read | Chris Aldrich

👓 Humane Ingenuity 8: Ebooks: It’s Complicated | Dan Cohen

Read Humane Ingenuity 8: Ebooks: It's Complicated by

Dan Cohen (buttondown.email)

In this issue, I want to open a conversation about a technology of our age that hasn’t quite worked out the way we all had hoped—and by we, I mean those of us who care about the composition and transmission of ideas, which I believe includes everyone on this list. Twenty years ago, literary critic Sven Birkerts reviewed the new technology of ebooks and e-readers for the short-lived internet magazine Feed. They sent him a Rocket eBook and a SoftBook, and he duly turned them on and settled into his comfy chair. What followed, however, was anything but comfy:

Image from a deck of cards by Rene Descartes

René Descartes designed a deck of playing cards that also functioned as flash cards to learn geometry and mechanics. (King of Clubs from The use of the geometrical playing-cards, as also A discourse of the mechanick powers. By Monsi. Des-Cartes. Translated from his own manuscript copy. Printed and sold by J. Moxon at the Atlas in Warwick Lane, London. Via the Beinecke Library, from which you can download the entire deck.)

My immediate thought is that this deck of cards was meant as a memory palace. I’m curious what training in rhetoric/memory methods Descartes must have had?
November 06, 2019 at 08:49PM

We are beginning a renovation of our main library at Northeastern University, Snell Library, and have been talking with architects (some of them very well-known), and I’ve found the discussions utterly invigorating. I would like to find some way to blog or newsletter about the process we will go through over the next few years, and to think aloud about the (re)design and (future) function of the library. I’m not sure if that should occur in this space or elsewhere, although the thought of launching another outlet fills me with dread. Let me know if this topic would interest you, and if I should include it here.

Dan, this is definitely interesting. Please include it here or on your main site!!!
November 06, 2019 at 08:43PM

But wait, there’s more. Much more. We generally encounter four different acquisition models (my thanks to Janet Morrow of our library for this outline): 1) outright purchase, just like a print book, easy peasy, generally costs a lot even though it’s just bits (we pay an average of over $40 per book this way), which gives us perpetual access with the least digital rights management (DRM) on the ebooks, which has an impact on sustainable access over time; 2) subscription access: you need to keep paying each year to get access, and the provider can pull titles on you at any time, plus you also get lots of DRM, but there’s a low cost per title (~$1 a book per year); 3) demand-driven/patron-driven acquisition: you don’t get the actual ebook, just a bibliographic record for your library’s online system, until someone chooses to download a book, or reads some chunk of it online, which then costs you, say ~$5; 4) evidence-based acquisitions, in which we pay a set cost for unlimited access to a set of titles for a year and then at the end of the year we can use our deposit to buy some of the titles (< $1/book/year for the set, and then ~$60/book for those we purchase).

Nice to see this laid out. I’ve never seen a general overview of how this system works for libraries.

I’ve always wondered what it cost my local public library to loan me an e-book whether I read it or not.
November 06, 2019 at 08:40PM

It is worth asking why ebooks and e-readers like the Kindle treaded water after swimming a couple of laps. I’m not sure I can fully diagnose what happened (I would love to hear your thoughts), but I think there are many elements, all of which interact as part of the book production and consumption ecosystem.

For me, and potentially for a majority of others, our memories have evolved to be highly location specific. It’s far easier for me to remember what I’ve read when I read a physical book. I can often picture what I was reading at the top, middle, or bottom of the left or right page. This fact in addition to how far I am in the book gives me a better idea of where I am with respect to a text.

These ideas are very subtle and so heavily ingrained in us that they’re not very apparent to many, if at all.

See also Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies: Orality, Memory and the Transmission of Culture by Lynne Kelly (Cambridge University Press, 2015)
November 06, 2019 at 08:32PM

🎧 @hypervisible | Gettin’ Air with Terry Green

Listened to @hypervisible from voicEd | voiced.ca

Gettin’ Air with @hypervisible Professor of English at Macomb Community College. Self described as the “The Beavis of Twitter”, we chat about how he works to raise awareness of the absurd and abusive tech practices of various platforms and companies and how he helps his students navigate this increasingly dystopian world. “There’s always material to talk about how something sucks if you’re in the ed-tech space”.

The description far undersells the great conversation here. I almost wish it had been recorded just after Halloween so we might have gotten some discussion about Ring Doorbells recording millions of children and then promoting that scary fact in their marketing and social media.

Somehow @hypervisible blocked me on Twitter, which is a painful shame–at least for me. He’s one of the few researchers to have done so and one of the few people it’s worth having a separate account just for reading his content. I’m glad that others like Terry help to get his message out in other ways!

Chris also mentions a great list of recommended reads at 11:30 into the episode including:

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism by Safiya Noble
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin
Behind the Screen: Content Moderation in the Shadows of Social Media by Sarah T. Roberts
Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri

👓 Festivus, for the Rest of Us | Hot Pod News

Read Festivus, for the Rest of Us – Hot Pod News by Nicholas Quah (hotpodnews.com)

Over the past month, we’ve been running a call for opinions built around a fairly straightforward question: “What are you most frustrated by?” (With respect to the podcast industry, of course.) To put it mildly, folks obliged.

Let me start by establishing what I tried to do this with this piece. Editorially, the goal was to lay out various clusters of frustrations being felt by a cross-section of the Hot Pod readership — at least, to the best that I could with the format I’ve chosen. Creatively, the idea with the format is to communicate what it feels like to live with my inbox and various messaging accounts. That’s pretentiously phrased, but you’ll see what I mean soon enough.

Some reading notes:

Different chunks represent different people, in case it isn’t clear.

The sections marked as “Deep Dives” represent entries from a single contributor who took the time to lay out an extensive, effectively-written submission.

For practical reasons, I’m not publishing every response — so don’t take it personally if you don’t see yours.

In adherence to the retweets =/= endorsements principle, I don’t necessarily agree with what’s being printed… nor should what’s being printed necessarily be taken as fully accurate. The point, instead, is to illustrate that person’s truth.

Almost everybody requested anonymity. So, for simplicity’s sake, I decided to implement blanket anonymity for all responses, including from those who listed their names.

There were a handful of very specific frustrations, which I’m setting aside for now to vet as leads for future columns.

Alright, enough wind-up. To the question: what are you most frustrated by?