1. This appears, it must be said, to be one of those rare moments in life when ‘free for existing users’ disappoints me a little. Marco is deserving of every cent he earns from this app.

I thoroughly enjoyed his insights. I’m on the edge of my seat, here, imagining how Mod’s concept of vertical chapters might be realized.

But I couldn’t help but be vexed by an offhanded remark he makes in his introduction:

As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?

We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback.

We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet.

These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.

Anyone who buys books will probably understand what he’s talking about. Even while running your eyes over the shelves at a bookstore, it’s not impossible to fantasize about which books you’d proudly keep on your bookshelf when you’re finished and which ones you’d probably resell on Amazon¹—the fact that you haven’t actually read any of the books you’re judging notwithstanding.

Of course, physical dimensions are a helpful guide; he doesn’t explicitly write it, but the throwaway/airport/beach paperback is often a mass market paperback. In case you’re not familiar with the terminology, close your eyes and visualize a novel from any one of the genres—romance, science fiction, fantasy—that have always been relegated to the critical ghetto. Note the diminutive 4×7 cover, the thick binding, the cheap paper. It’s an unmistakable image.

Despite the fact that I’m just as priggishly dismissive of such books as the next guy,² I can’t help but disagree with Mod’s assertion that they are expendable.

As is the case with TV, it’s the tremendous profits from the popular stuff that subsidizes the high-investment/low-return niche stuff. To lose mass market paperbacks—worthless or not—is to lose a large chunk of revenue. Which translates into a loss for all professional publishers and writers and a grievous blow for the ones with limited commercial appeal.

Though Mod’s publishing credentials are infinitely more impressive than my own (as in, he has actually published books), I worry that he’s mistaking ‘foundation’ for ‘dead weight’.

With large publishers scrambling to rebuild the bottom line, would it really be a stretch to imagine that a printed version of Infinite Jest—the weird, sprawling, annotated, 1104-page masterpiece—would never see the light of day? Or that a person would need to barter a kidney to get his or her hands on one?

There’s simply no telling whether an ebook model would suit the mass market format. Though Apple and Amazon will have no trouble matching the basement-level pricing scheme, one cannot look past the fact that getting them into the casual consumer’s hands will first require getting a $250+ device into the casual consumer’s hands.

It seems to me that the path of least resistance (and thus the most likely next step) will be the opposite of what Mod suggests—to send the niche publications to the ereaders and continue to sell the mass-market stuff for as long as the demand holds out.

The shortcomings of such a reality are apparent. Compiling a worthy bookshelf is, to the devoted aesthete, one of the unmatchable joys of life. Physical books can be lent to friends and colleagues, or dog-eared, or forgotten in airplane seat-backs. Losing these small things will be a bitter pill to swallow.³

There’s no questioning that the iPad will do for boutique publishers roughly what the Internet did for graphic designers and software engineers. Which is to say, in a decade, small publishers might find their thoughts drifting to how they ever got along without it. That’s the core of Mod’s essay, and I can only echo his hopes that it will become a reality.

But because the niche typically encounters tremendous resistance when it tries to cannibalize the mainstream—for the mainstream would probably rather just stop reading than read more challenging things, if forced to choose between the two—it seems a little shortsighted to cheer the possibility of a large-publisher apocalypse between then and now. There are few who would profit from it.

1. Or box up and abandon on the front steps of the library on a dark and stormy night
2. Disclosure: I recently bought the mass market version of Carl Sagan’s excellent Cosmos.
3. Though I suppose it would be somewhat less so if it were coupled with some sort of receptacle system—perhaps a network of drop boxes in public spaces, wherein readers could leave their ‘disposable’ books to be repulped and recycled

So here’s a demo of SublimeVideo, a stunningly awesome HTML5 video player. Check out the scrubbing functionality! The smooth resizing transitions! The excellent quality! The manageable CPU load!

Be forewarned that it only works in WebKit browsers for now—so Safari or Chrome.

via

a floating platform-mounted computer data center comprising a plurality of computing units, a sea-based electrical generator in electrical connection with the plurality of computing units, and one or more sea-water cooling units for providing cooling to the plurality of computing units.

Excess heat from hundreds of computer servers to be located in the bedrock beneath Uspenski Cathedral, one of Helsinki’s most popular tourist sites, will be captured and channelled into the district heating network, a system of water-heated pipes used to warm homes in the Finnish capital.

That’s some good thinking.

I know.

Via

Gravitation is pretty cool, too.

Wanna play around with tons of cool synthesizers, effects pedals, beat machines and mixing boards?
There’s a Flash-based simulation for that. Tip from Sam.

That, according to a seriously shaky Wolfram|Alpha calculation, is how much land that each person would get were the Earth (minus Antarctica and the Sahara Desert) split 6.67 billion equal ways.¹

Here’s the equation:

For comparison, 4.659 acres is about the size of 2.6 FIFA-sanctioned international match soccer fields.

If you’re thinking, Gee, that actually kind of sounds like a lot, bear this in mind: the actual Earth is not a flat grid of equally habitable cells—inevitably, many millions of people would get stuck with parcels on mountainsides or in toxic waste dumps, swamps, deserts and Siberia. The above figure is clearly on the generous side.²

That said, I’m on the borderline of horror with this one. It either makes the world seem very small or makes mankind seem very stifling.

Either way, this much is certain: the fact that Wolfram|Alpha can help be indulge in such childish things is undeniably cool.

1. A side note: one of mankind’s greatest inventions is the technique of building vertically. But, for the sake of this hypothetical, I’m talking straight-up land ownership.
2. And no, there’s no easy way to further refine the equation, short of making an exhaustive (and totally subjective!) List of All Terrestrial Hellholes Known to Man and plugging each item in one after another.

It sounds a lot more impressive after you watch the demonstration.

Really cool.

It is an attempt to loosen the mental blockages to recording information and to scrape away the tartar of convention that handicaps its retrieval. The solution is by nature nonconformist.

It’s actually just a cool app for people – like me – who save/make a lot of text notes.

Not new, by the way. Notational Velocity came out in 2006. I’m just late to the party.

He made a site, The 30-Day Flight and intends to chronicle his journey.

Yesterday – Day 10 – the guy sitting next to him was the guy who designed the ambient music system at Walt Disney World.

Today, I found out that Google is actually sharing Fast Flip ad revenue with participating publishers – the first time they’ve formed such a direct partnership with the publishing industry.

This is great news!

Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine.

Google’s newest offering. Especially cool if you’ve got an iPhone – paging through is as easy as a swipe.