February 06, 2004

A couple of book links

Two links via Maud Newton:

Pop-up and Movable Books from the University of North Texas: A collection of fabulous old books.

(Do you like pop-up books? I do, and Little Bump loves them. And he is finally at an age when he can restrain himself from ripping them to shreds. He particularly loves Jan Pieñkowski's Monster Pops. Last summer I bought him a copy of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz illustrated by Robert Sabuda, but that's still on the high shelf.

Second link: Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe is out, both on paper and electronically. This is the second novel Doctorow has released both ways; his first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) is also available on-line and from fine bookstores everywhere. Doctorow writes,

[H]ere is the book as a non-physical artifact. A file. A bunch of text, slithery bits that can cross the world in an instant, using the Internet, a tool designed to copy things very quickly from one place to another; and using personal computers, tools designed to slice, dice and rearrange collections of bits. These tools demand that their users copy and slice and dice — rip, mix and burn! — and that's what I'm hoping you will do with this.

What does this mean, though, alongside the safety of the fixed book version? Though I suppose one could slice and dice that as well.