19 JUL 2014 by ideonexus
The Decline in Reading is Because of Limited Time
With e-books becoming more dominant and less money coming into the industry, the bookstores die (they're already highly marginal now). With bookstores' death, so go the publishers (after all, any established author will make more money from self-publishing and now the *one* (incredibly important) thing the publishers offer - shelf space - is gone).
With publishers gone, we all essentially become slush pile readers. The books are nearly free, but the constraint is *time*, not money, and with ... 1 
notes
notesNot money, time is a limited resource.
30 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Reading a Novel Causes a Temporary Boost in Brain Power
We sought to determine whether reading a novel causes measurable changes in resting-state connectivity of the brain and how long these changes persist. Incorporating a within-subjects design, participants received resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging scans on 19 consecutive days. First, baseline resting state data for a “washin” period were taken for each participant for 5 days. For the next 9 days, participants read 1/9th of a novel during the evening and resting-state dat... 1 notes
notesStudy finds that reading an engaging novel that puts the reader in the perspective of another person creates new brain connections that last for days, but the effect is not reproduced in ebooks.
19 DEC 2013 by ideonexus
Accelerating Knowledge
The rate at which man has been storing up useful knowledge about himself and the universe
has been spiraling upward for 10,000 years. The rate took a sharp upward leap with the
invention of writing, but even so it remained painfully slow over centuries of time. The next
great leap forward in knowledge—acquisition did not occur until the invention of movable
type in the fifteenth century by Gutenberg and others. Prior to 1500, by the most optimistic
estimates, Europe was producing books at a...
1 Toffler describes and quantifies the increasing production of information in human civilization and its implications.
12 APR 2013 by ideonexus
The Early Days of the Printing Press was Like the Early WWW
As was the case during the early days of the World Wide Web, however, the quality of the information was highly varied. While the printing press paid almost immediate dividends in the production of higher quality maps,10 the bestseller list soon came to be dominated by heretical religious texts and pseudoscientific ones.11 Errors could now be mass-produced, like in the so-called Wicked Bible, which committed the most unfortunate typo in history to the page: thou shalt commit adultery.12 Meanw...
2 The glut of books produced a situation of "too much information" similar to the one produced by the world wide web.
12 JUL 2012 by ideonexus
Neil deGrasse Tyson's Reading List
1.) The Bible (eBook) - “to learn that it’s easier to be told by others what to think and believe than it is to think for yourself.”
2.) The System of the World by Isaac Newton (eBook) – “to learn that the universe is a knowable place.”
3.) On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin (eBook – Audio Book) - “to learn of our kinship with all other life on Earth.”
4.) Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift (eBook – Audio Book) – “to learn, among other satiric... 1 notes
notesEight books everyone should read to understand the forces at work in the world.
12 JUN 2012 by ideonexus
Ink VS Gunpowder
Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries. Folksonomies: books
Folksonomies: books
Gunpowder can only explode once, books explode for centuries.
13 DEC 2011 by ideonexus
Francis Bacon on Approaching Books
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; other to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books; else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a fu... 1 notes
notesThe different relationships we have with different kinds of books. A very eloquent passage.
18 MAY 2011 by ideonexus
Books Changed Everything
For 99 per cent of the tenure of humans on earth, nobody could
read or write. The great invention had not yet been made. Except
for first-hand experience, almost everything we knew was passed
on by word of mouth. As in the game of 'Chinese Whispers', over
tens and hundreds of generations, information would slowly be
distorted and lost.
Books changed all that. Books, purchasable at low cost, permit
us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of
our species; to understand ... 1 notes
notesThey made it possible to interrogate the past, see other view points, and communication across time.
06 APR 2011 by ideonexus
No Book Will Be an Island
Yet the common vision of the library's future (even the e-book future) assumes that books will remain isolated items, independent from one another, just as they are on shelves in your public library. There, each book is pretty much unaware of the ones next to it. When an author completes a work, it is fixed and finished. Its only movement comes when a reader picks it up to animate it with his or her imagination. In this vision, the main advantage of the coming digital library is portability ...Kevin Kelly new media prediction that echoes why I use MemexPlex for logging my research.
