Book Cartoon du Jour

Found at HowNovelistic via ReadingAsBreathing via TheLifeguardLibrarian via The New York Times

Yes, Why Not?

Found via How Novelistic via DorkFaceGirl via LiteratureisMyUtopia via CovertoCover via DogHouseDiaries

Is Television Watching an Enemy of Reading?

Maybe yes, maybe no, according to this Book Riot blogger and her blogpost’s readers.

No More Printed Britannica

Most Americans have probably already learned that earlier this month Encyclopedia Britannica announced that the current printed edition of the encyclopedia will be the final one. Mr. Google will point you to a host of news articles and commentary (like this one from the blog of The New Yorker).

Britannica is neither the first nor the last familiar encyclopedia to abandon the codex for the computer. The rationale for digitizing time-sensitive reference works like encyclopedias is ever more irresistable, and it’s hard to argue with the sheer ecological argument of refusing to fell additional trees for subsequent editions of an encyclopedia that’s required numerous revisions since it was first published in (wait for it:) 1768.

Still, we felt it somehow necesssary to register here at the Booklover’s Blog this heartbreaking-if-inevitable turning point in the history of the book, if only because for many bibliophiles, perusing (in addition to referring to) Britannica is among the fondest memories of our early reading careers.

Britannica’s nostalgic value among readers (well, readers of a certain age, perhaps) is so strong that we predict that booklovers (and second-hand bookstore owners) are going to be snarfing them up from library book sales any time a public library divests itself of whatever edition it happens to own. (Lucky the booksale browser who stumbles upon a discarded set of the highly-regarded 11th (1911) edition!)

In any case, the death of the printed Britannica feel like another omen of the End of An Era (in this case, the Gutenberg one). Let us hope the marketing gods keep the licensing fees for the Britannica’s electronic versions within the range of public library budgets.

4/18/2012 Postscript: Britannica put together this nifty compilation of the media coverage of its announcement:

Does Reading a Printed Book Distract the Reader from That Book’s Ideas?

We’ve seen a lot of ink and electrons devoted to the pros and cons of printed vs. machine-displayed books, but Tim Parks’ essay in the blog of the New York Review of Books is the first we’ve seen that makes the argument that e-books promote more thorough engagement with an author’s ideas than if the reader is using his eyeballs on a printed version of those ideas.

An excerpt:

“The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience. Certainly it offers a more austere, direct engagement with the words appearing before us and disappearing behind us than the traditional paper book offers, giving no fetishistic gratification as we cover our walls with famous names. It is as if one had been freed from everything extraneous and distracting surrounding the text to focus on the pleasure of the words themselves. In this sense the passage from paper to e-book is not unlike the moment when we passed from illustrated children’s books to the adult version of the page that is only text. This is a medium for grown-ups.”

Read Tim’s intriguing essay – and, of course, the equally interesting reader comments (which, admittedly, you wouldn’t be able to enjoy and evaluate if you had read the printed version of this essay instead of its electronic version – assuming Tim’s  blogpost gets printed at all in the “hard copy” version of the New York Review of Books).

Found via Shelf Awareness

Franzen Praises Printed Books, Disparages E-Books. Some Readers Promptly Disparage Franzen

In a recent interview with The Telegraph, bestselling author Jonathan Franzen added his voice to the chorus of authors denouncing e-books.

Some of the readers of the interview have posted comments noting the irony that some of Franzen’s popularity (and personal wealth) has resulted from his books being available in e-book format. Other readers have posted some never-before-mentioned (or seldom mentioned) circumstances where owning e-books over printed books would definitely be A Good Thing.

And more than one commentator mentions that the machine-readable vs. eyeball-readable debate is not an either/or question, but an it-depends-on-the-reader’s-circumstances question.

Which is pretty much what Jonathan Segura writes, over on one of NPR’s blogs. (Readers’ comments on that statement are also interesting.)

Found via The New Yorker’s Book Bench

Pages vs. Screens: The Debate Continues

Whether printed books are superior to, or merely precursors to, screen-transmitted words continues to be controversial.

A subset of that wide-ranging debate is the argument about the physiological differences (?) in the brain when a reader uses a book vs. when a reader uses a screen. This was touched on recently in the form of a survey of some recent books on this (and related) subjects; the survey was written by Thomas Larson and posted at The Rumpus.

Read Larson’s article (and the interesting readers’ comments).

 

More Printed Books Instead of Fewer Ones?

“Will the e-book kill off the print book? Every time I hear that question, I think about the ‘paperless office.’ Back in the ’80s, the rise of word processors and e-mail convinced a lot of people that paper would vanish. Why print anything when you could simply squirt documents around electronically? We all know how that turned out.”

So writes Clive Thompson at the beginning of a Wired essay explaining why he believes that there are more – not fewer – books in our collective future.

Sure, the e-book has been invented and reading on screens has become popular. Although purchasing an e-book is hardly as inexpensive as readers had hoped, more and more people are buying devices to read those not-always-inexpensive e-books on various types of screens – including, most incredibly, the tiny screens on their mobile telephones.

However, another – and far less publicized - invention that’s revolutionizing the publishing industry is the still-reasonably-priced “book-on-demand.”  True, the equipment used to instantly publish a printed book as it is ordered isn’t cheap, but Thompson predicts it will eventually become so, to the extent that individual consumers may end up owning them.

Read Thompson’s entire essay.

Found via Shelf Awareness

 

The Book as a Souvenir of When and Where You Read It?

Greg Zimmerman, at The New Dork Review of Books, is convinced that among the other reasons for preferring printed books over electronically-displayed ones is the fact that they are better than screens are at reminding you of the particular circumstances under which you read a particular title. Read Greg’s essay.

Found via Entomology of a Bookworm

Dept. of Startling Technology Breakthroughs: The Book

This Spanish-language video has English subtitles. Enjoy!

Contributed by Virginia-based retired librarian Steve Murden