From print to digital and back to print
Certain aspects of digital book publishing are liberating, astounding, tiny miracles
.. But on a whole, it’s a locked down universe if you start to look at it from even the slightest long-term, benevolent steward perspective. And one in which it’s very difficult to affect meaningful change in design or experience because of its closed nature.
BookMentions from Podcasts
Milo Yiannopoulos’s Cynical Book Deal
Though he is often described as a troll provocateur, he prefers the label “free-speech fundamentalist.”
.. Yiannopoulos, too, has suffered an exile—from Twitter, which finally banned him in July, after the Jones affair. Evidently, the episode boosted Yiannopoulos’s sense of himself as a man not to be trifled with.
.. Getting kicked off Twitter hardly stopped Yiannopoulos in his tracks, but it did deny him a major platform for his provocations. That he would parlay his notoriety into some sort of book deal is an unsavory, if inevitable, prospect. The rude surprise is that a major company like Simon & Schuster would be the one to give it to him
.. a man who has helped define the Trump moment’s flippant bigotry in the service of brand-building narcissism.
.. “I met with top execs at Simon & Schuster earlier in the year and spent half an hour trying to shock them with lewd jokes and outrageous opinions,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “I thought they were going to have me escorted from the building—but instead they offered me a wheelbarrow full of money.”
.. Yiannopoulos’s motivation is not so much ideological as it is fundamentally adolescent; he spreads his bile for the sake of seeing just how much bile-spreading he can get away with
Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States
Albert Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyality is a book written by an economist but accessible to all – a rare achieve in any academic disipline, especially economics. The book was written in the early 70’s but still has relevant today. Its greatest achievment is the illumination of ‘exit’ as the mentality of modern western capitalist societies – the idealisation of the consumers’ right to ‘vote with one’s feet’ – and its spread into all forms of social activity. Hirschman adds a historical dimension to this by arguing that the whole of the United States has largely been built on ‘exit’ mentality – from the mass migration out of Europe from the 17th century onwards to the calls to ‘go west’ across the plains. Exit is the strategy advocated today by neo liberals as being the manifestation of democracy in the market sphere.