Actually, though, it IS a small world (or maybe it’s just my schizophrenic brain that’s a small world), but whatever the case, I’m beginning to notice more and more that everything really is interconnected.  People think the same things at the same time.  That’s why it’s important for inventors to patent their creations as soon as they can, because other inventors are hard on their heels with the same idea.  Consumers are just stupid enough to buy the earliest release of this:  or this:  before they get wise and realize they’ve been ripped-off and swear never to purchase anything resembling that item again!

Okay, I think I’m finally getting to the point of this post.  Cripes!  About a week ago, I was reading about brain synapses (due to my schizophrenia problem, har).  Researchers now feel that our brains never stop changing and growing and developing, which flies in the face of what we’ve been taught about our brains hitting their peak in our late 20’s or early 30’s and then kind of falling apart after that (dementia excluded from consideration, of course).  This made me very happy since I’m forty-something and was starting to worry that, due to my misspent and lengthy adolescence, I may become a blithering idiot by the time I’m 50.  Now that I know I have nothing to worry about…hey, get your paws off my pipe!

Ahem, so I read about brains and then checked my e-mail, where I found a feed of this article by Mark Morford.  Mark, who was a lit major in college, hardly ever reads novels anymore because he feels that his brain is being rewired by the internet, and he’s sure he’s not the only nearly non-reader out there with this problem:

"Proof?  That’s easy: Just try to sit down with that dense copy of W. G. Sebald or Haruki Murakami after spending any portion of your week online, and watch as your Net-addled brain becomes almost instanly anxious and frustrated, eager after just a couple thousand words to jump away, ogle pictures, watch dumb teens humiliate themselves on YouTube, buy some shoes."

I do all of the things Mark mentions in that quote!  It’s kind of frightening, and now I’m beginning to realize that, while I still read a lot, I’ve slowed down considerably since my teens and 20’s.  The biggest reason for this change in my reading habits is definitely the net.  I’m totally connected at work and at home, and when I’m not searching databases for information for clients, I’m playing games, blogging, reading and replying to blogs, scrolling through Amazon, laughing at YouTube, writing nasty e-mails to my ex ( = and generally wasting hours of my time allowing my brain to be rewired so that it can only concentrate on written materials in short bursts and can only listen to soundbytes.  I truly am a member of the Borg collective!  Are you?

So, I found out that my brain is working okay, but it’s being rewired.  In his article, Mr. Morford points us in the direction of this article by Nicholas Carr.  Mr. Carr asserts that the internet is dumbing-us down because we’ve learned how to "power browse" --just skim through titles and snippets of information until we find what we need and then focus on snippets of that as well.  With all this "snippeting" going on, we are losing our ability to concentrate, and thus, more and more of us find it difficult to sit down and read a book for a substantial stretch of time.  We have become less able to analyze and synthesize all of the information that is pouring into our brains, so it is also becoming harder for us to comprehend the material we are reading, or to even enjoy reading it.  This is getting scarier and scarier!  

Finally, in order to wrap this meandering post up, I visited Julie over at Bookworm today and read her great post about sci-fi movies.  In her essay, she mentions Wall-E, which is surprisingly thoughful for a cartoon.  The human characters in Wall-E are totally connected to the web.  They are huge, fat slugs that communicate electronically and are wheeled around on tracks in lounge chairs.  Robots take care of their every need.  Is this where we are heading?  Will we become so wired that we won’t read conventional novels any more?  Maybe the future of the book doesn’t lie with the way they are produced (as in e-books vs paper publishing), but rather in the way they are read, if they are read at all.  Maybe reading is evolving into something else altogether, based on a kind of "wordbyte" means of written communication.  Are little twitter snippets of words and sentences representative of the future of reading?  Can you say "text messaging," boys and girls?

Can chartroose shut up now?  Yes, after this excellent conclusion:  We r Borg.  U wil b asimilatd.  Resistanz iz futil.

das Netz wird ja meist als Distributionskanal genutzt (siehe amazon). Seitdem wir aber, wie ich kürzlich auf einer Konferenz gelernt habe, in der Recommendation-Generation leben, wird alles, was der Mensch braucht gerankt und empfohlen (siehe del.icio.us, holidaycheck, qype etc.).

Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Assistenz- Professor für Kommunikation an der University of California in San Diego, geht einen Schritt weiter, indem er Teile des Manuskripts von seinem Buch „Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies“ auf dem Blog von „Grand Text auto“ stellt und diese von den Lesern kommentieren lässt, also eine "blog-based peer review" startet. Diese vergleicht er dann mit den traditionellen Vorkritiken und überarbeitet daraufhin sein Manuskript.

Für wissenschaftliche Bücher könnte dieses Vorgehen sicherlich bald zum Standardprogramm werden. Sobald das richtige Blog für die Zielgruppe gefunden wird, finden sich auch die Spezialisten zu diesem Thema und die wissen vieles einfach besser, als die herkömmlichen Lektoren.

Auch wenn ich nicht glaube, dass sich dieses Prinzip auch auf die Belletristik übertragen lässt, ziehe ich meinen Hut vor diesem Experiment.

1.

From the ifBook blog, an exciting new project that:

“represents a bold step by a scholarly press — one of the most distinguished and most innovative in the world — toward developing new procedures for vetting material and assuring excellence, and more specifically, toward meaningful collaboration with existing online scholarly communities to develop and promote new scholarship.”

The Institute for the Future of the Book created CommentPress, a paragraph by paragraph means of commenting on blog entries. It sort of reminds me of the track changes feature in MS Word, but of course the implications are far greater. It seems that Noah Wardrip-Fruin will be posting his book, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies, piece by piece on the Grand Text Auto blog and we will be able to comment as it comes. The big deal is that the MIT Press are the ones who “gave it the green light”. Read more at ifBook, this is an important development in scholarly publishing.

2.

I’m really excited about this video-in-the-making called "A Renaissance Computer" that states that the current migration to digital publication is historically paralleled only by the invention of the printing press. The creator of the video called it his “toe-in-the-water” of the media ecology field, and its one hell of a big toe in a relatively small puddle if you ask me. I’m excited to see where the video will go when it is done. Unfortunately it is not on YouTube so I wasn’t sure how to embed it, so to watch it you’ll have to follow the link. It is worth your time, the research is pretty amazing.

3.

I posted the other day and referenced “Better Together: Restoring the American Community”, Robert Putnam and Lewis Feldstein, and I wanted to revisit that book and complain about a piece of terminology. The entire book is about building “social capital”, a term that I suddenly realized is kind of gross: it commodifies community building and its participants, rather than promoting healthy activity within an ecology. Why has everything got to be about “capital”? Aren’t they really talking about building some kind of network, building trust and strengthening mutually beneficial relationships?

4.

Finally, I’m totally bummed out that there are people commenting fervently on the Annoyed Librarian blog about the “death of the book” and the “death of the public library”. I’ve been working in public libraries for about 8 years now, but only recently raced through an MLS degree, and one of the things that really got me down in school was this same kind of discussion. I don’t even believe that people in our field don’t recognize just how important this institution is in our country, and just how important it is to work really, really hard to keep our doors open and keep our services relevant to the needs of our communities. WTF people??? Can we stop with the doomsday stuff and get on with it???

I found this person's feedback interesting:

If you feel called the write this book, as it seems to me you clearly do, this is God speaking to you. It's not up to you whether the book is a success, is published or anything else. That's up to God. It's the process in your own life and between you and the Divine that matters. Follow your calling!

What's ironic about this comment is that the only reason I am writing the book is because I already have an offer to publish it. Without that, I wouldn't be writing it — I'd be writing for the blog instead. And I think that's really my point: as a writer, I feel the tension between two kinds of writing.

• Writing for the blog: short (hopefully) pieces, little or no editing process, willingness to publish untested ideas and perspectives which I may or may not choose to defend later on, since the blog is more of a laboratory where I can "try out" ideas and arguments, seeing how they fly with readers who are willing to comment on them, usually within 24-48 hours of publication.
• Writing for the book: a much longer project, both in time (13 months) and length (150,000 words), obviously a much greater emphasis on structure, organization, polish; text needs to be edited for coherence and flow and tightness of my logic; I'll have a small number of readers who will help me edit the book before publication, but most reader feedback will only come after publication, meaning a year or longer after the actual writing is completed.

Obviously, since I have a family and a full-time job and a spiritual practice, I only have limited writing time. Which means I have to be thoughtful about how much time I spend blogging (particularly on topics not immediately relevant to the book) vs. how much time I devote to the book. That's the tension I alluded to earlier.

I won't choose one of these media over the other. Both are necessary, and I am convinced that the blog will, in itself, be perhaps the best editing tool I've ever used for writing a book. That is actually quite exciting for me; as I said yesterday, I wrote all my other books before I began blogging in earnest. But I have to acknowledge that blog-writing and book-writing are different. Not everything that appears in the blog will be appropriate for the book.

Meanwhile, perhaps the larger question is this: I am currently 47 years old. Let's say I live to be 97 and I remain healthy throughout my life and that I remain both interested in writing and hopefully in demand as one. This means I have 50 years left to write. How many books will I write over the next fifty years? Between 1995 and 2004 I wrote nine and a half books (one was co-authored); I don't believe that I will ever write that rapidly again — I was trying to make a go at being a full-time author, which is no longer an ambition of mine. For now and for the future, I'd rather write fewer books, having more fun doing so and hopefully writing better books as a result. But how few? Will I write one book every five years? One every ten? Or, at some point, will I simply stop trying to write another "book" and simply pour my energy into the blog? In other words, I suspect I'll keep writing as long as I enjoy doing it and believe that it is of some small service to others. But whether I write books, articles, or blog entries (or how much time will I end up devoting to each format) — that's the question. I wonder if, as more and more talented writers pour their energy primarily into blogging, how this will change the face of publishing?

These are the questions that I, as an author, find lurking beneath the competition I feel between writing a book and maintaining a blog.

Even though I'm barely into the project (my deadline is 1/31/09, so I still have thirteen months to go), what I'm already noticing is a tension between blogging and bookwriting. Blogging is, to be blunt, more fun. Immediate feedback, questions or criticisms that force me to rethink or more persuasively argue my points, the ability to dance across a wide range of topics, the freedom to be humble and tentative about all my "I don't knows," the challenge of always thinking about keeping my entries short enough to avoid losing readers (ha! I'm not very good at that one) — in short, the rules are considerably different for maintaining a blog and authoring a book.

I've had a website since 1996 (when I was writing my first book), but didn't start blogging (via LiveJournal) until the summer of 2003, and for the first fourteen months or so on LJ, I was worse than sporadic. So really, it's only been since the fall of 2004 — when I began to realize that I was being called to enter the Catholic faith — that I have been regularly blogging. That is also, not coincidentally, about the time that I finished writing my last two books (366 Celt and the co-authored Magic of the Celtic Gods and Goddesses, which were written more or less simultaneously). So, basically, I was a book writer who happened to have a website from 1996 to 2004, when I stopped writing books and took up blogging.

So now I'm going for the Hegelian synthesis, since I want to keep blogging while I write the new book. Much has changed in the last three and a half years: in the summer of '04 I knew I was in love with Christian mysticism, but I had no connection with the monastery where I now work, I had never heard of the emergent community, or house churches, or even Google alerts. So in many ways, not only am I spiritually in a radically different place than I was at the writing of my last book, but I have an entirely new and different perspective on writing and information as well.

But I'm digressing a bit. Back to the point of this post: in just the past year (and for the first three months of 2007 I was on a "blog sabbatical") this website has received almost as many page views as the combined sales of all ten of my books. And it won't be long before my blog readership overtakes my book readership, given how rapidly the hits on this site continue to grow (it looks like December could be as high as 15% above November's traffic). I suppose this bodes well for the sales of my new book (which won't be published until late 2009 at the earliest). But on the other hand, why put so much energy into a big, clunky book which is neither interactive nor conducive to ongoing discourse, if I'm already reaching a large and growing readership via the blog? Frankly, the only reason I'm writing a book at this point is because I'm getting paid to do so. I guess my editor should be thankful that I haven't monetized this blog!

Which makes me wonder about the future of the book. I know this is a big, pretentious, portentous topic, and up until very recently I thought the cyberwonks who are predicting the demise of the book were overblown. But now, I'm not so sure. As much as I've loved writing books over the years (and so far, I'm having lots of fun with the newest one, too), I'm beginning to wonder, given the power and flexibility of the blog and the onset of new, eye-friendly technologies like Kindle, if books as we've known it really are heading in the same direction as the 8-track tape.

I'll try to keep you posted on my thoughts re. this topic over the next year, as I continue to simultaneously blog and bookwrite. Meanwhile, this morning I found a blog on this topic that looks interesting: Institute for the Future of the Book.

UPDATED: From Endgadget's Live blogging:
Seems very smart to me:

9:55 - "We didn't like this solution either. So instead we chose EV-DO cellular. ... as soon as I tell you we're using EV-DO that should cause a second set of concerns, a whole new thing to worry about. Everybody knows that using these wireless cell networks there's a data plan, a contract, a monthly bill. But we didn't like that, either. So we built Amazon Whispernet. It's built on top of Sprint's EV-DO network. There's no data plan, no contract, no bill. We pay for all of that behind the scenes so you can just read. What are you going to read?"

[hat tip to the bookseller]

MOST HYPED BOOK STORY OF ALL TIME (EXCEPTING HARRY POTTER, DAVINCI CODE and a few others)

Newsweek

Amazon's Jeff Bezos already built a better bookstore. Now he believes he can improve upon one of humankind's most divine creations: the book itself.

read/write web

Amazon Sets eBook World Alight with Kindle - Finally, Time For Read/Write Books!

O'Reilly

I'm rooting for Jeff and the Kindle. I'm not sure that he's going to win his bet that people will use a single-purpose device rather than reading on a multi-function device like the iPhone and its successors. But I'm also not sure he needs to. Even if some other device becomes the reader of choice, Amazon will still become one of the leading sources of the books that feed it. All Amazon needs to do here is move the industry forward, and I think that's already been accomplished.

Howard Owens
Seth Godin
Ryan Sholin
The Book Depository
PaidContent.org
Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog
Book Patrol

Yup, you can run, but you sure a hell cannot hide!
Eoin

 

Newsweek's newest issue contains a seven page article about how Amazon's Jeff Bezos wants to change the way we read and improve upon the book itself.

Technology," computer pioneer Alan Kay once said, "is anything that was invented after you were born." So it's not surprising, when making mental lists of the most whiz-bangy technological creations in our lives, that we may overlook an object that is superbly designed, wickedly functional, infinitely useful and beloved more passionately than any gadget in a Best Buy: the book. It is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or "For Dummies" guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can't be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.

"The book," says Jeff Bezos, 43, the CEO of Internet commerce giant Amazon.com, "just turns out to be an incredible device." Then he uncorks one of his trademark laughs.

Books have been very good to Jeff Bezos. When he sought to make his mark in the nascent days of the Web, he chose to open an online store for books, a decision that led to billionaire status for him, dotcom glory for his company and countless hours wasted by authors checking their Amazon sales ratings. But as much as Bezos loves books professionally and personally—he's a big reader, and his wife is a novelist—he also understands that the surge of technology will engulf all media. "Books are the last bastion of analog," he says, in a conference room overlooking the Seattle skyline. We're in the former VA hospital that is the physical headquarters for the world's largest virtual store. "Music and video have been digital for a long time, and short-form reading has been digitized, beginning with the early Web. But long-form reading really hasn't." Yet. This week Bezos is releasing the Amazon Kindle, an electronic device that he hopes will leapfrog over previous attempts at e-readers and become the turning point in a transformation toward Book 2.0. That's shorthand for a revolution (already in progress) that will change the way readers read, writers write and publishers publish. The Kindle represents a milestone in a time of transition, when a challenged publishing industry is competing with television, Guitar Hero and time burned on the BlackBerry; literary critics are bemoaning a possible demise of print culture, and Norman Mailer's recent death underlined the dearth of novelists who cast giant shadows. On the other hand, there are vibrant pockets of book lovers on the Internet who are waiting for a chance to refurbish the dusty halls of literacy.

Visit Newsweek for the rest

Kevin Driedger's Library Preservation Blog

The GAGA (Gray Areas to Green Areas) blog

Gary Frost's Future of the Book.com

if:book, part of the Institute for the Future of the Book

Antarctic Conservation Blog [And you think it's cold in the lab! At least we don't have to worry about our paste freezing.]

Museum Blogs - a collection of several different blogs that is also searchable.