Posts by giovanni tiso
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(Actually, and this one is for real, Veronelli claimed to drink no less of eight bottles of wine a day, without ever getting drunk. And he was a very respected publisher of literature on the subject. I think we should make him the patron of the book club.)
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Actually, I should come clean, in the spirit of this thread: I made up that quotation.
I was trying something radically new with forum commentary, experimenting with hybrid forms.
And I might have been slightly drunk at the time.
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I didn't realise the quote from AU was "no deliberate wrongdoing". Their plagiarism guidelines explicitly state that plagiarism can happen inadvertently - but still counts as plagiarism.
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I think it was the esteemed publisher and enologist Luigi Veronelli who said that he was a very well-read person, so long as you counted wine labels.
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This seems the opposite of making amends to me.
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Can I rescind my feeling somewhat sorry for the man? This strikes me as a very cynical volte face.
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What richard said.
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If its apparent potential is realised, one minute the book (paperback or hardback, you decide) you're holding is the collected, annotated works of Shakespeare, the next it's Bronte, then Freud, and now it's from the top of the New York Times' latest best-seller list. Looks like a book, reads like a book, even feels pretty much like a book, but with all the benefits of digital distribution.
In The Diamond Age Neal Stephenson does a very good job of imagining what the electronic book of the future might look like. And it's still most decidedly an object.
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I think many advocates of e-books are not book lovers, and they make the mistake of thinking of books as mere data.
Yes, a book is an object but really what you or I or anybody else care for are the words in it. Change the font or the cover of my copy of Moby Dick, it ain't going to affect my appreciation of the novel all that much. Note too how my Penguin Classics copy of Moby Dick is already quite a different object from the paperback that was published in Melville's day.
Now if electronically we were somehow able to replicate certain key aspects of the book-as-object - portability, ease on the eye, resolution of the page, opacity of the surface - I think you'll find that people are going to adopt this new encoding medium very quickly, all the more so since it allows to navigate the text in ways that a print book cannot achieve. It's going to be a shift comparable to the iPod for music, you mark my words. And I think we aren't remotely prepared to absorb its repercussions.
(I saw my first Kindle - a clone, actually - when I was in Italy a couple of months ago and it's a very slick thing indeed. Nothing whatsoever to do with reading a project gutenberg file on your computer.)
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I had to flick this off to a historian friend, we were discussing such things over lunch. As an explanation, it seems very convenient to me. And also a little problematic. If he was really so conscious of how he was handling his sources and aiming to credit them creatively, how in the world did he end up not crediting them at all?