All signs suggest punctuation is in flux. In particular, our signs that mark grammatical (and sometimes semantic) distinctions are waning, while those denoting tone and voice are waxing. Furthermore, signs with a slim graphical profile (the apostrophe and comma, especially) are having a rough go of it. Compared to the smiley face or even the question mark, they're too visually quiet for most casual writers to notice or remember, even (or especially) on our high-def screens.

There's a semi-viral video that's been kicking around for a couple of weeks titled "The Future of Publishing." The schtick is that the same column of text, about preferences of younger readers gets read two ways -- descend and you get a sharply pessimistic, anti-book message, but if you roll the text back and read it on the ascent (get it?), it turns out that the kids love traditional books after all.

I want to extend apologies to RSS subscribers and readers for the torrent of spam that washed over the site in the past few days. I've made some adjustments to both the spam filters and the users and permissions policies that will (I hope) keep that from happening again.

Keep reading, and keep writing. These are exciting times for bookfuturists like us. I'll do my best to keep the commons clean.

[Cross-posted at Snarkmarket]

[Cross-posted at Snarkmarket]

We've talked before about the book as a cross-technological concept -- that a "book" can mean either (or both) a codex or a scroll, an electronic or a physical unit. Roughly speaking, our ideas of what a book is are driven by the different technologies attached to reading -- but there's also SOME sense in which "book" persists across or transcends any particular technology.

Don Linn has a terrific post reflecting on what was and wasn't said at the recent O'Reilly TOC (Tools of Change) conference. Here are a few selections (everything in a bullet point is a direct quote, with snips in between):

Dan Cohen writes a nice post on the same theme I wrote about a few days ago -- roughly, what is a book, and why do certain communities hold it sacred?:

I've missed what might/might not for you already be a well-known TED talk -- Pattie Maes's and Pranav Mistry's demonstrations of the "sixth sense" projector technology -- at least three times now. Twice, in November and again at the end of January, I had a good excuse, stuck in the hospital.

It's been a relatively slow week here at Bookfuturism -- are we all just waiting around for the Jesus tablet, or stunned by how many books James Patterson writes (and sells)? (I wonder if he's heard of FastPencil?)