El Lissitzky

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

Fast Company has an article and video today on Polish art student Waldek Węgrzyn's ebook/pbook hybrid, an El Lissitzky-inspired project for his masters degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Węgrzyn's project, a more or less hardwired physical book that interacts with a digital interface as it's read, is beyond mesmerizing. Plus, we give high marks to any and all El Lissitzky references. —Brian Howard

From the article: "The concept is as obvious as it is radical: instead of making readers choose between physical and digital, why not give them the best of both?"