Routine Order

The Tintin Movie is bound to be released in 2009. Yes, it is true.

“After 25 years, they finally said ‘OK, let’s go’,” Nick Rodwell, head of Moulinsart NV, said of the protracted talks with Spielberg since the early 1980s.

- International Herald Tribune

The movie will be created by DreamWorks, that outfit headed by Steven Spielberg. Moulinsart Studios, the owner of Hergé’s rights to Tintin confirmed as much awhile ago. So far, we don’t know which of Tintin’s adventures will be featured in the movie, which could be the first of many, if the first succeeds. If I have anything to do with it, it should be a success!!

Layne Thrasher about writing his debut book:

Writing is not always peacefully releasing. Sometimes the words haunt, keeping one awake at night until they are released on the piece of paper where they live and breathe and ultimately die if not remembered.

I picked up my copy of the “100 sonnets - love and demise” in the bargain bin. There’s an occasional sparkle here and there, a couple of verses that are really good. It would have been much better if he wasn’t a slave to rhyme - some of the stanza jar, but they still rhyme.

It’s been a long, long time since I read really good poetry, discounted or not.

I am a bookswim alpha tester now! I got an invitation and I signed up for a plan today.

Bookswim is an online book rental library, much like Netflix, only for books. I had first written about BookSwim’s launch plans and then I had posted a link to the interview with Bookswim’s creator.

The plans for Bookswim are as follows:

1. $23.99 a month for a 3 books at a time plan
2. $26.99 a month for the 5 books at a time plan
3. $29.99 for 7 books at a time
4. $32.99 for 9 books at a time, and
5. $35.99 for 11 books at a time

In addition to the above there is a free membership which you can use to just look over everything - if you decide to rent books, you will have to upgrade to the paid plans.

First impression - the rates are high. $23.99 will buy me a decent book or two a month! Also, whats the point in the 11 books-at-a-time plan? You can finish 11 books all at once - I take at least a day or two to finish a decent sized book. Also, you can’t seem to send back a book as soon as you finish it - for the three books at a time plan, for example, you can send back two books when you are done with them, as you are reading the third book. This won’t be a big problem in the long run, since you can manage to read the 4th book that arrives and send in the third and fourth books and so on - if you know what I mean. Shipping is free both ways. Asking people so send in two books together will save them some shipping dues. Here’s what the plan says:

When you finish 2 books, send them back in return for 2 MORE books. You still have that third book in your hands to read while the others are being shipped, so you’re never without a book!

There is a one month money-back guarantee, in case it doesn’t work out for you, which is reassuring.

The collections seems okay. There are lots of graphic novels and comics as well. There is no Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), but I could find Umberto Eco and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Of course this was just a very cursory search.

Lets see how this takes off, and then maybe I will pay for the books themselves.

In the Preface to the Bibliography of American Literature(BAL) compiled by Jacob Blanck, he says:

“I am told that Chinese printers have a tradition which obliges them to introduce into their work a sprinkling of intentional errors; the reason for this curious action is to provide the careful reader with that sense of superiority which follows discovery of another man’s typographical lapse. We all know that strange pleasure; and while I would not rob you of such harmless delight it is nevertheless my sincere hope that no one will leave this Bibliography of American Literature with a violent attack of superiority complex.”

Wow! I wonder if this is another incident of someone using the “Chinese” as a vehicle for their imagination, like the old Chinese curse thingy.

However, it is interesting. I have always taken perverse pleasure in underlining mistakes in the books I read, as well as observing typesetting errors, like a top margin that varies in height from left to right. That a printer would intentionally introduce typos to make me feel smarter was beyond me!

I learnt that in the olden days, dictonaries, maps and authors used to intentionally misspell things, or even typeset some letters upside down to catch pirates. Copyright piracy, that is.

O’Reilly Radar > Distributed Proofreaders Completes 10,000th Book

Today Distributed Proofreaders (DP) posted a package of texts that takes us over 10,000 completed titles. I’m very proud of our community of volunteers who have accomplished this beautiful number. The 10K package (listed below) showcases the wide range of our volunteers’ interests and talents. For those of you who may not know, DP makes accurate e-text transcriptions of public domain printed material. The results of our efforts are available in html and plain text formats, primarily through Project Gutenberg (PG). Scanning and raw OCR are the first step in digitizing printed material. DP takes the next step to make accurate versions that can be reflowed, re-sized, cut and pasted, accurately searched, analyzed and so on.

For those who like numbers, the 10,000 titles represent around 3 million pages. We have produced books in over 20 languages and just under 15% of our production is in languages other than English. About 700 volunteers login each day, and about 3000 different volunteers login over a 30 day period. We have approximately 5600 projects in some stage of preparation.

Okay, “Today” was the 11th of March - I am late in reporting this to you, but I was a distributed proofreader myself for a few days, before that dropped off the edge of my attention span, like everything else. Read some free books at Project Gutenberg. The distributed proofreading effort is a fun way to read a little each day - you basically read the output of a scanner to detect spellos, typos and uh-ohs. Contribute a little of your time, and, more importantly, spread the freedom!

Take a look at this March 2007 Calendar to see what I mean. Pretty neat idea for those with writer’s block - a pithy sentence or phrase that will get your creative juices flowing. I stumbled across this during my evening walk.

Enjoy.

Set up an Invisible Book Shelf for yourself. Of course, the
key to it is that you butcher a book that you don’t want anymore, but all in all, it is a pretty cool effect.

Otto Frank—who survived the Holocaust by living out Auschwitz—was trying to save his wife Edith, his mother-in-law Rosa Hollander and his daughters Margot and Anne. The 80 letters how his effort to get out of Holland, and how he failed in doing that. These letters were just released and became common knowledge.

Had he got out, Anne Frank, his daughter, might not have written her diaries.

No one writes letters anymore - emails are always to the point and never substantial. The art of writing letters, and documenting one’s own life via letters, is almost dead. One could say blogs are a replacement, but really, who puts their private thoughts, feelings and fears on a blog. Most, like me, just write about what they find interesting, not whats going on in their own lives. Blogs have almost replaced collections of letters as a way to look into particular periods in history and their effect on individuals. I remember reading quite a few highly linked-to Iraqi blogs, and Israeli blogs.

via Time

We’ll explode in year 2 as we revolutionize the way America reads.

Joe Wikert interviews George Burke, who owns, or works for BookSwim. I had written about Bookswim (Bookswim: Netflix for Books) earlier. This interview puts some things straight - like how they plan to fix the problem of super heavy books and their postage. The solution is that they won’t stock textbooks, or catalogs, or any other backbreakers. They also will be shipping media mail, so service might be slow. $15 for a 3-books-out-at-a-time service seems okay to me. Also, it seems like they will offer readers the ability to own the books they rent at a discounted price. So will they end up being a used-books seller more than a Netflix-like lending service?

George says they are white-knucking and late-nighting for a March 2007 release - which is not that far away. I, honestly can’t wait to try it. Then again, I’d probably rent three books and keep them forever, the kind of busy I am right now…

I stumbled upon Art Garfunkel(of Simon and Garfunkel fame)’s Reading List and Music List.

The Reading List is amazing, containing each and every book he has ever read since 1970!!!

His fourth alltime favorite song is his own song, the Bridge Over Troubled Waters.

There was a time in my life when I wouldn’t sleep without listening to Simon & Garfunkel. Thank you for making life livable, Art.

Ever since I read the Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri, I have been wondering why she chose the name “Gogol” for her main character. I found the answer today in an interview which is quite interesting in and of itself: Interview: Jhumpa Lahiri Speaks on “The Namesake”

The original spark of the book was the fact that a friend of my cousin’s in India had the pet name Gogol

Aha! We all know that Jhumpa was born “Nilanjana” and then became “Jhumpa” since a teacher liked her nickname better, or something like that. Seems that she wanted to replicate that in the Namesake.

So disappointing! I thought there was some mysterious thread that links Gogol with Google, or that really huge number, or something more esoteric!

The Economist list of the top books of the year 2006 is interesting in itself, but what really got my gut was the following description of Richard Dawkins‘ latest book, “The God Delusion,” — as a wavering agnostic myself, maybe I should grab the book, and give it a half-chance of swaying me either way. Maybe it will just end up as another book on my Amazon wishlist, that stays there forever. Lucky are those that get gifts.

The God Delusion
By Richard Dawkins. Houghton Mifflin; 416 pages; $27. Bantam; £20

Atheists will love Richard Dawkins’s incisive logic and rapier wit and theists will find few better tests of the robustness of their faith. Even agnostics, who claim to have no opinion on God, may be persuaded that their position is untenable waffle.

BookSwim promises an online book rental service that works like Netflix does. I am wondering if it will get off the ground, as much as whether it will be successful.

1. Books have a much lesser audience these days
2. There are a lot more books than Movies released every year
3. Readers have pretty specific tastes, especially when it comes to non-fiction — where a person might want to read books on something that might sound obscure to me
4. Books might just cost more than DVDs in some case - think hundreds of dollars
5. Books have a limited re-usable life after which they get dog-eared, torn, ripped etc
6. Unethical customers might tear out a page - making the book un-reusable
7. Libraries are still alive and kicking
8. It takes 3 hours to watch a movie, around 3 days to read a book - so subscribers get less “value” per dollar with books, for the same subscription amount - how much cheaper will bookswim be, and how will hey manage it?

Considering all these factors it is difficult to see how they will make any profit, given the no-late-fees, free-postage deal they are offering. The site is set to launch this first quarter of 2007, but it looks like they are still looking for financers. There is a brochure touching upon why bookswim is an appealing idea, but it is superficial in some respects.

Thanks to the distant librarian who brought this in my field of view. The site he links to has some commetary too.

I’ll have to wait and see what rates and benefits they offer before signing up - owning a good book is still pretty high on my list of priorities, so renting a book does not seem too attractive - if I like the book, I’ll probably end up buying it, so it would be neat if bookswim offered the possibility of renting-to-own, for a small additional price.

Through Anil Dash, I ended up on this post at sylloge.com about a John Adams quote, the original version of which seems to be:

The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences; the arts of legislation and administration and negotiation ought to take the place of, indeed exclude, in a manner, all other arts. I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.

I couldn’t help smiling at the pleasure the author of that blog must have got when he finally discovered the quote he was searching for, after lots and lots of looking for it, asking around, etc. And hey, wikiquote says the quote is from a Letter to Abigail Adams from May 12, 1780.

P.S.: Since I quote so much, and would like to cite my quotations AND have the citations visible, in a sematically correct fashion, I should install the block quotations plugin from Chetan Kunte. Someday, soon.

Heartening news from Yahoo: Google book-scanning efforts spark debate - Yahoo! News

A splinter group called the Open Content Alliance favors a less restrictive approach to prevent mankind’s accumulated knowledge from being controlled by a commercial entity, even if it’s a company like Google that has embraced “Don’t Be Evil” as its creed.

The organization will be doling out millions to an Open Archiving group - the Internet Archive. Works to be scanned include those from a Boston Public Library and the Museum of Modern Art.

So what’s wrong with Google’s scanning initiative, you ask? Well, for one they intend to scan copyrighted material without explicit permission, and then show excerpts from the scans that don’t violate the copyright. And then there is the fact that they don’t want the content to appear on any other search engine besides theirs - A monopoly over knowledge, anyone?

It’s like having this huge, bad-ass “public” library, and then putting a gate upfront, and then charging to include books in the library, and to read the books, and no, the books can’t leave the library. There is nothing altruistic about google’s efforts - think about it - if you have original content that was not available in digital form earlier, that is now available only through you - who profits? I guess “humanity” is not the answer as much as “The Google Corporation” is.

I hope the Open Content Alliance survives, and thrives.

DC Comics
Now you can read the full first issues of the many Vertigo series that revolutionized comics! Follow the links below to download a PDF version of the first issue of these classic Vertigo series now collected in graphic novel form. When you visit the Graphic Novels section of VertigoComics.com, any graphic novel titles with a #1 icon () will have a download of the ground-breaking first issue!

Sandman, Death: The high cost of living, The Swamp Thing, all are anow available as free pdfs… Very Cool!

I am in love with LaTeX, the intelligent text formatter. Someday I will write a book with LaTeX. For that day, then, I save the following resource:

Getting to Grips with Latex - Latex Tutorials by Andrew Roberts @ School of Computing, University of Leeds

I wouldn’t consider myself an expert, but I’m learning all the time. I recall finding it quite taxing when I start to learn Latex, which is why I have started these tutorials. However, I hope that my experiences plays to your advantage, since I hope I can let you into the sort of questions and problems I had when I first learning Latex.

The guide seems quite comprehensive, and should be useful for graduate students who use LaTeX a lot, or better still, want a better alternative to the braindead-ness of MS Word.

Trying to find that elusive book to gift someone or treat yourself? Pick one that is new, released this past year. The following link also has links to notable books from each of the pst 4-5 years.

100 Notable Books of the Year - The New York Times Book Review - New York Times

The Book Review has selected this list from books reviewed since the Holiday Books issue of Dec. 4, 2005.