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Reading

This week I’ve been reading

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Panic Fables

The Locked Room by Maj Sjöwall, Per Wahlöö with Paul Britten Austin (Translator)

Also

Rotten by John Lydon (Johnny Rotten)

and A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

Those last two are bit on the back burner while I read the enormous Panic Fables which I must say started as a bit of a slog, as did The locked Room, which is a murder mystery/procedural that was recommended by someone. It was gotten more interesting in the third act, but I don’t think I’ll read any more in the series. The Panic Fables is just plain crazy. A weekly strip done for about 6 years I think–conceptual comics.

Rotten is about John Lydons life, and Paradise is “A startling investigation of what people do in disasters and why it matters.”

books, Tech

Probably one of the best definitions of what a book is, that I’ve ever read.

Cool Tool: Five Good eBooks

1) A book (even without its paper pages) is a long argument that coheres as a whole, and whose argument or story is made by integrating well-selected parts.
From Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of The Well (The WELL was an early, influential, and pioneering outpost in what later came to be called cyberspace.), an editor of Whole Earth Review 9and actin publisher after Stewart Brand left), and one of the founding editors of Wired magazine, among other things (for those who don’t know who he is). This is from his Cool Tools blog which is about Cool Tools for everyday living–sorta a continuance of the Whole Earth Review.
Check out the blog, and his other stuff.

books, General, Tech

Amazon: Reinventing the Book | Newsweek.com

Amazon: Reinventing the Book | Newsweek.com
This is a great article (7 pages, so be prepared to spend some time on it.) on the future of the physical/paper book vs the electronic book. It’s mainly about Amazon’s new Kindle, but delves deeper into what reading may look like in 20-50 years, with books, and reader, and writers being interconnected.
It all sounds wonderful (to some people anyways), and I would love to be able to store a couple hundred books in a space the size of a single paperback (and wouldn’t my wife love that 😀 ), but while the price of the books are o.k. ($9.99 or less)(on second thought, maybe that is too expensive since you can get a paperback for $7.99 and the cost of digitizing a book is much less than that, $2-$4 may be a better price range here), I can’t bring myself to pay $400 for the reader, when I can get a laptop for that price. I think when the price of the reader drops to something like $99 (or even less), it may be more palatable to readers (myself included).
There’s, also the whole DRM encumberment going on which I find very absurd. If I buy a book, I’d like to be able to lend it to someone else, just like I can now, and maybe that’s the best argument for paper books right there.
Via Slashdot (Some good comments there, by the way)