St. Augustine

We hear a lot of stories here about how this or that ebook is going to fundamentally change the ebook. And to varying degrees these books do and don't tweak the paradigm, so we take such news with a grain of salt.

But when Mark Z. Danielewski reinvents the ebook, we take notice. On Slate's Future Tense blog, Kim O'Connor reports that the author's new The Fifty Year Sword is "a key project in [Pantheon's] strategic development plan and a category changer in the realm of digitized adult fiction."

Color us intrigued.

—Brian Howard

 

There's an excerpt from Andrew Piper's "Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times" on Slate that trumpets the tactile advantages of p-books, positing that "E-reading isn't reading." 

Quoth Piper: "For Augustine, the book’s closedness—that it could be grasped as a totality—was integral to its success in generating transformative reading experiences. Its closedness was the condition of the reader’s conversion. Digital texts, by contrast, are radically open in their networked form. They are marked by a very weak sense of closure."

Aristotle, Braille, Delacroix and our favorite, El Lissitzky, also pop in.

—Brian Howard

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