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Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Round-up: Most recent writings on the ebook vs. book

Here is my offering to you of a brief roundup of articles that have come my way about the continued change to the publishing world from the vantage point of the ebook.

1)NPR's FreshAir hosted an interview with Ken Auletta regarding his recent article in the New Yorker on the Ipad as the e-pub savior. Literally. Notably the iPad is seen in some quarters as the quote unquote Jesus tablet.

2) From a design and integration standpoint Mr. Craig Mod delivers a fantastic piece on Embracing the Digital Book. Mod delves into the issues of design with some really helpful discussion and side-by-side screen shots of the iPad and the Kindle. Mod takes a slightly different path on the e-reader discussion where he suggests that "...reading was an act of solitude by design, with most residue of the process locked in a book's physicality. This is no longer true." His excitement about the digital book is the potential ability, once the publishers release their death grip on the e-book, is joint read, joint/shared/cloud marginalia, etc.
Related is Mod's earlier essay/article on Books in the Age of the iPad.

3) A recent study on the changes in reading via First Monday.

4) Gutenberg 2.0: Harvard's Libraries deal with disruptive change by Jonathan Shaw Any article that starts with the phrase "Throw it in the Charles" regarding a library collection is bound to be interesting and this article does not disappoint. Besides a good bunch of quotable quotes Shaw captures the essence of the difficulty of navigating the historical waters of the existence of libraries and the new roles that they are called to. Do we need to own the books or is access to the information enough? "How do we make information as useful as possible to our community now and over a long period of time? "(p. 40)

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