reeling and writhing

The reader is dead, apparently, though the death notice is awful early

I have to say, John Paul Titlow at ReadWrite hits it on the head with this article about the reported July demise of Google Reader (though I can't help wondering if its death might still be somewhat exaggerated at this early stage):

Can We Trust Google?

There's something unnerving about a service you use every day disappearing, even if the decision has perfectly sound business rationale behind it. It reminds us that the Web isn't ours and that the existence of these products is totally dependent on the whim of some corporation, which can pull the plug at any time. We have no say in the matter.

Shutdowns like this force people to reevaluate their relationship with their favorite places on the Web. It makes those relationships feel less secure. And as Techdirt wisely points out, it should make us all wary of relying to heavily on a single provider for our online existence. 

It makes us wonder: if five years down the road Google decides that Gmail isn't making enough money, will they kill that too? Probably not. What about Google Calendar? What will be on the "spring cleaning" list in 2017? We have no way of knowing...

Things like this make Google look less humane, less compassionate. It might not have been huge, but there was a very dedicated community of users on Google Reader. Shutting the lights out on all those people, even if they do have viable alternatives, just makes it feel like Google doesn't give a damn. It seems arrogant. 

Titlow makes another useful point: Google never tried to monetarise the Reader, seeming not to notice how addicted its users were and how much data it was populated with. Also he notes the reader's importance to many people he would have considered 'non-tech' - "journalists, bloggers, scientists, artists and people who prefer to follow local news and blogs via feeds".

He ends on an optimistic note, announcing his hope that something innovative will arise to take its place. There are several good links to ongoing discussions in this post, which I'll read later. 

Having spent quite a few empty minutes waiting for Newsblur to load over the last few days, I do wish I felt quite so blithe about it all. The best option for me seems to be to export to a couple of services, and keep an eye on how both are performing. 

(Update, March 19: Newsblur is speeding up beautifully. Looks great today. Well done, Mr Rose (link to his description of how a 'black swan' moment can pan out for a small competitor.)

 

 

 

Zoe Dattner finds shiny tools for change in New York

I enjoyed reading Zoe Dattner's conference report a couple of weeks ago in Bookseller and Publisher magazine (now known as Books and Publishing, thanks!) Zoe was present at the eighth Tools of Change conference, convened recently in New York by O'Reilly Media.

While commenting on the depth and breadth of the US book market, she noted some things that she felt were pertinent to the Australian market, in particular the scope for greater support to book events from booksellers, and a better understanding in Australia of the potential of POD (print on demand).

At some length she reported on a session with GoodReads, discussing a survey of 1000 users they conducted recently (I would have loved to know if they have presented at TOC before).

For discovery, Twitter and Facebook score very low. Friends’ recommendations (word of mouth) is the highest. (It is not known, unfortunately, if the word of mouth people refer to comes from social media or person-to-person. My guess is that Twitter and Facebook are actually far more influential, but people consider this the same as word of mouth.) Following this, the best discovery comes from Goodreads itself, and then from media (presumably reviews and media discussion). Discovery via bookstore and the library ‘hold list’ is also very good. (A separate session that gave some fantastic data about libraries made the brilliant point that a library is really a showroom, and one that publishers and booksellers should advocate for.) On the question of why someone buys the book after hearing about it, the top answers were: friends telling you to buy it, general hype, and book clubs. Over 50% of readers said Goodreads reviews helped to convince readers to buy the book.

One of the most valuable points I took away from the Goodreads session was the statistic that 69% of people want to discuss the book with friends after they’ve read it, making me think how much better the industry could get at providing special deals on multiple copies (specifically ebooks) and that there should be better, and stronger, calls to action at the end of the book. Considering the technology available to us—particularly with ePub 3—the possibilities for a ‘What should I read next?’ page at the end of a book are vast.

A last interesting thought from this session was that 49% say they’d be interested in reading a book in serial form instead of waiting six months for the release, but only with an established author, or someone they like, not at all with an unknown author.

Read more here. 

Zoe has kindly supplied the link to the keynote library session she mentions, 'The Library as Ebook Discovery Zone: More Lessons from *Library Journal's* Public Library Patron Research' delivered by Meredith Schwartz. A video link is supplied.

 

 

can haz streamed cutoffs? CAN HAZ.

The Millions kindly provided this vital link to the recent Rolling Stone interview with David Cross about the next season of Arrested Development, which will be released on Netflix:

It's really audacious and amazing. I think a lot of people will miss the work that is involved, the story, the Venn diagrams that are being created, the domino effect that characters have with each other in their various episodes. I know what he's doing, and this has never been done on a TV show like this. This makes Lost look like a Spalding Grey monologue. You'll have to watch each episode more than once.

in which the hip and happening judge demands free advertising for 'dweeb' tablets

(I imagine academics teaching IP law will try to sneak this one into lectures one of these days.)

A judge in the United Kingdom dealt an unusual punishment to Apple for losing a court case against Samsung last week. Apple sued Samsung in the U.K., claiming that the South Korean manufacturer's Galaxy Tab tablets copied the iPad. This, the judge said, was not true. Yesterday, the judge ruled that Apple must issue notifications on its U.K. website as well as in newspapers and magazines saying that Samsung did not copy the iPad. While the punishment may seem extreme, it may be just what the mobile device industry needs.

Apple has been fighting patent and design lawsuits against Samsung in courts across the world. The U.K. case hinged on design similarities between the iPad and the Galaxy Tab series, specifically the Galaxy Tab 10.1's back and rounded corners. 

Last week, Judge Colin Birss said that Samsung did not infringe on Apple’s design because the Galaxy Tabs “are not as cool.” They “do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,” Birss said, according to Bloomberg. 

The judge's ruling yesterday is a bit of a Pyrrhic victory for Samsung. In terms of tangible benefits, the South Korean company definitely wins. Its products will remain on the market in the U.K. and Apple must do penance for the “prejudice” its lawsuit thrust upon Samsung’s Galaxy Tabs. On the other hand, Birss basically called Samsung’s tablets dweebs compared to the uber-hip iPad.

More on this at ReadWriteWeb: report by Dan Rowinski.

it is the earth the geeks inherit, not the dirt

Newsweek decrees, via The Daily Beast website, that the geeks have inherited the earth.

They've published a Digital Power Index of 100 movers and shakers, conveniently arranged by category for those of us who enjoy such things. (Larry Page is an 'innovator' and Sergey Brin is a 'visionary'. Or vice versa.)

Something in here for everyone, I think.

please RT - not a request, but the name of an essay in n+1

But two-faced Twitter has also brought about, in its opposite aspect, the very last thing to have been expected from the internet: a renovation of the epigram or aphorism, a revaluation of the literary virtues of terseness and impersonality.


This means that Twitter, officially a microblogging platform, in practice has often functioned in a way opposite to the blog. Of course a tweet is just a tweet, not to be made too much of. Even so, La Rochefoucauld, Oscar Wilde, Dorothy Parker, Cyril Connolly, the Kafka of The Blue Octavo Notebooks, Cioran — they would have been excellent tweeters, and the best tweets, today, rival their greatest one-liners. (In fact to encounter their sententiae parcelled out as tweets would have made for a better experience than reading The Unquiet Grave or The Trouble with Being Born straight through. Aphorisms are ideally consumed like nuts or candies, a handful at a time.) So Twitter doesn’t only have the widely recognized usefulness of providing updates on news and revolution, and illuminating links, and many laughs and smirks. It has also brought about a surprising revival of the epigrammatic impulse in a literary culture that otherwise values the merely personal and the super-colloquial as badges of authenticity.

“Write as short as you can/ In order/ Of what matters,” John Berryman counseled in a pre-tweet of 44 characters. Favorite that, followers.

n+1: Please RT

Via The Millions.

Crossposted at Mulberry Road.

Kyle Schlesinger meditates on electronic conversations about writing at Jacket2

A friend of mine broke her leg when she stumbled down the subway steps reading Ulysses on her iPhone on Bloomsday. Another friend’s seven year old autistic son has dazzled me with his intimate knowledge of Tom Phillip’s Humument thanks to the iPad app. Look in the business section of The New York Times any day of the week and you’ll find an article about publishing. In turn, ask anyone on the bus for his or her opinion about e-books, the future of the library, or the effect of new media on cultural literacy, and you’re bound to get a strong response. Debates about publishing and the future of the book have never been more commonplace, provocative, complex, or uncertain than there are right now, and there’s never been a more interesting time to engage with the art of the book.

From Part 1 of a series entitled Facsimile Again.

news to me (that it is June tomorrow? aaargh)

So many books, only one life...I thought at first Mr Deaver was a serial killer, which is why I clicked on this when it came up in my reader. Got him confused with someone else....It is, after all, a fine name for a crime thriller writer .

From last week, there are five book reviews up on the blog at Overland. What a great platform for blog reviews - good to see this.

Included is a review of Lisa Dempster's Neon Pilgrim, Alec Patric's poetry collection which has been released as an e-book, and Emmett Stinson's short fiction collection, Known Unknowns, from Affirm Press.

Academic librarian Constance evaluates the Kobo reader, recently sold out at Borders stores across Australia.

Maud noticed this, and I thank her for it.

Not in a book group? try this one on for size. If you're not in the States, you might like to use it as a reading list later on. With notes.

The Duck has found us all something really good and silly to finish on.

Facebook public status updates searchable, says TechCrunch

Your public Facebook status updates? Now publicly searchable outside Facebook

Via the helpful chaps at TPUTH.

While the debate rages on about Facebook’s attitude to privacy, and in particular the views of Mark Zuckerberg, the current situation is that an awful lot of people make their status updates public, whether they realise the full implications or not. A stark reminder of this comes today in the form of a new search engine thrown together by two developers.

FacebookSearch simply takes those public status updates and makes them searchable, outside of Facebook. The guys behind it, Peter Burns and Will Moffat, have posted a simple explanation: “This is a simple example of just how open facebook has made your information. This data is wide open, and this is one of the least scary uses that anyone will make. If nothing changes, it’s only to get worse.” There’s an interesting discussion over at Hacker News on the morality of what they are doing.

 I am going to keep my eye on what happens there and suggest any Facebookin' readers do same. TechCrunch is a very reliable source for this kind of thing.

who listens to paper radio

A radio of paper. A fine new thing of audio podcasts on a monthly basis, of new writing.

After mountainous hours of pixel shifting and finger tapping – and countless more wrestling sound waves – we are extremely relieved and excited to announce that Paper Radio has now arrived. For those of you visiting for the first time we should explain that Paper Radio is a sonic interpretation of the unique culture of Australasia – in the shape of a podcast.

The first episode from the FM (fiction) channel, Chris Somerville’s The Drowning Man, is the story of an aloof teacher whose life is defined and dominated by the irascible temperament of water. In our next edition, a documentary for the AM (non-fiction) channel, Georgia Moodie rewinds to the 1920s and tails the experiences of the first African American jazz musicians to tour Australia.

The near future holds audio productions from Rachel O’Neill, Benjamin Law and Thomasin Sleigh.

Paper Radio has been created by a team headed by Jessie Borrelle and Jon Tjhia, working out of Melbourne.

I'm subscribed.

a new book to borrow at EWF - Chris Meade

News has come from the Emerging Writers' Festival  of a surprise addition to the Living Library program - Chris Meade:

Digital publishing: Chris Meade
Chris is Co-Director for the Institute for the Future of the Book in London. 

His particular interest is publishing and writing in the digital age.  Previously he was Director of the Poetry Society where he set up the Poetry Café in Covent Garden and the lottery funded Poetry Places project.

In the 1980s he was a pioneer of reader development, promoting public libraries as 'imagination services'.

Chris is the author of The Thoughts of Betty Spital (Penguin 1989) and a past winner of the George Orwell award for his play ‘We Two Boys’.

He is a member of Friendly Literature Organisations (FLO), a consortium supported by Arts Council England with whom he has been exploring the creative potential of new media for readers and writers.

Chris Meade will only be available for eight mentoring sessions so get in quick!

Booking details here. UPDATE: Meade will also be involved in another event at EWF. Details to follow. (I have been told I will like it.It doesn't get more enticing than that.)

teach reporters well

How journalism is being taught, right here, right now.

At the  Online Journalism blog, Paul Bradshaw and a team of UK journalism lecturers report on the vital question of teaching the journalists of tomorrow, and the answer to same. He has his undergraduate students running an online website, Birmingham Recycled, and in this post discusses how to keep them motivated during the term. The range of skills they are acquiring is what caught my eye, rather than the teaching strategies.

There's a great list of popular posts on this site which would be good to read sometime. I've already  bookmarked the one on Yahoo Pipes for future reference, having lost some other information on that handy tool a while back. I am ashamed to admit that I have been following this blog for a while, and simply cannot remember where I first heard of it. However it's worth keeping an eye on if you are interested in the nuts and bolts of web journalism.

it's news to me 12.04.10

The good folk at Mobylives have covered this report from Wired magazine that book artists are claiming their rights in the Google Books Settlement fracas too. At the time of the Mobylives post, Google was denying the charges. We'll see how that pans out.

Thanks to US bloggers Matthew Tiffany and Bud Parr for this link to audio of Faulkner reading from As I Lay Dying. 

Not only am I delighted for the good folk at Three Percent that they are on this list, but I am looking forward to studying it closely.

This article from the Vancouver Sun about Yann Martel's efforts to get his Prime Minister to read more books was spotted by Mark Sarvas, who also has some news for families on the future of the iPad, I believe.

As recommended in the latest Boldtype, where you can read an interview with the blog authors, here is a link to the blog on 'recommended inappropriate books for kids', Curious Pages.

Finally, Darcy Moore has spotted the first trailer for the film version of John Marsden's very popular YA (and well beyond) novel, Tomorrow When The War Began.

the iPad container for a new kind of book, says Stein

As readers of if:book know, i've often referred to books as the principal vehicle humans have used to move ideas around time and space. Thanks in large part to the internet, over the past fifteen years that function is increasingly being supplanted by the internet/computer/screen combo. I know many people are disappointed in the iPad because they see it as a crippled computer (e.g. Cory Doctorow's recent rant in Boing Boing). Perhaps, if Cory and other critics would stop thinking of the iPad as a computer, but rather think of it as the container for a new kind of book, they might see its potential in a different light. Although a book (in technology terms) is a closed system and certainly not a platform for creativity in the sense that a computer (or a typewriter is), that hasn't stopped books from being invaluable to humanity. For me, the iPad is a an exciting baby step on the way to realizing Neal Stephenson's astonishing conception of the future of the book as described in Diamond Age: Or a Young Lady's Illustrated Primer. Well worth the read.

[NOTE: Having said all this, I am still very disappointed in all the ways that Apple limits that potential by insisting that the iPad live within the tightly controlled garden walls it has constructed.]

via www.futureofthebook.org

Bob Stein being his usual idiosyncratic self, or is he on the money here?

On the other hand, Cory D certainly is very cross about a lot of things, not many of them to do directly with the transformation of content by instruments and more to do with distribution, creativity and shared culture. The comments on his (sometimes theatrical) post are instructive too.

papering over the cracks in the energy crisis

Megan Halpern at Mobylives shares some reading about the potential environmental repercussions of e-publishing:

Don Carli at PBS Mediashift argues that this choice between digital or print is a “false dilemma” — one that makes us feel guilty about using paper products and eliminates any sort of concern for the environmental impact of the digital sphere and the internet. But really, we should at this point be more concerned about the latter. All of our use of digital media, the internet, cell phones, iPads, etc. is the cause of record-breaking global energy use. And that record-breaking energy use is becoming worse for the environment than paper use. We’ve just yet to realize the consequences.

(Pic via Mobylives.)

new template, new posts, new internet scrapbook too

Chris Heathcote: anti-mega: post-digital media design, an introduction

Here's Chris Heathcote's part of the panel that got considerable Twitter time last week during SXSWI, particularly from Richard Nash, who quoted Ben Terrett of Newspaper Club saying 'we have broken your business, now we want your machines' (or words to that effect). Though no one has written a complete post on the presentation yet, it appears Nerds and gold coins were involved. Molly Wright Steenson's gnomic remarks are included in her post here, and probably deserve a post of their own. Newspaper Club, likewise. Looks like a lot of fun.

Update - as noted by Meanland folk (that's the Meanjin-Overland digital project), on  Twitter , James Bridle has now posted on his part of the panel at booktwo.org.

(crossposted at mulberry road )

Book Reviews: How The Web Reads 'Em, via ReadWriteWeb

Why Google and Other Humans Don't Read Your Book Reviews

The book and media industries are going through interesting times, to put it mildly. As physical books prepare for their demise, the confusion around pricing of digital ones grows. Yet, whether physical or digital, to sell books you need marketing. People need to hear about a book before they buy it.

Alex Iskold of ReadWriteWeb haz most of teh bomb on online book reviews.

In short, most reviews published online as part of large media outlets' contribution to book reviewing ARE NOT TAGGED SO THAT GOOGLE CAN FIND THEM (and I want to shout this from the rooftops, I do). Which partly explains, as you'll see if you read further into that post, why all the reviews I ran here last year carrying 'review' in the title did quite well in search results, thanks.

A Simple Way to Please Google

So how should the book reviews be tagged?

To start with, the title needs to make it clear, that this is a book review. Of course humans may find a more subtle title more enticing, but for the sake of machine: Book Review: Manhood by Mels has to be present. It would be even better to mark up that this is a book review, and here is the book title and here is the author.

Next, the post needs to be adorned with the right tags and keywords. L.A. Times' reviews are certainly very clever, but again, Google does not get humor. A better tag would the title of the book, the name of the author and the non-conspicuous phrase "book review".

Iskold obligingly runs through how this important task might be done better through the use of structured formats or markup, of which there are now quite a few breeds around. This is of course so damn important I had to stop my self-imposed Internet weaning exercises to tell you all.

I'm assuming you've looked at Iskold's example of tagging, but I will go further and tell you why Zadie Smith's review of E.M. Forster's radio show scripts in the New York Review of Books, the link to which I fluffed a while back, can be easily found online, even without review in the title: because the NYRB in their wisdom used a structured markup known to all good cataloguers and digital archivists as Dublin Core, a subset of RDF (see the comments in Iskold's post for further technical discussion on these matters.) This is an EVEN BETTER WAY, particularly if your subbies don't want to see a page full of titles screaming REVIEW. It works well, however my little reviews also work with none of this fancy metadata (to play with that I have to pay Typepad more dollars), only with review in the title.

(If you want to see the tags, go to View in the browser toolbar, and click on Page Source for a similar view to that shown in Iskold's post. Typepad doesn't like the long lines of markup text, so I won't waste time producing it here.)

What, then, are newspaper owners thinking while they skinny up our Saturday papers and threaten to lock up their book reviews behind paywalls, all for the lack of a little measly markup? "Hooray, no more book reviews, nobody has complained so they obviously weren't reading them anyway"??? Don't know why = don't want to know....!!

Do they care? One has to wonder, seriously. The small amount of research I have done into this across several sites, including Book Forum (where not all metadata in reviews is equal) and Flavorwire (which often has 'review' in titles, though they do lose some findability in a 'Daily Dose' reviews segment) suggest that the very simple act of including book review or review in the title can make all the difference, and structured markup is teh bomb.

The first of these two practices is very common web knowledge, and surely known to most sub-editors by now - or are we finding out the hard way, watching book reviews in papers die online so that media bosses can pretend they could never afford them anyway?

Bear in mind that the search online for a review does not take into account the browsing aspect of review reading which is such an inviting aspect of  the 'paper' newspaper (although a featured reviews webpage could assist with that).

The Age has it right, for the reviews that are put online anyway, following Iskold's suggestion that Book Review be in the title tag:

<title>A Woman of Seville - Book Reviews - Books - Entertainment - theage.com.au</title>

returns Carmel Bird's recent review of Sallie Muirden's A Woman Of Seville at the top of world and Oz searches.

The Australian failed this test on one example I tested - consequently the review of Lenny Bartulin's The Black Russian which was put online on the weekend is practically invisible. Here's its metadata:

<title>The art of being a bad luck magnet | The Australian</title>

<meta name="description" content="The Black Russian By Lenny Bartulin Scribe, 261pp, $27.95" />

<meta name="keywords" content=" crime thriller, Phillip Marlowe" />

Venero Armanno's November 2008 review of The Slap, which did have 'Book Review' in the keywords tag, though not the crucial title tag, has disappeared without trace, while my review still rides the Google waves and continues to draw traffic. This is a great pity, and I have linked to it from my review today.

If you're a reviewer or an editor, get thee to the IT department, go, go, and get it sorted. While you're there, tell them to put all the weekend reviews online very early on Saturday morning, too (this, the Australian does, and the Age dawdles unconscionably over). So bloggers can link to those fine examples of reviewing in the print pubs and go on doing what we prefer to do, engaging in conversation and chatty recommendation, hopefully a la Forster, instead of being blamed unfairly for the nonfindability of newspaper reviews. You have librarians, guys - clearly The Age is using theirs.

As you were. Transmission will probably resume in June. May not talk much more about this in the comments as there is a lot of stuff going on here. But I did want to share these words of vindication.

god bless publishers, each and every one

I have seen something on ReadWriteWeb about FastPencil before. This will strike fear into the hearts of some publishers, though not all.

FastPencil certainly has a catchy name - the writer covering this also mentions a company called SmashWords, which he reports is mainly making its mark in the area of distribution of DRM-free e-books. Note, too, that ReadWriteWeb content has been syndicated by the New York Times' technology section since September this year - it is a very good news feed to follow if you are interested in web trends in publishing, along with other tech news.

from my email...

For it is true, some of us live in an Internet world. And isn't "Internet Tendency" just the best name ever for a service delivering an i-Phone app from indie publishers? How 'hubbly jubbly'.

Mc Sweeney's email newsletter promises great things for its new iPhone app, The Small Chair:

No longer will T-Pain be your only salvation on trains, during lunch, and through all the other empty gaps in a day. Allow McSweeney's to fill your moments of solitude, moments of togetherness, moments of intolerable boredom.'

Und so weiter. There's a review making extravagant claims about sales of The Small Chair, here at Boldtype.

the book has a collaborative future, says Stein

While Bob Stein's address on the future of the book at the Capitol on Thursday night was riveting stuff, its delivery was not without some issues - it never ceases to amaze me how MWF administrators manage to program digital publishing events in venues with no Internet access. While two years ago anyone appearing with Net-dependent stuff should have come armed to the teeth with backup plans (including the ability to use a screen set up in a tent!) it's a tad surprising in 2009 that we still need to spell this kind of thing out to festival organisers.

Is it really that hard to let a presenter on digital issues know that there are digital issues with the venue well in advance? Not only that, but as with Germaine Greer's address in this venue a year ago (not part of MWF), it was apparently not possible to have stage lights dimmed, making it hard for Stein to see his own laptop screen while presenting. I doubt the magnificence of the venue made up to him for that, if indeed he could see the damn place at all (Greer could not, and complained she could not see us several times).

Rant over. In a rather large nutshell, early work with text and video at the Voyager Company showed Stein that 'a book is a medium where the user is in control of their experience', in other words, 'user-driven media'. In the early '80s, a book was also what he described as a 'random access device' - and in that sense, without the availability to the general public of recording and rewinding tools, television was not.

In his work on the Criterion series of films recorded on laser disc for Voyager, Stein watched films and 'read' movies the way he read books, turning back and forward, stopping, repeating bits he needed to see again, developing multimedia features now common on DVD, such as director commentary.

He left Voyager in the mid-90s but was coaxed back into publishing sometime in the 'noughties, eventuating in the development of the annotating tools and projects for which he is best known. 

the pick of the feeds (stars down on the right as well)

There has been a lot of wild speculation afoot regarding the potential release of an Apple product which might (gasp!) combine e-reading with other things. Mitch Ratcliffe of Booksahead is trying to put out some of the flames before there's a fire. Bookseller.com has more information here.

The Guardian has a great interview with Shaun Tan, as well as news of the discovery of some previously unseen letters of Flaubert's in a British stash.

I have been following this guy so I can find out things like this quickly. Richard Nash speaks to Publishers' Weekly about his past at Soft Skull and his newest venture, Cursor.

I have enjoyed reading Kris Hemensley's correspondence with his brother in Dorset this week. And I am very fond of the Australian Ballet's excellent blog, Behind Ballet. Here is their tribute to the late Merce Cunningham, by Martyn Pedler, complete with video.

a true desktop has landed

Kathryn Greenhill, Emergent Technologies Specialist at Murdoch University (and indeed for most of Australia's libraries) reviews Microsoft's Surface Computer on her remarkable blog, Librarians Matter.

Kathryn went on a tour of the United States and the Netherlands earlier this year as Australia's main library representative in all things 2.0. Not only is she a highly regarded global ambassador in these matters, but this table is EXACTLY what one of my son's former doctors should have had to manage his paperwork.
(His weapon of choice? a terrific secretary and an extraordinarily messy little backpack. I hope no one reading this knows who I mean, as he is a fantastic specialist.)

When I can find the article where the original research was quoted in which practitioners from the Mayo Clinic were surveyed some years ago to ascertain what kind of screen would best match the way they used documents, I will link to it. And I will send this picture to the specialist if I can find his email address, I think he will appreciate it.

But this is not just good for kids (though the low cost table and applications her husband is developing for use in disability sound wonderful). Oh Nooooo. Click through and have a look, it's a thing of beauty all right.

to review the reviewer

The title of James' recent post at City of Tongues (also listed here at The Group) is taken in vain by Ramona Koval's programmers to introduce a session at Radio National's Book Show on literary criticism, with Delia Falconer and Geordie Williamson.
This session acted also as publicity for the ASAL conference on Common Readers and Critics, held last week in Canberra. (we should be able to read some of those thought provoking presentations in JASAL early next year.)

This BookShow session is notable chiefly for Williamson's remarks on protecting Australian writing from comparisons with work from overseas, and, rather incredibly, his handpass to Falconer in the final five minutes of play, on Koval's nimbly explosive suggestion that it shouldn't be necessary to publish negative reviews if there are lots of good books around. (Not quite why I prefer not to publish negative reviews here, but a surprising suggestion nonetheless.)

And all GW says is, "well, I think that's one for you, Delia." !!!

The answer to that question might be, 'yes, it's something lone bloggers can get away with, I think, Ramona, but editors and writers working together can afford to cover a broader canvas.' It's not even a really useful excuse for a blogger. Where would any media program (RN Book Show included) be if it was friendly all the time because everything it cast its eye over was 'pretty noice, thanks'?

Falconer rises to the occasion like a right sport - do check out her wonderful article on James Wood here if you haven't already (among many other things). It is a shame that Koval chooses to cut her off at the end as she does, and I thank a friend who's an attentive listener for alerting me to Williamson's clumsy pass.

read some Granta for free

That venerable UK literary organ, Granta, did a site rebuild recently and has announced via the monthly email newsletter that the online content on Granta.com has been refreshed.

New on Granta.com in May 2009:

'Rhyme and Reason' by Adam Gopnik: In conversation with the award-winning poet and essayist Katha Pollitt.

'Letter from Gaza' by Hisham Matar: The tragic life of Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani.

'Dragon Island' by Laura Fellowes: The most recent in our New Voices series.

'The Last Modernist' by Chris Petit: A consideration of the life and work of J.G. Ballard.

'A Vacation from Myself' by John Beckman: ‘What I gained, and lost, from antidepressants.’

'The Public Poet' by Lavinia Greenlaw: An appreciation of Carol Ann Duffy, Britain’s first female poet laureate.

'Getting Lost' by Heidi Julavits: One wintry weekend in the Berkshires.

It will be noted by the observant that online content is available via RSS in seven categories. I  may have seen this when I first visited this sexy looking new site about a month ago: for some reason it looked overwhelming and I plumped for the email newsletter.

So I guess if I really don't want to know about events I can't possibly attend, I could just subscribe to the half dozen other feeds on the online content page.

Or the email newsletter, which gave me the list above in a neat little bloggable text package. Hey, it's my choice.
Do note that it is also possible to subscribe to New Voices, which is definitely an exciting choice. Enjoy.

it's all print

It appears that a bigger Kindle is in the offing, and that some are bruiting the possibility that this will assist in the online shift for newspapers.
It appears more likely to me that it will also assist in increasing the digital divide, but it would be good to hear what these guys think about it too.

Meanwhile at Newspaper Death Watch (horrible, horrible name for a blog, isn't it), it is reported that there is an upsurge in enrolments in journalism studies in the States. So there will continue to be writers and critics who prophesy with their pens...but they must keep their eyes wide for that chance.

Update: Details on the Kindle launch here, at Mobylives.