The modified article states its update date-time, but it does not provide the original version. I found the original story cached at this unusual, apparently Asian location. I found it by googling the story’s URL.

The updated version is here, the URL previously pointing to the original story, now pointing to the modified story.

In The Web Is Dead. Long Live the Internet, Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff observe a larger trend toward a post-web world. They observe how mobile devices, gaming consoles, and applications like feed readers are dominating the way people consume information. People still consume the information over the internet but they use devices other than HTML-based browsers, i.e., the web. The big difference is that search engines like Google that crawl the web cannot find information in the private domains or “gardens” of these devices and applications.

If search engines cannot find this information then neither can you. It is another blow to the open web, along with the two-tiered web that net neutrality advocates are fighting. It creates a whole new role for librarians whose modern role was to defend access to information … until the web came along. Librarians felt a little confused when the web arrived because suddenly information was abundant; we were overloaded with it. With the closing of the web, librarians are called upon again to take up that vital role.

Loads triple fast. Previously, OpenBook had to make two to three API calls to get all the book information it needed. The deprecated APIs needed separate calls for book and author information. If you supplied an ISBN, OpenBook would perform an extra call to look up the Open Book key. This is all history now. OpenBook 3 gets all the information in one API call, so it loads triple-fast.

Search engine optimization. Open Library has had a Javascript Books API for sometime now, but it is a client-side implementation. This matters because Javascript HTML is normally not discoverable by search engines. No doubt you want search engines to find your OpenBook data. That requires a server-side implementation. Open Library now provides this, returning the data in JSON format. Example: http://openlibrary.org/api/books?bibkeys=ISBN:0912932015&jscmd=data&format=json. If click this link here, your browser will prompt you download a file. Go ahead, you can view in NotePad.

Sorry, despite this progress, the release will be delayed for a bit due to my move to Ottawa. Will advise.

The title of the book might suggest a boring slog, but I found Slow Reading to be a quick, easy, and fun read. In it, John Miedema weaves his own reading and experiences through a thoughtful look at past and current trends in publishing and technology, couching personal reflections in a wide range of theories about the purposes of and psychology of reading.

In highlighting the locations where individuals performed the act of reading in America, through the use of images and objects from the AAS collections, we hope to tell a story. It is not a definitive story by any means, but a story of three centuries’ worth of individuals ‘caught’ in the act of reading in homes, taverns, libraries, military camps, parlors, kitchens, and beds, among other places.

(via The Book Report)

Perhaps more controversially, Miedema suggests that digital books have not evolved into anything other than a sort of metadata for print books (that they exist “only for evaluative purposes before the reader seeks out the physical copy”) (p. 37). I think it’s too early to say that this is the case; while the statistics aren’t in yet, it seems likely that many adopters of reading via the Kindle or iPad may not go out and buy physical copies of all the books they purchase for those devices (on the other hand, the amount of money I’ve spent on print copies of Google Books titles makes Miedema’s point work in my specific case).

The debate over technology and books has reached new heights this year. Amazon just announced that e-books have overtaken hardback sales. At the same time, there has been an intensification of debate about the effects of online reading on our brains. At the center of this debate is Nicholas Carr’s, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.

Do your kids still do memory work at school? Have you wondered if memorization matters much now that we can access information online anytime? Carr clearly shows that it does. When we read, information is placed in working memory and requires time before it consolidates in long term memory. The process requires the synthesis of new proteins for anatomical changes in the brain. Complex memories require concerted action across the brain. Any distraction can interrupt this process and the internet is a distraction machine. “When the load exceeds our mind’s ability to store and process the information — when the water overflows the thimble — we’re unable to retain or to draw connections with the information already stored in long-term memory” (125). Human memory is gradient, organic, alive. It gains in richness with each remembering. Only in our heads can we form the complex neural connections linking new information to our previous ones, giving them context and meaning. Biological memory is a completely different thing than computer memory. Offloading our memory to the web only spares us the work of learning, thus preventing a growth of intelligence.

That technology changes our brain is not a new idea. Everything changes our brain. The topic of brain plasticity is also popular this year, following research showing that our brains never stop learning. As Carr observes, it is good news for the brain injured in rehabilitation but it also means that our good mental habits cannot be taken for granted. Neglected pathways get pruned away. MRI studies demonstrate that online readers uses different mental pathways. While book readers are active in areas associated with language, memory and visual processing, online readers are engaging the prefrontal regions associated with decision making and problem solving. The high distractability of the web means online readers must constantly make choices between different reading paths, reverting to being decoders of information, not deep readers. If we don’t use the skills we will lose them. Citing McLuhan, our tools numb the part of the body they amplify, in this case, the brain. Online reading has its virtues but intelligence requires complementary deep reading, best facilitated by reading books.

The call to literacy may not appeal to Millennials. In my book, Slow Reading, I touched on my Gen-X experience that Carr calls a two-act play. Our Analogue Youth was a time when memory work was still a required educational practice. I was compelled to repeat a poem again and again to extreme boredom, discovering only then how I was truly becoming the poem, ultimately winning first prize for my recitation in a regional contest. Like the Baby Boomers, we fully share a memory of the time when print was still the dominant information technology. The second act is our Digital Adulthood. Unlike the Boomers, we were mere teenagers when computers went mainstream. Like the Millennials we grew up learning digital technology. Gen-X’ers may be uniquely called upon to make the bridge to literacy for Millennials.

Any book that starts with McLuhan and ends quoting Heidegger has my interest. The book extends the question Carr asked in his 2008 article, Is Google Making Us Stupid? “Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory.” I share Carr’s feeling. It is palpable, but I have not been able to put my finger on it till now. In The Shallows, Carr nails it. The richness of my memories has diminished, and “I miss my old brain” (16). As books continue to change along with the web, we need the solid research and analysis that Carr provides on literacy and deep reading.

Many middle zones are cataclysmic, marking a dramatic change that leaves no question. Watch water change state into steam at the boiling point. A shoreline is an unequivocal marking between land and water. A shoreline is beautiful too, like a sunrise and a sunset, declaring without doubt the difference between night and day. Lights are turned on and off, splitting darkness and light. A door is opened then closed. A person is dressed or undressed, each state indicating a very different sort of evening. Crossing the painted middle line in traffic has tumultuous consequences. Perhaps no transitions are more cataclysmic than birth and death.

I am deliberating avoiding the phrase, “radical middle”. Too tired. I like the Buddhist term, “bardo”, the charged passage between two realities, including those after death, but I will avoid metaphysics here. The cataclysmic middle is practical and definitive. No oatmeal.