individualism for the masses
May 23, 2013 Leave a comment
On the Invisible Order blog, my beloved missus explains why a PDF is not an ebook, despite what the advertising may claim.
Here’s my summary:
It’s not an ebook if you can’t read it on your iPhone.
She also explains why there is no automated process for converting PDF files to ebooks. (And there won’t be, until artificial intelligence improves significantly.)
For the full story, read her post.
April 4, 2013 1 Comment
Once you’ve read a few ebooks on the right handheld device, it’s very hard to go back to paper. But which is the right e-reader? The three most popular e-readers today are the iPad, Kindle, and Nook. And each has its uses.
I know ebook enthusiasts who will only read on the iPad. Jeffrey Tucker was giving thumbs-down reviews to the most popular ebook readers back when I was already a complete convert to digital text. He said that turning the pages was too slow, that you couldn’t flip around in the book. “I can see how this might be valuable if this is the way we mostly read — the way people navigate the latest best-selling novel — but I have my doubts that this is the way most of us use books.”
Five years later, he wrote,
The iPad was a revelation to me.… That thing changed my whole life. I only needed to see my first epub on iPad to realize that I would only read paper and ink with great reluctance from then on. It’s still the same today. In fact, I’ve turned the epub into my main profession: I run the Laissez Faire Club that releases top-of-the-line epubs weekly on a subscription basis.
April 3, 2013 1 Comment
Thank you, Marty Cooper:
On this day, 40 years ago, Motorola researcher Martin Cooper “made the first private, practical mobile phone call in a non-vehicle setting.” (“Watch The Incredible 70-Year Evolution Of The Cell Phone”)
Postscript: I just learned that it’s also the anniversary today of the first ride of the Pony Express, 1860. What a momentous day in communications history!
March 26, 2013 Leave a comment
My 6-year-old son, Benjamin, is asking when we will start to build robots together. A friend of mine is talking about starting a robotics club in the Charlottesville area, and I think Benjamin is now picturing us creating the autonomous bots and droids of science fiction. I’m trying to lower his expectations a bit, first by introducing him to programming through MIT’s wonderful Scratch system and iPad games like CargoBot, Cato’s Hike, Kodable, and Benjamin’s favorite: A.L.E.X.
So when I saw something on Hulu.com the other night about “Team Robotics,” I had to take a quick look. Hulu immediately warned me, “This video is intended for mature audiences.”
Really? Would this turn out to be some sci-fi fantasy about gynoid sexbots? That sure wasn’t the impression I was getting from the picture of Team Robotics: Read more of this post
March 5, 2013 1 Comment
In the world of digital publishing, style sheet is an ambiguous term.
It originated in the print-publishing industry. A style guide (or stylebook) is a book that lists the important rules of capitalization, punctuation, some basic grammar, some spelling issues, and the syntax of citations in footnotes and endnotes. At Invisible Order, our standard style guide is The Chicago Manual of Style. Other style guides you may have used or at least heard of include the Associated Press (AP) stylebook, the guide for the Modern Language Association (MLA) — even the venerable Strunk & White probably counts.
But there are various reasons a particular publication or company may want to diverge from the rules given in a style guide, while still wanting to remain consistent. If so, they maintain a document for their "house style." To avoid confusion, in IO we call this our house style guide, but the common term from the print world is "style sheet." As the name implies, it was not supposed to be longer than a single sheet of paper. It doesn’t have to be a list of differences from the main style guide; it can also be a list of the most important rules from the main style guide. You can see ours here.
Why would it cause confusion to use the term the way the print world does? Because at Invisible Order, we do both editorial and technological work. And on the technological side, "style sheet" means CSS (i.e., "cascading style sheets"): instructions to a web browser or ebook reader for the visual presentation of text and images.
I’ve worked on teams where someone would say "style sheet," and everyone thought they knew what the term meant, but the coders thought it referred to typeface, character size, and layout, while the writers and copyeditors thought it referred to commas, semicolons, and compound adjectives.
Fortunately, it’s easy to avoid the ambiguity. On the editorial side, we use the term "style guide" to cover both the Chicago Manual and our house style. We use "CSS" to be unambiguous on the tech side. And when someone talks about a style sheet, I smile and nod and look for an opportunity to make sure I know which kind they’re talking about.
(Crossposted at InvisibleOrder.com.)
December 5, 2012 Leave a comment
“Nothing is more natural than humans innovating to make life safer or more comfortable. Not even having a baby without painkillers.”
Invisible Order’s Mike Reid reflects on what is and isn’t “natural,” while his baby daughter comes into the world.
This article will be in the next print edition of the Freeman, but you can read it now on FEE.org.
July 22, 2011 1 Comment
This article is a treasure trove of useful links:
Old books plus new technology can make modern-day liberalism the most refreshing and interesting movement around, giving the thoughtful young person a welcome alternative to the smug, hidebound intellectualism of the Left and the proud anti-intellectualism of the Right.
– Danny Sanchez, “In Praise of Old Books”
July 21, 2011 1 Comment
I wish I had known of this video when we published "Luxuries into Necessities" last month.
It sometimes took many centuries until an innovation was generally accepted at least within the orbit of Western civilization. Think of the slow popularization of the use of forks, of soap, of handkerchiefs, and of a great variety of other things.
From its beginnings capitalism displayed the tendency to shorten this time lag and finally to eliminate it almost entirely. This is not a merely accidental feature of capitalistic production; it is inherent in its very nature. Capitalism is essentially mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses.
– Ludwig von Mises, "Luxuries into Necessities"
That’s worth repeating:
Capitalism is essentially mass production for the satisfaction of the wants of the masses.
SMU professor Michael Cox has a couple of great lines in this video:
Things get better because, in order for me to succeed, I have to pay attention to your needs and wants. … I cannot make myself better off apart from making you better off as well.
Capitalism, paradoxically, starts with self-interest; but if it’s guided by freedom it maximizes social welfare.
December 15, 2010 Leave a comment
I want to quote a Subversive Copyeditor blog post in its entirety:
For the last month I’ve been copyediting a second edition of Richmond Lattimore’s translation of Homer’s Iliad. War and battles and great hulking gods and heroes — but I’m struck too by its delicacy and pathos. For instance, the warrior Hektor with his family (6.466–74):
So speaking glorious Hektor held out his arms to his baby,
who shrank back to his fair-girdled nurse’s bosom
screaming, and frightened at the aspect of his own father,
terrified as he saw the bronze and the crest with its horse-hair,
nodding dreadfully, as he thought, from the peak of the helmet.
Then his beloved father laughed out, and his honored mother,
and at once glorious Hektor lifted from his head the helmet
and laid it in all its shining upon the ground. Then taking
up his dear son he tossed him about in his arms, and kissed him.Or Gorgythion dying in battle, an arrow in his chest (8.306–8):
He bent drooping his head to one side, as a garden poppy
bends beneath the weight of its yield and the rains of springtime;
so his head bent slack to one side beneath the helm’s weight.I don’t know about you, but I continue to hear grousing that digital delivery removes the “humanity” from writing. Nearly three thousand years ago, when the Iliad was first written down after being preserved for generations by vocal performance alone, no doubt many wondered how the silent markings could possibly convey the same effect. I might have been among them.
The transition of the Iliad and the Odyssey to digital form for e-readers is trivial in comparison. To those who can find no humanity on their screens, all I can say is, look within.
September 2, 2010 Leave a comment
The first bullet point in this iPad review summarizes my own experience with the iPad:
So we’ve owned an iPad for a few weeks now, and I’ve had plenty of time to get acquainted with the little slab. As a review of sorts, I’ll offer some impressions in bullet list form.
It’s useful in ways that I hadn’t expected, and not so useful in ways I had hoped it would be. You can’t really form a complete opinion on the iPad, however, if you haven’t used one for a few days to see how it fits your everyday life.
I found that review on iPadForKids.com.
What the iPad is unexpectedly great for is educating and entertaining a 4-year-old boy. I’m not sure how many people set out to spend $500+ on a gizmo for our kids, but that’s what a lot of us ended up doing.
Father of Benjamin, husband of Nathalie, BK Marcus works from Charlottesville, Virginia, as a publishing consultant.
He is the former managing editor of Mises.org and the founder of Invisible Order.
