Category: Future of the Book

An Introduction to Self-Publishing

The Guardian is offering extremely helpful advice on self-publishing. In brief: This comprehensive one-day course offers advice on all the finer points of self-publishing. From designing a cover to managing your costs (and projecting your profits), plus essential tips on how to promote your work in the press and social media, get inside knowledge from […]

The Essay as Reality Television

Adam Kirsch discusses whether or not essays are “extinct” as a form of writing, and references Michel e Montaigne, whose work is studied in CC201. Here is a sample: The essay, traditionally, was defined by its freedom and its empiricism—qualities that it inherited from its modern inventor, Montaigne. “What do I know?” Montaigne asked, and […]

From Scroll to Screen

From scrolls, to the codex, to e-books, like the Amazon Kindle, the format of the book is changing in our new technological age.  A recent New York Times article describes this ever-changing phenomenon and what we should expect to sacrifice in giving up the good-ole paperback. In the classical world, the scroll was the book […]

from the NYTimes: Computer or homework?

You can’t become a good writer by watching YouTube, texting and e-mailing a bunch of abbreviations. — Marcia Blondel, a teacher of English at Woodside High School in California, as quoted in “Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction,” one in a series of articles The New York Times is publishing in order to explore how […]

The Future of the Book, part 1

What is the future of the book? In the Core Curriculum, we treasure the experience of opening a text and transporting ourselves into a long-lost world and savoring the words of thinkers whose ideas are as alive today as they were hundreds of years ago. How much of this experience depends on the artifact of […]