

  6. Great piece. Like you, I love the physical aspect of books – there are few things I enjoy as much as browsing through used books – but I don’t fear that e-readers will destroy literature or the experience of reading. I haven’t bothered to buy an e-reader yet because many of the books I read haven’t been digitized yet, but I look forward to a revolution of reissues like the one that CDs brought to music. And I won’t mind freeing some shelf-space when I finally get a reader; five years ago I gave away more than 200 vinyl albums and I haven’t regretted it once.

  7. It’s possible to love books as physical objects and still want an e-reader. Honestly, I’m getting a kindle because otherwise I will never finish Moby Dick – it just doesn’t fit in my bag and is too bulky for the bus.

  8. The Kindle is so wicked popular for deploying Soldiers. It’s totally impractical to tote 20 lbs of books across the Atlantic, but the Kindle?

    I love physical books as much as the next guy, but I’m pretty sure I’m not going back.

  9. Pingback: This Week in the Self-Publishing Blogs, October 17 – 23, 2010 — The Book Designer

  10. E-readers just seem like technology for technologie’s sake. Other than use in school to eliminate heavy, unweildy textbooks, what purpose do they really have for the average, everyday reader? I have yet to hear a convincing argument that answers this queston. I stare at a computer screen all day long – the last thing I want to do at night is stare at another computer screen just to read a book, especially when I don’t have to. Let’s hope that reading paper doesn’t become a non-choice in the future! Try lending an e-book to a friend, reading an e-book to your child at night, lining your bookshelf with “A” e-reader. It’s just not the same and never will be! I don’t care which e-reader is the “best” b/c I just don’t care about e-readers at all! Why should I??

  11. My new kindle arrived (I had a 2nd gen already; this is the 3rd gen) and was having fun with it all weekend, loading it up with new books, showing it off to relatives, etc.

    Then my two year old found a little 2 inch by 1 inch Etch-a-Sketch, and began carrying around, playing with it, drawing on it, showing it to everyone and explaining it was a “puter” and “my little book.”

    That evening I read my kids a story off the kindle. We read a picture book too. The toddler went to sleep cuddling his “little book.” He would not be parted from it.

    It’s not the format but the content that matters. But I agree, there is something about the tactile interaction with an object which is soothing at the monkey-brain level. It’s amazing how quickly you come to love holding your reader.

  12. Pingback: Year of the Tablet « Stacked

  13. I think public libraries are the most crucial factor in the war between paper and screen. The dilemma framed by this essay is irrelevant to readers who never buy books. Libraries will have a much harder time switching to e-readers, because they require equipment. Maybe they will rent Kindles along with e-books? I’m reassured by the fact that my library still has a huge selection of CDs and VHS tapes; bureaucracy and budget cuts may finally benefit us by delaying digitization. Hopefully libraries will also be inundated by the books cast off by e-readers, pushing the switch even further off.

  14. Pingback: Sad Sad Sad | The Art of Observing
  15. Pingback: Meanland: You will read ebooks. Maybe. One day. « Overland literary journal

  16. I enjoyed this article, but I do have to say that I don’t see this as a dilemma. One can enjoy both print and digital formats. I don’t own an e-reader (no interest and no disposable income for it anyway), but I’m an avid online literary journal reader, and most people I’ve encountered who actually own e-readers still buy print books. I don’t think print, at least when it comes to literature, is going anywhere anytime soon.

    Of course e-readers will continue to rise in popularity, but print won’t die. I think print and digital will coexist for a good while. There are too many people who are emotionally/psychologically connected to the experience of reading a physical book. On top of that, the environmental effects of e-readers are pretty effing horrible (The Price of the Paperless Revolution by Ted Genoways).

  17. “JS” says above: “E-readers just seem like technology for technologie’s sake. Other than use in school to eliminate heavy, unweildy textbooks, what purpose do they really have for the average, everyday reader? I have yet to hear a convincing argument that answers this queston. ”

    Here’s my argument: I usually read during my daily commute to work, and I’m presently reading the complete Sherlock Holmes for the second time on my Nook. The last time I read it I could never do it during my commute because my copy of The Complete Sherlock Holmes is so large it’s hard to hold up even when reading it at home. By contrast, my Nook is small enough to fit in a pants pocket, and it also contains Moby Dick, the complete works of Jane Austin, and the complete works of Charles Dickens, all of which I’d be unable to read or reread during my commute.

    Incidentally, an e-reader is ideal for reading older books like the ones above, because unlike best sellers, out-of-copyright books in electronic form are free or virtually free and you’re not depriving authors of royalties (or used-book stores of their future stock) when you buy them.

  18. Pingback: On the (Rest of the) Net. « The Early Bird Catches the Worm

  19. I am one of the few who appreciate the scent of the ink and the comforting heaviness of a book in hands There is something so beautiful and calming about flipping through pages of a book.

    I wish I could continue buying paper books and reading them. I really do. However, sadly, after moving to Asia, purchasing books (via Amazon) has become so painfully expensive (the shipping cost especially) that I am financially unable to indulge my protest.

    Every time I buy books from Amazon, I am an inch closer to buying a Kindle. And the flamboyant advertisement of Kindle at every corner of the check out page did not help either.

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Notable Articles Quick Hits The Future of the Book

Oh, The Favorites You’ll Give: Literary Twitter’s Best Tweets

Notable Articles Quick Hits The Future of the Book
February 4, 2014 | 4 books mentioned 8 5 min read

Last year, we took a look at the affinity for Twitter in certain quarters of the literary world. A handful of well-known authors have acquired big followings on the platform, a result not just of their name recognition but of their mastery of the tweet, as well. Readers now also turn to twitter for book news and comment from a number of sources who are active on Twitter. Our previous piece looked at the very first tweets of these now-popular practitioners. Nearly all were halting “Hello World” efforts, and none seemed likely to win over those unconverted to the various (and admittedly sometimes maddening) wonders of Twitter.

So, to present literary Twitter in its best possible light, we are returning again to those most widely followed on literary Twitter, but this time, looking at which Tweets got the most favorites, we are highlighting each literary Twitterer’s best tweet. Here you’ll find much wry humor, gossip, lots of politics, Margaret Atwood flirting with a Twitter-famous comedian, and even a surprising amount of insight crammed into 140 characters. They may be enough to win over some fresh converts.

(For the Twitter regulars out there, we found that tweets with more RTs tended to be more about disseminating news to fans, while tweets with more favs captured some essence of the Twitterer, so we went with the latter when compiling this list. Also, if you find tweets by these folks with more favorites than the ones we’ve listed, let us know and we’ll swap them in.)

Why do people keep telling us to "get a room," @robdelaney? What's wrong with our usual dumpster out back of the #etobicoke MacDs? Cheaper!— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) November 13, 2013

Every 60 seconds in Africa, a minute passes. We can put a stop to this. Please retweet.— Teju Cole (@tejucole) May 9, 2012

Fox is now like, "What if we took states that Obama has already won and gave them to Romney – how would that change the map?"— colson whitehead (@colsonwhitehead) November 7, 2012

As #AWP13 starts today, it's a fine time for @VQR to post my massive treatise on the biz of lit http://t.co/CpDNN96iOp Thx 2 @JaneFriedman— Richard Nash (@R_Nash) March 7, 2013

Ironic that I am a judge for the Truman Capote award when Capote in a druggy interview said he hated me & that I should be executed. LOL.— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) October 14, 2013

For those curious about the mystery event that happened in my parlor last night, here's a clue. http://yfrog.com/gy3ugpj— Ayelet Waldman (@ayeletw) January 3, 2011

On a positive note, both can pronounce the word "nuclear".— Dani Shapiro (@danijshapiro) October 23, 2012

Kid at our door in a suit and tie. "What are you?" we asked. Him: "The 1 percent."— Dwight Garner (@DwightGarner) November 1, 2011

Next Schoolhouse Rock song is called "How a Bill Becomes a Law and Then Gets Held Hostage by Sore Losers Willing to Destroy Our Economy."— Ron Charles (@RonCharles) October 1, 2013

Thomas Pynchon's new novel BLEEDING EDGE will be published on September 17, deals with Silicon Alley between dotcom boom collapse and 9/11.— Sarah Weinman (@sarahw) February 25, 2013

Wouldn't it be fun to just totally ignore Ann Coulter? It would drive her crazy.— Susan Orlean (@susanorlean) October 23, 2012

A hard essay for me to write, and to publish. On being heartbroken and putting on a good show, on @the_millions. http://t.co/suPkVkkx65— Emma Straub (@emmastraub) July 11, 2013

Because I can lie beautiful true things into existence, & let people escape from inside their own heads & see through other eyes. #whyIwrite— Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself) October 20, 2011

Goodbye, my beloved friend. A great voice falls silent. A great heart stops. Christopher Hitchens, April 13, 1949-December 15, 2011.— Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) December 16, 2011

Sad day, man. I never really understood how sad the book is until now. Why did I make it so sad? Why have so many people read it?— John Green (@realjohngreen) September 25, 2013

Found this genius quote on Reddit today: Getting offended is a great way to avoid answering questions that make you sound dumb.— Doug Coupland (@DougCoupland) September 2, 2012

Affordable Care Act means health care for artists, writers, poets, dancers, filmmakers, and others in the arts without insurance now.— Amy Tan (@AmyTan) October 1, 2013

The gorgeous and talented Charlie Hunnam will be Christian Grey in the film adaptation of Fifty Shades of Grey.— E L James (@E_L_James) September 2, 2013

This Twitter post, from @JohnDonoghue64 last week, still makes me laugh. Sometimes Twitter really does amuse. pic.twitter.com/yQ5yXrtp3W— Erik Larson (@exlarson) January 4, 2014

Whitney Houston: Yes, somewhere tonight Patrick Bateman is weeping, shocked but not surprised, and ordering three hookers instead of two…— Bret Easton Ellis (@BretEastonEllis) February 12, 2012

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don't yet have a fully adult concept of scary.— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) October 2, 2013

Not doing #twittersilence b/c I don't think the response to those who want feminists to shut up and go away is to shut up and go away.— Jennifer Weiner (@jenniferweiner) August 4, 2013

Want to become a better writer? Then read this free essay: 'Developing a Theme' by Chuck Palahniuk – http://bit.ly/aNRUqk— Chuck Palahniuk (@chuckpalahniuk) October 12, 2010

Via @SciencePorn This is what a child's skull looks like before losing baby teeth. pic.twitter.com/pr7nF7w82G: [Happy Holidays, Love, Joe]— Joe Hill (@joe_hill) November 27, 2013

I'm going to wash Joe Biden's car tomorrow. With my tears of gratitude.— Gary Shteyngart (@Shteyngart) October 12, 2012

o no i mistook mascara for concealer again! My eye sockets are black and greasy also idk what's going on in Eritrea. Can a website help plz— Emily Gould (@EmilyGould) August 14, 2013

100 Notable Books of 2011 http://t.co/1UtIx68O— New York Times Books (@nytimesbooks) November 22, 2011

How to write fiction: Andrew Miller on creating characters http://t.co/JpcwgIoO— Guardian Books (@GuardianBooks) October 16, 2011

Sun Ra used to perform for catatonic schizophrenics. One broke a years-long silence to ask, “Do you call that music?” http://t.co/YZuaLW29kZ— NY Review of Books (@nybooks) October 11, 2013

Little, Brown to publish JK Rowling adult novel— Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) February 23, 2012

The New Yorker brings back Haruki Murakami story for Japan issue http://lat.ms/h0rix6— L.A. Times Books (@latimesbooks) March 21, 2011

Library acquires ENTIRE Twitter archive. ALL tweets. More info here http://go.usa.gov/ik4— Library of Congress (@librarycongress) April 14, 2010

Print free 'Go Away, I'm Reading!' book covers for Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games & more: http://t.co/dQjrR0Iz— GalleyCat (@GalleyCat) March 17, 2012

SO FUN: A First Read of @bjnovak's new story collection w/readings by Novak, Emma Thompson, and Mindy Kaling! http://t.co/cP0ggj9mFp— NPR Books (@nprbooks) January 21, 2014

Our average member has read 7 of the #ALLTIME100 Best Non-Fiction Books. How about you? http://t.co/WrdBSlI http://t.co/4OMY4CY #BestBooks— goodreads (@goodreads) August 31, 2011

“Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person."-Nora Ephron #RIP— The Paris Review (@parisreview) June 27, 2012

Incredible landscapes carved into books: http://t.co/jJcvdAAe // @twistedsifter— Electric Literature (@ElectricLit) January 2, 2012

An unpublished shorty story by David Foster Wallace has been posted on tumblr: http://bit.ly/aa7B38— The Rumpus (@The_Rumpus) October 29, 2010

(•_•) <) )╯I've actually / \ \(•_•) ( (> Read / \ (•_•) <) )> Infinite Jest / \— The Millions (@The_Millions) January 9, 2014

This picture is so important. pic.twitter.com/aQmlq9XE— Nick Moran (@nemoran3) October 17, 2012

Notable Articles Quick Hits The Future of the Book
| 4 books mentioned 8 5 min read
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The Future of the Book

Amazon’s Orwell Repo an Orwellian Move

The Future of the Book
July 20, 2009 | 4 books mentioned 3 2 min read

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 and burn your books “for the good of humanity.” This deeply dystopic vision has, thankfully, not come to pass. Nor could it. In the U.S., the First and Fourth Amendments project against unreasonable government intrusion, especially where it implicates ideas. The state will never be able to enter your house and burn your books, even in an age of terrorism. I really believe that.That’s why I was so disturbed to learn that Amazon has managed to “burn” two other famous dystopias, these ones by George Orwell, without implicating the Constitution. According to reports, people who had purchased Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm for the Kindle woke up to find that Amazon had erased the ebooks remotely.Jonathan Zittrain has warned about this phenomenon – which he calls “software as service” – wherein people no longer own what they buy. Digital products become evolving and hence unstable services that a company may alter or even destroy at whim. Like many things that happen first on the Internet, the death of ownership is also happening offline, as when car dealers leave GPS devices in vehicles so as to make it easier to repossess the vehicles later.Ebooks evoke dystopian novels in a second way. It is rapidly becoming impossible to peruse or buy a book without leaving a digital trail. Law enforcement has already reportedly asked Amazon to hand over customer purchase history; it is a matter of time before the government approaches Google Book Search. It is no accident that common to practically every dystopian novel is the abrogation of privacy. This is clearly true of Bradbury and Orwell. In Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, the buildings are all made of transparent glass. In Huxley’s Brave New World, the biggest taboo is solitude. Bernard Marx tells us that an aversion to being alone is, of all state messages, repeated the most times during sleep conditioning.I don’t mean to overstate. In many ways we live in a historic zenith of freedom. And Amazon zapping books for business reasons is a far cry from state sanctioned book burning. But we nevertheless must get a handle on the issues of ownership and privacy that ebooks raise, lest we wake up one day to find they have disappeared.

The Future of the Book
| 4 books mentioned 3 2 min read
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