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Something for the Weekend

What Do You Do With These Things? — Andrew Pettegree, author of The Book in the Renaissance, interviewed at the Boston Globe (via The Second Pass):

What you’ve got to do once you’ve got 300 identical copies of a book is you’ve got to sell it to people who don’t even yet know they want it. And that’s a very, very different way of selling…

It’s this classic example of how you get technological innovation without people really being aware of the commercial implications, of how you can make money from it. There’s quite a little similarity in the first generation of print with the dot-com boom and bust of the ’90s, where people have this fantastic new innovation, a lot of creative energy is put into it, a lot of development capital is put into it, and then people say, “Well, yeah, but how are we going to make money…?”

Your Brain on Gadgets — NPR looks at digital overload:

The average person today consumes almost three times as much information as what the typical person consumed in 1960, according to research at the University of California, San Diego.

And The New York Times reports that the average computer user checks 40 websites a day and can switch programs 36 times an hour.

“It’s an onslaught of information coming in today,” says Times technology journalist Matt Richtel.

Digital Horde — Fast Company on the launch of The Mongoliad, Neal Stephenson’s experiment with digital storytelling and social media:

The innovation in The Mongoliad… [is] in the entire concept of a serialized, dynamic, digital “book” that includes video, imagery, music, and background articles among the text of the storyline and comes with a social media companion, with which fans/readers can comment and interact. The social aspect even goes so far as including badges, the new digital “reward” phenomenon, which readers can earn for taking part in particular activities. The book will be available online via a browser, and also through dedicated apps for Apple iDevices and Android phones.

There’s more about the venture at The New York Times. At what point, however, does this stop being a novel and start being a game? Can we tell anymore…?

This Is Our Niche — Steven Heller talks to Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and editor Eva Prinz about Ecstatic Peace Library for the The New York Times:

Moore and Prinz believe that the analog and digital are more distinct in books than in other media. “To say that an art book can be an e-book is ignorant of the tradition and art of color separations, printing and binding,” Prinz said. “Likewise, to suspect that a digital storytelling experience is simply a pdf downloaded on your iPad or Kindle platform is disrespectful to the interactive arts and artists.” She has been experimenting with video game technology to create their first e-book. “In similar processes to those employed by the 1960s experimental subcommittee of the College de Pataphysique, a group of French writers and poets who called themselves OuLiPo (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle),” Prinz continued, “Ecstatic Peace Library is creating new ways to ‘escape’ into literature and art.”

The Wolf Hall EffectIntelligent Life looks at the growing respectability of  historical fiction in the wake of Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novel.

And finally…

Little Acts of Civil Disobedience — A profile of book designer Peter Mendelsund by Stefan Kamph from 2009 that I hadn’t seen previously (thx Jacob):

Moments of humor and surprise in a cover are a designer’s “little acts of civil disobedience,” says Mendelsund, and he “would like to think that if you’re a good reader there are little exegetical clues you can sneak in.” The court artist hides his private mark in the appointed painting.

Peter also recently posted his beautiful designs for the Steig Larsson deluxe boxed set at his blog JACKET MECHANICAL.