I want one of these: http://noteslate.com/

And I want it now.

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Just in case you’d forgotten, physical books are dead. And this just after Amazon sold out of the new Kindle in five days. Those new Kindles are cheaper and leaner and more efficient, which you knew had to happen because of the popularity of the iPad as an e-reader. And the technology is evolving fast enough that some companies, like Plastic Logic, are canceling upcoming products and moving forward with newer feature sets. Perhaps these newer devices will be helpful to fans of romance novels printed by places like Dorchester Publishing, which is going all-digital.

Sigh.

I was going to start this blog off with a confession about different files and programs I may or may not have pirated in my life, but then I thought better of it. You never know who actually reads this thing. Instead, I’m going to provide a couple links that argue the possible effects of pirating digital media and the future of authors and artists who create such media.

The first link is to Scott Adam’s blog. You might know him as the Dilbert cartoonist. He basically argues that within his lifetime authors won’t exist:

I predict that the profession known as “author” will be retired to history in my lifetime, like blacksmith and cowboy. In the future, everyone will be a writer, and some will be better and more prolific than others. But no one will pay to read what anyone else creates. People might someday write entire books – and good ones – for the benefit of their own publicity, such as to promote themselves as consultants, lecturers, or the like. But no one born today is the next multi-best-selling author. That job won’t exist.

As an author, my knee-jerk reaction is to assume that the media content of the future will suck because there will be no true professionals producing it. But I think suckiness is solved by better search capabilities. Somewhere out in the big old world are artists who are more talented than we can imagine, and willing to create content for free, for a variety of reasons. And so, as our ability to search for media content improves, the economic value of that content will approach zero. Read more »

In his lecture given to journalism students at Columbia University, Steven Berlin Johnson poses the proposition that texts should not be still, that they should move, connect, find new relationships with new texts. He explains that this is actually the way we’ve treated texts throughout most of history. He describes the “commonplace book” that was most popular around the Enlightenment in which scholars, scientists, and wanna be scholars and scientists took notes on what they were reading. Anything that caught their attention or inspired them would go into these commonplace books. John Locke kept a commonplace book in the mid 1600s and developed an intricate system for organizing his passages that is strikingly similar to the way our modern-day search engines function. These commonplace books, which were a lot like the way we catalog our favorite books and websites on our blogs, according to Johnson, caused the texts within them to take on new meaning, never before achieved in their linear forms. So, basically, we’ve been cutting and pasting, linking and blogging, for centuries. Pretty cool. But another of Johnson’s points is that some of our newer technologies (for instance the iPad) and texts (The New York Times Editor’s Choice iPad app) are trying to place texts inside a glass box for readers to look at but not manipulate, and he thinks this is problematic. So do I. The iPad, without certain extra apps, doesn’t allow readers to copy and paste text, something that many iPad users would expect to be able to do, especially if they are also avid bloggers. Readers don’t want to manipulate texts in order to steal their ideas, co-opting them as their own; rather they want to share, rearrange, and communicate with the texts in new ways that will keep the text alive (albeit often in a different body) and keep the ideas evolving. Isn’t this what language is for?

Here’s a quote from his lecture, but I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

The contrast here suggests to me that we have two potential futures ahead of us, where digital text is concerned, or that the future is going to involve a battle between two contradictory impulses. We can try to put a protective layer of glass [over] the words, or we can embrace the idea that we are all better off when words are allowed to network with each other. What’s the point of going to all this trouble to build machines capable of displaying digital text if we can’t exploit the basic interactivity of that text? People don’t want to read on a screen just for the thrill of it; even with the iPad’s beautiful display, reading on paper is still a higher-resolution experience, and much easier on the eyes. Yes, the iPad makes it easier to carry around a dozen books and magazines, but that’s not the only promise of the technology. The promise also lies in doing things with the words, forging new links of association, remixing them. We have all the tools at our disposal to create commonplace books that would astound Locke and Jefferson. And yet we are, deliberately, trying to crawl back into the glass box.