The Tower of Babel
Cities live and breathe. As I wrote in a post last week on Social Media, cities are no more artificial [technological] than the hives of bees. As we go about our daily lives [mostly unconsciously,] we psycho-drift from block to block through neighborhoods that we know well, in amongst communities that have [...]
It’s that time again, time for my annual Summer Reading List, and this year’s is the biggest yet. As always, I asked several of my friends and colleagues for their recommendations — including newcomers Daniel Pinchbeck, Steve Aylett, Ian MacKaye, Mike Daily, Paul Saffo, Gareth Branwyn, Rodger Bridges, and Peter Lunenfeld, as [...]
Wired Editor in Chief and Author of The Long Tail, Chris Anderson has a new start-up called BookTour. It’s a 2.0-enabled site designed to connect authors, readers, and publishing industry types. The hype copy reads,“In just a few minutes any author can create a page showcasing their biography, books, and upcoming engagements. Listing new events [...]
Richard Nash from Soft Skull Press sent out a link to this speech by Mike Shatzkin on “The Future of Books for Publishers and Booksellers,” calling it “dead-on.” There are certainly some key insights here: the vertical arrangement of publishing online (as opposed to the horizontality of old-school publishing), acknowledgment of the file as the [...]
The man who has led The Fall for 32 years, a man of much notoriety Mark E Smith, has his book Renegade: The Lives and Tales of Mark E Smith, published on April 24th in the UK. No USA release date is available. There’s an extract on the Guardian’s web site which gives you a [...]
My post about musicians and the concept of “free” music on the internet is now followed here by news of an actual free book online, as in giving it away for free. Chris Anderson wrote on his blog about how Oprah Winfrey gave away Suze Orman’s book “Women and Money.” The interesting point to this [...]
The Champagne Bar, St Pancras, London
Roy Christopher’s comment about my Pownce post yesterday led me via his web site over to the Powell’s Books Blog and a post from the author Neil Strauss. What caught my eye in one of his posts was his experience of the book tour and its similarity to a rock [...]
Friend and fellow traveler Mark Pesce sent me a link this morning to a documentary called Good Copy Bad Copy regarding the current state of copyright and digital culture. As my own piece on the topic does, Good Copy Bad Copy sites Danger Mouse’s Grey Album as the event horizon for the situation (i.e., The [...]