I like curries, so let's say that Auntie Layla wants to put all of her curry recipes in a book and make it available to family, friends, curry-lovers, and posterity. She can contact companies like Blurb.com and Picaboo.com to receive a relatively simple to use and free software package that will turn her text and photos into a book with the aid of customizable templates. Blurb is also developing enhancements including tools that "slurp" blog entries into templates and allow for communal authorship (the dream of socialist realists everywhere, if any remain). According to Eileen Gittens, chief exec at Blurb (as quoted in the NYT), "Books are breaking wide open ... Books are becoming vehicles that aren't static things." Print-on-demand certainly is a valuable means to economically print books in small quantities, but the new wave of companies hoping to exploit this post-modern method of publishing by appealing to the needs/vanities of their clients and to potential subterranean markets for niche would-be "classics" is quite a different thing. In the end, it's the content that matters, and I imagine that most of what Blurb and Picaboo and companies like them put out are meaningful to very small numbers of people. They are more aesthetician than publisher; the value is not in the content, but rather in the artefacts of sentiment (i.e., books) that they produce. Books are "breaking wide open," but not exactly in the way that Ms. Gittens would have us think ...
I like curries, so let's say that Auntie Layla wants to put all of her curry recipes in a book and make it available to family, friends, curry-lovers, and posterity. She can contact companies like Blurb.com and Picaboo.com to receive a relatively simple to use and free software package that will turn her text and photos into a book with the aid of customizable templates. Blurb is also developing enhancements including tools that "slurp" blog entries into templates and allow for communal authorship (the dream of socialist realists everywhere, if any remain). According to Eileen Gittens, chief exec at Blurb (as quoted in the NYT), "Books are breaking wide open ... Books are becoming vehicles that aren't static things." Print-on-demand certainly is a valuable means to economically print books in small quantities, but the new wave of companies hoping to exploit this post-modern method of publishing by appealing to the needs/vanities of their clients and to potential subterranean markets for niche would-be "classics" is quite a different thing. In the end, it's the content that matters, and I imagine that most of what Blurb and Picaboo and companies like them put out are meaningful to very small numbers of people. They are more aesthetician than publisher; the value is not in the content, but rather in the artefacts of sentiment (i.e., books) that they produce. Books are "breaking wide open," but not exactly in the way that Ms. Gittens would have us think ...
From Matt: The scriptwriters made quite a few changes from the book, but they were all for the best - and booklover though I am I have to admit that its better to see magic than to read about it.
From Mina: I adore this film. Monsieur Hulot’s very modern sister and brother-in-law don’t know what to do with Tati’s charmingly untidy and bungling protagonist, who inhabits a world where meaning is still more important than appearances.
From Carey: A must see Hayao Miyazaki’s anime is Laputa: Castle in the Sky, originally released in 1986. A fantasy film that explores the altruistic and compassionate nature of humans, aspects lost through repeated exposure to power, technology, and the complexities brought by the combination of the two. 
Comments