SpiralTruth
Just another post-modern quest for meaning.
Browsing SpiralTruth blog archives for April, 2009.
Steven Johnson of The Wall Street Journal posted this article today on how the e-book might fundamentally change the process of reading and writing (therefore changing us). I disagree that Amazon’s Kindle will be what brings e-books mass acceptance. It reminds me of a BlackBerry. Too clunky and ugly. Plus there’s the DRM issue which will hopefully go the way of iTunes DRM. Remember, e-books have been around in one form or another for a while now and have so far managed to be far from revolutionary. That said, once you can combine a DRM-free Amazon with a better e-reader, like the one being developed by Plastic Logic (still not the ideal e-reader, in my opinion, but getting close), then I think we just might start seeing people carrying their libraries around with them… but, as Johnson suggests, it will be more than that:
Think of it as a permanent, global book club. As you read, you will know that at any given moment, a conversation is available about the paragraph or even sentence you are reading. Nobody will read alone anymore. Reading books will go from being a fundamentally private activity — a direct exchange between author and reader — to a community event, with every isolated paragraph the launching pad for a conversation with strangers around the world.
I was noticing a lot of images floating around the web that shared a common theme. They either were or looked like a post card, and they had some sort of secret hope or fear or memory written on them. A couple of days ago, I finally decided to track down the source. Of course, in the age of Google, tracking down the source hardly ever amounts to more than an hour of dedicated searching. The only difficulty with these images was that they didn’t contain any sort of brand logo… only a certain style. In addition, the images I had been looking at had no sort of attribution made by the person who had uploaded them (tsk, tsk!) After typing in a few of the secrets, I eventually found a link to one of the images, which mentioned “Post Secret” and voila! I had found the source. Kind of.
Frank Warren had the idea back in 2003 to ask a bunch of strangers to send him their deepest, darkest secrets. Turns out, a lot of people have some pretty interesting secrets. Enough for Frank to be swamped with postcards and have enough material to pump out five books (that I know of) to date. I now have four of them on order. Here’s a sample of what I’m talking about:
