Books of the World newsletter

ISSUE NUMBER 009

MAY - 2000

Previous issues:
NEWS AND ARTICLES
  • E-Books for Writers, Not Readers Electronic books and publishing on demand are making it easier for writers to get published, but is anyone actually reading these online tomes? M.J. Rose.
  • Internet kills off oldest bookshop BY SHIRLEY ENGLISH - THE TIMES. JOHN Smith & Son, the world's oldest bookseller and a favourite of the poet Robert Burns, is to shut its doors in Glasgow after losing the battle against book superstores and online discount shopping.
  • Library of Congress Gets Hip After 200 years, the Library of Congress is entering the information age. But making its collection of books accessible online isn't a priority. By Kendra Mayfield.
  • The Cosmos Is Coming Microsoft is trying do for pictures of the cosmos what it did for pictures of the Earth: Put them on the Web for anyone to see. By Leander Kahney.

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RECOMMENDED BOOKS
  • CYBERCULTURE
    • "Minds, Machines, and the Multiverse: The Quest for the Quantum Computer"
      By Julian Brown
      Quantum computing is the latest next big thing in the world of long-range computational research, and no wonder: exploiting the strange properties of subatomic particles, a quantum computer could do its calculating in millions of parallel universes at once. If you're as intrigued by the idea as the brainiest physics geeks are, this book will get you well up to speed. Brown's detailed explanations of quantum logic circuits are challenging but never less than lucid, and his grasp of the technology's social and philosophical implications is as deft as it is comprehensive.

    • "The Advent of the Algorithm: The Idea That Rules the World"
      By David Berlinski
      He's at it again. Berlinski--whose bestselling "A Tour of the Calculus" served up an erudite and archly literary guide to the mathematics that modern science is built on--has returned with an equally lavish history of the mathematics that modern computing is built on. As before, Berlinski's exuberant sense of style will either engage or enrage you, but if you really want to understand the strange, momentous worldview that is algorithmic logic, there's no getitbusng around this book. From binary math to genetic codes (by way of Leibniz, Goedel, Turing, and Wallace Stevens), he plumbs the mysteries and mechanics of the algorithm as no author has before.

    • "Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer"
      By Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine
      First published in 1984--the year the Macintosh was born--this riveting history of the personal computer was long overdue for an upgrade. In the revised edition, the authors bring the story up to date with snapshots from the browser wars, the Apple renaissance, and Microsoft's death-star years, as well as reverent where-are-they-nows on PC pioneers like Doug Engelbart and Steve Wozniak. But the heart and soul of the narrative is still what it was in version 1.0: the improbable saga of a bunch of West Coast techno-freaks who dreamed of bringing computer power to the people--and built an industry on the dream.

    • "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference"
      by Malcolm Gladwel      l
      "The best way to understand the dramatic transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life," writes Malcolm Gladwell, "is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do." Although anyone familiar with the theory of memetics will recognize this concept, Gladwell's "The Tipping Point" shares quite a few interesting twists on the subject.

    • "The Social Life of Information"
      by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid
      How many times has your PC crashed today? While Gordon Moore's now famous law projecting the doubling of computer power every 18 months has more than borne itself out, it's too bad that a similar trajectory of the reliability and usefulness of all that power didn't come to pass as well. Advances in information technology are most often measured in the cool numbers of megahertz, throughput, and bandwidth--but, for many of us, the experience of these advances might be better measured in hours of frustration. The gap between the hype of the Information Age and its reality is often wide and deep, and it's into this gap that John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid plunge in "The Social Life of Information."

    • "Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho"
      by Jon Katz
      Teenage hackers Jesse Dailey and Eric Twilegar are the heroes of "Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet out of Idaho," a thoughtful, affecting pop ethnography--and heroes is exactly what Jon Katz wants you to see them as. To the rest of the world, themselves included, they are geeks, which is a complicated thing to be these days. With the rise of the networked economy, the world and its wealth have become increasingly dependent on the expertise of Star Wars-loving, cola-swilling propellerheads everywhere.

    • The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet"
      edited by Ken Goldberg
      It may be trite to say that new technology changes the way we see ourselves and the world, but it's crucial that we explore those changes fully. In "The Robot in the Garden," computer scientist Ken Goldberg curates a collection of essays on telerobotics by critics, philosophers, and engineers, addressing questions as fundamental as "How does mediation affect the knowledge we acquire?"

    • "True Names and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier"
      by Vernor Vinge and James Frenkel
      In 1981, three years before the publication of William Gibson's "Neuromancer," Vernor Vinge's novella "True Names" invented the concept of cyberspace. This book explores the blossoming discoveries and groundbreaking applications, both current and future, on the new frontier of the Internet and all its subsets. Vernor Vinge is a computer science professor at San Diego State University who is known for writing science fiction that combines an insightful grasp of technology with some of the most fantastic scenarios ever imagined.

    • "The Emerging Cyberculture: Literacy, Paradigm & Paradox"
      Edited by Stephanie Gibson and Ollie O. Oriedo
      "The Emerging Cyberculture" is a collection of essays from innovative thinkers in the field of hypertext and cyberspace. This book offers excellent forays into the interaction between the emerging communication technologies and American culture. "The Emerging Cyberculture" explores what occurs when a dominant communications shift takes place--these shifts alter how we manage information, challenge previously unquestioned assumptions, and change how the self is viewed.

  • BUSINESS




 
 
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