Why books don't work

What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem | Aeon Essays

Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time

Andrew Tate Doesn’t Get the Point of Books

The erosion of deep reading weakens our capacity to grasp complex ideas.

Post Artifact Books and Publishing

How does digital affect publishing spaces? How do we talk about these effects?

How a flawed idea is teaching millions of kids to be poor readers

For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it.

Content Design, second edition - Paperback and eBook bundle

We work with organisations, big and small, to transform their content and help them succeed.

Reading, and Understanding Media

A guidebook, and poetry more than prose, Marshall McLuhan's 1964 work remains one of our best resources for exploring the nature and effects of new media. It's not an easy read, so I'm going to help.

The Left Case for Great Books | The Point Magazine

A great-books model at the undergraduate level is, in fact, so consonant with Freire’s radical critique that it represents a far better path forward for a left-wing vision of education than virtually anything else currently on offer in the United States.

No effect of different types of media on well-being

It is often assumed that traditional forms of media such as books enhance well-being, whereas new media do not. However, we lack evidence for such claims and media research is mainly focused on how much time people spend with a medium, but not whether someone used a medium or not. We explored the effect of media use during one week on well-being at the end of the week, differentiating time spent with a medium and use versus nonuse, over a wide range of different media types: music, TV, films, video games, (e-)books, (digital) magazines, and audiobooks. Results from a six-week longitudinal study representative of the UK population 16 years and older (N = 2159) showed that effects were generally small; between-person relations but rarely within-person effects; mostly for use versus nonuse and not time spent with a medium; and on affective well-being, not life satisfaction.

Brett Scott (@brettscott)

Marshall McLuhan is famous for his observation that the form of a communication technology can shape our mind and society The age of the printed book, for example, carried with it a particular way of being. Regardless of the differing content of different books, all books required a particular mindset in which a thread is followed from the beginning to the end through an arc I feel the age of social media is like the age of a ripped up book, as if we were surrounded by torn shards and shreds of paper floating like confetti around us. We grab for them, hoping for some tiny insight, but not having any way of knowing where it fits in the overarching narrative This note is one such shard. You can toss it away now

Academia: What Was "Digital Literacy"?

Short Shelf Lives Make For Bad Curricular Planning

BookHive — Reading is better together

Track your books, connect with friends, and discover your next favourite read on an open, social platform.

BookHive — Reading is better together

Track your books, connect with friends, and discover your next favourite read on an open, social platform.

BookHive — Reading is better together

Track your books, connect with friends, and discover your next favourite read on an open, social platform.

College professors face an emerging challenge: We know students are no longer reading entire books

Some teachers increasingly are shifting their approach to reading, assigning fewer books than they once did.

» How Jordan Mechner Made a Different Sort of Interactive Movie (or, The Virtues of Restraint) The Digital Antiquarian

One can learn much about the state of computer gaming in any given period by looking to the metaphors its practitioners are embracing. In the early 1980s, when interfaces were entirely textual and graphics crude or nonexistent, text adventures like those of Infocom were heralded as the vanguard of a new interactive literature destined to augment or entirely supersede non-interactive books. That idea peaked with the mid-decade bookware boom, when just about every entertainment-software publisher (and a few traditional book publishers) were rushing to sign established authors and books to interactive projects. It then proceeded to collapse just as quickly under the weight of its own self-importance when the games proved less compelling and the public less interested than anticipated.