links for 2009-2-21

Pictures of Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer at a reading/performance! Yay!

“I lived through the dotcom boom and bust in San Francisco, arriving in 1999 and departing in 2003, and the two things that stand out for me were 1) how fast it fell and how deep the bottom turned out to be and 2) how quickly the unthinkable became normal and people started to have fun and do cool stuff even without the stupid amounts of money sloshing around the city, like Whos having Christmas without all the be-Grinched trees and trinkets.”

“The idea that a functional micropayment system could somehow defibrillate the newspaper industry and solve “the free problem” is nothing new (enormous logistical challenges as well as questions about privacy have prevented anyone from making it work thus far).”

Love it.

“Mr Gray was smart enough to realise two things; firstly that Lulu have made the mechanics of book-making so cheap and easy that you can move straight to the physical form of the thing as soon as you want. The best way to write a book is bundle all your notes and rough thoughts together and stick them in a book. Then carry that around, make amendments, even invite other people to do the same, until you fancy making another version. And one day, who knows there’ll be a definitive ‘finished’ version. But maybe there never will be.” Interesting concept, eh? (Or, yes, schtick.)

“The book as open source software: never finished, revised and mutated in v* versions, supported by social dev teams.” With links to more info about unbooks.

March 2-8! I’m doing it; are you?

Old news, but I love these covers!

“While braille is still the standard, printing braille books is a costly and time-consuming process that can’t produce a proportionate amount of books for the visually impaired. Now, though, there is a device called the Voice Stick, which is an advanced optical character recognition scanner designed to make all books available to the visually impaired.”

“And if, for instance, you’ve ever craved a brief and lucid explanation of Gödel’s Theorem (I realize that’s it’s possible you have not), Stewart’s your man. If you’ve ever heard of fractals or Fibonacci numbers (which you have if you’ve read The Da Vinci Code) and want enough information to bluff your way through cocktail-party chatter, look no further.”

“From BBC to Bollywood, fangs to phantoms, rotting flesh to outer space—is there anywhere Austen can’t go?” Apparently not!

“Harper Perennial has generously offered to give away five trade paperback copies of The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal to readers of this blog. You have until 11:59 p.m. CST Friday, February 27, 2009 to enter.” GO GO GO