Speed Reading With A High Tech Twist

Wish you could read more quickly? There’s an app for that. From Quill & Quire:

Boston-based tech company Spritz has developed a technology that replaces digital pages with quick-streaming text, thereby eliminating time-consuming “inefficient eye movements.” According to the company’s website, some test subjects were tracked reading 900 words per minute, thanks to a process referred to as “spritzing.” At that pace, the company claims Atlas Shrugged could be read in a day.

Read the full story here.

How “Book Porn” Has Saved the Book

Despite increasingly strident warnings over the last decade that the physical book is taking a dive, signs that the opposite is true continue to rise. The latest of these voices comes from PolicyMic with an article by Shan Wang called “How Book Porn is Actually Revolutionizing the Book World.” If you’re one of those who are tired of hearing all the doom and gloom around books and reading, this is one you’ll want to peek at:

Now more than ever, we are revering physical books and the places that carry them in what should be the unlikeliest of places — through websites with titles like "Book Porn" and "Library Porn," or through unusual mixed-media sites like "Fuck Yeah, Book Arts!" Want book-shaped bookends or boxers patterned with the spines of books? The "Book Fetish" section of Book Riot has you covered.

Truly, Wang reminds us, there’s lots of news about books and reading. And most of it is good:

These sites are also a welcome turn away from "saving" books to celebrating the very experience of reading, from browsing spines to discarding finished copies. And they're helping us read more.

The full piece is here.

Stephen King Tweeting

It hardly seems like it should be news. And yet.

On December 6th, iconic author Stephen King (Carrie, The Shining) uttered his first tweet:

“No longer a virgin,” King tweeted. “Be gentle!”

“On Twitter at last,” he tweeted later that day, “and can’t think of a thing to say. Some writer I turned out to be.”

Within 90 minutes, King had 30,000 followers. A few days later, nearly 175,000 followers.

King’s most recent novel, Dr. Sleep, was published by Scribner in September.

You can follow Stephen King on Twitter @StephenKing

Signing an Electronic Book? There’s An App for That… Soon

PatentlyApple.com reports that the US Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple Computers on September 26th that “reveals a new iBook autographing system and more specifically to techniques and systems for embedding autographs in electronic books.” From PatentlyApple:

Book signing is the affixing of a signature to the title page or flyleaf of a book by its author. A book signing is an event, usually at a bookstore or library where an author sits and signs books for a period. Book signing is popular because an author's signature increases the value of books for collectors. The author may add a short message to the reader, called a dedication, to each book, which may be personalized with the recipient's name upon request. Book signings provide more than a just a chance to obtain signatures. Authors and bookstores are benefited by the fact that many copies of the book being promoted are sold. Signings also increase public goodwill and allow authors to connect with their fans. For fans, signings give them a chance to see and meet a favorite author and ask them questions. In order for this process to have value in the digital world, Apple has invented this new advanced autographing system.

The challenge of getting author signatures into electronic books, or across the world digitally has been looked at before. Author Margaret Atwood began developing her Longpen system in 2004. The Longpen is now being developed by the Syngrafii Corporation of Toronto, where Atwood is on the board of directors.

Sex and the City Author Attacked by Pirate

It is every author’s worst nightmare and the embodiment of the industry’s worst fears.

On May 7th, a hacker calling himself Guccifer broke into Sex and the City author Candace Bushnell’s e-mail account and carried away a large portion of her unpublished novel, Killing Monica.  The manuscript had been attached to an outgoing message and sent to Bushnell’s publisher. And then things got worse. According to Techworld:

Extraordinarily, the hacker was also able to hack into the author’s Twitter account in order to post links to screengrabs of the book’s pages on a Google Drive repository before hijacking her website, making it a near clean sweep.

“Here you can read my last book ''killing monica'' first 50 pages; enjoy as long as you can!,” read the tweet on 7 May.

As though that weren’t bad enough, the attack continued:

Adding insult to injury, the attacker was also able to intercept between Bushnell and her agent as she tried to regain control of her Twitter account plus a number of private images and other personal messages.

“Oh dear this is terrible,” one of Bushnell’s emails reads.

This isn’t the first time Guccifer has struck. Techworld reports that he previous hacked into the e-mail accounts of friends and relatives of both former Presidents Bush, then leaking snippets of electronic conversations. Another time, he broke into the Facebook account of former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell.

“Since then,” says Techworld, “Guccifer has also reportedly attacked email accounts belonging to various high-profile individuals. That seems to be the logic; embarrass the wealthy and powerful.”

The Merging of Books and the Internet: Go Hard or Go Home

We live in a time when only the largest assertions get any attention. Go hard or go home. It may be silly, but it’s true. And you can make those big assertions and they can be empty because, a year from now? Pretty much no one besides Jon Stewart will remember what you said. So when Hugh McGuire of Pressbooks released the part of an upcoming book that says that books and the Internet will merge, he got a fair amount of attention. Even The Guardian sat up and quoted which is always a big, hairy deal.

McGuire’s rationale is not imperfect, but it is fatally flawed (sez me). It all began with a tweet McGuire made a year ago: “The distinction between ‘the internet’ & ‘books’ is totally totally arbitrary, and will disappear in 5 years. Start adjusting now.”

In Book: A Futurist’s Manifesto, to be published by O’Reilly (print) and Pressbooks (electronic) on March 22, McGuire explains further:

If you think about “books”—which are, more or less, collections of words, sentences, and images arranged in a particular way—and compare them to, say, websites—which are, more or less, collections of words, sentences, images, audio, and video, arranged in a particular way—there is a jarring distinction that presents itself. We have decided, for mostly historical reasons, that collections of words and sentences of one kind go into a “book” and collections of words and sentences of another kind go onto the “Internet.”

And while I get what he’s saying here, it isn’t quite as true as he makes it sound. Think, for instance, of people tooling around Stuttgart in Daimlers in the late 1800s. And someone says, “the ‘car’ and the ‘bicycle’ are the exact same thing: mark my words. The distinction between them will soon disappear.”

On one level, all of that is true. Both cars and bicycles have wheels. And you use both of them to get from one place to another. An argument could even be made for the mechanical skill involved in creating/building/maintaining them. And in both cases, you have to know what you’re doing, at least a little bit: you can’t just hop on.

But see, here we are, more than a century later and though there have been times when the technology has blended, we still have cars. We still have bikes. They are distinct. Unique. Separately important. And you can store them in the same place and think about them in the same way but they’re not ever going to be the same thing. And some of us? We need them both. ◊

Linda L. Richards is the editor of January Magazine and the author of several books.

Mapping the Path to a Literary Life

Though we’ve seen a lot of new technology aimed at booklovers over the last few years, perhaps nothing is likely to touch us in our reading life as acutely as the Book Drum World Map, an addictive site/technology that may well change the way we experience books and perhaps even the way we read them.

Billed as “the perfect companion to the books we love, bringing them to life with immersive pictures, videos, maps and music,” one of the things this might mean in the real world is that we’ll never get any work done again! In the Guardian, Alison Flood surrenders a few hours for a good cause:

Text and pictures illustrate each location, giving a whole new insight, for generally-desk-bound-me at least, into the Gulf of Mexico (The Old Man and the Sea), The Chrysalids (set in a post-apocalyptic Labrador), the Chatham Islands of Cloud Atlas and the Congo of The Poisonwood Bible. Its creators hope users will enjoy working out puzzles such as how close Bridget Jones and Fanny Price lived, and how far the Snow Goose would have to fly to reach Brave New World's lighthouse: I've been having fun searching for the most remote tags – from Svalbard, Philip Pullman's armoured bear island from Northern Lights, to Lord of the Flies, which gets its little red pin on an "uninhabited tropical island" in the middle of the Pacific.

This is interactive book-related content created by folks with a passion for same. The profile of each book includes page-by-page commentary and illustration of the text; description and illustration of the main places or themes of the book; foreign, invented and tricky words deciphered; an objective synopsis of the book as well as subjective analysis and evaluation of the book and biographical information, interview videos, links and photos of the author.

You can experience the Book Drum World Map for yourself here and taste Flood’s take on it in the Guardian here.