Getting Saved - There's an App for That

The New Yorker explores how churches are incorporating digital technology in their communities.

From the piece...

The question of how, exactly, digitized texts will change religious practice has been a pressing one in religious communities for at least a decade. (A recent article in Christianity Today wondered whether the People of the Book shouldn’t be rechristened the People of the Nook.) But the era of digital religion is only now poised to begin in earnest, ushered in by technological advancements—the widespread adoption of tablets and smartphones—and by religious leaders eager to harness the power of that technology to inspire and instruct their flocks.

Last week, I contacted leaders of several religious institutions in New York and asked about how the digital was being used in their communities. Cregan Cooke, the director of communication and media at Redeemer Presbyterian, Manhattan’s best-known megachurch, told me that parishioners use mobile devices during services to look up Bible verses; that pastors like having multiple translations of the Bible on their tablets to refer to “whenever they’re away from their physical libraries”; and that the church has recently developed its own app, which contains a sermon podcast and community news. It’s been downloaded more than twenty-five thousand times.

This isn’t surprising at a church whose senior pastor, Tim Keller, is an Internet video star with his own publishing imprint. But more traditional congregations have also eagerly embraced digital technology. Kevin Gabriel Gillen, a Dominican friar at the Church of St. Joseph in Greenwich Village, wrote me that iBreviary is in common use in the church. “Walking into a chapel with an iPhone may raise the eyebrow of another friar, because they may think you are about to make a phone call or text, but the iPad seems to be accepted.”

The Genius at Apple

11 definitive profiles of Steve Jobs can be found, here, at Byline.

Cookbook Revolution

Cookbooks are making their way to iPads and e-readers. Will they be used?

From a story in the Chicago Tribune...

"I think the future of a lot of cooking information is electronic, but we don't know how it's going to shake out yet," says Molly O'Neill, whose latest cookbook, "This American Burger: The Meat, The Heat and the Recipes" was published solely as an e-book.

"It's sort of like the days when audio came to film. People tried to take what worked onstage and use it in film, and it didn't work. The demands of the media are very different."

Until recently, cookbooks had been challenging to publish electronically, says Mike Shatzkin, a publishing consultant. E-book software is good at reproducing pages of text, but it hasn't been able to handle elaborately designed layouts that integrate mouthwatering photographs — elements that are the core of most modern cookbooks. That's changing, particularly for iPad and Nook.

More flexibility in design is part of the reason "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" is now being published as an e-book, says Paul Bogaards, publicist for Knopf Doubleday.

The Confederate Flying Machine

One man's vision caught Jefferson Davis' attention, but never could get funded.

From a piece on NBC...

The papers of R. Finley Hunt, a dentist with a passion for flight, describe scenarios where flying machines bombed Federal troops across Civil War battlefields. Hunt's papers are set to go up for sale at the Space and Aviation Artifacts auction during the week of Sept. 15-22, giving one lucky collector a chance to own a piece of an alternate technological history that never came to pass.

"It's incredible for someone who loves early aviation, because it poses the great question of 'What if?'" said Bobby Livingston, vice president of sales and marketing with RR Auction. "What if planes had appeared above the wilderness when (Union Gen. Ulysses S.) Grant began his campaign in the Shenandoah Valley?"

The hardback collection includes pencil drawings of wings, propellers and a multicylinder steam engine. Hunt's designs drew inspiration from his love of studying any and all flying methods found in nature, despite his own lack of professional expertise.

Ayn Rand - The App

Totally.

Will the Nook Save Barnes & Noble?

Well, certainly Barnes & Noble hopes so.



From an article in the Independent...



Barnes & Noble, the largest chain of bookshops in the US, said sales of physical books are sliding sharply at its stores and it no longer expects any of the company's growth to come from that traditional business.



The company is pinning its hopes instead on the Nook e-reader, a rival to Amazon's Kindle, and on sales of e-books for the device, which it promised to double to $1.8bn (£1.1bn) this year.



B&N's latest quarterly results, out yesterday, showed the accelerating changes in the way books are read and sold, and underscored the difficulties facing traditional bookstores.

Booktrack - a Soundtrack for Books

BookLamp - "The Pandora of Books"

It's gone live.



From a piece in Paste...



Booklamp.org went live earlier today, offering a free service similar to the wildly popular Pandora Internet radio service, but for books.



The story of BookLamp, the brainchild of 29-year-old Aaron Stanton, began back in 2003 when he and other students at the University of Idaho put together what they called the Book Genome Project. Similar to the Pandora-originating Music Genome Project, the Book Genome Project breaks down a literary work to analyze the style of writing, which they refer to as Language DNA, and assign numerical values to what they refer to as Story DNA: a breakdown of the settings and actors in any given scene.

The Future of the Book

Imprint has a Q&A with the Institute for the Future of the Book. They're about worried about it - the future.



From the piece...



The first time we spoke was back in the pre-Kindle, pre-iPad days of 2006. For decades, you’ve actively been thinking about and working to augment the future of the book. What is your read of how the concept of the book has changed in the past five years?



There is the question of how it has involved in my mind and how it has evolved in the minds of the public. I view the book as a place where readers congregate and the social aspect of reading is where we’re going. The publishing industry is trying very hard to keep the traditional model of a book in tact, selling 300 or 400 pages to one reader at a time.



There is this social aspect: books are becoming these places to congregate, the form of expression is undergoing changes. In most cases e-readers and the e-book developers haven’t caught up to this. There are concepts that are too far afield, like people trying to write a novel collaboratively in World of Warcraft. I have no problem with such a book being considered fiction just like Tolkien but the execution isn’t there. And then there is something like Push Pop Press. Yes, the Al Gore book has interactive media but it is just for one reader at a time. They are simply books with audio and video on the page. We figured that out long, long ago. And it isn’t sustainable. When you’re doing something for the first time you can beg, borrow and steal all sorts of help when it comes to all this content. But when you go back to do it again and again you have to pay up.



My big problem with these apps is that they are like CD-ROMs, in the wrong sense – both are islands unto themselves. I’m reading The Waste Land all by myself. The apps are all walled in, all you have is the app. Heaven forbid you have an idea and want to go down the rabbit hole. You can, but you have to leave the app. I believe we are heading toward browser-based materials.

Five Best E-Readers

Lifehacker breaks 'em down.

From the piece...

Amazon Kindle

Amazon's Kindle is probably the most ubiquitous ereader on the market today. The Kindle comes in a standard 6-inch model and the larger 9-inch Kindle DX, priced at $114 for the ad-supported 6-inch model, $139 for the Wi-Fi only version, $189 for the 3G 6-inch model, $139 for the ad-supported 3G model, and $379 for the 3G Kindle DX. The Kindle features a high-contrast E-ink display, is capable of storing over 3,500 books from the Kindle store, and if you spring for the 3G models you can download books anywhere, or surf the web using the built-in browser.

The Book Is Not Dead, It's Just Shapeshifting

So says the Guardian.

From the article...

Now that the Great Panic of 2000-2010, the world of print's freak-out at the threat of digital, is subsiding, at least in the world of books, we can begin to discern the shape of the future and enumerate the potentially positive aspects of this historic paradigm shift.

Make no mistake: as in every previous IT revolution, there will be (already is) a creative dividend. For instance, the print boom of 1590-1610 liberated Shakespeare and his successors, from Jonson to Donne, and sponsored an explosion of ephemeral publications, the inky compost that would nurture the best of the Jacobeans. Similarly, in Edwardian London, new media shaped the careers of Joseph Conrad, Arthur Conan Doyle, Henry James, and countless others. Heart of Darkness was first published as a magazine serial.

I've no doubt that, with the benefit of hindsight, literary historians will note that the first decade of the 21st century witnessed some equally profound shape-shifting in several familiar genres.