NewsTrust - Books - Most Recent Stories: Opinion

Aliteracy Anxiety

Fri, 05 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Time Passing - By Lance Strate - Aug. 05 (Opinion) - Aliteracy may be the trend of the future. Reading limited to short bursts. Street signs. Restaurant menus. Headlines. Status updates and tweets. Short paragraphs online. And reading that is limited to the functional, reading for directions, for instructions, for getting tasks done. As opposed to reading for pleasure. And as opposed to reading as a cultural activity.

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What Hemingway Would Think of the Internet

Sat, 02 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Wired - By Marty Beckerman - Jul. 02 (Opinion) - If Ernest Hemingway hadn’t killed himself 50 years ago today at age 61, he probably would have died by now anyway. (No human liver could withstand more than a century of nonstop alcoholic pummeling. Not even Papa’s.) But Newsweek can fantasize about Princess Diana cheating death, so we can imagine Hemingway walking — or staggering — among us in 2011. What would the hard-drinking, adventure-loving writer think of our modern technological lifestyle? Not bloody much. We’re obsessed with conquering the digital world — accumulation of Twitter followers, Facebook friends, LinkedIn recommendations — whereas Hemingway conquered the physical world. The thrill of a retweet from Roger Ebert or Ashton Kutcher will never compare to the thrill of running with (more like from) the bulls or fighting a pack of voracious sharks over the remains of a prize-catch marlin.

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Google can't be trusted with our books | Simon Barron

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 10:43:12 -0700

The Guardian - By Simon Barron - Apr. 26 (Opinion) - The threat to Google Videos shows businesses are not suitable cultural custodians – they can't be held accountable to the publicGoogle announced last week that it would be deleting the content of the Google Videos archive. After a public outcry, it said it would work on saving all the video content and making it available elsewhere. In this instance, the public managed to change Google's mind and stopped the mass deletion of a unique digital archive but the situation raises concerns about data under Google's control, including the unique archive of Google Books.The reason cited for Google Videos' closure is that the company would like to focus on its raison d'être, search, "[the] ability to let people search videos from across the web, regardless of where those videos are hosted". Shifting its priorities is its prerogative as a company: the issue is that on the basis of refocusing its business priorities, its first impulse was to delete the gigabytes of content given to it by users.This situation has disturbing implications for Google Videos' sister project, Google Books, and the approximately 15 million scanned documents in the archive. In partnership with some of the greatest research libraries in the world – the Bodleian Library in Oxford, Harvard University Library, the New York Public Library – Google Books has built up a huge digital library containing thousands of unique documents.Google Books has suffered problems in the past: practical problems – lawsuits from publishers and authors, criticism of its inconsistent metadata – and philosophical problems involving the theoretical concerns of allowing a private sector company to control shared cultural resources. These concerns have remained abstract but now, with the company's disregard towards videos, become more concrete.As a private sector company, the core aim of Google is to make money. The Google Videos situation shows that in order to lower expenditure and adjust its priorities, Google was willing to delete content entrusted to it by users. Libraries have trusted Google with millions of documents: many of the books scanned by Google are not digitised or OCR-processed anywhere else and, with budgets for university libraries shrinking year after year, may not be digitised again any time in the near future. Google acted admirably by listening to users and working to save the videos but entrusting such vast cultural archives to a body that has no explicit responsibilities to protection, archiving and public cultural welfare is inherently dangerous: as the situation made clear, private sector bodies have the ability to destroy archives at a whim.Enabling access to digital information should be one of the key responsibilities of our cultural institutions and our public sector. Keeping these resources in the public sector and ensuring that they are freely available to everyone is the key to bridging the UK's widening digital divide: the chasm between those who can access digital information via internet access at home and the 27% of households who cannot. Last week, Amazon announced that it was working with libraries in the US to allow users to borrow Kindle ebooks. This mutual co-operation between the private and the public sector should allow more people to access shared digital resources and hopefully help bridge the US digital divide.As Peter Singer and others have argued, we need to develop a digital library that can make resources available in the same way as Google Books but that will be accountable to the public. Google Books is one of the largest digital libraries in the world but, as Robert Darnton has argued, we cannot trust it to be the sole custodian of our digital archives forever. A national digital library would be subject to regulations to protect our cultural heritage and would take responsibility for the artefacts placed in its care. Publicly funded libraries and archives are important precisely because they are not committed to the "market fundamentalism" of pursuing profit above all other motives. Some libraries and archives need to modernise and make resources digitally available but this requires support and the protection of our public sector libraries.Google's motto is "don't be evil". Not doing the evil thing is not the same as doing the right thing. In this instance, it has done the right thing: next time, it may not.GoogleDigital videoLibrariesInternetUnited StatesSimon Barronguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

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The Google Books settlement should teach the company humility. It won't

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Slate - By Siva Vaidyanathan - Mar. 23 (Opinion) - Google has been humbled. For a company with the audacity to make "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible" its mission statement, it takes a lot to take Google down a peg. But yesterday federal Judge Denny Chin did just that. He ruled—after more than two years of study and debate—that the elaborate new used-book store that Google had designed in collaboration with the most elite authors and publishers could not stand. Or, at least, Chin ruled that the methods Google chose to build this massive digital bookstore, now called Google Books, was improper.

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Digital Textbook Startup Inkling Nabs ‘Multi-Million Dollar’ Investment From McGraw-Hill And Pearson

Tue, 22 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

TechCrunch - By Leena Rao - Mar. 22 (Opinion) - Inkling, a startup that develops an innovative digital textbook platform, has scored a ‘multi-million dollar investment from educational content giants McGraw-Hill and Pearson. Inkling’s technology delivers interactive textbooks that include the ability to collaborate, add multimedia and communicate within content. The startup adds another layer to online textbooks by adding 3-D objects, video, quizzes, and even social interaction within the content.

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Amazon's Kindle opens new chapter for publishing industry

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Los Angeles Times - By Alex Pham - Dec. 29 (Interview) - Russ Grandinetti, the head of content for Amazon.com's Kindle business, talks about Amazon's plans for its rapidly growing Kindle business. When Amazon.com Inc. launched its Kindle digital book business in 2007, little did many people realize that the company was really rewriting the book on the entire publishing industry.

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C.K. Chivers' The Gun explains how the AK-47 changed the world.

Mon, 01 Nov 2010 11:09:00 -0700

Slate - By Nicholas Schmidle - Nov. 01 - In late 1945, Sergeant Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov entered an office contest more pressing than even the most rabid of Fantasy Footballers could fathom. Joseph Stalin wanted a new gun, and the Soviet leader tasked his army with selecting the best

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Opinion: Books are better without pages

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

GlobalPost - By Nicholas Negroponte - Sep. 02 (Opinion) - The paper book is dead. Long live the narrative. Kindle owners buy twice as many books as non-Kindle owners. Just one of the many signs that while the paper book is dead, the narrative will live on. If you are saying to yourself, “That sounds horrible. I hope books do not go away,” I ask you to consider the world’s poorest and most remote kids. The manufactured book stunts learning, especially for those children. The last thing these children should have are physical books. They are too costly, too heavy, fall out-of-date and are sharable only in some common and limited physical space. Paper books also do not do well in dampness, dirt, heat or rain. Not to mention that 320 textbooks require, on average, one tree and produce about 10,000 pounds of CO2 in manufacturing and delivery. This makes no sense. Kids in the developing world should not be sent physical books.

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Orwell and the Tea Party

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

the Millions - By Darryl Campbell - Jul. 31 (Opinion) - George Orwell never thought that his work would outlive him by much. After all, he considered himself “a sort of pamphleteer” rather than a genuine novelist, and confidently predicted that readers would lose interest in his books “after a year or two.” Yet sixty years later, Orwell endures, and I am not sure that this is a good thing.

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Life in Iceland: Nasty, brutish and short

Mon, 07 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Economist - Jun. 07 (Review) - FILTHY, damp, cold and exhausting, living in Iceland for most of the past millennium had one redeeming feature: that the long dark winter evenings gave people the chance to read a lot and tell stories. That combination of cultural depth and material backwardness is the central message of Sigurdur Gylfi Magnusson’s social history of one of Europe’s

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Shadow Elite: Are They Responsible For The Subprime Mortgage Crisis?

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Jack Blum - Jan. 15 (Review) - Janine Wedel's breakthrough "Shadow Elite" shows why "anecdotal" evidence is essential to grasping what is really going on. As an anthropologist who has taken the time to examine how things really work, Wedel provides a bold new frame of reference for those of us who look at things as they are and relationships as they have evolved, as well as the tools to understand the complex interplay of people and institutions that make up modern government. Her framework demonstrates not only why the careful analysis of players' activities, roles, sponsors, and networks is so necessary but how, in the aggregate, these profiles form clear patterns. "Shadow Elite" identifies players who perform overlapping, mutually influencing, and not fully revealed, roles across government, business, think tanks, and national borders in pursuit of their own policy agendas ("flexians," she calls them, and flex-nets"--such players who work together in a network) as an important key to understanding how influence is wielded and why policy decisions are made.

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For The Shadow Elite Failure Often Guarantees Future Rewards

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Janine R. Wedel - Jan. 14 (Review) - When most of us fail, consequences are not widespread. When the shadow elite fail, it affects all of us because their power is pervasive and they are largely beyond accountability. For confirmation one need only look as far as two of the country's top economic helmsmen, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers.

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'Shadow Elite': Outsourcing Government, Losing Democracy

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By Charles Lewis - Jan. 13 (Review) - Professor, Founding Executive Editor of the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University James Madison famously wrote in the Federalist Papers (#51), "If men were angels, no government would be necessary." We've learned the hard way, most starkly in the Great Depression and now in the Great Recession, that men and women are anything but angels, and that government first and foremost must protect the American people from the unmitigated avarice of the private sector.

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Is the Internet melting our brains?

Sun, 20 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Salon - By Vincent Rossmeier - Sep. 20 (Review) - By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

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California - Central Coast Writer To Be Nationally Aired On WNB West on September 21st, 2009

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

NewsVine - By John Crippen - Sep. 07 (Press Release) - "The Sweet Smell of ASH in the Morning" will talk live about his book, a humorous dedication to Atascadero State Hospital and also talk about the difficult struggles of the healthcare system. This book also takes a lighter look at what it's like to be a Psychiatric Technician in the largest freestanding forensic mental Institution in the world."

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Shock Waves From the Google Bombs

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Kathleen Parker - Aug. 25 (Editorial) - A lawsuit gives the blogosphere a wakeup call about defamation and decency.

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Mind Matters

Wed, 18 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Steven Johnson, Jonah Lehrer - Mar. 18 (Review) - Most great stories revolve around decisions: the snap brilliance of Captain Sullenberger choosing to land his plane in the Hudson, or Dorothea’s prolonged, agonizing choice of whether to forsake her husband for true love in “Middlemarch,” or your parents’ oft-told account of the day they decided to marry. There is something powerfully human in the act of deliberately choosing a path; other animals have drives, emotions, problem-solving skills, but none rival our capacity for self-consciously weighing all the options, imagining potential outcomes and arriving at a choice. As George W. Bush might have put it, we are a species of deciders.

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What Obama Should Read

Mon, 19 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Monthly - Jan. 19 (Opinion) - A president who is a serious reader is of course likely to be shaped by what he reads, and we know a bit about what has been on Obama’s list so far. From interviews, we know that Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls made an impression on him as a young man. His campaign reading list—or at least the books he chose to be seen with on the trail—included Jonathan Alter’s The Defining Moment, Larry Bartels’s Unequal Democracy, Steve Coll’s Ghost Wars, Fareed Zakaria’s The Post-American World, and Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals. And we know that, at least in the case of the latter book, Obama’s choice of reading has already had some impact on his governing choices (or at least on how pundits frame them on the Sunday-morning talk shows). So in the hope that he’s willing to take a few more reading assignments, we asked a few of our favorite writers and thinkers to offer their suggestions on what the new president should have by his bedside.

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Bush Is a Book Lover

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Wall Street Journal - By Karl Rove - Dec. 26 (Opinion) - With only five days left, my lead is insurmountable. The competition can't catch up. And for the third year in a row, I'll triumph. In second place will be the president of the United States. Our contest is not about sports or politics. It's about books. It all started on New Year's Eve in 2005. President Bush asked what my New Year's resolutions were. I told him that as a regular reader who'd gotten out of the habit, my goal was to read a book a week in 2006. Three days later, we were in the Oval Office when he fixed me in his sights and said, "I'm on my second. Where are you?" Mr. Bush had turned my resolution into a contest. By coincidence, we were both reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals." The president jumped to a slim early lead and remained ahead until March, when I moved decisively in front. The competition soon spun out of control. We kept track not just of books read, but also the number of pages and later the combined size of each book's pages -- its "Total Lateral Area."

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The 2008 Election in Verse

Sun, 07 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Huffington Post - By John Lundberg - Dec. 07 (Review) - Calvin Trillin, responding to Daily Show host John Stewart's impish description of his new book in verse on the 2008 election Deciding the Next Decider, joked, "You made me feel like one of those guys who's done the Palace of Versaille in beer cans." No, John Milton he isn't. Trillin is a comedic writer with a gift for light verse. And it was clear from last week's Daily Show interview that he understands that his latest project--chronicling politics in rhyming couplets--is a little goofy. He refers to his book in a tongue-in-cheek fashion as "epic" (it is, in fact, written in heroic verse). But while the author himself calls it doggerel, as you'll see from these excerpts on John McCain, his verse can be very biting:

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Groundbreaking 2-year backpacking odyssey across the 33 provinces of China

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0800

chinatravel.net - By Rebekah Pothaar - Nov. 11 (Interview) - A photographer, his camera, a backpack, two years, one country, 56 cultures, 1.3 billion people, 33 provinces and 56,000 kilometers.

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George Orwell's Language

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Newsweek - By Jennie Yabroff - Nov. 02 (Review) - In 1944, a young British writer named Eric Blair sent the publisher Jonathan Cape a manuscript for a novel-length parable about the rise of Stalin. The book had already been rejected by one editor for its inflammatory content. Cape also declined. While he personally enjoyed the manuscript, he wrote, he believed it was "highly ill-advised to publish at the present time." Perhaps Blair might have better luck were he to change the identity of the main characters? "It would be less offensive if the predominate caste in the fable were not pigs," he wrote. Blair finally found a publisher, and the book, "Animal Farm," released under Blair's pseudonym, George Orwell, became a bestseller. But the experience proved instructive. The next year, in the essay "Politics and the English Language," he wrote that degraded, unclear language was both symptom and cause of the decline of contemporary culture and political thought. "One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end," he wrote. In other words, it's important to call a pig a pig.

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Raoul Felder: Alec Baldwin's "A Promise to Ourselves" Captures the Brutality of Divorce Wars

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Raoul Felder - Oct. 13 (Review) - Alec Baldwin is one of the walking wounded, a casualty of the divorce/custody wars. Written out of his pain, looking from the inside looking out, viewing events through the prism of that pain with all of a victim's perceptions and acuity

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The Book-Banning Double Standard

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Pajamas Media - By Mike McNally - Oct. 09 (Opinion) - While America’s mainstream media has spent the last few weeks obsessing about the imagined book-banning proclivities of Sarah Palin, news of a very real threat to Western values of tolerance and freedom of expression has gone largely unremarked upon by those same commentators. In London three men have been charged over a firebomb attack on the home of Dutch publisher Martin Rynja, who owns the UK rights to The Jewel of Medina, a historical novel by the American author Sherry Jones which tells the story of the relationship between Mohammed and his child bride Aisha. The novel is being likened to Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in terms of its potential for inciting anger amongst Muslims. And sure enough, London’s resident mob of radical clerics has defended the attack on Rynja’s home and warned of more trouble to come.

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Real W.M.D.'s

Sun, 22 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Richard Holbrooke - Jun. 22 (Review) - Any new entry in the crowded field of books on the 1962 Cuban missile crisis must pass an immediate test: Is it just another recapitulation, or does it increase our net understanding of this seminal cold war event? By focusing on the activities of the American, Soviet and Cuban militaries during those tense October days, Michael Dobbs's "One Minute to Midnight" passes this test with flying colors. The result is a book with sobering new information about the world's only superpower nuclear confrontation -- as well as contemporary relevance.

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