My podcast interview of Yochai Benkler about his excellent new book, The Penguin and the Leviathan has been posted. Yochai makes brilliantly (of course) a case that shouldn’t need making, but that in fact does very much need to be made: that we are collaborative, social, cooperative creatures. Your unselfish genes will thoroughly enjoy this book.

And, Joseph Reagle has promulgated the following email about his excellent, insightful book that explores the subtleties of the social structures that enable Wikipedia to accomplish its goal of being a great encyclopedia:

I’m pleased to announce that the Web/CC edition of *Good Faith Collaboration* is now available. In addition to all of the book’s complete content, hypertextual goodness, and fixed errata, there is a new preface discussing some of the particulars of this edition.

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As Publishers Weekly puts it, in June ebooks jumped while print plunged:

• $80.2MM e-books

• $84.9MM hardcover

• $48.4MM trade paperback

• $47.4MM mass-market paperback

Adult paperbacks were down 64% in that month.

Discussion at Reddit

Well before the last press has punched out its last paper book, we will have switched to thinking that p-books are print-outs of e-books. That’s when the switch will have been made, just as occurred when we switched from typewriters to word processors. That Day of the Modifier — when physical books need a modifier to specify them — is coming fast.

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At the Library Innovation Lab blog, there’s a podcast interview I did a couple of weeks ago with Susan Hildreth, director of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency that supports libraries and museums. She is quite frank about the future of libraries as works gets digitized, suggesting that physical copies of books might be archived in regional offsite repositories.

For someone with the embossed U.S. business card earned by going through a Senate confirmation process, she’s remarkably candid. (I also had the pleasure of sitting next to her at a conference dinner a few weeks ago and can report that she’s hilarious.)

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My interview of Tim O’Reilly for the Harvard Library Innovation Lab podcast series is up. Tim begins by arguing that paper books will go away before our culture is entirely ready for it because the disappearance will be driven by the publishers, not by demand. Good point.

The conversation ranges wider than that…

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Brewster Kahle gives a tour of one of the Internet Archive‘s book scanning facilities. This one is part of the Archive’s San Francisco headquarters:

Recorded during a tour of the facilities, as part of the LOD-LAM conference.

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James Bridle is the interviewee in the first in a series of podcasts I’m doing for the Harvard Library Innovation Lab.

I met James at a conference in Israel a few weeks ago, and had the great pleasure of getting to hang out with him. He’s a British book-lover and provocateur, who expresses his deep insights through his wicked sense of humor.

Thanks to Daniel Dennis “Magnificent” Jones [twitter:blanket] for producing the series, doing the intros, choosing the music, writing the page…

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BoingBoing lauds a new book called “Go the Fuck to Sleep,” by Adam Mansbach, with illustrations by Ricardo Cortés.

I’ve been thinking for the past couple of months about seeing if someone wanted to do illustrations for a similar project I posted under a CC license in 2004: “Now Go to Damn Sleep: A Children’s Book for Parents. ” Now it would be a tad redundant.

I trust that Adam has done a better job with the topic than I did. I was never very happy with my mastery of meter.

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Michael Eisen has a terrific post in which he does the detective work to figure out how dueling algorithms from two competing bookstores drove the price of a book about flies up to $23,698,655.93.

I’m sorry that some human noticed and backed the prices down. I would have liked to have seen a financial bubble form as the price went into the trillions.

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Jeff Goldenson, my colleague at the Harvard Library Innovation Lab found this fabulous 1947 short documentary on how books used to be made. (He posted it at the LiL blog.)

What a production! It’s hard to believe (or, for some of us, to remember) how hard it used to be to print books.

(Jeff found the video at Y-Combinator.)

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I’ve got an ever-growing list of books that I intend to write reviews of because they’re so damn interesting. In fact, it’s because they deserve full reviews that I’m not writing any reviews. So, with the knowingly-false intention of coming back to write a longer review, here’s a brief report on one book on my list.

John Sundman (Disclosure: John is a friend from a mailing list) is a geek, and Cheap Complex Devices is a geeky novel. It not only assumes familiarity with some technical concepts (some but not all of which it explains along the way), it’s got a slashdotty sense of humor. But it shares its deep recursiveness — I can’t tell if it ever actually comes to ground — not only with Stanislaw Lem and Douglas Hostadter, but also with Borges, and contains passages that are reminiscent of (deep praise ahead) Nabokov.

Since much of the fun is in figuring out what’s going on in this very brief work, I don’t want to give away too much. But I feel safe in disclosing the premise: This book is supposedly the winning entry in a contest for computer-generated narratives. But there may or may not be a floating point error in the computer. Thematically, I take the book as a playful meditation on the emergent properties of loosely connected systems, the way a hive emerges from bees, the Shakers are (or, perhaps, are not) more than their individual members, narratives are more than their words, and consciousness is more than a bunch of neurons (or bits). It’s a narrative that seems to be at war with itself, struggling to be whole, but not sure that it wants to be.

Yeah, I’m being obscure. In part that’s to keep the book a surprise for you. In part it’s because I haven’t figured out how all the pieces work together. This is not a normal book. But it’s fascinating, and written with a very sure hand. As Julianne Chatelain says in her review, it “contains sentences of terrible beauty that are also terribly funny.” As soon as I finished it, I began reading it again.

John details the mechanics and economics of flogging self-published books in his report on DefCon.

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