Face it—eBook sales are up, analog eBook sales are down. Pretty soon collectors are going to realize that normal people no longer share their bourgeois fascination with things like the bittersweet aroma of ink on paper, or the satisfying heft of a classic hardcover, or the fact that books don’t randomly turn off when you…
If you’re a veteran gamer you’ll remember the golden era of text-based adventures. The Hobbit, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Zork… titles that conjured whole worlds out of narrative descriptions and two-word player inputs. That genre never went away, of course – interactive fiction communities still thrive on the web (a good place to look is…
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As the typewriter become popular, it was sometimes referred to it as a “literary piano,” or “the sewing machine of thought.” But the piano and the sewing machine both require a more complex interaction between fingers and machine parts than does the keyboard, which essentially requires you to press whatever button features the letter or…
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…Amherst thinks that there may be long-term gains — both for scholarship and the economics of academic publishing — by publishing books that are subject to traditional peer review, edited with rigor and then published in digital form only, completely free. Some university presses issue some of their works in free digital formats. And Rice…
The headline is provocative — I wouldn’t have phrased it that way, but this anecdote was certainly interesting. [W]hen I asked him about his BA in English, which he had earned about five years earlier, he got nervous. “What was your favorite century of English literature,” I asked. But he hadn’t really focused on any…
Tonight we’ll be blocking my big scene as FDR in Annie. In this speech, delivered to students at UNC, Roosevelt is more playful than he is in his better known more formal speeches (his first inaugural “The only thing we have to fear” and the Pearl Harbor “A date that will live in infamy“). Here.…
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What was the quality control process behind the creation of this logo? Should that be “Discover Your Interest” or “Discover You’re Interesting”? I’m not sure I associate owls with curiosity. Owl from the Christopher Robin stories is pompous and oblique. The owl from the Tootsie Pop commercial is impatient and destructive. The Owl in “I…
Increasingly book vendors provide options that allow us to purchase e-books instead of print when both are available. We’ve now formally committed to purchasing e-books when given that choice. —UMD Libraries Similar:Bother (a minor Turnitin.com grademark bug)That whole thing should be a link — the…AcademiaIn defense of the Selfie StickI’m sure there are hipsters, even…
Have I mentioned lately that I have awesome students? For a “Creative Critical Presentation” in my online American Literature survey, English major Tyler Carter created A Message from Hester Prynne, a 9-minute video that explores Hester’s psychology and spirituality, through music, dance, poetry, and cinematography. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivxfKoZmF5k All the technology Seton Hill offers to its students…
My daughter delivered the opening “Marley was as dead as a doornail” speech as the narrator in the Stage Right! homeschool production of A Lyrical Christmas Carol. My son played Scrooge. The show was great. During the bows, I was already pretty misty-eyed when my daughter threw her arms around Scrooge and proudly announced, “He’s…
Dictating student feedback, I said “Would a rational person argue against your claim that Poe is a Gothic poet?” My Mac typed: “What irrational person would argue against your claim that hoe is a Gothic punk?” Similar:Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed [a Certain Political Slant] NewsOne day when I was an undergraduate work…BusinessThe Zombie…
At the head of the team is a grizzled old engineer who’s been at Apple forever. He’s surly and crude, always making vulgar jokes about iPads. But the company can’t afford to get rid of him—he’s the only one who understands how to operate the furnaces in the iTunes boiler room. Then one morning the…
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We looked at every story we geotargeted during the months of July, August, and September 2012, focusing on the ones that the localized NPR Facebook following liked, shared, and commented on at a high rate. From this group of successful stories, we identified similarities which allowed us to create nine distinct content categories. We…
The Irish have a weakness for puns, and this is as evident in the Book of Kells as it is in Finnegans Wake, although in the former the puns are for the most part visual, for no monk would think to tamper with the Gospel texts…. Thus on the recto of folio 180, a line of…
The Hobbit stood out from the adventure games of the day in three ways, the first of which was its use of graphics. Many scenes in the game included a colour image that may have drawn at painfully slow speed but still offered a far richer experience than the text-only adventures of the day. The second…
Current US law extends copyright protection for 70 years after the date of the author’s death. (Corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication.) But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years (an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years). Under those…