Immortal Books

     The now defunct BookTailor used to sell its book-customization software mainly to travel agents. Subscribers assembled their own, private edition tome from a library of electronic content. The emerging idiosyncratic anthology was either printed and bound on demand or packaged as an e-book.

     Consider what this simple business model does to entrenched and age-old notions such as “original” and “copies”, copyright, and book identifiers. Is the “original” the final, user-customized book – or its sources? Should such one-copy print runs be eligible to unique identifiers (for instance, unique ISBN’s)? Does the user possess any rights in the final product, compiled by him? Do the copyrights of the original authors still apply?

     Members of the BookCrossing.com community register their books in a central database, obtain a BCID (BookCrossing ID Number) and then give the book to someone, or simply leave it lying around to be found. The volume’s successive owners provide BookCrossing with their coordinates. This innocuous model subverts the legal concept of ownership and transforms the book from a passive, inert object into a catalyst of human interactions. In other words, it returns the book to its origins: a dialog-provoking time capsule.

     Their proponents protest that e-books are not merely an ephemeral rendition of their print predecessors – they are a new medium, an altogether different reading experience. Continue reading »

     This post is a book review.Of course,I also think that this is a very good book.It is worth reading.

     It is a little Bantam Classic Book with a blue cover with Sir John Millais’s painting ‘Nina’ on the front. This is, of course, a 1987 reprint. The book was originally published in 1905 and like many of the other works by its author, most notably ‘The Secret Garden’, became an immediate best-seller. It is still a very good read, although far from being perfect – there are many obvious and rather incredible discrepancies, like the ages of the characters; some grow older, while others apparently retain ever-lasting youth – and the over-sensitive PC crowd will also no doubt find much to take offense at. It is after all a tale of an Upper Class, Rich, India-born, English Girl, set in the Victorian times, and so, of course, some of the attitudes are accordingly dated. Some things, however, never go out of fashion – although there are some that might cynically scoff at them as sentimental – things like humanity, kindness, imagination, and fortitude in face of the most demanding trials and tribulations. And it is the generous sprinkling of these values – without any cloying sermonizing, I should add – in the well-written, sometimes dream-like prose that has made this book so well-beloved over so many generations.

     Sara Crewe, the heroine, is seven at the start of the story and has just arrived in England, after a long voyage from India, to be admitted into a boarding school or, rather, ‘Seminary for Young Ladies’, run by a certain Miss Minchin. Sara is an imaginative, clever child, much wiser and self-reliant than her years, and is the only, much-indulged daughter of the widowed Ralph Crewe. Continue reading »