This school year caught me somewhat by surprise. I was up absurdly late last night reading works by Plato for my History of Lit Theory class. Luckily with an energy drink and a few shiny highlighters I was able to stay motivated and thoroughly finish my reading for at least that class. Plato is actually quite interesting, especially his arguments concerning the suitability of poetry and traditional myth. I didn’t buy into much of what he had to say, but it gave me a better understanding of why early church leaders would often skip over sections like the “Pericope de Adultera” when they exposited the Bible. Oh yeah, I’ve decided to try highlighting my reading books this semester, based mostly on advice gleaned from blogs. I’ll let you know how that goes (I rarely ever marked up books in the past) and if it fails miserably.
For those following my Google calendar, yes, I did change some classes around. I dropped King James Bible as Lit (after the first two lectures I could tell that I knew more about the KJB than my professor , and in other ways the class did not live up to my expectations) and replaced it with a topics course entitled something like “Black European Literature.” Sounds weird, but I already am enjoying it after my first lecture yesterday (no playing catch-up as the first day of that class came after the first week of school).
Don’t expect new content from this blog for awhile…busy, busy busy.
a hazy glow floats over the city,
like an orange peel
drifting through the sky
.
a steady beat flows from the road:
it’s the clockwork sound
of searching tires
.
the cricket’s sing
here on Franklin Avenue,
happy to perform just for the ants,
and the honeysuckle,
and the passersby
.
we board the 2C,
say hello to the driver,
and move on
I had a thought today while trying to remember how to install .deb packages. When I flipped open my very handy copy of the Linux Phrasebook (highly recommended for Linux newbies like myself) I quickly scanned the table of contents to find the section on Installing Software. Since the variant of Linux that I use, XUbuntu, employs the Debian system (as opposed to RPM) the first six sections in this chapter were of no use to me. If I had been using RedHat or SUSE, the opposite would have been true and the last eight sections would have simply been more padding in that handy volume.
The Thought:
Instead of simply picking out a book online or in a store, what if customers could choose to omit or include features based upon their own needs? For example, a book on home gardening might have a lot of well-written and integrated content on vegetables and how to prevent your tomatoes from getting spoiled by frost. If you live on the equator one or both of those topics might be utterly useless to you. If you live in the Midwest and want your own garden maybe you don’t want vegetables but you do want to know how to protect your azaleas from the cold. Maybe you want extra information about natural fertilizer. Maybe you just want the introductory chapters on gardening. Imagine that instead of having to buy one of many “one-size fits all” gardening books on Amazon (or having to read a copious amount of reviews to find the book that has everything you need and nothing you don’t), you could just select the items from the book that you want with your order.
Problems:
Any book published under such a format (build-your-own-book let’s call, it, byob) would require a great deal of cooperation between publisher and author. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and in many cases is already expected. All that would change is a slight difference in the nature of that cooperation (more technical and structured, but in the end less restricting on the content that the author can choose to expound upon).
Another difficulty of course is the issue of printing costs. Printing costs would inevitably go up, but they may eventually be offset by marketing tie-ins available as “book extras.” For instance, a book on blogging techniques may include available bonus chapters on commercial blogging software and themes, or plugs from big-name bloggers who want to expand their readership.
A final problem may arise from this scenario: what if I order my book but decide later that I do want to read the parts I thought were unimportant. One solution for this would be that when you byob you get a specialized printed copy and a fully-featured ebook copy.
ps - the program I installed is the Flock browser. I’m using it now to upload this blog post.