"An e-book, I realized, is far different from an old-fashioned printed one,” writes Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, in the Wall Street Journal. “The words in the latter stay put. In the former, the words can keep changing, at the whim of the author or anyone else with access to the source file. The endless malleability of digital writing promises to overturn a whole lot of our assumptions about publishing.”

Carr’s own experience with editing an e-book that has already been published allowed him to speculate on the future of publishing and what it might mean for the idea of “the book.” Text is forever maleable. “Beyond giving writers a spur to eloquence, what the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein calls “typographical fixity” served as a cultural preservative,” he writes. “It helped to protect original documents from corruption, providing a more solid foundation for the writing of history. It established a reliable record of knowledge, aiding the spread of science. It accelerated the standardization of everything from language to law. The preservative qualities of printed books, Ms. Eisenstein argues, may be the most important legacy of Gutenberg’s invention.”

How authors conceive of book topics and their approach to subject both may change in profound ways once the idea of writing for the digital page becomes fully formed. What happens to prose when it doesn’t have to be your final word? Carr writes, “Not long before he died, John Updike spoke eloquently of a book’s “edges,” the boundaries that give shape and integrity to a literary work and that for centuries have found their outward expression in the indelibility of printed pages. It’s those edges that give a book its solidity, allowing it to stand up to the vagaries of fashion and the erosions of time. And it’s those edges that seem fated to blur as the words of books go from being stamped permanently on sheets of paper to being rendered temporarily on flickering screens.”

Harvard University is establishing its own digital library of the world, and it will rival the work that Google is doing. From the Boston Globe:

“Who will control knowledge in the future?

“So far, the most likely answer to that question has been a private company: Google. Since 2004 Google Books has been scanning books and putting them online; the company says it has already scanned more than 15 million. Google estimates there are about 130 million books in the world, and by 2020, it plans to have scanned them all.

“Now, however, a competitor may be emerging. Last year, Robert Darnton, a cultural historian and director of Harvard University’s library system, began to raise the prospect of creating a public digital library. This library would include the digitized collections of the country’s great research institutions, but it would also bring in other media - video, music, film - as well as the collection of Web pages maintained by the Internet Archive.”

How to store your books in a small home. Courtesy of Bookshelf: “Designer Sallie Trout built shelves in an inaccessible stairwell. She reaches them by using a bosun’s chair that is fastened to a chain hoist hanging from the ceiling above.”

I can’t wait to get back to the U.S. Open later this summer. In the interest of making a more emotional connection between players and their fans, the Womens Tennis Association just launched its campaign called “Strong is Beautiful.” From the Times’ story about the campaign:

“This is a global sport and this is about celebrating our next generation of stars,” said Stacey Allaster, chief executive of the W.T.A. She said the campaign aimed to convert “peripheral fans” who watch only a couple of major tournaments into diehards who follow the entire women’s tennis tour, which includes more than 50 events. Having players talk about their backgrounds, aspirations and drive will hook fans, Ms. Allaster said.”

It has been said practically since it was first developed that the codex is on a march toward extinction. Yet, for the first time in history e-books have outsold print. Maybe this time, it’s true, writes Ben Ehrenreich in the Los Angeles Times.

"None of this is new of course.  Nor is it new to point out that people have been diagnosing—and celebrating—the book’s imminent demise for generations.  It is possible to regard much of Western avant garde poetry and prose as an extended argument with the bound pages from which literature would prefer to break free. In a 1913 manifesto, Filippo Marinetti (a futurist of the OG sort) called for “a typographic revolution directed against the idiotic and nauseating concepts of the outdated and conventional book.” His insurrectionary program may now seem quaint—“on the same page we will use three or four colors of ink, or even twenty typefaces if necessary”—but Marinetti was not alone in rebelling against the uniformity imposed on language by the standard typeset page.  Similar urges ran through most of the high modernists, certainly through Stein, Joyce, and Pound, and through the iconoclastic American poet and journalist Robert Carlton Brown (better known as Bob), who, in the late 1920s, envisioned a reading machine designed to liberate words from the static confines of the page. Brown imagined something like a desk-sized microfiche reader capable of displaying spooled celluloid texts called “readies.” ”Writing has been bottled up in books since the start,” he wrote.  ”It is time to pull out the stopper.”

This is my favorite paragraph from Ehrenreich’s well-written essay: “It is perhaps a symptom of print’s decline that the current conversation about the book’s demise has forgotten all these other ones.  Instead we shuttle between two equally hollow poles: goofball digital boosterism a la Negroponte on one side and on the other a helpless, anguished nostalgia for the good old days of papercuts.  Call it bibilionecrophilia: the retreat of the print-faithful into a sort of autistic fetishization of the book-as-object—as if Jeff Bezos could be convinced to lay e-profits aside by recalling for a moment the soft, woody aroma of a yellow-paged Grove Press paperback; as if there were nothing more to books than paper, ink, and glue.”

New York Times media columnist David Carr shares some thoughts in a recent column about journalists moving to the Web, and the disappearing divide between online and print media. He highlights some of the struggles media companies continue to face and shares some of his own experiences walking the line.

* “More and more, media outlets are becoming a federation of individual brands like Mr. Kurtz. Journalism is starting to look like sports, where a cast of role players serves as a platform and context for highly paid, high-impact players. And those who cross over, after years of pushing copy through the print apparatus, will experience the allure of knocking some copy into WordPress and sending it out into the world to fend for itself.”

* “It was clear back then [a decade ago] that the Web, with its low-cost, friction-free distribution, was a remarkable way to publish. But 10 years later, paying for reporting on the Web remains daunting. The reason that newspapers put all the white paper out on the street is that we get a lot of green paper back in return. Put out all the pixels you want, even ones that render scoops, and you will still receive pennies in return.”

* “On a journalistic level, the new playing field is more even. Many people see the news in aggregated form on the Web, and when they notice a link that interests them, they click on it with nary a thought about the news organization behind it. Information stands or falls on its magnetism, with brand pedigree becoming secondary.

“More and more, the dichotomy between mainstream media and digital media is a false one. Formerly clear bright lines are being erased all over the place. Open up Gawker, CNN, NPR and The Wall Street Journal on an iPad and tell me without looking at the name which is a blog, a television brand, a radio network, a newspaper. They all have text, links, video and pictures. The new frame around content is changing how people see and interact with the picture in the middle.”

I followed a link recently and found this interesting blog post at The Art of Manliness. It explores the ways that twenty famous men used pocket notebooks-perhaps the equivalent of today’s ubiquitous smartphone. The use of such notebooks at one time was very common, according to the post. For the bibliophile, the list looks at how a few well-known authors used theirs, including Mark Twain.

From the post: “Twain’s first pocket notebooks were purchased in 1857 at the age of 21 during his training to become the “cub” pilot of a steamboat on the Mississippi River. He felt confident that the job would be fairly easy to learn but found he could not remember the instructions his teacher, Horace Bixby, imparted to him. Bixby advised Clemens, “My boy, you must get a little memorandum-book, and every time I tell you a thing, put it down right away. There’s only one way to be a pilot, and that is to get this entire river by heart. You have to know it just like A B C.” Clemens accepted Bixby’s advice and thus began a lifelong relationship with the pocket notebook.”

Twain kept between 40 and 50 notebooks in his lifetime, often starting a new one before leaving on a trip. They are filled with pithy sentences and unique observations. Check out the rest of the notebooks featured in this post.

I can’t resist highlighting another notebook from the post. This includes the notebook that General George S. Patton began in 1921, where he began to collect and form his ideas about what made a good soldier and a good leader, including these observations:

“War means fighting. Fighting means killing, not digging trenches.”
“Find the enemy, attack him, invade his land, raise hell while you’re at it.”
“Officers must be made to care for their men. That is the Sole Duty of All Officers.”

The trade association for consumber magazine publishers has a new name. To reflect changes in how publishers interact with readers (if you call them that anymore), the Magazine Publishers of America now calls itself MPA-the Association of Magazine Media. From the press release:

“Reflecting the growing ways – online and offline – that magazine content reaches consumers, industry leaders today unveiled a new name, tagline and logo for their trade group: MPA —The Association of Magazine Media. By adopting the well-established initials, MPA, as the organization’s formal name and dropping “publishers” from its tagline, MPA is underscoring the fact that magazine media content engages consumers across multiple platforms, including websites, tablets, smartphones, books, live events and more.  MPA will officially launch its new name and logo to its membership at the annual American Magazine Conference (AMC) on Monday, October 4, in Chicago.”

The new logo replaces the classic one depicting pages turning in a magazine; instead, the squares are meant to evoke “ multiple ways through which magazine media are being experienced and enjoyed today.” Read more about the change at the New York Times, here. The Times points out that the name change only marks the second time the association has changed its name. Founded in 1919 as the Magazine Publishers Association, the group changed its name in 1987 to Magazine Publishers of America. Writes Stuart Elliott of the Times, “The 1987 renaming took place a week before the Black Monday stock market crash of Oct. 19, so investors who are magazine readers — and vice versa — might want to re-examine their portfolios in coming days.”

Part of the new campaign includes videos, called Magazine Media Minute, published on YouTube highlighting some of the latest developments in magazine publishing, er, media. Here’s an example:

The latest issue of Granta includes an article on Nostalgia. Part of that issue includes this Web-only feature that reprints an old essay called Ribbon of Valour. The discussion about whether new technology is really better didn’t begin with the invention of the Internet. From Granta online: “Hal Crowther’s essay ‘One Hundred Fears of Solitude’, a blistering critique of digital technology and the internet age, is printed in Granta 111: Going Back. This article, which voices similar concerns about a dawning technological age, was printed in The Independent Weekly of Durham, North Carolina, upon Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1992. Principally an ode to an ageing typewriter, it is also the sound of an increasingly rare voice: a concern that we may not, after all, be trading up when we digitize.”

I particularly like this line: “Silent in the computer showroom, a 47-year-old digital virgin among high-tech commandos speaking the brave new language, I stared at my future laptop as a college freshman might gape at his first blind date. I felt like one of those Japanese soldiers on the Pacific atolls who surrendered twenty years after the war was over.”

And then there’s this prescient line, written in 1992: “Another thing that worries me is that the tendency of all this technology – laptop, desktop, electronic bulletin boards – is to make every writer his own publisher. Eventually there will be more publishers than readers, better than a one-to-one ratio between the sources of information and its consumers. Besides dilution and a loss of focus, there will be a tendency for consumers to eat what they like and ignore what is nourishing.”

Check out this link for a photo collection at Slate called “Remember Reading on Paper?” This photo of James Dean was taken at the Winslow farm in Indiana in 1955. He is reading James Whitcomb Riley.

There seems to be so much discussion in the media and on various blogs lately contemplating the end not only of traditional media, but of print culture in general. Ross Douthat at the New York Times takes up the debate in a blog post titled Reading as a Luxury Good. “Yes, escape and vacation have always been luxury goods, but since the dawn of mass literacy, deep reading has been a possibility for everyone, rich and working-class and poor alike. Yes, most people who grew up in Jacobs’ circumstances didn’t read their way into broader intellectual vistas — but some of them did, and any of them could.”