The Serial Ebook: Margaret Atwood’s Positron

Posted on November 29, 2012 by admin

I'm Starved For You (Positron), by Margaret Atwood. Published by Byliner. $2.99. Available for Kindle, Nook, iPad, and others.

Reviewed by Veronique Greenwood

There’s something a little bit retro about the scorn heaped, in some quarters, on ebooks:
As Download the Universe overlord Carl Zimmer has noted, similar charges of cheapening the reading experience were once leveled against paperback books.

It’s fitting, then, that publishers of ebooks are continuing to rediscover the promises and perils of earlier publishing forms. Serialized novels are one of the latest experiments: In September, Amazon launched its Kindle Serials, and in August, Byliner, known primarily for long-form nonfiction, announced that it would be publishing several new novels, including Positron, by Margaret Atwood, in installments.

Continue reading “The Serial Ebook: Margaret Atwood’s Positron” →

Matter: A Look At A New Way To Read About Science

Posted on November 14, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Do No Harm, by Anil Ananthaswamy. Published by Matter, $.99. Visit Matter for details about formats, purchasing, and membership.

Reviewed by Carl Zimmer

Talk about burying the lead.

Yesterday the Washington Post announced that they were hiring a new editor-in-chief. Reporting for the New York Times, Christine Haughney wrote that the Post made the switch because they were struggling with a steep decline in readership. It's not until deep in the piece that Haughney makes a startling statement:

"The paper also faces fresh competition from online news outlets, like Politico, whose founders include former Washington Post reporters."

Politico certainly didn't bring the Washington Post to its current moment of crisis singlehandedly. But it is striking to me that a web operation started from scratch in 2007 could baloon so fast that it could become a major threat to what was once one of the world's leading newspapers.

My attention was drawn to this buried lead because I've recently been getting to know a new player in the science news business, called Matter. This morning they are launching their web site, and their first piece of long-form journalism. It's way too early to predict whether Matter will become the Politico of the science world. But they definitely are entering the arena with impressive style.

Continue reading “Matter: A Look At A New Way To Read About Science” →

A Medieval Bestiary: When a book breaks your heart

Posted on September 20, 2012 by admin

A Medieval Bestiary. Published by eBook Treasures. iPad. £4.99

Reviewed by Maggie Koerth-Baker

A Medieval Bestiary is just not that into me.

We should have gone so well together. It was a scanned copy of The Royal Bestiary, a 13th century manuscript stored in the British Library, enhanced for the iPad with text and audio interpretation on every page. I was a giant nerd. Clearly, a match made in heaven.

But I don't think it's going to work out.

It's not that the book is terrible. In fact, parts of it are, objectively, pretty damn cool. We are, after all, talking about an opportunity to virtually thumb through the pages of a very old book. And the scans are excellent. You can see stains on the vellum, and the margin lines drawn by the scribe or illustrator to make certain that text and images were put into just the right place on every page. You can zoom in on the beautiful, colored and gilded drawings of bees and eagles, lions and centuars. On every page, there is, indeed, a little tab that you can tap to learn more about the animals you see in the pictures – especially helpful for the book's many imaginary animals, such as the leucrota. Leucrotas, you may be interested to know, happen when a male hyena mates with a female lion. The result of that partnership looks, for some reason, rather like a horse, but with a forked tail and a creepy, Jack Nicholson smile. The Medieval Bestiary assures me that the leucrota's "teeth" are actually a single piece of sharp bone, curved into a U shape. If I tap the "Listen" button, this information will be read to me by a soothing, female, British voice.

In short, A Medieval Bestiary does everything it promised to do. In fact, I'm sure this book could make somebody very happy. (Maybe an art student?) Just not me. That's because, while it does do everything it promised, A Medieval Bestiary does only that. And not a bit more. I, unfortunately, need the bit more.

The truth is that some of this is my fault. I read the description and then set my expectations rather higher than I should have. I can't really blame A Medieval Bestiary for being the book it is (and said it was) rather than the book I want to be. And yet. And yet.

A book like this needs context. I need to know about the genre of bestiaries, in general. Did the authors make up the clearly made-up animals (and the clearly made-up information about real animals)? Or were they writing down longstanding traditions? What was the point of the book? Am I supposed to be studying the natural world, or exploring my own morality? Do books like bestiaries have a role in the development of true taxonomy and biology, the same way that alchemy had a role in the development of chemistry and physics? I have no idea. Because A Medieval Bestiary doesn't tell me. In fact, I had to run a couple Google searches to even figure out the book's real name. This is the full extent of context it offers on itself:

A bestiary is a book of real and imaginary beasts, though its subjects can extend to plants and even rocks. It combines description of the physical nature and habits of animals with elaboration on the moral or spiritual significance of these characteristics.

This amazing book was produced in the first decade of the 13th century, and is one of the earliest bestiaries to feature vivid paintings of animals. They are set on gold grounds and in colourful frames, supplanting the line-drawn renderings that populated earlier bestiaries. These lavish illuminations would have made this a costly book to produce, and so it is likely that it was produced for an aristocratic, or even royal, owner who could read Latin or had a chaplain who could do so.

Even more frustrating was the interpretation within the book. A Medieval Bestiary is in Latin (and written in that sort of fancy medieval font that makes it difficult to read even if you do know Latin). But there is no translation of the actual text. The interpretation merely describes the illustrations. In some cases (but not all) that includes a summary of the text around the image, but even then that's almost worse, because what you get are stunted plot points of a story that probably would have been a lot more interesting to read for itself.

Basically, I look at A Medieval Bestiary and think of all that it could be, but isn't. Particularly with the iPad book format, there's such an opportunity here to add lots of context: History, philosphy, quotes and links to other works. Done right, a reader could come away from this understanding more about medieval society as a whole and the development of science from magical/religious art to rational tool. Instead, A Medieval Bestiary just wants to tell you what's going on in the pictures. There's nothing wrong with that. But I'm too old and too wise to waste much time thinking I can change a book into something it's not.

Besides, in the course of breaking up with it, I discovered that A Medieval Bestiary had been kind of misleading me all along. I paid the equivalent of $8 for this book (I was offered a free review code, but couldn't figure out where to apply it during the ordering process). But, turns out, this isn't exactly unique content. In fact, the whole thing is available as free PDFs on the website of the Royal Library. Some of the scanned pages there even come with the exact same interpretation as is offered in the iPad version. Which just kind of serves to make the shortcomings of the iPad book that much more apparent. I don't mind paying $8 for something really cool. I mind paying $8 for an iPad version of something I can get for free as a PDF. If the publishers – eBook Treasures – were going to convert A Medieval Bestiary to iPad, why not take advantage of that and do some stuff that you couldn't do with PDFs?

Sadly, I think it's time this book and I went our separate ways. Hopefully, we can still be friends. And, who knows, maybe in the future, when A Medieval Bestiary has had some time to grow, we can rekindle the relationship.

The British Library: Books of Beasts in the British Library: the Medieval Bestiary and its context (the book published on iPad as A Medieval Bestiary is listed here as Royal 12 C. xix)

Explore and learn more about medieval bestiaries as a genre at The Medieval Bestiary website (not affiliated with eBook Treasures or the iPad version of The Royal Bestiary)

Image: An illustration from the The Royal Bestiary, depicting a unicorn laying its head on the lap of a lady. Presumably, the illustrator had never seen a unicorn, nor (one suspects) a lady.

Maggie Koerth-Baker is the science editor at BoingBoing.net, the science columnist at The New York Times Magazine, and the author of Before the Lights Go Out.

The New Republic gets Download-The-Universe-ish!

Posted on August 2, 2012 by Carl Zimmer

Here at Download the Universe, we're pleased to see a venerable publication like the New Republic give some attention to science ebooks–in the August 23 print edition, no less. In "The Naked and the TED," Evgeny Morozov takes a look at three ebooks published by TED. His harsh verdict is a lot like our reviews of a couple TED titles (me on The Demise of Guys, David Dobbs on Smile). He even refers to my review in the piece–although he doesn't actually mention Download the Universe, a shout-out that would have been most appreciated.

Morozov's main object of scorn is a TED ebook called Hybrid Reality. I can see why. It's one of those utopian manifestos promising solutions to all our woes–political, social, medical, and so on–through advances in technology. Attacking a book like Hybrid Reality is not a big jump for Morozov–he writes frequently about the hidden threats to democracy posed by the Internet.

Morozov's writing has one main mode–the snarky attack. It works just fine when he's going after smiley-faced privacy-assassins like Facebook. But Hybrid Reality doesn't just invoke the Internet to promise us a better tomorrow. It also pledges that the Human Genome Project, neuroscience, and other branches of science will provide cures for what ails us. And since Morozov loathes the authors of Hybrid Reality, he stands ready to belittle whatever they like. If they like the Human Genome Project, for example, then it must be bogus. "The Human Genome Project," Morozov declares, "for all the hype it generated a decade ago, has not accomplished much."

What ruler is Morozov using to measure the project's accomplishments? He doesn't tell us, so we'll have to guess. If he relied solely on breathless news articles in the late 1990s and thought we'd have a cure for every disease known to man in under ten years, then I can see why he's disappointed.

But if Morozov had done the right thing and had looked at the actual scientific impacts of the Human Genome Project, he'd see that scientists have indeed accomplished much. Thanks to the Human Genome Project, scientists have discovered a previously unknown lineage of extinct humans in Siberia. As I wrote last month in the New York Times, scientists are gaining a new appreciation of the role that microbes play in our bodies–an appreciation only possible because scientists sequencing the human genome figured out how to assemble complete genomes from broken pieces. By sequencing the entire genomes of patients, scientists can pinpoint the mutations responsible for genetic diseases. That's just the start of a very long list. (And let's not forget the $141 in economic benefit for every $1 of government investment in the Human Genome Project.)

Morozov's dismissal of results like these is just as glib as the techno-utopianism that he attacks.

Because Morozov is perpetually on the attack, I have no idea if he really thinks that the Human Genome Project is yet another bogus technological fix. Does he think that genome research can't possibly solve any problems? More broadly, I wonder what Morozov thinks is the proper place of technology and science in society. If I've missed this in Morozov's writings, I'd be happy for someone to point it out to me.

Like the Human Genome Project, ebooks are guilty by association–or at least ones published by TED:

When they launched their publishing venture, the TED organizers dismissed any concern that their books’ slim size would be dumbing us down. “Actually, we suspect people reading TED Books will be trading up rather than down. They’ll be reading a short, compelling book instead of browsing a magazine or doing crossword puzzles. Our goal is to make ideas accessible in a way that matches modern attention spans.” But surely “modern attention spans” must be resisted, not celebrated. Brevity may be the soul of wit, or of lingerie, but it is not the soul of analysis. The TED ideal of thought is the ideal of the “takeaway”—the shrinkage of thought for people too busy to think. I don’t know if the crossword puzzles are rewiring our brains—I hope TED knows its neuroscience, with all the neuroscientists on its stage—but anyone who is seriously considering reading Hybrid Reality or Smile should also entertain the option of playing Angry Birds or Fruit Ninja.

This is fun to read, but it raises questions that it can't answer. Are ebooks by their nature corrupting? Or does Morozov only object to ebooks that are produced by one organization that he doesn't like? Here at Download the Universe, we don't flinch from calling garbage what it is. But we also find ebooks that delight us. Is such a thing even possible in Morozov's moral universe? I know for a fact that Morozov reads Download the Universe, and so let me end with four words: Our comment thread awaits.

–Carl Zimmer

Science by Candlelight

Posted on May 24, 2012 by admin

The Chemical History of a Candle, by Michael Faraday, (Griffin, Bohn And Co., London, 1861), available free from Project Gutenberg in multiple e-reader formats and also from LibriVox as a free audiobook.

reviewed by Deborah Blum

"There is no better, there is no more open door by which you can enter into the study of natural philosophy than by considering the physical phenomena of a candle."

It was the above line that first caught my attention. The recognition that we often best appreciate our extraordinary natural world by seeing it through the lens of the ordinary: crystalline structure as revealed by the stitchery of winter frost, the chemical dance of light and life found in the changing colors of leaves, the hot whisper of oxygen as it sends the flame higher.

That recognition has driven much of my own science writing – the idea that we can often illuminate science through tales of the everyday. I wish I could tell you that I'd thought of it first, that it was somehow primordially my own. But, at best, I think I can claim to be carrying on a time-honored tradition. Because it's very clear that the 19th century scientist Michael Faraday was doing that and doing it exceptionally well some 150 years ago.

Here at Download the Universe, we reviewers are mostly looking toward the future – what we hope is the promise of e-books, their potential to transform the reading experience. Possibly transcend it. But I want to take this opportunity to explore another aspect of the electronic publishing world, the ability to explore our past, the free archives offered by publishers like Project Gutenberg.

Founded in 1971 by the late Michael Hart, Project Gutenberg began as a labor of love, the painstaking transfer of books in the public domain – many of them once forgotten– into digital life. The Gutenberg website now makes 39,000 free e-books available. It also links with digital partners to provide access to another 60,000 e-manuscripts. Like Faraday's candle–to stretch that analogy a little here - it offers an open door, a brightly lit access to the words, and even the wisdom, of our past. Like no other generation, we can explore this virtual library, stumble across old chemical histories of candles and learn to think differently about our own work.

And stumble is exactly what I did.

I see you are not tired of the candle yet, or I am sure you would not be interested in the subject in the way you are.

Not that it was much of a fall. More of a sidestep. I spend a lot of my time writing about and researching the history of science, for books like The Poisoner's Handbook, my recent story of poison, murder and the invention of forensics in the early 20th century. I do so because I believe–no, really, I know–that we cannot understand who we are unless we understand how we got here. And so I was doing some research into the history of chemistry and Faraday's book almost immediately appeared in my browser.

This, I think, is the other magic wrought by on-line publishers like Project Gutenberg. You can be happily rambling through the history of chemistry (a phrase, I know, that only a geek could write) and suddenly discover that a scientist born in the close of the 18th century (1790) understood perfectly the very principles of science communication that you'd been preaching in the 21st century.

Continue reading “Science by Candlelight” →