Alan Jacobs


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The book as such isn’t obsolete; inherently, it’s less immediate and raw, going as it does through the old-fashioned labyrinth of the publishing industry, and even when the book is printed and ready to go, you have either to get it at a store or to have it shipped to you via Amazon. For now, this is a constraint we can work around. I take it as a challenge: to give a book a “live,” up-to-date, aware, instant quality. There will always be a place for, say, the traditional novel that people read on the beach or chapter by chapter at bedtime for a month as a means of entertainment and escape. There is, though, this other, new form of reading that most books being published today don’t have an answer for. Even achieving a happy medium between the new and old reading experience is a great breakthrough.

Efficiency in the natural world: the brutal cunning of natural selection as it sculpts DNA within living organisms; DNA always pushing toward the most efficient journey to reproduction; water finding the briefest, easiest path downhill. Concision is crucial to contemporary art: boiling down to bare elements, reducing to basic notes (in both senses of the word). The paragraph-by-paragraph energy is everything.