136 private links
A new company, Booktrack, is devising book-length soundtracks for novels and non-fiction. Is it a good idea? Or do we risk losing the serendipitous soundtracks that already accompany our reading?
Something very important and very weird is happening to the book right now: It’s shedding its papery corpus and transmigrating into a bodiless digital form, right before our eyes. We’re witnessing the bibliographical equivalent of the rapture. If anything we may be lowballing the weirdness of it all.
The last time a change of this magnitude occurred was circa 1450, when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type. But if you go back further there’s a more helpful precedent for what’s going on. Starting in the first century A.D., Western readers discarded the scroll in favor of the codex — the bound book as we know it today.
Author of the cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, William Gibson talks about the relationship between his fiction and the contemporary urban landscape
The author of Free Ride warns that digital piracy and greedy technology firms are crushing the life out of the culture business
T-shirts inspired by Gibson’s Sprawl novels