Category: Books

“This creature who is part genius, part fool.”
'The human being is a truly remarkable creature,' he tells us.
'He has discovered fire, built cities, writen magnificent poems, interpreted the world, invented mythologies, etc. But at the same time he has never ceased waging war on his fellow humans, being totally wrong, destroying his environment, etc. This mixture of great intellectual powers and base idiocy creates an approximately neutral outcome.
So when we decide to explore human stupidity, we are somehow paying tribute to this creature who is part genius, part fool.'
From Jean-Phillippe De Tonnac's introduction to This is Not the End of the Book…
November 22, 2011
Booktrails… the story of 22 used books
Over the last few months, I've been progressively upgrading the print editions of my books to digital editions; selling the print copies on Amazon to finance their electronic offspring. Uhuh, replacing atoms with bits.
With almost daily trips to the post office to despatch these used books, I began to wonder about the journey each book was taking to its new home. Were there any patterns or correlations in the places they were headed? Here's a simple BatchGeo map of their destinations…
Unsurprisingly, most titles (largely graphic novels) ended up in London, with the furthest (Y: The Last Man – Safeword) travelling 240 miles to Londonderry, and the closest (Head First HTML) travelling 16 miles to Oldham. Curiously, most of the comics headed South, whilst textbooks and novels headed North!
Really, I should have spimed every title by adding it to BookCrossing and hopefully been able to trace it's lifetime of ownership. Sadly, my nerd prescience wasn't so acute.
What's to be learned from this? There's no social graph here, or recommendation algorithm, just some geo-sprayed representation of my tastes.
However, it returns me to the notion of books as social objects, objects that have lives beyond a single owner. How do we gift or sell ownership of digital artefacts to others when we no longer own, but are simply blessed with access; access mediated by corporations that won't always have your interests at heart. The only reason I'm comfortable buying Kindle editions, is because I know I can break the digital locks if I need to – illegal yes, but by no means immoral.
Stallman was prophetic. Choose your data jailor wisely. DRM is now in your clouds…
October 8, 2011
Shelf Life
Eventually, Everything is Bits. Even you.
And Everything has a shelf life, even shelves.
My shelves are experiencing an accelerating half life – a shelfular singularity if you like. Books, photos, movies, music and games now inhabit the clouds, pixellated, digitised and discless. My media genome is now scattered across many heavenly shelves…
—
Moving pictures took almost two years to turn from these…
into this: (their corporeal forms now grace the shelves of charity stores)

—
Then came the kindling of the pages, turning most of these…
…into things that could be in many places, but mostly in two.
Those that couldn’t make the journey, remain neither wholly binary or atomic.
—

Along the way, I started foresaking these…
…and adopting their etheral brothers, though some still remain in limbo:
—

The most precious, began as atoms, then light, before becoming embalmed in silver hallide…
… and now existing as blocks of light, coarsing through slices of silcon, behind sheets of glass some livpure:

—
My shelves will soon be emptied and no longer required. I don’t own those in distant clouds, but I do own those in the computers that belong to me. I have one, where I own none of the contents, nor the shelf itself… and it hurts when it’s altered without consent.
Is this Better Than Owning? Perhaps.
The absence of atoms isn’t problematic, but my senses can’t yet fully appreciate and comprehend all the bits in all those new places…
October 6, 2011
Y, El Último Hombre
This week's episode of Lost – '316' – features a gratuitously self-referential shot of Hurley reading Y, El Último Hombre, the Spanish language edition of Y: The Last Man, written in 2004 by one of Lost's current principal writers, Brian K. Vaughn…
Nothing's ever a coincidence in the Lostiverse. Hurley is reading the fourth volume, One Small Step, a story with a very Planet of the Apes ending…what does that mean?!
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Y: The Last Man is currently being adapted into a movie trilogy, but I've always thought it'd make for a great Abrams-esque TV quest 🙂
February 20, 2009
Islanded In A Stream of Stars
From Night on the Great Beach, in Henry Beston's The Outermost House…
"For a moment
of night we have a glimpse of ourselves and of our world islanded in its stream of stars— pilgrims of mortality, voyaging between horizons across eternal seas of space and time."
January 25, 2009
Y: The Last Man
Like many late 80s geek teenagers I was consumed by adult comics and graphic novels such as The Dark Knight Returns, V for Vendetta and Watchmen; many of which have been recently re-released as gorgeous hardcover ‘Absolute’ editions by DC’s Vertigo label.
I missed out on many of the long running series at Vertigo, with just a handful of compilation editions purchased over the last few years (I kinda grew outta comics…)
However, in the last few weeks Vertigo has begun to offer the first issue, of some of their seminal titles, as downloadable PDFs editions, including series such as Y: The Last Man,
Death (The High Cost Of Living) and
Saga Of The Swamp Thing.
Though some way from Scott McCloud‘s vision of ComicsML and digital publishing, a dumb, static PDF is good enough. I hope Vertigo are bolder and begin to offer full editions of their works; I can imagine an Amazon Kindle or OLPC XO loaded with a ton of remixable and quotable comics 🙂
Last night I read the thought provoking first issue of Y: The Last Man – Unmanned – on my
MacBook, wondering if what Kevin Kelly recently termed ‘generative values of embodiment‘ could yield a renaissance in comic publishing.
February 4, 2008
Persepolis
Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis is one of my favorite books and probably the one I’ve most often given as a gift to others.
Until today’s post at AICN, I had no idea there was a movie adaptation in production. The short trailer seems to capture the energy, spirit and humour of the book… I can’t wait to see it on the big screen 🙂
November 15, 2007