Anyway, the other day Scott McLemee from wrote a really gracious article about the book:

So cough up the three bucks, is what I’m trying to say. It goes for a good cause — and besides, the book is a good deal, even apart from the low price. The pieces have been revised somewhat, and arranged by topic and theme, so that the whole thing now reads like a reasonably cohesive attempt to come to terms with the developments in book culture during the late ‘00s and early ‘10s. As John B. Thompson showed in his study Merchants of Culture (Polity, 2010), dealing with any particular change in publishing requires you to grapple with the whole system — the vast apparatus of production and distribution that connects writer and public. Translation is one aspect of it, of course, but it links up in various ways with the rest of publishing. While Post was making his running assessment of the state of literary translation, he also had to think about the new ways we buy and consume texts. One of essays is called “Reading in the Age of Screens,” which indeed could be an alternative title for the whole book.

Notification that the book was available came to me last week via Facebook, which is amusing given Post’s definite ambivalence about the “all digital, all the time” tendency of contemporary life. “In the digital world,” he said in a note, “we tend to stick to what we already know we want, reinforcing certain patterns, and losing some of the serendipity that a lot of readers point to as a huge influence on their life.” True, and yet I did buy the book and start reading it (on a screen) within a few minutes, and was able to ask the author questions later that afternoon. The lack of serendipity was not a big problem.

It’s a really great piece (and I’m not just saying that because it’s about this book), and does a fantastic job of laying out some of the issues—especially in relation to academia and the study & teaching of international literature.

Definitely worth reading

Open Library is a new online tool for finding information about books – even (perhaps especially) for titles that are out-of-print, scarce, or likely to find one reader per decade, if even that. It is, so to speak, a catalog with benefits. If a text is available in digital format, there is a link. Citations and excerpts from reviews will be available. Likewise, cross-references to other works on related topics. A user of Open Library can see the cover of the book and, in some cases, search the contents.

The whole interview is interesting, and Open Library sounds like a cool project. And here’s a bit about Swartz’s motivation:

Q: What will Open Library offer that you can’t already find online? What was missing from the existing array of online book-data resources – WorldCat, Google Books, Amazon, etc. – that makes it worthwhile to create a new one?

A: As the kind of person who reads Intellectual Affairs (an academophile?), I’m often looking for interesting books on an obscure topic. I can look on Amazon, but its coverage of out-of-print books is pretty poor. (In my experience, most of the really interesting books are out of print.) I can search an academic library or WorldCat, but the quality of data is pretty weak — you can get basic bibliographic info, but no reviews and weak search and a painful interface and most require a subscription.

So I wanted to build a site where one could more easily find those hidden great books, by combining all the data we have on them in one place and letting the people who love them go back and annotate and highlight them.

Did I already mention that he’s only 21?