Nicholas Carr's Blog, page 38

The web expands to fill all boredom

Clay Shirky says: 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!" It was only later that I realized the value of being bored was actually pretty high. Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment. But now it is an act of significant discipline to say, "I'm going to stare out the window. I'm going to schedule some time to stare out the window." The endless gratification offered up by our devices means that the experience of reading in particular now becomes something we have to choose to do. "Being bored is a kind of diagnostic for the gap between what you might be interested in and your current environment": that's well put. We don't like being bored because boredom is the absence of engaging stimulus,...

A history of the future of the book

On the afternoon of Saturday, April 14, I will be giving a talk, "The Book as Gadget: The Rise of E-Readers and E-Reading," at the Newberry Library in Chicago. The lecture is part of the Newberry's History of the Book series. It's free and open to the public, but you have to register in advance. Details are here....

Spinelessness

One thing I'm going to miss about the print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, now that it's been consigned to the dumpster of history, is the spines - all 45 of them, ranked across the shelf like stoic beefeaters. They're handsome things, somehow managing to be imposing and inviting at the same time. But the best part is that each one is branded with a pair of index words, there to tell you where the volume begins and where it ends. You thus get a bunch of almost-random two-word phrases to conjure with. Some don't rise above their functionality: India Ireland, for instance, or Accounting Architecture. But others open up new and unexpected territory to wander in. Here, for the record, are some of my favorites: Freon Holderlin (a man I'd like to meet, despite his reputation for coldness) Menage Ottawa (a perfect oxymoron) Chicago Death (Jack White's new side project) Light Metabolism (what the Theory of Everything, once discovered, will be called) Excretion Geometry (a field understood by only seven people in the world) Arctic Biosphere (Freon Holderlin lives here, according to rumor) Krasnokamsk Menadra (when I take up meditation, this will be what I chant) And my favoritemost...

Big Datum

"Facts are collected indiscriminately by the naive empiricist, who lives in fear of missing the one fact that will give meaning to the rest. His fear is justified; that fact will never be found." -Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel...

Bring back Google Scholar!

I realize that Larry Page is on a crusade to dumb down Google in order to compete more effectively with Facebook (exhibit 1: Google Search Plus Your World), but was it really necessary to remove Google Scholar, one of the company's most useful services, from the search-options drop-down menu on search results pages? A couple of months ago, Google actually expanded the choices appearing on that menu, in a ham-fisted attempt to promote more of its services, but it deleted the Scholar option: The menu is now a confusing mishmash of options to refine searches (e.g., Books, Photos) and links that whisk you over to landing pages for Google services (e.g., Wallet, Offers). But to get to Scholar, you have to click on the Even More link, then scroll down through a dog's breakfast of obscure Google products, click on the Google Scholar link, and then (since Google doesn't bother to remember what you were searching for in the first place), retype your keywords into the Google Scholar search box. What a kludge. In addition to the drop-down menu, Google also lards its search results pages with two other search-options menus - the one that runs across the top, in...

Five books

I had the pleasure recently of being interviewed, by Alec Ash, for The Browser's excellent "Five Books" series, in which one writer talks about five books written by other writers. The theme of my interview was the Information Age, which I think had its origins back in the fifteenth century, with the arrival of the mechanical clock and the invention of the printing press, and the five books I chose to talk about were Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet, James Gleick's The Information, Tim Wu's The Master Switch, Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft, and Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story. You can read the interview here....

More on book bundling

Following up on my earlier post suggesting that publishers include a free copy of an ebook with a sale of a print book, here's a piece from Publishers Weekly reviewing some of the pros and cons of book bundling as well as a response from a publisher. Both pieces quote Bloomsbury USA sales exec Evan Schnittman, who argues that an e/print bundle could be sold for a higher price than a print book alone. I don't see that approach making much of a dent in the marketplace (who wants to pay more for a book at this point?); in fact, it might well backfire (by making readers even more sensitive to the price premium of printed books, particularly hard covers, in comparison to ebooks). For bundling to make a strategic difference to publishers, the ebook would need to be a freebie, for the reasons I outlined earlier....

Don't say you weren't warned

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke published a collection of prophetic writings called Profiles of the Future. His intent, he wrote in an introduction, was not "to describe the future, but to define the boundaries within which possible futures must lie." In one chapter he predicted the creation of a high-speed worldwide communications network (he thought it would be satellite-based) and discussed some of its probable consequences. The physical mail system, he wrote, would be replaced by "an orbital post office," which "will probably make airmail obsolete in the quite near future." The new system will "of course" raise "problems of privacy," though these "might be solved by robot handling at all stages of the operation." The revolution in communication won't be limited to correspondence, though: "Perhaps a decade beyond the orbital post office lies something even more startling - the orbital newspaper." News reports would come to be transmitted to video screens in homes. To get "your daily paper," you'd need only "press the right button." Moreover, each reader would be able to create a personalized bundle of stories: "We will select what we need, and ignore the rest, thus saving whole forests for posterity. The orbital newspaper will have...

Words in stone and on the wind

After I wrote, in a recent Wall Street Journal article, about the malleability of text in electronic books, a reader asked me to flesh out my thoughts about the different ways that "typographical fixity" - to again borrow Elizabeth Eisenstein's term - can manifest itself in a book. I've been thinking about that and have come up with four categories of fixity or stability - not all of which are typographical in nature - that influence the permanence of a book (or other written work) and that change, sometimes radically, as we shift from print publishing to electronic publishing. I'm sure this isn't a complete list, but I hope it's a useful start: Integrity of the page. At the simplest and most fundamental level, typographical fixity means that when you have a page printed in ink, you're able to trust that the page will maintain its integrity; when you pick it up tomorrow, or twenty years from now, its contents will be the same as what you see today. The printing press didn't create this type of fixity - it was there with the scribal book, the scroll, and certainly the stone tablet - but it did extend it into...

Saint Zuck

"Facebook was not originally created to be a company," writes Mark Zuckerberg at the start of his letter to would-be shareholders in the company's IPO filing. "It was built to accomplish a social mission — to make the world more open and connected." Hosanna! One of the great things about our newly transparent world is that we can peer into people's pasts - I mean, their timelines - and see what they were doing and thinking way back when. And when you scroll Zuckerberg's timeline back to Facebook's formative days, you do indeed see a young man filled with philanthropic fervor, a man without worldly desires who is putting his heart and his soul into a grand social mission. Just look at what Zuckerberg was doing, as a sophomore at Harvard, in the days just before he created Facebook. Working selflessly at his computer in his dorm, he created a site called Facemash. It pulled photos of Harvard undergrads from other campus sites, put two of the photos side by side on a web page, and allowed people to vote for which of the two was the "hottest." It then tallied the votes to create lists ranking students by their...