Letters Remain

Category: books

  • Books, Printing, and Self-Publishing

    In an age of increasing digitization, objects become more valuable. And that value is the reason print media will not die, even if it does shrink. My prediction for print media, therefore, is two-fold: you will see small run, local editions of hardbound books and quick, cheap paperbacks. Couple this with our new attitudes on the democratization of…

  • Social Publishing

    You’ll hear more about social publishing from me in the future, but this is too fresh to hesitate showing you. Richard Eoin Nash, former publisher of Soft Skull press, has been trying to rally interest for a social publishing start-up called Cursor. In this interview, he defines “social publishing”: 1) Define “social publishing” in terms…

  • There is something outside of the text

    To make a very long story short, I was a book lugging Luddite until about three years ago when I discovered that the internet was more than cats fiending after cheeseburgers. And, since then, I have become increasingly fascinated with digital culture’s scrolls and more than a little concerned about my friend, the codex. Over the next few days,…

  • Ebook Readers and Auto-Correcting Books

    With the growing prevalence of ebook readers that can be updated remotely–such as Amazon’s Kindle–could the time of the book riddled with errors be coming to an end? Errors are common in all forms of media, but it is mistakes in the printed word that are perhaps the most pernicious. Once a “fact” has been…

  • Entrepreneurial Reads and Annual Reads

    I’m a real sucker for book lists. Entrepreneurial Reads is a wiki list of suggested reading for entrepreneurs. The list contains books written specifically for entrepreneurs (e.g. The E-Myth Revisited) in addition to much fiction containing entrepreneurial lessons (e.g. The Fountainhead). That link came via What Books Are Worth Reading Once Per Year?–a post by…

  • A Guide to Speed Reading

    The PX Project is a single 3-hour “cognitive experiment” designed to increase your reading speed. Average increases using the technique are apparently in the region of 386%. The technique seems to involve three steps: Minimize the number and duration of fixations per line. Eliminate regression and back-skipping. Use conditioning drills to increase horizontal peripheral vision…

  • Free: Interview with Chris Anderson

    Whether you’ve read it or not, you’re undoubtedly aware that Chris Anderson, editor in chief of Wired and author of The Long Tail, has written a new book: Free. I haven’t read the book but can likely guess the premise—and given that the unabridged audiobook can be downloaded online I’ll no doubt be giving it a…

  • Books to Ignore

    Like timesink productivity websites, books written purely to instruct us what books to read are inherently counterproductive.  The Second Pass does the opposite, producing a list of ten ‘classic’ books not to read. White Noise by Don DeLillo Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel GarcĂ­a MĂĄrquez The Road by…

  • Art Direction for David Foster Wallace’s Books

    Marie Mundaca on her art direction for a number of David Foster Wallace’s books: It’s a little odd to design interiors for fiction and literary non-fiction. It’s just text—what is there to do? There are the obvious things, like leaving enough space at the margins. Basically, the designer’s job is to pick a font that…

  • Gödel, Escher, Bach Video Lectures

    Last year I pointed to MIT’s programme dedicated to Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach—the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on cognition that defies categorisation. Just to update you on GEB news; MIT have now produced a series of video lectures dedicated to the book. (6 lectures, each approx. 1 hour in length.) (I have a sort of love-hate…