As Schiller ticked down the list, for feature after feature — portability, durability, interactivity, searchability, and currency — the book earned a big red X. Curiously, Schiller didn’t let his earlier observation of the antiquity of books undermine his critique on the grounds of their durability; not only the technology of the book, but many actual tomes survive from Gutenberg’s era; and when older formats are taken into account, far older books are still with us. It is comparatively difficult to imagine an iPad of today, much less an app designed to run on one, still in use two hundred, five hundred, a thousand years hence.
The publishers’ dream of creating content once and having it run everywhere is just that, a dream. We will all be nostalgic for Microsoft soon, which for about a decade or two essentially developed and controlled a standard for all computing. Those days are gone. There will be some publishers who will develop products for all available platforms (at great expense) and others who will focus on one platform alone (giving up a big piece of the market). But these are difficult days for publishers because platform wars have come to the book business.
His strong point is that religion never lost faith in using culture to improve vulnerable, childlike souls. It understands, he contends, human frailties and how to work on them better than godless polities. He’s at his most bracing when he proposes wholesale educational reform, suggesting that universities’ humanities departments should be overhauled to do what John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold hoped for them, namely to instil wisdom. He recommends: “Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary would thus be assigned in a course on understanding the tensions in marriage instead of in one focused on narrative trends in 19th-century fiction, just as the recommendations of Epicurus and Seneca would appear in the syllabus for a course about dying.”Doesn’t instrumentalising culture thus involve traducing it? “Religion is very unembarrassed about this – culture should have a purpose. I agree with it. Arnold said that culture should be a salve for society. Then in the late 19th century you get the late romantics, Oscar Wilde and then the modernists, Joyce and TS Eliot, who say ‘No – art is a privileged sphere and shouldn’t have a purpose’. But I have a practical attitude: I’ll use a particular poet or particular music or art to get me through something. I would be even more of a basket case without culture. “
Jobs didn’t just use pseudo-asceticism for marketing. He wielded purist fanaticism so as to have power in the world of nerds. This is how it came to be that Jobs is so often remembered as an ‘inventor,’ though he rarely was one. His genius was not technical, but he was a genius at manipulating technical minds. …My impression, based on a number of interactions I witnessed over many years, is that Jobs traded one form of obsessive, principled nerdiness against another. It was useless for a typical designer or marketing person to plead with engineers during the early years of personal computers. Engineers had airtight criteria and data, and that trumped mere opinions and intuitions. But Jobs didn’t plead. He declared even more rigid and exacting criteria.
Jobs won the arms race of control freakery. He remains the only figure in a non-engineering role I have ever seen win this race against engineers outright.
Christopher Nolan views anarchy with dread, and human behavior in the absence of state-imposed stability is the central theme of his trilogy. Batman’s position within this social order is unclear. A vigilante, Nolan’s Batman is emblematic of a failed state: if Gotham’s legitimate instituions could guarantee stability, Batman would have no reason to exist. Similarly, unlike previous visions of Batman Nolan’s Bruce Wayne doesn’t fight crime out of civic duty; he does because he a deeply damaged individual incapable of dealing with loss and forming real relationships. This completes the foil between Nolan’s Batman and Joker. Just as the Joker likens himself to a dog chasing a car that wouldn’t know what to do if he he caught it, Bruce Wayne’s personality becomes more and more invested in the construct of Batman rather than himself: ending his vigilante quest ends himself. The Joker knows this, even if Wayne himself doesn’t.
Now both individual authors and trade and textbook presses can be drawn into a development and publishing ecosystem that begins and ends with Apple. Amazon may offer more eyeballs, but Apple offers an easier workflow. And the multimedia enhancements baked into the new iBooks will tempt everyone creating an e-book to add bits that will be specific to Apple’s platform — creating accidental exclusives. It’s not just about engaging students. It’s about engaging everyone in the education and publishing industries. If Apple can win their hearts and minds, it will win their business, too: Macs, iPads and iBooks.
What people haven’t seemed to notice is that on earth, of all the billions of species that have evolved, only one has developed intelligence to the level of producing technology. Which means that kind of intelligence is really not very useful. It’s not actually, in the general case, of much evolutionary value. We tend to think, because we love to think of ourselves, human beings, as the top of the evolutionary ladder, that the intelligence we have, that makes us human beings, is the thing that all of evolution is striving toward. But what we know is that that’s not true. Obviously it doesn’t matter that much if you’re a beetle, that you be really smart. If it were, evolution would have produced much more intelligent beetles. We have no empirical data to suggest that there’s a high probability that evolution on another planet would lead to technological intelligence.
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.
Czeslaw Milosz, from "From the Rising of the Sun"
My generation was lost. Cities too. And nations. But all this a little later. Meanwhile, in the window, a swallow Performs its rite of the second. That boy, does he already suspect That beauty is always elsewhere and always delusive? Now he sees his homeland. At the time of the second mowing. Roads winding uphill and down. Pine groves. Lakes. An overcast sky with one slanting ray. And everywhere men with scythes, in shirts of unbleached linen And the dark-blue trousers that were common in the province. He sees what I see even now. Oh but he was clever, Attentive, as if things were instantly changed by memory. Riding in a cart, he looked back to retain as much as possible. Which means he knew what was needed for some ultimate moment When he would compose from fragments a world perfect at last.