Michael Agresta makes some good points in this essay, and I’m glad that he avoids the sentimentalizing that often occurs, but several gaps occur to me:

1. Much of the juxtaposition of ebooks vs. print books relies on the notion that the eInk ebook will be the dominant, final form of the e-book. I don’t know that that’s true.

2. I agree that the biggest danger is to mass market paperbacks and even trade paperbacks with a diminishing but still viable market for hardbound books. But I also wonder what happens as people become more and more aware of the ephemerality and tracking that is present with ebooks and devices that use them. I can see a samizdat style culture arising in reaction to this. I also wouldn’t count out Print On Demand just yet.

3. Agresta brings up paratext. Related back to my point #1: an electronic format doesn’t necessarily limit the possibilities for paratextual experimentation. Hypertext didn’t take us very far back in the 1990s when that seemed poised to be a big think for narrative, but technology has changed in terms of screens, mobility and software.

4. I think we also need to be open to the possibility of technology hardware become more book like in nature. There are major limitations to the flat slab of glass that dominates computing and ereading right now.

The Fallacy of Information Overload – Brian Solis.

I completely agree. But let’s be honest about one thing: the platforms that we use to stream and filter the information we consume are incentivized to get us to use them as much as possible. Facebook, Google, Twitter, media websites, social gaming apps/sites, etc. all spend major bucks on usability and design to try and get users to spend as much time as possible on their sites.

Perhaps what we need is for companies to offer products where their income is based on how good their filtering/curation systems are and how healthy and productive their users are when it comes to spending time online.

Four things:

1. I’m not much of a fan of the creative nonfiction genre so take my opinion with a grain of salt.

2. The use of words like “realish” or “storyteller” is lame. Every good writer is a storyteller.

3. The solution seems to me to be rather simple: Sedaris should call himself and should be called a humorist. Humorists are expected to exaggerate.

4. This is the problem with “This American Life” — it has conditioned listeners to accept creative nonfiction as a journalistic-ish mode of storytelling. Perhaps it should simply embrace the blurring that goes on in creative nonfiction and state that clearly to its audience.

What Seth Godin says about books as the product of a lone author is true. Of course, let’s not ignore the fact that the renumeration for most of the books that are published does not add up to an impressive hourly wage — even books that aren’t dreck.

And yet people still keep churning them out. What a strange labor of love and narcissistic spasm of self expression is the writing life.

I want a smaller version of the iPad with a retina screen.

I realize that my tastes are very different from most people’s. But what I need above anything is a highly portable device that is awesome for both reading and writing.

Reading on the iPhone is amazing — so crisp. But the screen is too small. Writing on the iPhone isn’t bad either (using Notesy + Dropbox). The iPad is okay, but it’s too big of a device to hold in your hands for extended periods of time. When I picked up the Nook tablet and position my hands and imagined what a full thumb keyboard would look like at that size and then how much real estate would be left for the text, it seemed just about perfect. In fact, it wasn’t too far off from how much space I have up on my laptop when using a text editor (gedit, usually).

I may be wrong, but I think a smaller version of iPad would be a killer device for doing what I do the most at a screen: read and write.

Metadata is still incredibly important, and it will become increasingly important in ebook sales, but Mark makes an excellent point here about the limitation of keywording works of fiction.

I still use Google Reader and still find it the most efficient way to track blogs. Twitter is great for discovery, but not for reliable, consistent discovery.

And I hate how many blogs now require some kind of log-in, whether it’s Disqus or WordPress.com’s or Blogger’s native systems. These systems are often buggy and always annoying.

The conversation is already fragmented because of Twitter and Facebook (and G+ and Reddit and Tumblr). The fact that even that which takes place directly on the blogs it is also hard to track in one central location dampens my enthusiasm for blog commenting, especially on blogs that I don’t actively frequent.

I don’t mind a certain amount of ephemerality. And perhaps ephemerality is the only rational response to the tidal wave of conversation that now happens. But I still miss co.comment — it was the best method of curating conversation I have used so far on the web.

I haven’t fully committed to Scrivener yet, but that’s only because my current projects are all manageable with just text files right now. But I have done an extensive test drive of it, and while I’m not crazy about all of the UI elements, on the whole, I think it’s a great piece of software for writers.

This explanation of the development process for the iOS version is fantastic. To me it’s a great model of how to communicate with a user base — a skill that is, sadly, often lacking among independent software developers (not to mention the big software companies).

It certainly made me feel more comfortable with the developers and want to be aligned with the company. The minute I have a project that isn’t working with my current system, I will be buying Scrivener. If there’s an iOS version by then so much the better.

What about those of use who never cut cable because we never signed up for it in the first place? The only current TV I watch is on Hulu plus the occassionally football game on over the air TV (using a digital converter box). My daughter sometimes watch PBS Kids. Everything else is either Hulu or Netflix. If the networks/studios cut me off from Hulu, then I’ll stick with Netflix even though they’ve crippled it by refusing to do content deals with it.

Content is content. I’m willing to pay a certain amount per month in dollars and mind space (e.g. advertising) in order to be entertained. The entertainment business could probably pry another $10-15 per month out of me.

This, should it happen, wouldn’t be a way to do that.

Click through above and take a look at the infographic. For many students it could appear as rather daunting. I would guess that for the type of student Wharton wants, it’s exhilarating. I think it’s a brilliant strategy and a fantastic infographic — one that isn’t just about the standard chart-shapes and arrows that many infographics use.

The core image tells the story itself.