In this Monday’s Link Roundup, I really identified with Bibliocide. If you’re like me and have an old encyclopedia gathering dust, you’ll want to read this article. And have you ever wondered about whether e-mail sign offs make sense in today’s electronic universe? Then check out You Say “Best.” I Say No.
- What Happens to Publishers and Authors If a Used Ebook Market Becomes Legal? “Amazon has a patent to develop a market for used digital content. Apple has filed for a similar patent and ReDigi, a self-styled marketplace for used digital content, is currently embroiled in a legal battle with Capitol Records over the resale of digital music files. Basically, it looks like a used ebook marketplace might become a reality. For consumers, this could be very good news indeed. Imagine seeing on an ebook’s Kindle page a link that will take you to a sell page for the exact same product for half the price. Same ebook, same user experience, even lower cost. For publishers, this would undoubtedly be very bad news.”
- Bibliocide. “They were mouldy, unread and long out of date. So why did I feel so bad about burning my Britannicas?”
- You Say “Best.” I Say No. “Email signoffs are holdovers from a bygone era when letter writing—the kind that required ink and paper—was a major means of communication. The handwritten letters people sent included information of great import and sometimes functioned as the only communication with family members and other loved ones for months. In that case, it made sense to go to town, to get flowery with it. Then, a formal signoff was entirely called for. If you were, say, a Boston resident writing to his mother back home in Ireland in the late 19th century, then ending a correspondence with “I remain your ever fond son in Christ Our Lord J.C.,” as James Chamberlain did in 1891, was entirely reasonable and appropriate. But those times have long since passed.”
- A Vanishing Past? “Can science save the daguerreotype, the first successful medium of photography?”
- Clare Boothe Luce’s Advice to Her 18-Year-Old Daughter. “On November 24, 1942, Luce penned a letter to her 18-year-old daughter Ann, at the time a sophomore at Stanford, found in Posterity: Letters of Great Americans to Their Children (public library)– the same wonderful collection that gave us Sherwood Anderson’s timelessly poetic advice on the creative life to his teenage son. Amidst counsel on Ann’s first romantic relationship, Luce offers the following advice, which in some ways squarely contradicts and in others subtly seconds F. Scott Fitzgerald’s famous advice to his daughter, and is at its heart the same manifesto for living with awareness and presence that Jackson Pollock received from his father.”
- The loss of you lingers. “In 1989, 52-year-old Long Island resident Joan Cook Carpenter passed away after succumbing to breast cancer — a battle which she had chosen to keep from her loved ones until her final days. In 1999, a decade after Joan’s death, her 29-year-old daughter, Karin, wrote her the following letter.” [Thanks to Francie King of History Keep for alerting me to this item.]
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