Entries Tagged 'literature' ↓

That’s my best guess, anyway, after reading this item at Publishers Lunch ($$):

How Many More eBook Releases Will We See?

The press release from Ectaco draws on a variety of cliches (”kiss your
old-fashioned, dusty library goodbye”) to announce the company’s new jetBook ereader. The cheap-looking device weighs just 7 ounces and has a five-inch screen (smaller than Kindle and Sony Reader) and appears to handle only .txt, .pdf and .jpg text files, along with mp3s. The company specializes in translation dictionaries and those are a focus feature of this device as well, which sells for $350.

Mostly you look at their site and realize how relatively easy it must be to design and produce a reader like this, and how many similar products must be on the way.

Duh.

From the press release:

jetBook(R) is an incredibly sophisticated e-book reader with a built-in
mp3 player that allows users to listen to AudioBooks as well as keep up
with their reading. Preloaded with translating dictionaries, you can
simultaneously enjoy a good book, improve your vocabulary by looking up and
translating any words you want, listen to your favorite audio files and
check out photos — all in the same device! With an incredibly simple to
read, large 5-inch, high-resolution display that is easy on the eyes, users
can now read for hours without the eyestrain that comes from ordinary
computer screens. And those with trouble reading normal-sized print books
will benefit from the different fonts and sizes you can change to
instantly. Weighing in at a remarkable 7 ounces, the super-slim device fits
easily in the palm of your hand for a truly comfortable reading experience.

I don’t yet own an e-book reader. (I don’t have a commute, so there’s no urgency. I’m waiting for early adopters to test them out and to advise me on which one to buy.)

My motto, however, is: if you love books, set them free^TM.

The last time I urged book lovers and book cultists to embrace the technological revolution was here.

She was a fixture of downtown New York, a stellar writer, and a woman with a most generous heart:

Hillel Italie writes:

In many ways, Paley wasn’t a typical American writer. Her characters did not suffer “identity crises.” Instead of living on the road, they stayed home, in Greenwich Village. They discussed politics, dared to take sides and belonged to clubs anxious to have them as members.

“People talk of alienation and so forth,” she said in a 1994 interview with The Associated Press. “I don’t feel that. I feel angry at certain things, but I don’t feel alienated from it. I feel disgusted with it, or mad, but I don’t feel I’m not in it.”

(I wrote this on the run earlier today; embarrassing typos are now fixed)

A delightful and helpful reminder for those contemplating “negotiations” with the Islamic Republic of Iran:

Azar Nafisi, the author of “Reading Lolita in Tehran,” quoted a former colleague in Tehran who compared dealing with the Islamic Republic to playing chess with a monkey.

“In the middle of the game, the monkey picks up your queen and swallows it,” she said. “Then what are you going to do? You are dealing with a country that is not going to follow your rules.”

Nafisi, like all the Iranian expats/analysts interviewed for the New York Times piece I quoted above, is in favor of engaging Iran, not bombing it.***

Mehdi Khaliji, a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute, for example, makes a lot of sense:

With Iran, the United States needs to become both more confrontational in private, and less bellicose publicly, he said. For example, rather than threatening regime change and not doing much to back it up, he said, the American military should have come down hard on Iranian interference in Iraq while sounding more diplomatic in public. That approach would make Iran more amenable to compromise, he said [emphasis added].

Like I was saying yesterday, when I was talking about plan B: it’s all about hypocrisy public diplomacy. Get used to it.

———–

***In a demented attack earlier this year on Nafisi and her wildly successful memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran (a work of dissident literature about the soul-killing totalitarian regime of the Mad Mullahs of the Islamic Republic of Iran), Columbia “scholar” Hamid Dabashi accused Nafisi of being a “native informer” and “colonial agent” serving the agenda of the Bush administration and of writing “a kaffeeklatsch version of English literature as the ideological foregrounding of American empire.” He called her work “reminiscent of the most pestiferous colonial projects of the British in India.”

In an interview, he called Nafisi “the Lynndie England of Abu Ghraib dressed up as the simple, everyday comprador intellectual you might meet in the supermarket.”

I have no desire to get in between Persians. However, this is my wish for “Professor” Dabashi:

May all his teeth fall out except one, and may that one be the source of constant, agonizing pain.