paper notes in a digital world

Encyclopedias. The Real Thing.

I want a nice, new set of encyclopedias.

Yes, yes, I know - the Internet is one big encyclopedia. All the big encyclopedias are online. The CIA Factbook is online. A thousand country profiles are online. Heck, countries are online - we can even visit the official website of <gulp> North Korea! Yes, I know, it's all online. But....

While I spent a week in bed not feeling well, I was craving a set of good old-fashioned encyclopedias. You know, those multi-volume sets, (Britannica is 32 volumes for 2006), that you maybe last saw in High School. I know, I know, there I had my laptop right on the bed with me- connected at high-speed to the Internet - and I wanted a set of $1400 encyclopedias.

It's that paper thing again.

You see, no matter how many sites are on the web that tell me everything I could possibly want to know about Ernest Hemingway (for example), nothing beats being able to pull down a nicely bound volume of "GE-HI" to read about PaPa Hemingway. No links to click, no pop-ups, no slow-loading sites hosted on Angelfire or Tripod, no links that go nowhere; just a nice book I could have laid back with and absorbed myself in - without all the flash and flicker - for a good hour or more. And in a few hours if a taste of the life of Virginia Woolf calls my name - it's as easy as "TA-WR." Ahh, I had a craving in a bad way and had no fix. Clicking from site to site or surfing to, er, Wikipedia, just didn't do it for me. I wanted the original thing, a true-blue set of tightly bound encyclopedias. Britannica or World Book - I'm not picky. A set of World Book encyclopedias runs 22-volumes and is a cool $989. Quite a bit less expensive than Britannica, but, truth be known, I'm fond of the World Book graphs, charts, full-color pictures and tiered-for-depth-of-interest articles. But heck, this last week I was craving a set so badly I would have settled for a supermarket set of Funk & Wagnalls. I guess it wasn't the amount of information I was after, per se, it was the experience. I wanted to feel the book in my hands and turn the pages. (The paper thing.) I also wouldn't have had to wonder if some ILoveHemingway.com website was put together on a whim by a 12 year-old who doesn't get out enough.

The world is at my fingertips, right on the keyboard, a click away....but sometimes it just doesn't feel right. (And don't even remind me that, "encyclopedias," are all available in CD-ROM editions.) It's the look on the shelf. The smell as I open a volume. The dark ink on the pages. The well-written entries. The feel of the paper. Surely I'm not the only one who, in 2006, says, "I want a set of encyclopedias." The real thing. The real deal. On my shelf.

More On The Future Of Books

The Observer of London has published a very interesting article looking at the future of books, as we have always known books. Some excerpts:

The world of publishing stands on the cusp of the greatest innovation since Gutenberg. With cheap, portable electronic readers just around the corner, what is the future of the printed book?

Every year at the Booker Prize, there's an odd little ritual in which six 21st-century writers come face to face with the art and craft of the book as Caxton and Chaucer knew it. Before the winner is announced, each writer is presented with a sumptuous, hand-tooled, hardback edition of their novel. Once a reaffirmation of a venerable, but vital, tradition, in years to come this ceremony may seem as quaint as the presentation of Maundy money. All the signs are that the book as we know it may be going the way of the codex and the illuminated manuscript.

Almost every IT expert in the world is agreed that the book faces a revolutionary challenge from e-books and e-paper. Carr says: 'In the next five to 10 years, maybe much sooner, we'll see a decent, ultra-lightweight, portable e-paper device that allows book lovers to download titles straight from the internet, either legally or illegally.' Dick Brass, a retired Microsoft vice-president with wide experience of e-readers, agrees: 'Tablet devices are getting lighter and cheaper. Eventually, and I'm betting it will be before 2020, one of these devices, like the iPod in music, will offer an experience close enough to paper to shift the paradigm to digital distribution. That will mark the beginning of the end of the age of paper books.'

Such speculation will not liberate the written word from its inalienable place on the page. The word, written and spoken, remains at the heart of our civilisation. There is every reason to want to see the printed word enhanced by something more in tune with current information technology, but until the geeky entrepreneurs of MIT, Microsoft, Google, Amazon and the rest can come up with something that looks like a book, feels like a book and behaves like a book, those who handle such items every day, and marvel over the magical integration of print, paper and binding, will probably continue to read and enjoy books much as Caxton and Gutenberg did.

I'm cheering for Gutenberg 2.0 ........... No AJAX required.

A Million Little Lies

Internet scams are a dime a dozen. Phony this and phony that - it's become a part of dealing with the pseudo-anonymous nature of the web. But the latest scandal of lies and fabrication is not on the Internet, it's on the bookshelves in millions of American homes. The million little lies is contained within the covers of the blockbuster book, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey.

The Smoking Gun, an investigative website owned by Court TV, blew the story of fraud and deception wide open for all to read Monday night. (If you have the stomach for it - read the whole story here.) It is an excellent piece of investigative journalism. There is no doubt, after reading the piece, that James Frey turned a novel, which he was unable to sell, into a memoir and made a bundle - on a lie.

In these times of scrutiny of the Internet and wondering what is, and is not, true and credible, we are confronted with a huge fraud in the world of good old-fashioned book publishing. No, it's not the first time readers have been had by a book that turned out to be fabrication, but this is quite possibly the most brazen fraud in modern publishing history.

Arrests, drug use, Mafia friends, responsibility for the death of High School friends, events at Hazelden rehabilitation clinic, on and on and on. Lies. Lies bought by three and a half million people to keep the book atop the New York Times Non-Fiction paperback bestseller list for 15 weeks. This is a sad and sordid story of a man who pulled a fast one on his publisher, Doubleday, and on millions of readers who shed tears over the million little pieces of his disturbing - but fabricated - life story.

Shameful.