Adactio: Links

ET Book · Edward Tufte on GitHub

I’ve always loved the way that Edward Tufte consistently uses Bembo to typeset his books. Here’s a version made for screen and freely licensed.

Bots | A Working Library

Absolutely brilliant stuff from Mandy (again). A long hard at today’s tech industry’s narrow approach to bots and artificial intelligence compared to some far more interesting and imaginative approaches in fiction:

Ann Leckie’s superb Imperial Radch series,
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Aurora, and
Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.

So in addition to frightening ramifications for privacy and information discovery, they also reinforce gendered stereotypes about women as servants. The neutral politeness that infects them all furthers that convention: women should be utilitarian, performing their duties on command without fuss or flourish. This is a vile, harmful, and dreadfully boring fantasy; not the least because there is so much extraordinary art around AI that both deconstructs and subverts these stereotypes. It takes a massive failure of imagination to commit yourself to building an artificial intelligence and then name it “Amy.”

Future Simple Steps - where to find your favourite ex-Five Simple Steps authors and their books

Now that Five Simple Steps has closed down, the individual authors are in charge of distributing their own books. This site links to all of those books.

getify/You-Dont-Know-JS

Graham—whose opinion I trust completely—has been raving about these books. And Kyle Simpson is a super-smart guy. So I reckon I should make these JavaScript tomes my holiday reading.

Translating Gender: Ancillary Justice in Five Languages Alex Dally MacFarlane | Interfictions Online

A fascinating look into the challenges encountered translating Anne Leckie’s excellent Radchaai novels into Bulgarian, German, Hebrew, Japanese, and Hungarian.

What is clear in all of these responses is that by examining the notions of ‘neutral’ and ‘feminine’ in grammar and gender through the lens of translation, we reveal their complexity – and some of their possible futures in languages, in both literature and speech.

How To Organise Your Library

John expands on just one part of his superbly dense and entertaining dConstruct talk.

Russell Davies: Unbooked: How to live mindfully in a literate world

The many benefits of an analogue detox. There’s neuroscience and everything.

It’s so important that we take the time to connect and switch on.

Future Library – Framtidsbiblioteket

Here’s a lovely project with an eye on the Long Now. Trees that were planted last year will be used to make paper to print an anthology in 2114.

Margaret Atwood is one of the contributors.

Penguin Classics - Take the Little Black Classics for a spin

A cute way of exploring a collection of classic works.

Perf.Rocks

A collection of performance resources: articles, tools, talks, and books.

Powerful Ideas Need Love Too!

Alan Kay’s written remarks to a Joint Hearing of the Science Committee and the Economic and Educational and Opportunites Committee in October 1995.

Singularity&Co. — Save the Scifi!

The campaign to restore out-of-print pulp sci-fi books in electronic formats.

Brian Aldiss: ‘These days I don’t read any science fiction. I only read Tolstoy’ | Books | The Guardian

A profile of Brian Aldiss in The Guardian.

I still can’t quite believe I managed to get him for last year’s Brighton SF.

A Book Apart, New store discounts and bundle options

This is a great idea from A Book Apart—the more different books you buy at the same time, the more of a discount you get.

Got to get ‘em all!

Iain M Banks’ Universe

Francis Spufford—author of the excellent Backroom Boffins—writes a cover story for the New Humanist magazine remembering Iain Banks with the middle initial M firmly to the fore: it was Iain M Banks—and his creation, The Culture—that took the seemingly passé genre of space opera to new heights.

A Book Apart celebrates its third anniversary

Aw, my l’il ol’ book is three years old!

To celebrate, you can get 15% off any title from A Book Apart with this discount code for the next few days: HAPPY3RD.

Support Scrunchup

If you’re coming along to the Responsive Day Out and you’ve got some tech books you no longer need, bring them along. We’ll collect them and distribute them to schools.

Jan V. White

Eight of Jan White’s excellent books on graphic design are now available for free online, licensed under CC0 …they’re in the public domain now.

All he asks in return is that you might buy one of his books still in print, and maybe make a donation to the Internet Archive.

Jan V. White is a mensch.

YOU CHOSE WRONG

Documenting all the ways you could die in a choose-your-own-adventure book.

The Humble eBook Bundle (pay what you want and help charity)

This looks like an excellent deal: buy eight sci-fi books for as much money as you think is fair. Lauren Beukes, Paolo Bacigalupi, Cory Doctorow …all good stuff.

Five Simple Steps - Pocket Guides

These short pocketbooks from Five Simple Steps look like they’ll be very handy indeed. Shame they won’t be available in dead-tree format: I bet they’d be really cute.

An e-reader is more like a book than you think | Books | The Observer

James muses on the physicality of ebooks in this week’s Observer.

Platforming Books — by Craig Mod

Craig describes the many different ways he’s publishing his book, including putting the whole thing on the web for free:

Why do this? I strongly believe digital books benefit from public endpoints. The current generation of readers (human, not electronic) have formed expectations about sharing text, and if you obstruct their ability to share — to touch — digital text, then your content is as good as non-existent. Or, in the least, it’s less likely to be engaged.

I also believe that we will sell more digital and physical copies of Art Space Tokyo by having all of the content available online.

The Publication Standards Project

Like the Web Standards Project but for ePub. I approve of this message.

2012 Shortlist | Arthur C. Clarke Award

Well, that’s my reading list sorted then.

Marginalized

Notes in manuscripts and colophons made by medieval scribes and copyists …in 140 characters or fewer.

Albatros - The bookmark following any journey

Well, this looks clever: a self-updating bookmark (that’s an actual bookmark for books, not browsers).

A Book Apart, 2011 Holiday Bundle

The perfect Christmas gift for the web geek in your life: get a discount of 30% when you buy all six books apart.

Welcome to Small Demons

Turning text into hypertext. Pivot on people, places and things mentioned in books. I really, really like this.

The New Value of Text | booktwo.org

A rallying cry from James: since when did we decide that text couldn’t stand by itself without extra layers of “interactive” shininess?

The shape of our future book — Satellite — Craig Mod

Craig has written down his dConstruct talk, the one that completely polarised opinion. Personally, I loved it.

Post-Artifact Books and Publishing — by Craig Mod

Take some time out to read this. Read all of this. Craig’s thoughts on the nature of publishing today:

Digital’s effect on how we produce, distribute and consume content.

Why Preserve Books? The New Physical Archive of the Internet Archive | Internet Archive Blogs

Brewster Kahle explains how and why the Internet Archive is keeping physical copies of the books it digitises.

Out of this World: China Miéville: what if?

China Miéville gives a rundown of some underrated classics of the alternative history subgenre …including Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill.

Google can’t be trusted with our books | Simon Barron | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

The threat to Google Videos shows businesses are not suitable cultural custodians — they can’t be held accountable to the public.

Cranking | 43 Folders

I got your work/life balance right here. Merlin means it, man.

I love him.

The Technium: What Books Will Become

Kevin Kelly asks “What is a book?” and provides some thought-provoking answers. There’s some inspiring crystal-ball gazing in here.

New Titles in Lending Library! « The Open Library Blog

You can now borrow HTML5 For Web Designers through the Open Library. Nice one, George!

James Bridle on Phare Conference on Vimeo

Everything is worth preserving and protecting.

YouTube - TOC 2011: James Bridle, “The Condition of Music”

James’s talk from Tools Of Change. Great stuff!

Publishing Experiences | booktwo.org

I wish I could’ve attended James’s talk at Tools of Change. It sounds like it was great.

The Malcolm Gladwell Book Generator

This is kind of mean, but it made me laugh. Out loud.

Dreams of Space - Books and Ephemera

A blog documenting printed visions of space exploration in the form of children's books.

Once Upon a Title

Pervy little stories made entirely from children's book titles.

Welcome to Open Library! (Open Library)

One web page for every book. I love this project.

Walter Benjamin’s Aura: Open Bookmarks and the future eBook | booktwo.org

James Bridle propsed Open Bookmarks during a presentation at Tools of Change in Frankfurt today: "Open Bookmarks is not a thing, it’s a proposal, a flag in the ground. We need to agree on a way of sharing and storing annotations and bookmarks, reading attention data and everything around the book: that aura."

Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus? | Culture | Religion Dispatches

A fascinating look at hypertext in illuminated manuscripts.

These Golden Books Are Not For Children - Humor - Kotaku

Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

NYRblog - Atwood in the Twittersphere - The New York Review of Books

Margaret Atwood is all kinds of wonderful.

Books in the Age of the iPad

A detailed look at traditional and digital publishing, considered from the content out.

Andy Ihnatko's Celestial Waste of Bandwidth (BETA) » Analog IMDB

A medium-zoom view of shifts in publishing.

A Democracy of Netbooks

The bottom-up appeal of netbooks in all their cheap, crappy glory.

cyoa

An in-depth study mapping all the permutations in "choose your own adventure" books.

Smell of Books

An aerosol e-book enhancer.

Bookkake — Dirty Books

Best. Appropriate domain name. Ever.

Hamish Hamilton: Five Dials

A beautiful PDF literary magazine, designed to be printed out and read away from the computer. I'd still love to see an HTML version.

Eucalyptus: The Library, to go – on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

This looks like a nice book reading app.

kewlchops: A new leaf.

The perfect person for the job—George will be working on the Internet Archive's Open Library project: a webpage for every book ever published.

How the E-Book Will Change the Way We Read and Write - WSJ.com

A good piece from Steven Johnson on the future of e-books but alas, it completely ignores DRM which is a show-stopper to the bright future he imagines.

Letterpress books, posters &c. - a set on Flickr

A lovely set of letterpress printing

BBC NEWS | Technology | Bruce Sterling - Prophet and loss

I know this sound uncharitable but there's a good chance that the reason why Bruce Sterling's books aren't selling is because he's just not a very good writer. And I say that as a big sci-fi fan. I mean, really... have you read Distraction? I tried ...and failed.