What kind of books does the 21st century invite? and on what platforms shall we read them? how does e-reading change our reading habits? and how do publishing houses monitor their readers' reading habits? and, finally, how will the interaction with literature (and hardware) that reads us provide us with new kinds of literature? Thoughts, stats and speculations about "bound printed nonstreaming artifacts" and those read from screens.

1. New Directions for e-Reading
Thoughts, Stats and SpeculationsNew
Media Salon
Thoughts, Stats and
Speculations
New Media Salon
April 2013

2. e-Reading Today
1. Serial
Cell phone novels are
ongoing serial literature
generally written in short
chapters totaling up to
around 100-200 words
per chapter.
Cell phone novels reached
one million books in 2007.
Cell phone novels are the
heralders of genre fiction
Illustration from The New Yorker “I <3 Novels” by Dana Goodyear (Dec. 2008)

3. e-Reading Today
2. Collaborative
Book of Comments?
“At any moment the
reader is ready to turn
into a writer. ”
Benjamin, “Work of Art in
The Age of Mechanical
Reproduction”)
A tablet displays "The All-Comments Magazine“
New Yorker . Cartoon by Roz Chast

4. e-Reading Today
3. Interactive
The app AR News uses augmented reality to promote
certain stories published in the print edition of Tokyo
Shimbun. Kids can scan selected articles with an iPhone
and the app will show them a “kid-friendly version”

5. e-Reading Today
4. Augmented
Between Page and Screen an Augmented Reality Book
of Poems.
“Reinventing visual poetry, doing so by displaying
hieroglyphs that humans can read only through the
eyes of robots”

6. e-Reading Today
5. Updating/ Post-Postmodern
Emoji Dick -crowd sourced and crowd
funded translation of Herman Melville's
Moby Dick into Japanese emoticons
called emoji.
Dead SULs - Gogol in the Age of Google-
An exploration of identity in the Internet
era: Dead SULs considers the meaning of
our constantly logged-on lives.

7. Cette versatilité systématique....Elle
m'a valu la réputation d'être une
sorte d'ordinateur, une
machine à produire
des textes.
(Le Figaro, Dec 1978)
Georges Perec / Notes sur ce que je cherche

8. We Know What You Read Last Summer
For centuries, reading has largely been a solitary and
private act, an intimate exchange between the reader
and the words on the page. But the rise of digital books
has prompted a profound shift in the way we read,
transforming the activity into something measurable
and quasi-public
“Your E-Book Is Reading
You” Alexandra Alter
(WSJ, July 2012)

9. We Know What You Read Last Summer
The rise of digital books has prompted a profound shift
in the way we read, transforming the activity into
something measurable and quasi-public
Science-fiction, romance and crime-fiction fans often
read more books more quickly than readers of literary
fiction, according to Nook data
e-readers turn novels into a "continuous scroll”

10. We Know What You Read Last Summer
Readers took an
average of 20
hours to finish
George R. R.
Martin's 1,040-
page novel 'A
Dance with
Dragons,'
according to E-
reading service
Kobo

11. We Know What You Read Last Summer
17,784 readers highlighted the sentence
'Because sometimes things happen to people
and they are not equipped to deal with them.'
The most highlighted passage on Kindle is from
'Catching Fire,' the second book of 'The Hunger
Games' series
17,784 readers highlighted the sentence 'Because
sometimes things happen to people and they are not
equipped to deal with them.‘
The most highlighted passage on Kindle is from
'Catching Fire,' the second book of 'The Hunger
Games' series

12. We Know What You Read Last Summer
The digital reading platform
Copia recently launched a
subscription service that will
provide for publishers the a
ge, gender and school
affiliation of people who
bought particular titles, as
well as how many times the
books were downloaded,
opened and read.

13. Kenneth Goldsmith
-

14. Kenneth Goldsmith
“Kenneth Goldsmith is perhaps best known for his
work Day, in which he transcribed every word of a
mundane day’s issue of the New York Times into a nine-
hundred-page book. For his work “The Day,” he did the
same exact task to the New York Times of September
11, 2001. Hence, even the innocuous news reports and
weather are loaded with fact, fear, and emotion, making
us aware that language is never
simply an innocent carrier of
meaning but is wildly variable
depending upon context and
framing.”
Poetry (July/August 2009).

15. Kenneth Goldsmith
e2 the new york times, tuesday, september 11, 2001
ARTS ABROAD
Continued From First Arts Page
On Islam, Mr. Houellebecq went still further, deriding his estranged
mother for converting to Islam and proclaiming that, while all monotheistic
religions were “cretinous,” “the most stupid religion is Islam.” And he added:
“When you read the Koran, you give up. At least the Bible is
Sexual tourism
and inflammatory
remarks about
Palestinians.
very beautiful because Jews have an extraordinary literary talent.” And
later, noting that “Islam is a dangerous religion,” he said it was condemned to
disappear, not only because God does not exist but also because it was being
undermined by capitalism.
Islam

16. Automatic Writing
Bjork/ Bachelorette music video by Michel Gondry

17. Automatic Writing
literature based on mapping, connecting and
revealing of places and themes

18. Internet of You – Stats about You
Tracking and decoding data about the self
-

19. Internet of You – Stats about You
Quantified Self – data aggregated, visualized, bound
creating narcissistic, personalized narratives?

20. Decoded Dream Reconstructed in Video
Researchers Use Brain Scans To Reveal Hidden
Dreamscape (see video)

21. Decoded Dream Reconstructed in Video
Time series of visual dream contents decoded from
brain activity in higher visual cortex during sleep
(two dream samples) .
The movie displays superimposed stimulus images of
18 different semantic categories used for decoder
training. The contrasts were modulated according to
the decoder outputs (continuous "scores") for each
category at each time point.
The images for each category were randomly picked
from the stimulus image set collected from web
databases. The tag cloud illustrates the names of the
categories.

22. AI - writing/ reading and predicting
based on online presence
“Be Right Back” - Black Mirror. Season 2 Episode 1

23. Does Writing Have a Future?
• "A book is [...] an intermediate stage on the
way from the forest into the land of artificial
intelligences... One might say, then, that the
informatic revolution would save more than
forests, it would save us from the danger of
being inundated with paper"
• Vilem Flusser, Does Writing Have a Future?

24. The End?