Kate Meyer, a teacher from West Stockbridge, MA, writes a letter to the New York Times Magazine responding to the February 14  piece on Christianist moves to influence Texas textbook standards. She writes:

Desperate to corner the Texas market, publisher's are alienating other markets and teachers who now have more choice thanks to the internet.

Meyer tells how she and her colleague use primary documents from Yale's Avalon Project and other collections in their teaching practice. These documents are used to teach that history is made of competing stories, with many different points of view. She concludes:

Textbook publishers are becoming irrelevant in the digital age, and kowtowing to Texas will only hasten their demise.

I found an interesting "minimalist" word processor named Writer.app (Mac only). It presents the simple interface that a lot of people seem to like these days. The hook is that Writer.app allows only forward movement. Backspacing causes the text to be struck out and corrections or modifications can only be placed at the end of the strike-through region. A few minutes of this and the page looks like a first draft done quickly on a typewriter, which is the point. There's also no spell checker, as the writer is expected to get it right the first time. Writer.app has a couple of other features; it takes control of the screen, making the desktop dimmed an inaccessible until the user saves and exits. The user can also create a "network space", with no internet access. At the end of the session, the text can be exported, without strike-outs, to a text file or to a Word or Mellel document. The idea is that by simlulating a typewriter as closely as possible, a distraction-free environment is created. I remember typing papers in college and I can testify that the typewriter did not make me more focused and efficient. As long as I was sitting in a room with books, magazines, a radio, a stereo, or a TV, there was plenty to take my mind off typing (and this was back when television only had 4 channels, counting PBS, which I didn't). I was especially distracted by errors--backspacing or using White Out always made me just frustrated enough to do something else for a minute or two. I was not an accurate typist and the first word processors  with backspace and word wrap seemed on a par with the discovery of electricity. I always wrote out first drafts long hand, saving the typing for the end. If I actually tried creating on a typewriter, I'd never have finished college. In the end, Writer.app is just gimmicky and frustrating. Distraction is everywhere, and writers have to figure out their own strategies for dealing with it. A new tool isn't the answer.

Zeldman frets about the preservation of personal web material, which usually disappears once the hosting bill goes unpaid. He has an idea:

A suggestion for a business. Sooner or later, some hosting company is going to figure out that it can provide a service and make a killing (as it were) by offering ten-, twenty-, and hundred-year packets of posthumous hosting.

A hundred years is not eternity, but you are not Shakespeare, and it’s a start.

Jason Epstein is no Luddite. One of his recent projects is the Espresso Book Machine, a print-on-demand device that produces a library-quality paperback book at the point of sale. Epstein worries about the implications of digital publishing:

Digital books migh facilitate unparalleled central control over content; as Amazon.com recently proved, the end-user never really "owns" a digital text.

Physical books are likely to survive, though, if only because authors will require some such artifact in return for months or years of solitary labor.

Epstein proposes an interesting revenue model where ebooks would be sold by subscription. Since DRM isn't going away (writers have to eat), the "lending library" model "more accurately reflects the conditional relationships, enforced by digital rights management software, between content providers and end-users". Such models were common in the Great Depression and in 19th Century Great Britain.

A nice way to waste time on a Friday afternoon is by databending jpg files. Open any jpg picture in a hex editor and mess around. Usually, you'll change the picture in glitchy, unintended ways. Sometimes, you get something interesting. Once in a while, the jpg is corrupted beyond repair, so make sure you're working on a copy. stAllio! has a decent and simple primer, and there is a databending photopool on Flickr. stAllio!, bless his heart, also has a primer on editing an image file in a wav editor designed for music (like Audacity).

Here's a couple of original images and databends:

Seattle Times:

Among Emmie's birthday haul today was a small Dover edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales, which might come in handy for AW's school reading, and for LW and I to read as well.

I read a lot on the web and I like to take notes and otherwise keep track of my reading. Pencil and paper are good, but I use some other tools as well. My three favorites (or at least the three I use most are: Readability. This bookmarklet formats your page for easy reading. Go to the site, set your preferences, and drag the bookmarklet to the browser toolbar. Click on it when reading a page and all the distracting ads and titles and comments and blogrolls are stripped out, leaving nothing but what matters to the reader. A bonus is that you can print the formatted page to a pdf file to save for later or to file in your digital clipping service. Evernote. Everybody's heard about this, but I have to concur. Its a great way to save part of a page (or the entire page) in a database that is synchronized to the cloud and to any other devices you have enabled. As long as you upload less than 40 megs a month, its free, and thats a lot of text. Its also good for notes, to-do lists, contacts, whatever. Text editor. With Evernote, you'll probably be able to get away without a text editor. Still, I use one every day for copying quotations and writing notes to myself. I like a small editor with quick start-up and a simple interface. Payware editors like Ultraedit and Textmate are expensive overkill for this kind of work. Vim and Emacs, though open source, have too many features not related to what I want to do. I like to stick with something free and tiny. Textwrangler and Textedit are great for the Mac. For Windows, I can't recommend Notepad as it lacks wordwrap. I'd prefer a "notepad replacement", like Metapad or Notepad++. OS X Textedit and Windows Wordpad have advantages in that they come with the OS and can read and write RTF files.

How and Why Wonderbooks:

Elizabeth Bear writes on hypertext fiction at Charlie Stross' site.