Hannah Arendt Collection, Bard College — A fascinating collection of annotated books from her personal library, letters, notes, postcards.

Yale University Library Digital Collections — The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library has some good ones. Particularly cool is the American Literature collection, with Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams

Brown University Library Center for Digital Scholarship – The Signature Collection is worth a browse to see Brown’s impressive digital Abraham Lincoln collection.

Cambridge University Digital Images Collection —  Excellent quality Gutenberg Bible digital images

Indiana University Digital Library Collection – Check out the Isaac Newton collection; the page images of which looked completely indecipherable to me, but cool nevertheless.

World Digital Library — A vast, wide-reaching collection of things from all over the world. It’s not the easiest in terms of navigability — sort of the garage sale collection item on this list. But, there are some truly interesting things collected here. I’d recommend browsing by topic, with this link.

(And I didn’t know that Google was working with the Library of Congress on this. Neat).

While at the airport, I couldn’t help noticing the people who were reading on Kindles and iPads. One thing that caught my attention was that the average ebook user — in this small, uncontrolled, and unscientific sample size — was older than I would have at first suspected. Curiosity piqued, I decided to do a bit of informal research on this.

The Daily Mail reports that Silver Surfers are more likely to read ebooks.

There was possibly useful information found in this Trade E-Book Publishing 2009 study, but unfortunately I decided to save the $2495.00 it costs to check out the report. Maybe next time.

According to this very recent 2010-2011 PEW research of 3000 Americans (“Who Owns What?“), 5% of all adults own an e-book reader and the 40-somethings and 50-somethings are the most prominent ereader owners. What’s problematic with these statistics, of course, is that this doesn’t really take into account other devices — phones, computers, etc. — that can also serve as ereading devices. Hard evidence is hard to come by with ebook demographics, and it’ll be interesting to see how these trends change within the next year or two.

I think Zadie Smith’s “Generation Why?” in The New York Review of Books is one of the most thoughtful discussions on our sense of self in relation to how we spend our time online (thanks Ricky O’Paterny for the recommendation) that I’ve seen recently. It’s a little more sophisticated than the usual “Facebook is bad because blah, blah, blah” monologues we’ve all seen and heard many times already. Instead, there are legitimately philosophical issues considered. While Zadie’s discussion is prompted by reflections on The Social Network and Facebook (and the implications of Facebook as one’s chosen “interface with reality”) it’s the thoughts on the self (People 1.0 and People 2.0, as she calls it) in the age of social networking that are truly interesting:

Has it really been that long? I guess it has. The Official Google Blog shares the news that the @Google Talks team posted its 1000th video. What a milestone! The list of visitors that have participated in @Google Talks is indication enough of just how relevant Google is, in so many areas of current knowledge. You can check out all 1000+ videos on the official @Google YouTube channel.

So many great talks, it would be so difficult for me to pick a favorite.

Last week, the social reading website GoodReads.com announced it had acquired Discovereads.com to bolster its algorithmic book recommendation technology. The Discovereads recommendation service, which has some origins at Stanford, will draw upon the data of the GoodReads community’s database of 100 million book ratings from 4.6 million users. As Otis Chandler (GoodReads Founder & CEO) notes at the end of his announcement post, better book recommendations also mean better targeted book advertisements, and thus sales and profits. I’m curious about how Discovereads works and will have to check out how good its recommendation engine is, especially with my all-over-the-place taste in books.

The Friendship Algorithm

The New Yorker Book Bench blog  (“Algorithms: Better Than a Buddy?“) ruminates upon ”the business of determining taste” and what the future of book recommendations might look like. While there are similarities to what Netflix and Zappos is doing in terms of recommendations based upon preferences and previous purchase history, it seems to me that the comparison with book recommendations can only extend so far (“Netflix is like a rather dimwitted but well-meaning robot-friend with whom it’s amusing to waste a little time”).

One of the main virtues of GoodReads.com is the community it offers, which is inherently different than the upselling that a Netflix or Amazon.com does with its recommendation engines. The New York Times Bits blog draws a similar distinction (“Need Advice on What to Read? Ask the Internet“):

“For books, Amazon.com already has a robust recommendation system. But Mr. Chandler said Goodreads’s recommendations will be better because Amazon considers books a customer has browsed or bought, so buying a gift for a child could throw off the recommendations, for instance.”

Granted, the user population that rates books read within GoodReads is somewhat self-selecting, whereas Amazon is, for better or for worse, taking a more all-encompassing approach with how it recommends books and other products.*

I’m all for better book recommendations. There are lots of things I find appealing about an online book community, but is it the same thing as the shared social experience of having read the same book with someone else? At least it seems pretty clear which side of the ‘friends vs. algorithm’ discussion Book Bench falls on:

“Whatever algorithm God put inside these two people is the right algorithm for me. Otherwise, though, I have to engage in a little pragmatic chaos: I have to listen to the opinions of a few buddies and a few good reviewers, and sort of wait to get wind of the general opinion (it’s mystical), and then I can decide whether to jump. And it’s a great system! It’s unbeatable, even by a clever machine.”

Could we be losing something in the quest for more and more efficiency? Can there be a formula for our taste in books? Our reading tastes change over time because, after all, we change over time. Do I always like every single book recommendation I get from friends? No. But I’d be sad to see those sort of imperfections disappear anytime soon. Evenact of communications such as a book recommendation — good or bad recommendations, observed or ignored — are always instructive in learning more about another person.

In that spirit, here’s a great new blog (Tandem Reading) from J. Raimo, devoted to friends reading books with other friends.

* This isn’t actually related, but it’s still funny. From McSweeney’s: “Amazon.com’s Recommendation Algorithm Applied to Life Events“

I really like stuff like this. Google’s Ngram Viewer is a rather cool new data visualization tool, drawing upon an impressive corpus of nearly  5.2 million scanned books and something like 500 billion words from the Google book scanning project.

Researchers at Harvard are using some innovative  quantitative approaches to humanities studies, tracking the frequency of words as they occur in literature over different historical periods. Note the language employed to describe these projects, very symbolically-telling: research through scanned books becomes one part archaeology (“a digital “fossil record” of human culture) and another part life sciences (in search of parsing out a “cultural genome“). The team of academics working on this project has dubbed this data-driven approach “culturonomics” — an intriguingly broad potential scope, delving into topics such as “humanity’s collective memory, the adoption of technology, the dynamics of fame, and the effects of censorship and propaganda.”  The scope is ambitious — from The Harvard Gazette: “It is the largest data release in the history of the humanities, the authors note, a sequence of letters 1,000 times longer than the human genome. If written in a straight line, it would reach to the moon and back 10 times over.” Some of the early findings might confirm what some of us suspect (“Humanity is forgetting its past faster with each passing year”).

The Atlantic surveys some wry observations on the Ngram Viewer (example: “We’re Quicker to Adopt Technology and Forget Celebrities” than previous generations. Cause, or correlation? Maybe technology makes it easier for us to re-remember and subsequently forget celebrities).

And as much as I love books for all that we can discover within them, there was a spot-on observation from one of the researchers noting the limits to what can be learned from quantitative analyses of books (and only books):

“Books are not representative of culture as a whole, even if our corpus contained 100% of all books ever published. Only certain types of people write books and get them published, and that subclass has changed over time, with the advent of things like public literacy.” Eventually, he says, the database will have to include “newspapers, manuscripts, maps, artwork, and a myriad of other human creations.”

In terms of perspective, a great bit of book scanning trivia from The New York Times (“In 500 Billion Words, New Window on Culture“):

“So far, Google has scanned more than 11 percent of the entire corpus of published books, about two trillion words.”

On the academic side of things, some well-known humanities scholars seem to be showing some cautious approval of the Google Ngram Project and its possibilities, such as Harvard Library’s Robert Darnton and Harvard linguistics professor Steven Pinker (although Louis Menand would also like to see some book historians get in on the action, too).

Here’s a neat idea: Read an eBook Week (March 6 – 12, 2011). The Huffington Post has the backstory of Rita Toews and her great idea of an eBooks public awareness campaign (“The Story Behind ‘Read an eBook Week’): “For the one week only, publishers and authors offer thousands of original ebooks for free and at deep discounts to encourage book lovers around the globe to give ebooks a try.” Toews has landed some noteworthy partners in the event, including Amazon, E Ink, Kobo, and Cory Doctorow.

The ebookweek.com website has a nice, concise history of the eBook – spanning from Plato, Gutenberg, to penny dreadfuls, paperback novels, and Project Gutenberg. In terms of eBooks historical trivia, interesting to think that one could make an argument that the ebook had its origins forty years ago in 1971 with Michael Hart and what would become Project Gutenberg: “The first ‘e-book’ was born—a copy of the Declaration of Independence. Those humble beginnings would become Project Gutenberg.”

Remarkable to think of just how much has changed in ten years. Perhaps history will one day decide Oprah’s role in how ebooks met popular culture. But Amazon sure wasn’t complaining in 2008 when she called the Kindle ‘her new favorite thing the world.’

The Great Gatsby in NES form* was making its way through the blogosphere a couple of weeks ago. Per The Atlantic‘s synopsis, players are able to control a Fitzgeraldian Nick Carraway avatar as “as he fights his way through flappers, gangsters and those evil giant eyes by throwing a little squashed shape at them—either his hat or a crushing metaphor for the death of the American dream. But probably his hat.”

And then there’s a Waiting for Godot video game (link courtesy of GalleyCat), in all of its Atari-like form. How is this not cool?

Last year, the Dante’s Inferno video game garnered an abundant amount of press (to show that they weren’t messing around, EA even had a Super Bowl ad spot for their video game epic), with seemingly mixed reviews —  could it be entertaining enough for the video gamers and contain any reasonable semblance to The Divine Comedy to satisfy those who care about it?  This bit from a New York Times review certainly indicated that the former at least was an open question: “In a survey of 800 people, Mr. Marineau said, 83 percent said they had heard of Dante’s “Inferno,” the first book of his “Divine Comedy,” but fewer than 20 percent could explain its contents.” The idea of a butt-kicking action hero Dante seems pretty novel, but I’ll probably stick with my Oxford World’s Classics edition over the EA one, just the same.

Maybe it’s not everyone’s first (or second or third …) criteria when it comes to video games, but the topic of storytelling within games is an interesting question to me.  To that end, here’s a great, surprisingly not-dated 2006 article on narrative and video games that describes the difficulty in comparing video games to other mediums — as we are wont to do with new mediums, because we often make sense of the new in relation to the old (such as video and books) – because there isn’t really a perfect analogy. Video games are sort of a mishmosh, hybrid medium, with some apparent shortcomings when it comes to the story aspects within the industry as a whole, from the producers as well as the consumers end: “Video games, as narratives, are not getting better. Game companies do not seem to believe that telling better stories is in their best interest. They’ve generally relied on the graphics and the bells and whistles to sell games. With a few exceptions, they’ve never tried to sell us on emotion or character. This can be partially blamed on us, the gamers.” Is this still an accurate critique five years later? I wonder. Henry Jenkins from USC weighs in on how literature and video games are in some respects different means to the same end that can “generate aesthetically and socially meaningful experiences which communicate complex ideas in a rich way.” Worth reading if for no other reason than when else will you find “War and Peace” and “video games” in the same sentence? 

American McGee's Alice 2

When browsing through this rather thorough list of literature-related video games (although it uses the term “literature” very, very loosely in many cases), I couldn’t help but notice that Sherlock Holmes and Alice in Wonderland** recur with great frequency — which makes some sense; fantasy world exploration and mysteries seem to lend themselves well to video game adaptation. But, I’m sure most of these other games on the list suck. Just saying.

* Here’s a link to the backstory behind the Gatsby “NES” game (“Debunking The Great Gatsby Game Creation Myth“)

** I’m more than a little curious about the new American McGee’s Alice 2. If it’s anywhere near as creepily surreal as the first one, that could make for some good video-gaming time.