Don Quixote

The New York Times' John Williams interviews humorist Joe Queenan about his new book, One for the Books. On the future of print books, which Queenan prefers to ebooks, he is blunt:

"Books, I think, are dead. You cannot fight the zeitgeist and you cannot fight corporations. The genius of corporations is that they force you to make decisions about how you will live your life and then beguile you into thinking that it was all your choice. Compact discs are not superior to vinyl. E-readers are not superior to books."

—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

SecretBuilders, a developer of mobile and social web games for children based on literature, has partnered with Oxford University Press to “gamify” the greatest classics as mobile and social apps for kids. The SecretBuilders’ “50 Great Reads Before 15” initiative will gamify such classics as Alice in Wonderland, Macbeth, Arabian Nights, Pride & Prejudice, and Don Quixote as mobile and social games. “When it comes to mobile or social games, the only choices for kids are either chocolate fudge or chocolate-covered broccoli!

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