Category: Ebooks
-
Monographic Experiments
For some time now (and more pressing recently) I have been exploring the possible future of the monograph, of the academic book, in the Humanities. The transition of this tangible medium to a digital environment is one that is (necessarily) slow and cumbersome, due to its strong ties to traditions, habits, practices and honor and…
-
Remix online for free
Lawrence Lessig has announced the release of the free Creative Commons licensed download version of his book Remix from Bloomsbury Academic on his blog. Bloomsbury Academic is a new imprint from Bloomsbury (yep, the one from Harry Potter), led by renowned publisher Frances Pinter. I have written about Pinter and the Bloomsbury model before…
-
Business is boring
Via RethinkingMedia I came upon this lecture (in Dutch, sorry) by Martijn Aslander from Lifehacking.nl in which he talks about bookhacking. Although his lecture is filled with hip marketing one-liners, he does give a clear overview of how an online business model based on the giving away of free content could work. As he shows,…
-
Krisis re-emerges from the ashes
I never burned books. Not as a ritual after graduation; not as a Dadaistic attempt to enstage some kind of surreal happening; not as a way to cleanse my soul from feelings of materialistic belongings. No. Books are holy to me. I would probably not even be able to burn a book (though I could…
-
Highlights from APM – Day 2
The second day of the Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean region (APM) conference started with a session (entitled Strength in numbers) on cooperation between and the (future) role of university presses. The first speaker was Roman Schmidt (Sens Public, editor-in-chief of crossXwords), who, in his very inspiring lecture entitled Request for comments: discussing the…
-
Highlights from APM – Day 1
Last week, on the 19th and 20th of March, the first Academic Publishing in the Mediterranean Region (APM) conference was held, an offshoot of the APE (Academic Publishing in Europe) conference, which was held for the fourth time last January in Berlin. Both conferences want to transgress the traditional sectoral boundaries that exist in…
-
Ancient texts in new worlds
I am now the proud owner of number 167 of the hand-bound limited second edition of Anthony Grafton’s little booklet called Codex in crisis. The colophon states amongst others: Cover paper Neenah Classic Laid in Peppered Bronze Text paper Mohawk Superfine in Bright White Flyleaf paper Frazier Pegasus in Black Codex…
-
Nails and Books
Happy days for Creative Commons and NIN! Trent Reznor managed to make a huge profit selling his bands 2008 album Ghosts I-IV online, topping Amazon’s best selling list for 2008. Strange enough, the album was legally available for free at the same time (even on the same website). This nice article over at Ars Technica…
-
Science Commons Video
Today Science Commons, a subdivision of the larger Creative Commons non-profit organization, launched a short video explaining what Science Commons stands for. Science Commons, headed by John Wilbanks, is a project that tries to improve scientific communication and research by making a plea to lower access barriers and to free locked-up research results. They want…
-
Lesesucht
Two weeks ago I went to a conference organized by Stichting Lezen, the Dutch organization for reading promotion. The conference was entitled Reading and watching and focused on the differences between the written word and the image: what does the written word have that images don’t? The keynote speaker was Hungarian writer György Konrád, who…
-
The Universal Library
With the launch a few days ago of Europeana, the new European digital library which serves as a portal to the rich diversity of European cultural heritage (from archival materials to books, movies, photographs and much more), the ideal of the universal library seems to be gaining ground again (not withstanding the fact that Europeana…