what we talk about when we talk about books by leah price

Rebook generates digital “association copies” (remember Obama swearing in on Lincoln’s Bible) by allowing readers to give away ebooks that they’ve underlined or annotated. Then again, perhaps print books aren’t the ones whose poverty needs to be remedied: other projects feel like pale electronic imitations of features that print books have long taken for granted. Some projects return to the decades-old premise of electronic enhancements or “enrichments,” which went during the aughts under the ungainly name of “vooks.” SubText overlays digitized works of literature with annotations and images BookPlaylist synchronizes a text with background music. But instead of it being a notification on Twitter or a restaurant recommendation, it’s a beautiful passage from a work of literature with a tie to that place.” I thought back to the nineteenth-century guidebooks that inserted a snippet of Shelley next to their map of the Alps the book has always been about bringing worlds together. That literary pedometer meets its real-world counterpart in LitCity: “Imagine walking down a city street and feeling that familiar buzz of a push notification. “Fitbit for books”: an app that blocks incoming calls and buzzes your phone with reminders to get back to a book.

“Uber for books”: a same-day service that would deliver library volumes to your door. At the Codex Hackathon, a convention whose participants spend a frenetic weekend designing electronic reading tools, I watch developers line up onstage to pitch book-related projects to potential collaborators and funders. Increasingly, people of the book are also people of the cloud. Illustration by Albert Robida, for “The End of the Books,” by Octave Uzanne, published in Scribner’s Magazine, vol.

What we talk about when we talk about books by leah price