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Now may this little Book a blessing be
To those that love this little Book, and me:
And may its Buyer have no cause to say,
His money is but lost, or thrown away.

John Bunyan

Tag: books writing author

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Literature can stop my heart and execute me for a moment, allow me to become someone else.

Colum McCann

Tag: author let-the-great-world-spin

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The approach to digital culture I abhor would indeed turn all the world's books into one book, just as Kevin (Kelly) suggested. It might start to happen in the next decade or so. Google and other companies are scanning library books into the cloud in a massive Manhattan Project of cultural digitization. What happens next is what's important. If the books in the cloud are accessed via user interfaces that encourage mashups of fragments that obscure the context and authorship of each fragment, there will be only one book. This is what happens today with a lot of content; often you don't know where a quoted fragment from a news story came from, who wrote a comment, or who shot a video. A continuation of the present trend will make us like various medieval religious empires, or like North Korea, a society with a single book.

The Bible can serve as a prototypical example. Like Wikipedia, the Bible's authorship was shared, largely anonymous, and cumulative, and the obscurity of the individual authors served to create an oracle-like ambience for the document as "the literal word of God." If we take a non-metaphysical view of the Bible, it serves as a link to our ancestors, a window. The ethereal, digital replacement technology for the printing press happens to have come of age in a time when the unfortunate ideology I'm criticizing dominates technological culture. Authorship - the very idea of the individual point of view - is not a priority of the new ideology. The digital flattening of expression into a global mush is not presently enforced from the top down, as it is in the case of a North Korean printing press. Instead, the design of software builds the ideology into those actions that are the easiest to perform on the software designs that are becoming ubiquitous. It is true that by using these tools, individuals can author books or blogs or whatever, but people are encouraged by the economics of free content, crowd dynamics, and lord aggregators to serve up fragments instead of considered whole expressions or arguments. The efforts of authors are appreciated in a manner that erases the boundaries between them.

The one collective book will absolutely not be the same thing as the library of books by individuals it is bankrupting. Some believe it will be better; others, including me, believe it will be disastrously worse. As the famous line goes from Inherit the Wind: 'The Bible is a book... but it is not the only book' Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.

Jaron Lanier

Tag: books writers bible book authors writer author mashups digitization

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When I die I hope it may be said:
'Her suffering was black, but her books were read'.

Shannon L. Alder

Tag: humor questions writing death self-help novels feelings author rhymes inspirational-writers open-people

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An inspirational writer's life is an open book that never shuts. Choose your words carefully.

Shannon L. Alder

Tag: writing writer author

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Not matter what your sacred or religious book is, it's not how well you know the book, it's how well you're in alignment with the author.

Steve Maraboli

Tag: motivational life inspirational success happiness religion book action religious author sacred texts

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Authors can write stories without people assuming that they are autobiographies, but songwriters and poets are often considered to be the characters in their works. I like Michelangelo's vision, 'I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.

Criss Jami

Tag: art music poetry writing vision story autobiography character artist sculpture author angel songwriting michelangelo marble