“The important thing isn’t thinking about computers or programming as they are today, but thinking about moving from a static medium like marks on paper to a dynamic medium with computational responsiveness infused into it, that can actually participate in the thinking process,” he says.
Every area you don’t given a damn about you probably should read at least one book in. Because the very best book in that area is superb, and you’re not going to know what it is. So if tennis is something you don’t know anything about, well, read Andre Agassi’s memoir. That’s a wonderful book. You don’t have to know about or care about tennis. And... See more
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you're making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.
And then there’s this 89-year-old grandmother, who got dressed nicely and put her paintings up for display at an art showing, and guess what? No one fucking came. Then she packed up her paintings and drove home, feeling “foolish.” You know what that is? It’s cluey as shit. Especially her choice of the word foolish in particular. I really don’t need... See more
Book is a sequence of spreadsIn a paper book, a unit of meaning is a spread, and it is absolutely irreplaceable. A spread is a specific place that you can easily remember, find and refer to in a conversation: “read the page about the Museum.”
The computer can look at every word on the page, every phrase, name, quote, and section of text, and show me a "map" of the words and ideas behind which lay the most interesting ideas I might want to know about. Links are no longer lonesome strands precariously holding together a sparsely connected Web, but a booming choir of ephemeral connections... See more
We don’t want to make websites instead of books. To understand what a digital book should be, it’s worth trying to perceive it as an information format, not a physical medium.