… over the last couple of decades. Technical revolutions, societal revolutions, cultural revolutions. I gave a long talk at UIUC recently where I told the story of one of them, as context and contrast with current revolutions. The story itself is worth telling in this forum. It’s long, so sit back. I want to first [...]

In an essay at Ars Technica, “Nobel winner blames cultural decline on ‘blogging and blugging’” Nate Anderson discusses the near-loathing that the esteemed SciFiction writer Doris Lessing pours out on Internet communications, generally speaking. Lessing is quote as saying: And just as we never once stopped to ask, How are we, our minds, going to [...]

Having gotten caught up to some extent in the Open Access debate over research publications, I am continually astonished by the lack of objectivity and the sheer partisanship of many of the participants. For those unfamiliar with Open Access or OA, this is the principle of “information wants to be free” applied to the world [...]

I’ve been reading Doris Lessing’s Nobel speech, and thinking about the similarities between it, and the recent NEA report on reading. Both stress the importance, for children, of books in the home. Both fret over the number, and attractiveness, of the alternatives to reading that are available in modern society. But Lessing, fittingly, makes her [...]

I flew across the country this Sunday to attend a conference, on Virgin America. It’s my second flight on VA, and I largely enjoy it, at least as well as JetBlue. But looking at their “Red” in-flight entertainment system today, with a menu button marked “Read” along with Music and Games and Chat and other [...]

I have been following the developments of SCOAP3 , which is one of the more enterprising organizations in the Open Access world. SCOAP3, an acronym for Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics (which actually presents the “3″ as an exponent; very clever), is attempting to make all research publishing Open Access by [...]

I was speaking this morning with Mark Dressler, who puts together the panels and education programs for BEA. We discussed Tim O’Reilly’s very useful Radar post about monetizing content. Tim made it very clear why advertising for what we think of as book content is probably a futile pursuit and made it painfully clear that [...]