Here’s a book about books worth checking out, courtesy of Maria Popova at Brainpickings.org (“Books: A Living History“).

I spend a lot of time thinking about books as a form of information technology. Thinking about the present and future of books necessarily means thinking about its past — all 2000 years or so of it — and Martyn Lyons’ book covers a lot of ground.

What do we mean by ‘book’? I prefer a more encompassing sort of definition, similar to this excerpt from Books: A Living History – 

“Defining the book itself is a risky operation. I prefer to be inclusive rather than exclusive, and so I offer a very loose definition. The book, for example, does not simply exist as a bound text of sheets of printed paper — the traditional codex with which we are most familiar today. Such a definition forgets two millennia of books before print, and the various forms that textual communication took before the codex was invented.

A traditional definition based only on the codex would also exclude hypertext and the virtual book, which have done away with the book’s conventional material support. I prefer to embrace all these forms, from cuneiform script to the printed codex to the digitized electronic book, and to trace the history of the book as far back as the invention of writing systems themselves. The term ‘book’, then, is a kind of shorthand that stands for many forms of written textual communication adopted in past societies, using a wide variety of materials”

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Selectism.com (“Martyn Lyons’ “Books – A Living History”“) has some excellent page previews of Books — A Living History.

I am utterly fascinated by bookshelves. Specifically, other people’s bookshelves. Whenever I’m visiting someone’s home for the first time, my eyes always seem to find their way to the bookshelves. I can’t help it. And yet, there’s always that sneaking sense that I’m meddling a bit more than I should be, by taking a peak into someone’s inner life in the form of books.

Leah Price has an enjoyable essay on bookshelves which articulates some of that meddling feeling when we sneak peaks at those bookshelves (The New York Times: “The Subconscious Shelf“). The books we and other people tend to display can sometimes be quite a personal thing: “To expose a bookshelf is to compose a self.”

Part of it might be self-motivation (“I’ll read this … eventually”), part of might be vanity on our parts (“Check it out: I read Proust!”), and maybe the motives are equal parts deception and self-deception when it comes to those displayed books that we’ll honestly never read:“We display spines that we’ll never crack; we hide the books that we thumb to death. Emily Post disapproved: her 1930 home decorating manual compared “filling your rooms with books you know you will never open” to “wearing a mask and a wig.”

Part of the appeal of bookshelves to me is that it can be a private and surprisingly revealing look into someone’s internal life — either how that internal life is, or how they hope it might be — and I don’t think it’s a stretch to think that we are all to some extent the things that we choose to read. And now, social reading websites such as GoodReads.com or even the “Books” we decide to list on a Facebook profile are very much a part of that projection of the bookish shelves we want to show to the rest of the world.

“Because books can be owned without being read and read without being owned, bookshelves reveal at once our most private selves and our most public personas. They can serve as a utilitarian tool or a theatrical prop. For a coffee-table book of my own, I recently toured a dozen writers’ book collections. Gazing at the shelves of a novelist whose writings lie dog-eared on my own bookcase, I felt as lucky as a restaurantgoer granted a peek at the chef’s refrigerator.”

Flann O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan) may really have been on to something with his book handling service idea. I’m really thinking of bringing this idea back. And I think I’d call it, “Already Read Books” –

“In the 1940s, the Irish humorist Flann O’Brien proposed a “book handling” service for clients who liked the look of a well-stocked library but lacked the time or ability to read its contents themselves. If you joined his book club, O’Brien explained, “we do the choosing for you, and, when you get the book, it is ready-rubbed, i.e., subjected free of charge to our expert handlers,” at a series of different price points:

“Popular Handling — Each volume to be well and truly handled, four leaves in each to be dog-eared, and a tram ticket, cloak-room docket or other comparable article inserted in each as a forgotten book-mark. . . .

“Premier Handling — Each volume to be thoroughly handled, eight leaves in each to be dog-eared, a suitable passage in not less than 25 volumes to be underlined in red pencil, and a leaflet in French on the works of Victor Hugo to be inserted as a forgotten book-mark in each. . . .

“De Luxe Handling — Each volume to be mauled savagely, the spines of the smaller volumes to be damaged in a manner that will give the impression that they have been carried around in pockets, a passage in every volume to be underlined in red pencil with an exclamation or interrogation mark inserted in the margin opposite, an old Gate Theatre programme to be inserted in each volume as a forgotten book-mark (3 percent discount if old Abbey programmes are accepted), not less than 30 volumes to be treated with old coffee, tea, porter or whiskey stains, and not less than five volumes to be inscribed with forged signatures of the authors.”

Here’s one of the better book reviews I’ve read in awhile.

From the Sunday Book Review, New York Times: “What Friedrich Nietzsche Did to America” –

And really, there’s no such thing as too much Nietzsche:

“With escalating intensity, he issued innovative works of philosophy that challenged every element of European civilization. He celebrated the artistic heroism of Beethoven and Goethe; denigrated the “slave morality” of Christianity, which transfigured weakness into virtue and vital strength into sin; and called on the strong in spirit to bring about a “transvaluation of all values.” The “higher man” — or as Nietzsche sometimes called him, the “overman” or “Übermensch” — did not succumb to envy or long for the afterlife; rather he willed that his life on earth repeat itself over and over exactly as it was. In later works, Nietzsche wrote with continued brilliance and growing megalomania of his disdain for the common “herd,” the dangers of nihilism and the possibility that the will to power is the “Ur-fact of all history.”

American Nietzsche by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen (University of Chicago Press) sounds like an excellent study to me. (interesting note: you can buy a 30-Day ebook license of American Nietzsche for $7.00): “Ratner-Rosenhagen concludes that Cavell, Bloom and the pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty constructed “an American Nietzsche” by drawing upon “philosophical interpretations which understood that in a world without foundations, our views of truth, language and the self are not mirrors of reality but useful fictions to explore new avenues of discovery, new sources of wonder.”

An intellectual history of Nietzsche in the United States covers a lot of ground, after all (the relationship between Nietzsche and Emerson is particularly interesting). I’ll resist quoting page-long passages here. But, here are a few of the good parts:

• “From the start, Nietzsche’s American readers were bewitched and bedeviled … young Americans who felt estranged from their culture, and has continued to do so. But today’s inescapable and perplexing Nietzsche is not necessarily the same Nietzsche who inspired readers in the past”

• “The German émigré and Princeton professor Walter Kaufmann almost single-handedly revived his standing with his many translations and forceful reminder that Nietzsche hated anti-Semites and German nationalists as well as woolly-headed romantics. Kaufmann’s Nietzsche was a late flower of the Enlightenment, a tough-minded rationalist with the courage to face the Darwinian revelation that there is no purpose to nature or to our existence. The true task of the overman was to overcome himself, not others, and to do so by sculpturing his impulses and thoughts and inheritances into a willed unity that could be called “style.”

• “As Ratner-Rosenhagen shows, a later generation of American interpreters, influenced by Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida, esteemed Nietzsche not as the guarantor of the individual but as its dismantler. “The ‘doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed,” Nietzsche wrote in “On the Genealogy of Morals,” and the implication was clear: If God was dead, so too were equally fictitious entities like the self. There was no objective truth, only the truth-effects engendered by the workings of power and the instabilities of language. Even as this poststructuralist Nietzsche occupied the university in the 1980s, it bred a counterreaction from conservative intellectuals.”

Here’s one that I’ve been thinking about, courtesy of Media Bistro: “Could Selling Used eBooks Work?”

“The whole concept of selling used digital content is tough. Yes, it was nice in the days of print to resell records, CDs, DVDs and books that you have already listened to or read, and to pick up used copies of other people’s old media at a cheaper price. But how do you do this with digital content?”

“What’s actually happening, of course, is not the transfer of a physical object, but the transfer of access rights or data. Data don’t depreciate, so there’s no real reason to discount the product because it’s been used. The straight transfer is therefore rather dull: person A yields it to person B for the same amount he or she paid for it, and person B gets the file via bluetooth or similar rather than via Whispernet or broadband download. Um. No measurable benefit to anyone. Or, yes, you’d end up with a market where people would discount in order to make some money back, and ultimately drive down the value of the book. Not great news.”

We took a look at Melville House’s HybridBooks earlier (“What are ‘Hybrid Books’?“), and the New York Times provided a closer look at the reading experience: “The Book Beyond the Book“.

“The electronic element comes in with the ancillary material. The last page of the Melville edition directs readers to a Web site, where they will find an 1852 map of lower Manhattan: a recipe for Ginger Nuts, a biscuit that plays a role in the narrative; lengthy excepts from Emerson and Thoreau; a contemporaneous classified ad for a scrivener; and similar material.

“Basically, we decided to mimic our own reading process,” Mr. Johnson said “When I read a great classic, if I like it, I want the experience to somehow continue, so I will pursue more information about the writer, or the setting, or some aspect of the plot’s background. (Dueling? What’s up with that?) My mind wanders, imagining what the world of the book looked like. And so on. Now we have curated exactly that kind of material, and it allows you to linger in the world of the book, to understand more about it — to simply luxuriate in the world of the book longer. It’s something more than just the book, but something very much ‘of’ the book. This seems very innovative to me at the same time that it seems kind of an obvious innovation.”

Here’s something to think about: “Should eBooks Be Distinguished From Books?” (eBookNewser)

Sure, it’s a question for ebook-obsessives and publishers to think about now. But, it’s not all that far-fetched to think about how that distinction might seem less and less clear as time goes on (after all, remember that too-cute video with the toddler was confounded that a paper magazine didn’t work like an iPad?) –

“This, in and of itself, points out that the stigma of an eBook over a print book. Aside from the obvious, eBooks being short for electronic books, Archer raises a bigger issue. Should eBooks be distinguished from their print counterparts?

Maybe and maybe not. Unless the format changes the experience as enhanced eBooks do, then a book is a book, be it paperback, hardcover or digital.”

Should there be a distinction? It’s worth some discussion. The fact that such a question can be asked is an interesting one to me. On the one hand, there are some who may well think a book is a book is a book. And, on the other hand, there is of course a pretty set distinction between books and ebooks, and I don’t necessarily see that changing any time soon. But, still.

Fun article from the New York Times: “The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute.” (thanks ropaterny and jmendelsohn for the sharing the cool article)

I’m looking forward to checking out Matthew Kirschenbaum’s upcoming book, “Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing” — among other things, it’s fun to think about the mix of authors that come up when talking about the literary history of word processing (including the likes of Mark Twain, Henry James, and Bram Stoker).

But maybe the most interesting bit of information from the article was about Stephen King –

“Mr. King’s 1983 short story “The Word Processor,” Mr. Kirschenbaum ventured, is “likely the earliest fictional treatment of word processing by a prominent English-language author.”

The story, published in Playboy (later retitled “Word Processor of the Gods”), certainly captured the unsettling ghostliness of the new technology, which allowed writers to correct themselves without leaving even the faintest trace. In the story a frustrated schoolteacher discovers that by erasing sentences about his enemies he can delete them entirely from the universe and insert himself in their place, a reflection of Mr. King’s fascination with his Wang System 5’s “insert,” ”delete” and “execute” keys, recounted in the introduction to his 1985 story collection, “Skeleton Crew.” “Writers are used to playing God, but suddenly now the metaphor was literal,” Mr. Kirschenbaum said in the lecture.”

Studying the means (mechanical, digital, etc.) by which literature is produced is an incredibly interesting topic. And I especially appreciated this nifty bit of Nietzsche trivia:

“The study of word processing may sound like a peculiarly tech-minded task for an English professor, but literary scholars have become increasingly interested in studying how the tools of writing both shape literature and are reflected in it, whether it’s the quill pen of the Romantic poets or the early round typewriter, known as a writing ball, that Friedrich Nietzsche used to compose some aphoristic fragments. (“Our writing tools are also working on our thoughts,” Nietzsche typed.)”

Nietzsche even wrote a poem about his writing ball –

“The Writing Ball is a thing just like me: of iron
And yet easy to twist, especially on journeys.
Patience and tact one must richly possess
And fine little fingers to use us.”

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By the way — did this article remind anyone else of Foucault’s Pendulum?

Well, if anyone is going to succeed in reinventing the textbook, betting on Apple to do so is a fairly safe bet.

The newly-released iBooks 2 is good, and has the potential to be great.

It’s worth noting that iBooks 2 is for all kinds of ebooks, not just textbooks, although the potential for educational content is very exciting and has deservedly been getting much of the attention thus far. As mentioned earlier, this could be the sort of thing that the digital textbook market needs to really get going.

For starters, ArsTechnica has a solid rundown of iBooks 2 (“Apple announces iBooks 2, iBooks Author to ‘reinvent textbooks‘”) –

“Books created for iBooks 2 can have all manner of media attached, complete with multitouch capabilities. The company listed numerous ways in which iBooks 2 authors can create engaging content for students, including multiple-choice questions with immediate feedback within the text, the ability to make notes and highlights that can be found in a single location as note cards or sprinkled throughout the text, ways to explore embedded graphics and 3D animations, full-motion movies, and more.

iBooks 2 itself is an app for the iPad, but books for the application can be found within the already existing iBookstore under a new “textbook” category, with free samples available to those who want to try out the books first. Students can use codes to redeem them for books and can re-download them whenever they need to.” 

Gizmodo goes even more in-depth with an excellent review of iBooks 2 (“Apple’s iPad Textbooks: Everything You Need to Know About iBooks 2“), and takes a closer look at some of the key features to expect in Apple’s new iBooks 2 textbooks (features which include: Thumbnail index, Built-in videos, Interactive animations, Custom glossary, Quizzes and review questions).

Textbooks really need to be collaborative, if they’re going to be used in the most optimal way in a classroom of students. Maybe that’s something for the textbook publishers to sort out amongst themselves. But for now:

“Apple’s new iBooks are as impressive as they said in the presentation. They are beautifully crafted. Their use of videos, timelines, animations, embedded presentations, integrated review questions and quizzes and their highlighting and study card system are extremely good. They work and they are enjoyable.

Unfortunately, they are not perfect. The lack of sharing features is a major killer with actual school work, in which collaboration is a must.

Right now there’s no way to share your highlighted text with others. You can only share your notes. I can’t export it all to a file so I can work from my notes and highlighted text in the computer, something that would be useful to everyone, not only students. All my digital books are highlighted and have notes, so I really want to have this feature.”

Speaking of the textbook publishers, Apple’s done an impressive job of lining up content providers, as CNET notes: (“Apple launches iBooks 2 digital textbooks“)

“Apple has already formed partnerships with a host of major textbook makers, including Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. That’s important. According to Apple, those companies are responsible for 90 percent of all textbooks in the U.S.“

By the way, there’s one feature of iBooks 2 which hasn’t been getting as much attention, but I for one love it: instant notecards (Gizmodo: “iBooks 2’s Instant Flash Cards Are Pure Apple Magic“). Heck, it’s cool enough to have given me an I-wish-I’d-had-that-in-school moment.

For the textbook industry, iBooks 2 is very big news indeed.

The digital textbook market has seen relatively modest growth over the past few years — for numerous reasons, one of the chief factors being how costly and time-consuming making truly enhanced textbooks has been —  as The Wall Street Journal (“iBooks 2 aims to boost iPad use in schools“) points out:

“E-textbooks today haven’t taken off because most of the material is replicas of print versions, said Sarah Rotman Epps, an analyst at Forrester Research. By adding new tools so the material will be more interactive and customized for the tablet, Apple can help jump-start adoption, she said.”

… The e-textbook market is still small. On college campuses, even as the latest best-sellers have become popular for devices such as Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle reader, digital textbooks were just 2.8 percent of total textbook sales in 2010, according to the National Association of College Stores.”

And let’s be serious: digital textbooks which are merely warmed-over PDFs of the printed textbooks really aren’t so hot. But, what about digital textbooks that offered truly interesting and valuable learning content for students and readers? How big of a deal is iBooks 2 (and iBooks Author)? Too soon to say. But, it’s fun to think about it: “If you look at what iTunes has done for music, if iBooks 2 and iBooks Author can do that for publishing it’s a big deal,” said Forrester’s Epps.”

The Los Angeles Times (“Apple’s iBooks 2, iBooks Author: Bids to own publishing’s future“) has an excellent first-impression analysis that I would highly recommend checking out. iBooks 2 and the iBooks Author app are big moves on the part of Apple to potentially alter the fundamental nature of the education, textbook, and self-publishing industries (and, to sell more iPads, of course).

Most interesting from that Times article, perhaps, are some comments from the late and great Steve Jobs courtesy of Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, regarding the state of the textbook market –

“Jobs told Isaacson “the process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt … but if we can make the textbooks free, and they come with the iPad, then they don’t have to be certified. The crappy economy at the state level will last for a decade, and we can give them an opportunity to circumvent that whole process and save money.”

Today was the day of the much-speculated upon textbook news from Apple. And as it turns out, it actually was pretty big news.

iBooks Author could represent a big leap forward in terms of how digital textbooks are created — the barrier of entry for textbook creation just changed a whole lot. And that’s a good thing.

I’d definitely recommend Engadget’s hands-on review (“Apple’s iBooks Author hands-on“), which provides some sound guidelines for what to expect if you want to give iBooks Author a try –

“One of the things we noticed is that you probably won’t want to spend too much editing raw text in the app. This is certainly not going to replace your text editor of choice — the templates are very fussy and require you to have everything ready before you commence. What does impress us is that every part of the layout is customizable. In this regard, it feels as if Apple’s tried to anticipate most common tweaks that amateur textbook authors would want to make and provide for them.”

And depending on what educators or prospective textbook publishers are planning to do, this is important information:

“Apple confirmed to us that you can publish classroom materials for free and that each book will be approved in the same way that the App store approvals process works. Copyrighted works (if you utilize any) will have to be strictly cited and referenced in order to pass muster. You’ll be able to publish books for free, all the way up to $14.99: with a fixed profit-share model of 70/30 between yourself and Cupertino. Most importantly of all, any book that you publish must be an exclusive to iBooks.”

From what I’ve been able to tell from my own hands-on time with iBooks Author thus far, the ease of use and user interface gets an “A” in my books. Compared to some of the current options out there to the general public for digital textbook publishing, iBooks Author is a big, big change for the better.

GalleyCat (“Apple Unveils iBooks Author App“) has a helpful, short and sweet rundown of what iBooks Author is all about.

For those of us that are interested in such things, the next best thing to being at the Apple announcement event is courtesy of AllThingsD, with a super-thorough live-blogging report (“Apple Unveils iPad Textbook Plan“).

And — was anyone else also pleasantly surprised that iBooks Author is free? Free educational tools for teachers = good. Check out iBooks Author on the Apple website here.

Also check out Apple’s iBooks Author Gallery for some textbook examples. Not bad. Not bad at all.

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