oblique

Benjamin Markovits is the author of six books: The Syme Papers,...

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:02:56 +0200

Benjamin Markovits is the author of six books: The Syme Papers, Either Side of Winter and Playing Days as well as a trilogy on the life of Lord Byron — Imposture, A Quiet Adjustment, and Childish Loves. He is also the only Granta Best of Young Novelists who is known to be able to dunk. In this podcast with Yuka Igarashi, he discusses his time playing minor-league basketball for a team in southern Germany, and the ways in which this and his other experiences inform his work as a writer. He also talks about his new novel, extracted in the issue, about a group of university friends who get involved in a scheme to regenerate Detroit.

Watt 3,14 al Salone del libro di Torino. Anteprima nazionale.

Wed, 15 May 2013 00:10:00 +0200

Watt 3,14 al Salone del libro di Torino. Anteprima nazionale.

salone off -- Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino -- Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino

Sat, 11 May 2013 12:55:42 +0200

salone off -- Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino -- Salone Internazionale del Libro di Torino

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Mon, 06 May 2013 17:48:59 +0200

Si parla di 8x8 su "la Repubblica".

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:27:57 +0200

Si parla di 8x8 su "la Repubblica".:

Raffaella De Santis parla di 8x8 su “la Repubblica” per fare un discorso più generale sulTalent show dei libri.

Jakuta Alikavazovic, La bionda e il bunker, illustrazione di...

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 13:03:31 +0100

Jakuta Alikavazovic, La bionda e il bunker, illustrazione di Guido Scarabottolo, art direction Silvana Amato, 66thand2nd. Traduzione di Elena Sacchini

Denis Lachaud, Imparo il tedesco, 66thand2nd, traduzione di...

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:03:32 +0100

Denis Lachaud, Imparo il tedesco, 66thand2nd, traduzione di Sergio Claudio Perroni

Le cose brutte non esistono, il trailer

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 18:18:00 +0100

‎#189libri di Silvana Amato, domenica 10 mar ore 18,...

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 10:39:29 +0100

‎#189libri di Silvana Amato, domenica 10 mar ore 18, inaugurazione, galleria angelica, via s.agostino 13.

Caroline Lunoir su Radio Capital.

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 12:01:48 +0100

Caroline Lunoir su Radio Capital.

La ricerca di Alfonso Duro. Riccardo Romani, Le cose brutte...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 11:15:47 +0100

La ricerca di Alfonso Duro.

Riccardo Romani, Le cose brutte non esistono, 66thand2nd

Il tour di Caroline Lunoir.

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 11:02:49 +0100

Il tour di Caroline Lunoir.

Le cose brutte non esistono, Riccardo Romani, 66thand2nd. Art...

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 11:52:00 +0100

Le cose brutte non esistono, Riccardo Romani, 66thand2nd.

Art direction: Silvana Amato.

Illustrazione di Fabian Negrin.

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Mon, 04 Feb 2013 23:49:37 +0100

Come leggeremo?

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 01:07:52 +0100

fndgs:

This post is part of “How We Will Read,” an interview series exploring the future of books from the perspectives of publishers, writers, and intellectuals. Read our kickoff post with Steven Johnson here. And check out our new homepage, a captivating new way to explore Findings.

This week, we were extremely honored to speak to Internet intellectual Clay Shirky, writer, teacher, and consultant on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. Clay is a professor at the renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU and author of two books, most recently Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.

Clay is one of the foremost minds studying the evolution of Internet culture. He is also a dedicated writer and reader, and it was natural that we would ask him to contribute to our series to hear what he could teach us about social reading. Clay is both brilliant and witty, able to weave in quotes from Robert Frost in one breath and drop a “ZOMG” in the next. So sit down and take notes: Professor Shirky’s about to speak.

How is publishing changing?

Publishing is not evolving. Publishing is going away. Because the word “publishing” means a cadre of professionals who are taking on the incredible difficulty and complexity and expense of making something public. That’s not a job anymore. That’s a button. There’s a button that says “publish,” and when you press it, it’s done.

In ye olden times of 1997, it was difficult and expensive to make things public, and it was easy and cheap to keep things private. Privacy was the default setting. We had a class of people called publishers because it took special professional skill to make words and images visible to the public. Now it doesn’t take professional skills. It doesn’t take any skills. It takes a Wordpress install.

The question isn’t what happens to publishing — the entire category has been evacuated. The question is, what are the parent professions needed around writing? Publishing isn’t one of them. Editing, we need, desperately. Fact-checking, we need. For some kinds of long-form texts, we need designers. Will we have a movie-studio kind of setup, where you have one class of cinematographers over here and another class of art directors over there, and you hire them and put them together for different projects, or is all of that stuff going to be bundled under one roof? We don’t know yet. But the publishing apparatus is gone. Even if people want a physical artifact — pipe the PDF to a printing machine. We’ve already seen it happen with newspapers and the printer. It is now, or soon, when more people will print the New York Times holding down the “print” button than buy a physical copy.

The original promise of the e-book was not a promise to the reader, it was a promise to the publisher: “We will design something that appears on a screen, but it will be as inconvenient as if it were a physical object.” This is the promise of the portable document format, where data goes to die, as well.

Institutions will try to preserve the problem for which they are the solution. Now publishers are in the business not of overcoming scarcity but of manufacturing demand. And that means that almost all innovation in creation, consumption, distribution and use of text is coming from outside the traditional publishing industry.

What is the future of reading? How can we make it more social?

One of the things that bugs me about the Kindle Fire is that for all that I didn’t like the original Kindle, one of its greatest features was that you couldn’t get your email on it. There was an old saying in the 1980s and 1990s that all applications expand to the point at which they can read email. An old geek text editor, eMacs, had added a capability to read email inside your text editor. Another sign of the end times, as if more were needed. In a way, this is happening with hardware. Everything that goes into your pocket expands until it can read email.

But a book is a “momentary stay against confusion.” This is something quoted approvingly by Nick Carr, the great scholar of digital confusion. The reading experience is so much more valuable now than it was ten years ago because it’s rarer. I remember, as a child, being bored. I grew up in a particularly boring place and so I was bored pretty frequently. But when the Internet came along it was like, “That’s it for being bored! Thank God! You’re awake at four in the morning? So are thousands of other people!”

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Wed, 26 Dec 2012 01:30:07 +0100

La bellezza delle fonti

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 18:26:37 +0100

La bellezza delle fonti

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Thu, 13 Dec 2012 11:27:53 +0100

Ecco 8x8, edizione 2013

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 17:40:40 +0100

Cosa si dice di WATT.

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 11:59:35 +0100

Cosa si dice di WATT.