Most avid readers would readily admit to having an obsessive side. A tech startup, Small Demons, aims to appeal to, nay manipulate, those literary obsessions, and the idea behind it is so simple and brilliant you can’t help but marvel that it’s never been done…
Last week Goodreads’ Otis Chandler wrote an article describing various ways in which books are discovered, both online and off. For anyone unfamiliar with Goodreads, the site is a socially-oriented online neighborhood for authors and readers. It specializes in recommendations, reviews, promotional items, and for the…
As we have been discussing on MobyLives, publishing is awash with instances of arbitrary censorship. For example, here by Apple and here by Paypal. It is apparent that journalists and editors are no longer afraid of big government, but quake before big business and big money. Private bodies whose influence…
As detailed in this New York Times report by David Streitfeld, the 15-year-old non-profit Internet Archive has started a hugely ambitious project to assemble and scan all of the world’s printed books. According to Brewster Kahle, the founder of Internet Archive, “We want to collect one…
Or actually, to be more exact, her assistant posted the review for her. (Via The Poetry Foundation) Here it is: Assuming these are actually her words, Glück’s Yelp shares with her poetry a passion for clean and glittering things. Here’s a stanza from her poem ”A Summer Garden”: Freshly polished…
The novelist Daniel Alarcón is looking for funding for a new initiative, and it’s a good one: he and his colleagues at Radio Ambulante aim to create a Spanish-language radio show of the quality and appeal of English-language institutions like This American Life, Snap Judgment…
… or is it? Google has developed an algorithm that judges comments left on YouTube videos, and through it they claim to have found the funniest video on the internet. And here it is. Side-splitting, huh? The algorithm was based on recurring words/phrases/nonsense left in…
![big oak You are in a dense forest. To the East you can see a clearing. To the West, North, and South the forest continues, however the forest is to [sic] dense in the West and South. >run north woods You continue on [sic] into…](http://mhpbooks.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/oulupo1-100x64.jpg "FRIDAY CHALLENGE: Oulipo-inspired interactive fiction")
big oak You are in a dense forest. To the East you can see a clearing. To the West, North, and South the forest continues, however the forest is to [sic] dense in the West and South. >run north woods You continue on [sic] into…
We’re familiar with the argument: the modern age is bankrupting our attention spans, we are all technology-addled morons clicking semi-consciously between browser screens, unable to complete the simplest of tasks: mesmerised, drooling, catatonic simpletons. They’re not Claire Tomalin‘s precise words, but let’s imagine that that’s…
In the most hilariously excellent insult I’ve seen lately, David Shields has just named Justin Halpern of Shit My Dad Says a more engaging writer than Jonathan Franzen. In an extract from his forthcoming book How Literature Saved My Life published in Little Star Journal,…
