As publishers struggle with ‘whack-a-mole’ websites, experts, authors and Guardian readers who illegally download books, assess the damage
Tag: books
🔖 The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff
Shoshana Zuboff's interdisciplinary breadth and depth enable her to come to grips with the social, political, business, and technological meaning of the changes taking place in our time. We are at a critical juncture in the confrontation between the vast power of giant high-tech companies and government, the hidden economic logic of surveillance capitalism, and the propaganda of machine supremacy that threaten to shape and control human life. Will the brazen new methods of social engineering and behavior modification threaten individual autonomy and democratic rights and introduce extreme new forms of social inequality? Or will the promise of the digital age be one of individual empowerment and democratization?
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism is neither a hand-wringing narrative of danger and decline nor a digital fairy tale. Rather, it offers a deeply reasoned and evocative examination of the contests over the next chapter of capitalism that will decide the meaning of information civilization in the twenty-first century. The stark issue at hand is whether we will be the masters of information and machines or its slaves.
Can’t wait to get this…
On first blush, I’ll note that the cover looks a lot like that of Pikkety’s Captialism in the 21st Century. Certainly an interesting framing by the publisher.
👓 Marie Kondo v. Tsundoku: Competing Japanese Philosophies on Whether to Keep or Discard Unread Books | Open Culture
By now we've all heard of Marie Kondo, the Japanese home-organization guru whose book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up became an international bestseller in 2011.
Having minimized many of the things in my life, I’ll say that getting rid of books was something I just couldn’t bring myself to do either.
Jeremy Keith (adactio.com)
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
—Groucho Marx
👓 The 10 Best Books I Read in 2018 | Newley.com
Newley Purnell (newley.com)Here’s the best of what I read in 2018. As in previous round-ups, some of these titles came out this year, while others were published in years past.
👓 Do Scholastic Book Fairs Live Up to the Nostalgia? | The Atlantic
Years later, many adults still pine for the days their school libraries, auditoriums, and gyms transformed into pop-up bookstores.
👓 Bottleneck at Printers Has Derailed Some Holiday Book Sales | New York Times
A backlog at the printing presses, plus a surging demand for popular hardcover titles, has hurt publishers at peak sales season, with popular titles out of stock in some stores.
👓 Towards the Future Book | Kottke
Writing in Wired, Craig Mod expertly dissects both the e-book revolution that never happened and the quieter one that actually d
👓 Why Books Matter for the Long Run | Knowledge@Wharton
Book publishing is a business and increasingly a technical one, but at its heart it is an art, writes Peter J. Dougherty in this opinion piece. He is the editor-at-large at Princeton University Press,
A nice little essay here.
👓 Of Were-Owls and Wandering Jews | Jewish Review of Books
There were two Jewish shape-shifters in my Faerie and Zion reading this month. The first is the protagonist of Metunshemet (Owled), an Israeli novel for younger readers. Noga is a sixth grader in Kfar Sava. But she also has a second, secret identity: each night she turns into an owl. She has an owl friend named Vermeer and some acquaintances among the neighborhood fruit bats, but finds all of her nocturnal relationships far less challenging than the ones with her parents, her younger brother, and the other kids at school.
I’ve been randomly thinking about other were-animals lately, so it was interesting to see this pop up serendipitous-ly.
👓 Ricky Jay’s Magical Secrets | The New Yorker
Jay’s deft illusions flout reality, and he rejects the notion that his magic is a suitable entertainment for children.
A great set of stories about Ricky Jay.
Highlights, Quotes, Annotations, & Marginalia
I once asked Mamet whether Jay had ever shared with him details of his childhood.Mamet replied, “I can’t remember.”I said, “You can’t remember whether you discussed it or you can’t remember the details?”He said, “I can’t remember whether or not I know a better way to dissuade you from your reiteration of that question without seeming impolite.” ❧
November 29, 2018 at 12:44PM
Magic is about working hard to discover a secret and making something out of it. You start with some small principle and you build a theatrical presentation out of it. You do something that’s technically artistic that creates a small drama. ❧
November 29, 2018 at 12:48PM
Jean Prévost’s “La Première Partie des Subtiles et Plaisantes Inventions,” the earliest known important conjuring book, printed in Lyons in 1584. ❧
November 29, 2018 at 01:15PM
The main thing that dissuaded him, he says, is that “I wouldn’t want to sell a book to a philistine, which is what every bookseller has to do.” ❧
November 29, 2018 at 01:18PM
Two automatons stood on the table. One, called “The Singing Lesson,” was the creation of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the nineteenth-century watchmaker-turned-conjurer, who is considered the father of modern magic. The other was a Chinese cups-and-balls conjurer built by Robert-Houdin’s father-in-law, Jacques Houdin. ❧
November 29, 2018 at 01:34PM
Two automatons stood on the table. One, called “The Singing Lesson,” was the creation of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin, the nineteenth-century watchmaker-turned-conjurer, who is considered the father of modern magic. The other was a Chinese cups-and-balls conjurer built by Robert-Houdin’s father-in-law, Jacques Houdin. ❧
November 29, 2018 at 01:34PM
🔖 Accelerated Reader Bookfinder
Searching for books with a corresponding Renaissance Accelerated Reader 360® quiz is easy with Accelerated Reader Bookfinder®. Students, teachers, parents, and librarians can search in English or Spanish using criteria such as ATOS book level or a Lexile™ measure, interest level, title, author, fiction/nonfiction, subject, award-winners, state lists, CCSS Exemplars, and more
An interesting site with a wealth of information and details for children’s books.
👓 All Those Books You’ve Bought but Haven’t Read? There’s a Word for That | New York Times
Most of us own books we’ve read and books we haven’t. Kevin Mims considers the importance of owning books we’ll never get around to finishing.
I had hoped for more here, but it’s just a recap of things I’ve read in either their original incarnations or via other resources.
👓 What Do They Want from Us? On the Return of Big Bookstore Chains | The Millions
Bookstores have become cultural Rorschach tests. After the past decade or so, you’ve either been traumatized by watching your favorite store go dark, or you’re fine with the coffee and craft cocktails now served alongside exquisitely curated books.
This fall begins a new era, or maybe a retro one, marked by the reemergence of national bookstore chains and two prototype stores opening next month. In New York, Shakespeare & Co. is growing to three locations, laying the groundwork for its national expansion, while Indigo, Canada’s largest bookstore chain, is opening its first U.S. store in New Jersey, staking its claim before growing west. Both believe there’s big potential in general bookstore chains despite wildly different ideas about how we buy books.
👓 Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound | Maryanne Wolf | The Guardian
When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age writes Maryanne Wolf, author of Reader, Come Home