Lit Pickup

Tim Carmody at Wired:

When I saw that French was one of the supported interface languages for the new entry-level Kindle, I knew that a new Kindle store en français would not be far off. Now it’s here, with 35,000 French-language titles for Kindle available now and the 99-Euro Kindle shipping to Amazon.fr customers on October 14.

If you read French, whether you live in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Canada, many nations in Africa, Haiti (and elsewhere in the Caribbean) or scattered parts of Asia and South America — or even if you picked some up in high school or college and would like to stay sharp — this is a pretty big deal. (The store looks good, with a nice mix of new bestsellers and classics, and is likely to grow.) But let’s say you don’t. Why should you care?

I’ll give you three reasons.

NYTimes. By Alexandra Horowitz:

The footnote jousting could soon be moot, as the e-book may inadvertently be driving footnotes to extinction. The e-book hasn’t killed the book; instead, it’s killing the “page.” Today’s e-readers scroll text continuously, eliminating the single preformed page, along with any text defined by being on its bottom. A spokesman for the Kindle assured me that it is at the discretion of the publisher how to treat footnotes. Most are demoted to hyperlinked endnotes or, worst of all, unlinked endnotes that require scrolling through the e-reader to access. Few of these will be read, to be sure.

En entrant dans l’ère de l’informatique en réseau, le livre devient inscriptible. Son développement ne suit plus la ligne droite de la traditionnelle chaîne du livre, mais se diffuse par ramifications réticulaires. Comme un oignon, il se pare de multiples couches d’informations, ajoutées par différents métiers, mais aussi par les lecteurs. Ensemble, ils participent à une vaste entreprise d’enrichissement documentaire qui multiplie les grilles de lecture du texte et en fait miroiter les multiples sens. Inscriptible, le livre s’insère désormais dans un système d’information riche, polymorphe, mouvant et encore très fragile. C’est le Read/Write Book.