[photo of Gutenberg statue by Robert Scarth] 

This Thursday, October 22 at 3:15p (Denver (MDT) time, check for your time zone) I and my compadre Jared Stein will be in Denver at WCET presenting on the Gutenberg Parenthesis, secondary orality, and information literacy & fluency. If you are attending WCET, you can just show up at the room: Colorado GH.

If you’d like to participate remotely, we will be broadcasting the session via U-Stream (http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ruminate) and monitoring the live U-Stream chat as well as the Twitter hashtag: #wcet09

I’d love to make this session as interactive as possible because it really is about high-level rumination on something that represents emergent thinking (for me, at least)… so the more I can hear from you the better.

The basic idea behind the session is to explore the potential for the thinking of Walter Ong on secondary orality (the Gutenberg Parenthesis) as a lens for conceptualizing and teaching new media literacy and information fluency. Along the way I’ll dip into a couple of sidestreams, such the “problem” of so many different ideas of digital literacy and the changing role(s) of memory in the context of new media.

There are many things I like about the Kindle—particularly the Kindle DX, which is amazingly readable—now that I have access to a 3G network. For various reasons, the Kindle’s not a suitable device for me to read fiction, poetry or other creative writing. But it could be perfect for disposable reading (magazines and newspapers) and much of my nonfiction needs. Could be.

I’m not talking about the larger issue of lack of Kindle content outside the most mainstream—I can count with just the fingers of both hands the number of times a Kindle edition of a book I am looking for has been available—but a much simpler problem: the horrible production quality of so many Kindle edition books. It’s one thing when a free, public domain book is the victim of poor conversion, but when I pay very near the paper price for a book and Amazon (or whoever create the Kindle edition) can’t be bothered to even take care of things like formatting paragraphs properly… that’s not cool. And with no way to preview a Kindle book, you essentially roll the dice each time you buy one.

For example, here’s what my recently purchased Kindle edition of Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy looks like:

Notice anything missing? Having sufficient leading between paragraphs—or even indented first lines—might seem like a small thing, but not when you have thousands of screen to read. And this is just one example of many. The books I download have problems more often than not.

Two more examples that clearly stem from faulty conversion and absolutely no effort put into correction: