Sunday Posts

I am already a fan of Open Utopia , an experiment in social reading. I met this with a pure deja vu feeling: First, an article by Jennifer Howard on the project, and then, coincidentally, an email from a Linkedin contact complaining about how rough Amazon and the various self-publishing organisations treat the authors, set me up for this. If I was feeling despondent about books and more so, about creativity, here is the answer. Indeed, I am talking about the idea rather than the specific project. Open Utopia is an experiment, carefully crafted, though I think Utopia is rather an unfortunate choice. This experiment could have been easily crafted on some other book, one, I may hope, that had a world-changing impact, and by implication, showed a deeper confidence in the way the future will indeed play out. Open Utopia, I would like to believe, is not an utopia, but more a precursor of an excitingly creative future. Printed books have to change. Those of us in love with paper, with...

Kindle Fire will be the technology Mobile Learning was waiting for. Plausibly. Cheap and pocketable, Kindle Fire is an exciting opportunity. Here, Amazon is trading off the lure of a bigger, iPad like screen with its deep reservoir of content. One would think they would actively pursue the education market, leaving iPad out to the lifestyle users.  Whether or not this will happen would be determined by whether or not Amazon tries to redefine the Academic publishing business. This is already under serious threat from Internet and Open Access movements. Amazon may want to position Kindle Fire as a sort of panacea to academic publishers, as they tried to sell the idea of Kindle to the book publishers and newspaper groups earlier. So far, Apple and Samsung looked the other way as far as Academic journals are concerned; Amazon indeed has a bit of game-changing opportunity. I have previously said that I would not buy a Kindle as I did not want to surrender my book-reading to...

I have finally moved home, after living in the same flat for almost seven years. The movement became quite a long drawn affair, particularly because of the books I bought over the years. On top of this, the house I moved in has no bookshelves, which meant another significant expense and today, a whole day's very tiresome visit to our local IKEA . In fact, I find the shopping experience in IKEA the most distressing I can have, not just because of the layout, where you have to walk miles before you can start the business of shopping: It must be nice for people who are building a new house obsessively, but not me - with limited time and specific requirements. The £600 odd expense on bookshelves sound a bit ridiculous at this stage, but it must be made. My life isn't going to be back to normal till the books are back on shelves and become accessible yet again. In the new place, where I can afford a small study, allowing me to read and write in relative privacy, looks promising; bu...

There are many reasons why we should not be reading books any more. First of all, they are bulky to carry. I could not shift house for last six years, despite feeling the necessity, because I have to find a way to move my books. I have paid excess baggage and lived a cramped life, and had numerous arguments with others, because of my books. Second, because there is an alternative. The electronic format is catching up on resolution etc. One can get books under 60 seconds, almost anywhere in the world (not in Iran though, one of the countries where book reading is so popular), as Amazon claims for its Kindle. What can be better to be able to 3500 books in your hand within a tiny, slim device: for all of £150. Someone reminded me that you will need to spend five times as much to buy bookshelves that can hold so many books. Third, with newspapers and vinyl gone that way, book reading remains an ugly twentieth century habit. For all romanticism, it is limiting, not liberating. It is a lazy ...