Some refelctions on the Week 7 class...

A few things that relate to the last class...

I thought I had seen a copy of Round Trip by Ann Jonas before but I couldn't remember where. I had gone through my kids' bookshelves but couldn't find it anywhere. But then I happened upon it by chance when I was in my garage this weekend - it was sitting at the top of a box of books from when my wife was teaching a different grade. I brought it inside and each of my kids spent time with the book this weekend - it really captured their imaginations.
Amusingly the link goes to a Harper Collins digital web sampler which only previews the book in one orientation - a limitation of the technology. This made me wonder if there is an eBook version and dos it require the reader to turn off the automatic landscape/portrait switching on a device.


Although I don't have The Empire Strikes Back (yet!) I do have a couple of the records from the story record series Prof. Galey mentioned in the last class:

I can confirm, it is the sound of R2D2 who indicates when to turn the page, but as you can see in the picture, the book spells the droid's names phonetically, which seems really odd....

I have quite a few story and spoken word records, some are from my childhood but there are many more that I have picked up over the subsequent years. I always liked this inner flap comment from Mr. T:

Still on the subject of records...  I was reminded of the album X2 on Lex Records by Tes when Prof. Galey had mentioned that the giveaway that "S" by Abrams and Dorst was not a real annotated library book was that lack of indentations from the ballpoint notes in the margins.

Such an effect is possible to achieve in the printing process. The cover of X2 has the appearance of a journal which has been doodled on and the indentations are embossed on the sleeve. You can even see the reverse impressions on the back of the sleeve. I imagine this type of embossing was extremely expensive to print but maybe we will see a limited embossed edition of the novel in years to come. I hope the effect shows  in the photos here - it really is cool. Lex records have had an amazing history of intriguing artwork (glow in the dark sleeves, quirky embossing, gold leaf, etc.). A lot of it can be seen on their website, but for many of them you have to touch the object to experience just how magnificent the artwork really is: http://lexprojects.com/

 Lastly, I read an article this week about a talk Neil Gaiman gave on stories: https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/06/16/neil-gaiman-how-stories-last/

I haven't had a chance to listen to the full recording yet (below) but the following quote from a separate Gaiman podcast interview jumped out at me:

"Douglas Adams … understood media, understood change. He essentially described the first ebooks long before most commuter trains were filled with people reading on them. And he also perceived why, even though most commuter trains are a hundred percent people with ebooks, there will always be physical books and a healthy market for physical books — because, Douglas told me, “books are sharks.”
[…]
There were sharks back when there were dinosaurs… And now, there are sharks. And the reason that there are still sharks — hundreds of millions of years after the first sharks turned up — is that nothing has turned up that is better at being a shark than a shark is.
Ebooks are absolutely fantastic at being several books and a newspaper; they’re really good portable bookshelves, that’s why they’re great on trains. But books are much better at being books…
I can guarantee that copy of the first Sandman omnibus still works."