"Trade secrets of medieval book illuminators, the private press movement and Barker's welcome apostasy ("Who the hell reads Kelmscott Press books?"), the degradation of paper quality, the improvement in ink, bookshop merchandizing, the importance of visual detail and symbolism and how the ability to read images has decayed, the importance of the shape of letters as a map of the human mind, Congolese bards, calligraphy, copperplate engraving and the personality of the engraver, Victorian typography, Goudy, Gill, Dwiggins, Morison, the importance of curve, and the current state of "Jine" printing. "

An important thing for that to work its best is that it has to be a tribe that is porous. An entity that only looks inward, that preaches to its own choir, inevitably will die off because there always needs to be a constant flow of newness, whether you want to use the metaphor of the ecosystem or of evolution. Or language. I think it is ironic, the obsession in the United States with defending the English language. The rest of the planet is like, “The English language is taking us over.” And why is the English language taking over? I think part of the reason why the English language is so effective is that it is the most porous language. It is the language that is changing and is most open to the rest of the world, for reasons that have to do with, sure, British colonialism. But English, for a variety of historical, geographic, economic, and political reasons, is a very open language, and that’s why it’s been so powerful and so widely adopted. So anyways, when I’m talking about the tribalization of culture, I recognize that there are dangers inherent in that, and I think good communities have to be mindful that they be open to change and outside influence.

Today's "information explosion" may seem like an acutely modern phenomenon, but we are not the first generation nor even the first species to wrestle with the problem of information overload. Long before the advent of computers, human beings were collecting, storing, and organizing information: from Ice Age taxonomies to Sumerian archives, Greek libraries to Dark Age monasteries.
Today, we stand at a precipice, as our old systems struggle to cope with what designer Richard Saul Wurman called a "tsunami of data." With some historical perspective, however, we can begin to understand our predicament not just as the result of technological change, but as the latest chapter in an ancient story that we are only beginning to understand.
Spanning disciplines from evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology to the history of books, libraries, and computer science, writer and information architect Alex Wright weaves an intriguing narrative that connects such seemingly far-flung topics as insect colonies, Stone Age jewelry, medieval monasteries, Renaissance encyclopedias, early computer networks, and the World Wide Web. Finally, he pulls these threads together to reach a surprising conclusion, suggesting that the future of the information age may lie deep in our cultural past.

One bright spot: The use of public libraries has remained consistently strong over the years, particularly in manufacturing towns. Toledo, Ohio, and Fort Wayne, Ind., for example, were in the bottom half overall but were two of six Rust Belt cities in the top 10 for library resources.

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20081202: Chengdu Business News has released its 2008 ranking of China's richest authors, and Guo Jingming is in first place for the second year running.

"Are there certain types of books you would read on one screen rather than another?" Yes! "Is it a control issue, a content issue, or an aesthetic one? Or something larger about the way we connect to digital literature?"