Posts by Tim

Barnes and Noble’s Nook e-reader* has a lot of nice things going for it. But I’m really intrigued by a particular design/software/sales choice that’s gotten less attention than native PDF support or the color touchscreen or even the ability to “lend” e-books to friends.

Barnes & Noble has figured out a way to tie the experience of using the e-reader to the experience of shopping in one of their brick-and-mortar stores. In principle, this could allow B&N to use an electronic marketplace not to substitute for retail shopping, but to augment it (and vice versa). And I think this shows us an alternate way to think about electronic reading than the delivery model that most of us have taken for granted.

Here’s how this is supposed to work:

In any of the chain’s 1,300 stores, consumers can download books on the Wi-Fi network. Outside the stores, consumers will access AT&T’s 3G network to download books…

In an interview, William Lynch, president of Barnes&Noble.com, said the company would aggressively market the Nook within its bricks and mortar stores. The Nook also has software that will detect when a consumer walks into a store so that it can push out coupons and other promotions like excerpts from forthcoming books or suggestions for new reading. While in stores, Nook owners will be able to read any e-book through streaming software.

The promise of the Kindle is that you can buy and read books anywhere at all – that is, nowhere in particular. The Amazon store has no location. You read the books on your screen, and they are technically stored on your device, but effectively, the books are likewise nowhere.

Barnes & Noble, on the other hand, is still committed to the idea that books have PLACES, that they are most properly browsed and bought and read in specific locations. They say: yes, you can use your Nook anywhere – but the very best place to use it is in one of our stores. What’s more: as long as you’re in the store, you can read as much of as many books as you want. Just like if you were flipping the pages. That’s huge!

This choice may have been inevitable: B&N had to find some way to leverage its retail chain, the only real advantage it has over players like Amazon or even Sony. They also have customers who are accustomed to coming to their stores, flashing their discount cards, drinking coffee and eating scones in their cafés. For Barnes and Noble, THIS is the natural constituency for their e-readers — not the wandering digital nomads who might buy a Kindle, might buy an iPhone, might buy a PS3, or might blow it all at Newegg, depending on how long they stay online. And B&N can also partner with other businesses — offering its library to readers at Starbucks (or some other coffee chain) or the CTA. Wherever books are read!

If this works — by which I mean, not only that the Nook sells well, but that customers actually take their Nooks into stores to take advantage of these added features, and the wi-fi actually works, and the coupons and ads aren’t out-and-out bothersome, then we’ll have a new way of thinking about the use of electronic readers in all sorts of contexts: libraries, museums, elementary schools, civic centers, college campuses. The content and its delivery become not just user-aware, but location-aware.

Above and beyond Nook’s competition with the Kindle as such, the fact that it actually offers a competing model for use opens things up quite a bit. Let’s see where this goes.

* I don’t like the term e-reader. The phrase I always WANT to use, which is justified nowhere, is reading machine. Is anyone with me?

At New Geography, Aaron Renn takes a Kotkinesque shot at the darlings of urban planners and bike-toting social climbers everywhere:

If you take away the dominant Tier One cities like New York, Chicago and Los Angeles you will find that the “progressive” cities [e.g. Portland, Seattle, Austin, Minneapolis, and Denver] aren’t red or blue, but another color entirely: white.

In fact, not one of these “progressive” cities even reaches the national average for African American percentage population in its core county. Perhaps not progressiveness but whiteness is the defining characteristic of the group…

As the college educated flock to these progressive El Dorados, many factors are cited as reasons: transit systems, density, bike lanes, walkable communities, robust art and cultural scenes. But another way to look at it is simply as White Flight writ large. Why move to the suburbs of your stodgy Midwest city to escape African Americans and get criticized for it when you can move to Portland and actually be praised as progressive, urban and hip? Many of the policies of Portland are not that dissimilar from those of upscale suburbs in their effects. Urban growth boundaries and other mechanisms raise land prices and render housing less affordable exactly the same as large lot zoning and building codes that mandate brick and other expensive materials do. They both contribute to reducing housing affordability for historically disadvantaged communities. Just like the most exclusive suburbs.

It’s worth reading the whole thing, but I want to propose an alternate hypothesis.

This is something I think about a lot, not least because I’m an aspiring college professor married to an urban planning student who is also a black lady. Who doesn’t drive. And we have kids.

How can we find someplace to live that’s 1) safe, 2) planning-progressive, 3) politically progressive, 4) with good schools, 5) with some good jobs — and where my wife and our children won’t be the only middle-class African-Americans most people in our neighborhoods ever see?

It’s a harder nut to crack than you’d think, not least because my wife is probably keener on places like Portland than I am. I grew up in Detroit, and like big cities that are sometimes a little seedy: Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, San Francisco, Boston. My wife grew up in D.C., but then moved to semi-rural Georgia (where her family WERE the only middle-class blacks her neighbors had ever seen).

We both love cities. But she doesn’t drive a car, and I don’t ride a bike. There we are.

Now here’s the thing. Why do these little model cities not have very many black people?

It’s worth asking: why do some places have relatively high concentrations of African-Americans? The answer, historically, has been: 1) they are in the South, or 2) they are large, industrial cities that attracted lots of black men and women during the industrial migrations of the first half of this century.

Now, if a city didn’t have a big industrial base forty years ago, it probably didn’t (and don’t) have a big African-American population.

And – if it didn’t commit head-over-heels to industry, it’s probably in better shape now than most of the cities that did.

Hence Renn’s correlation is a classic example of what the statisticians call a missing variable problem. That missing variable is relative industrialization, which drives both the size of the Af-Am population and whether a city is a small-town, new-urbanist model or a post-industrial hellhole. (Sorry, Detroit.)

Let me add too: if a city is a really, really desirable place to live, then it will be expensive. If a city is expensive, then it will largely attract either wealthy adults or young people, students, etc. who are willing to live in small apartments on the cheap. You don’t get a lot of families with four or more kids, and – given the relative income and wealth distribution in this country – you don’t get a lot of black people.

NOW. This doesn’t account for cities like San Francisco, where a once-substantial black population has essentially been driven (and then priced) out.

It doesn’t explain why young black professionals are way, way more likely to move to New York or Atlanta than Portland.

It also doesn’t negate Renn’s observation that one of the things that may attract wealthy and high-climbing whites to cities like Portland is their low black population and relative lack of “urban problems.” It may be a kind of socially-acceptable white flight for greenie liberals. But that’s not anything you can blame on the cities. If it’s true, it’s in the psychology of their residents.

Matt’s looking at how the internet is changing churches; Mark Bittman looks at how the internet ought to be changing the real spiritual center of most neighborhoods today, the grocery store.

The one time I tried shopping online I was sent a free watermelon — how does that happen? — but that didn’t make up for the even-less-than-supermarket quality of the food. This is my fantasy about virtual grocery shopping: that you could ask and be told the provenance and ingredients of any product you look at in your Web browser. You could specify, for example, “wild, never-frozen seafood” or “organic, local broccoli.”

You could also immortalize your preferences (“Never show me anything whose carbon footprint is bigger than that of my car”; “Show me no animals raised in cages”; “Don’t show me vegetables grown more than a thousand miles from my home”), along with any and all of your cooking quirks (“When I buy chicken, ask me if I want rosemary”). You would receive, if you wanted, an e-mail message when shipments of your favorite foods arrived at the store or went on sale; you could get recipe ideas, serving suggestions, shopping lists, nutritional information and cooking videos. If poor-quality food arrived — yellowing broccoli, stinky fish, whatever — you would receive store credit without any hassle. You might even, I suppose, be able to ask the store to limit the amount of impulse purchases that you make — forget that second pint of Ben & Jerry’s or those Cheez-Its you have trouble resisting.

These are services I’d be willing to pay for. And suppose this online grocer also sold precut or preseasoned vegetables, meat, fish and so on that were made with high-quality ingredients. (Surely I’m not alone in believing that the worst carrots are selected to be formed into “baby” carrots or that premarinated meats feature not only inferior meats but also inferior seasonings.) Maybe I could order my precut broccoli to be parboiled for two minutes, shocked, tossed with slivered garlic and packaged with a lemon. It would be ready for me to refrigerate until I’m ready to eat, and then, in five minutes, I could sauté, dress and put it on the table.

Gosh. True personalization in online retail really is the holy grail, isn’t it? Everyone wants it. We think it should be easy, that it’s right around the corner — but nobody never quite gets there.

No corporation big enough to pull off an operation like online grocery shopping is nimble enough to actually pay special attention to you as a person. It seems like online shopping can give you personalization roughly up to the level where you can pick one of five choices. Also, 50-60% of the time, at least two of them will be unavailable. Even with something like Amazon, which has a pretty sophisticated recommendation engine, I often find myself chastising it, like an unfavored lover: “sometimes I think that you don’t know me at all.”

As for complex operations like Bittman’s parboiled broccoli with garlic — which admittedly sounds delicious — if you can’t get either your grocery’s butcher or your favorite chef to tailor your order that precisely, you’re never going to get a drop-down menu to do it.

Some of these other ideas are great – but when it comes to the cooking, unless we’re willing to take what the supermarket’s serving, we’re on our own.

Oh ho ho — Bill Keller, spilling the beans (or just gabbing like the rest of us):

I’m hoping we can get the newsroom more actively involved in the challenge of delivering our best journalism in the form of Times Reader, iPhone apps, WAP, or the impending Apple slate, or whatever comes after that.

This is noteworthy not just for gossip-y reasons. Even if he isn’t talking as an insider, Keller’s a journalist — he and his reporters probably have good info on this. Just how impending is impending? And is the NYT ready to do something real in that format, and related ones, like the iPhone?

Something cool is going to be happening soon.

Derek Thompson writes:

Once upon a time, personal electronics were designed to be single-function. Cameras were cameras, only. Phones were phones, only. The computer was a heavy stationary thing. But engineers slowly figured out how to build smaller chips, store greater memory and consolidate 130 functions. Today a single smart phone can do all of these things: Take pictures, make calls, go online. It’s the Swiss Army Knife theory of technology.

Today it seems to me that there are at least three major classes of popular personal technology that have yet to be fully consolidated into a modern Swiss Army Knife: cell phones and computers and I think e-readers will soon fill that trio. The arc of personal tech history dictates that functions don’t remain separate for very long. Someday the idea of an e-reader designed merely to read will seem as limiting as the cell phone that doesn’t receive emails or the desktop that won’t fit in your satchel. It will still have an consumer audience, but it will be seen as behind the wave.

Fallows disagrees:

I’m skeptical because of the dozen previous times through the computer era in which that prediction has not panned out. “Real” cameras are still much better than in-phone cameras; the right device to carry in your pocket, as a phone or PDA, will always be worse to read on than a device with a bigger screen, which in turn is too big to fit in your pocket; keyboards are simply better than little thumbpads for entering more than a few words, and any device with a real keyboard has to be a certain size. So, sure, some things will be combined, but the all in one era is not at hand, and won’t be.

Josh Marshall splits the difference, but also takes it someplace a little different:

Just a short time ago we heard from one reader who can’t wait to get TPM on her Kindle. But she doesn’t seem representative of our audience. There are many fewer Kindles out there than iPhones, let alone Blackberries. But even among Kindle users, demand didn’t seem too great. A lot of you said that you love it for books. But it’s just not made for rapidly changing information, our more iterative style of writing and reporting. And it’s also not great visually for anything but pure text. Another way of saying this is that it’s designed for books, which of course it is. Just speaking for myself, and as someone who’s become an avid user of my Kindle for books, I think I agree. I’d love to be able (and I and you soon will be) to access a high-end iPhone app for all the stuff that’s available at TPM. But I can’t say the idea of reading TPM on my Kindle gets me too excited.

So, let’s review.

1) The overall trend is clearly towards media devices with multiple (but discrete) functions.
2) There’s still room for a solid handful of dedicated-use devices who do their job really, really well; for reading plain text, a device like the Kindle could fit into that category.
3) A lot of what we read isn’t plain text. It never was.

Potential solutions:

1) Whenever possible, tear down the walls between the “separate” functions on multi-function devices. It should feel like a device that has one function — just that the function is complex, multilayered, integrated.
2) Within the content, too, stop treating text as if it could be fully isolated as a separate data channel from every other kind of media.
3) The end of the multiple-function device, and perhaps even the multi-media object; the birth of the integrated-function device, and the integrated-media object. These last two were made for each other.

For some reason, I’ve been unsubscribed from Howard Weaver’s Twitter feed, which means I missed a bunch of great links. (I figured it out when he linked to my post on publishing from the other day, and my vanity alerts went off.)

Anyways, I thought this was a clever link: Dave Pell’s Top 25 Reasons We’re Fucked, which enumerates some of the most glaring asterisks to the claim “online social networks are terrific!”

Two in particular struck me as being both 1) true experiences and 2) symptomatic of a major (maybe THE major) problem of social networks: the illusion of control over the dissemination of what you write.

3. No Party Favors: You’re having a great time at the party? Well I didn’t get invited to the goddamn party and now I know about it and I know you’re having fun.
Solution: Shut the fuck up.

20. Diss-intermediate: Instead of being direct, you vent your loosely veiled personal (and even professional) attacks on the web. Here’s the bad news. The person on the receiving end of the attack also has a computer. And guess which one of you looks like a pussy?

(Note: For #20, I would substitute “asshole” for “pussy.”)

Both of these experiences suggest that when social networking fails, it’s due in no small part to either the excessive transitivity or the excessive symmetry of information. You write something intended for person or group A, but it winds up being broadcast to person or group B — either because someone in A relayed what you said to B, or because A and B are all part of the same undifferentiated audience.

NB: So far, this is just a different version of the old saw, “everything you write on the internet can be seen by everyone and stays there forever and will someday be used against you” — used to frighten teenagers and employees and grad students since the internet began.

What I’ve discovered, though, that social networks often experience the opposite problem. Here’s the scenario. You write something with the intent that EVERYONE — all of your Twitter followers, or Facebook friends, or blog subscribers — will read it. Inevitably, however, it winds up missing some of them. I might even add, it winds up missing MOST of them.

This is because for most people, messages on social networks aren’t actually messages, discrete items with a sender and recipient, but a broadcast. Facebook is like a television that’s always turned on. Sometimes you watch it intently, absorbed in what you see; sometimes you’re staring at it, bored, waiting for something good to come on; sometimes, it’s just background noise; and sometimes, you leave it on while you go on vacation so that people think someone is home. If you’re trying to reach the reader/viewer of a social network as broadcast, your status update or blog post or heartfelt plea for help is just as likely to reach a blank couch as it is a living, breathing person at the other end.

For example; I haven’t blogged about this here, but:

About a month ago, I was in a very serious accident. I broke my leg, broke my arm very badly (requiring multiple surgeries to repair), broke several ribs, took a gash to my forehead, etc… I’m actually quite lucky to be alive. However, the prognosis is good, and with hard work in rehab (and TLC for the parts still healing), I’m expected to make a full recovery.

I was in a hospital for a few weeks, during which you saw reduced Tim-activity on the Snarkmarket. I re-learned how to type left-handed (thanks to Robin for correcting typos), and I’m now in an inpatient intensive rehab facility, working on getting all of my functions back. I can walk using a walker (although I have to use a special platform to put weight on my elbow rather than my wrist), and I’m a whiz in a wheelchair. Now, I can even type right-handed again. I’m still in a fair amount of pain, and I’ve got swelling around a bruise on my back that won’t quite go away — but I’m in good spirits and actually doing quite well.

(Now, that is on the internet forever; readable by everyone. Please don’t use it against me.)

A week or so ago, I posted a statement very similar to the one above, and sent it to all of my Facebook friends. Many people responded instantly with surprise, well-wishes or concern. Most said nothing.

Then, a week or so later, when I started posting status updates again, including some which made reference to hospitals and injuries, I got a flurry of messages. “What happened?” “Are you okay?” And again and again: “Did I miss something? What’s going on?”

In some cases, people were away, or at least away from Facebook — and my message had dropped beyond the circumference of attention. In most cases, my quite-startling, very serious message had simply been filtered out — lost in a sea of viral videos, reunion invitations, and petty complaints. I might as well have written: “I had a great run today!” — just omitting the key coordinating clause, “until I got hit by that car.”

It turns out that social networks are actually terrible places to try to send a message en masse. At some point in their development, they stopped being a high-function version of your email address book, and became a kind of low-power broadcast antenna. It might be a great station, but it’s static-y, there’s too much filler, and it’s all too easy to drive out of range.

When I first saw the NYT headline, “For Some Parents, Shouting Is the New Spanking,” I thought, oh, great. I prepared myself for an argument that parents were too sensitive about shouting (just as they are too sensitive about spanking), and that they should just lighten up, go old-school, and slap and yell at their kids.

But nope; it’s not a lagging indicator but a leading one. I can guarantee that parents at the farmers’ market, this article in hand, will turn their laser vision on any parent who slightly raises their voice at a child, even from across the park.

Okay, enough with the straw men on either side.* Just to be clear, I think regular yelling at kids is a really bad idea. Here’s what the article says:

Many in today’s pregnancy-flaunting, soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering generation of parents would never spank their children. We congratulate our toddlers for blowing their nose (“Good job!”), we friend our teenagers (literally and virtually), we spend hours teaching our elementary-school offspring how to understand their feelings. But, incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells.

“I’ve worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking,” said Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, which teaches parenting skills in classes, individual coaching sessions and an online course. “This is so the issue right now. As parents understand that it’s not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don’t work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again.”

I also like this principle, from the University of New Hampshire’s Murray Straus:

If someone yelled at you at work, you’d find that pretty jarring. We don’t apply that standard to children.

*Let me just say that dealing with parenting advice is absolutely exhausting. Whether it’s a young mom toting the latest research on vaccination and language delays featured in Fretful Mother magazine, a well-meaning grandma offering ludicrous folk remedies and endless, endless stories, a hipster dad justifying why he lets his kids free-range their BMs in the backyard, or a frazzled mom angrily defending slapping her kids on the subway, the message is always: “You’re doing it wrong.”

I always say that one of the best how-to movies about fatherhood is Finding Nemo, which presents three models of fatherhood: the initially neurotic, PTSD, over-anxious Marlin (who wants to protect Nemo from everything); the initially selfish Gill (who’s willing to subject Nemo to real danger so he can escape the dentist’s office himself); and the turtle Crush, who has achieved a kind of laid-back affirmative Zen. Over the course of the movie, Marlin needs to relax and trust in his son, Gill needs to learn to care about somebody else, and Crush — well, Crush is a turtle. He doesn’t have to do much of anything.

I’m also liking (with some reservations) the justly famous dad whose wisdom fills Twitter’s shitmydadsays:

“The baby will talk when he talks, relax. It ain’t like he knows the cure for cancer and he just ain’t spitting it out.”

I wish I’d read that six months ago — soooo much grief could have been averted.

I saw a link to a Publishers Weekly story saying that Cory Doctorow was kicking off “a unique publishing experiment.” And I thought, cool! Doctorow’s stories aren’t exactly my thing, but I like innovations in publishing, and always wish to know more about them!

But then when I read the article, I was kinda let down. Basically, he’s releasing a free e-book (which he’s done for a while now), an on-demand paperback, and a de luxe hardcover edition. And one dude gave him 10K as a commission on a story.

Well, let me be fair. There are two things that I think are interesting and kind of new about what Doctorow’s doing:

• Doctorow has some nifty-sounding software, contributed by a fan, Vaskin Kissoyan: “a beta of a package called ‘Ange’ that he’s written to single-source my master text files into HTML, PDF and EPub, so that all I need to do is make an edit in the text file and run the script, and it converts the updated file to all the other formats and uploads them for me. There’s a reason this collection is called With a Little Help!” That’s pretty cool.
• Doctorow is going to disclose all of his earnings, from every stream, in a blog for PW, to show that giving away e-books can pay off. I think that’s kind of nice, and might even be useful.

I think what bothers me is that Doctorow’s “packages” aren’t really packages. Each book is a separate product at different, individuated price points, without any overlap. And you get to pick one. Compare that to what this whippersnapper is offering:

• Pledge $3 or more

  DIGITAL PACK. Get a PDF copy of the book and follow along with behind-the-scenes updates.

• Pledge $11 or more

  PHYSICAL PACK. All of the above, plus get a physical copy of the book. (The more people who choose this level or higher, the better the book is for everybody!)

• Pledge $19 or more

  SINCERITY PACK. All of the above, plus your book is signed, and it comes with a little surprise.

• Pledge $29 or more

  PATRON PACK. All of the above, plus your name (or secret code-name) is listed in the acknowledgments.

• Pledge $39 or more

  SUPER OCCULT VALUE PACK. All of the above, plus get three more copies of the book (for a total of four), so you can give one to a friend, donate one to the library, leave one in a coffee shop with a line of hexadecimal code scribbled across the title page…

Note the refrain: “all of the above.” When you spring for a package, you actually get more than one thing. You don’t choose between a digital book and a paperback — you get both.

This is pro forma true in CD’s model, too, b/c he’s giving away the e-book for free — but what if the e-book, for hard copy purchasers, came without advertising? Might not the collectors’ edition hardcover buyers also want a paperback as a reading copy? How can an upmarket purchase actually give a reader some leverage on a downmarket one – or vice versa?

I’m going to put a marker down on this. In this transitional period, the most valuable and successful experiments will come from people who find new ways to give readers BOTH digital and print books – who in fact create incentives to encourage BOTH kinds of reading – and that in turn value their readers as members of an interlocking community, not (just) isolated buyers at different price points. And that means aligning readers’ interests and offering them MORE than they might think they’d want.

I think Phil Gyford’s observation here is really important:

It wasn’t long ago that buying a purely digital piece of music — downloading a file rather than paying for a piece of holdable plastic — seemed terribly modern. But already I feel like an old fool when I visit Amazon or 7Digital to pay for an MP3. These days, a several-megabyte file on my computer is starting to feel as much of a burden, as much of a physical thing to cart around for the rest of my life, as a CD or a cassette or a record.

I can imagine the Renaissance analogue: “An octavo book printed on paper is starting to feel as much of a burden, as much of a physical thing that I need to store and display and move from home to home, as a manuscript folio book on parchment.”

Via things.

Most of my favorite quotes in Derrida’s Paper Machine come from the first full chapter, “The Book To Come.” (The title is also the title of a book by Maurice Blanchot, and a chapter in that book, which is largely about the poet Stéphane Mallarmé.) Samples:

A question trembling all over, not only with that which disturbs the historical sense of what we still call a book, but also with what the expression to come might imply—namely more than one thing, at least three things:

1. That the book as such has—or doesn’t have—a future, now that electronic and virtual incorporation, the screen and the keyboard, online transmission, and numerical composition seem to be dislodging or supplementing the codex (that gathering of a pile of pages bound together, the current form of what we generally call a book such that it can be opened, put on a table, or held in the hands). The codex had itself supplanted the volume, the volumen, the scroll. It had supplanted it without making it disappear, I should stress. For what we are dealing with is never replacements that put an end to what they replace but rather, if I might use this word today, restructurations in which the oldest form survives, and even survives endlessly, coexisting with the new form and even coming to terms with a new economy—which is also a calculation in terms of the market as well as in terms of storage, capital, and reserves.

2. That if it has a future, the book to come will no longer be what it was.

3. That we are awaiting or hoping for an other book, a book to come that will transfigure or even rescue the book from the shipwreck that is happening at present.

This – especially the first part – is one of my favorite moves, that of the LONG historical perspective, coupled with that critical sensibility, borrowed from Ferdinand de Saussure’s structuralist linguistics, that multiple terms coexist but change and shift in their relative values and significance as they jostle against one another. Linguistic change is never a straight substitution, but a high-friction accomodation to the new. In fact, so is most cultural change — the distinction isn’t between live and dead, or even (entirely) high and low, but between forms that are residual, dominant, or emerging.

But this position, which could just make for a tidy deflation — we’ve seen all of this before — is joined to an acknowledgement that what we are experiencing is a shipwreck. It’s just not (or at least not only) the shipwreck we think it is:

Now what is happening today, what looks like being the very form of the book’s to-come, still as the book, is on the one hand, beyond the closure of the book, the disruption, the dislocation, the disjunction, the dissemination with no possible gathering, the irreversible dispersion of this total codex (not its disappearance but its marginalization or secondarization, in ways we will have to come back to); but simultaneously, on the other hand, a constant reinvestment in the book project, in the book of the world or the world book, in the absolute book (this is why I also described the end of the book as interminable or endless), the new space of writing and reading in electronic writing, traveling at top speed from one spot on the globe to another, and linking together, beyond frontiers and copyrights, not only citizens of the world on the universal network of a potential universitas, but also any reader as a writer, potential or virtual or whatever. That revives a desire, the same desire. It re-creates the temptation that is figured by the World Wide Web as the ubiquitous Book finally reconstituted, the book of God, the great book of Nature, or the World Book finally achieved in its onto-theological dream, even though what it does is to repeat the end of
that book as to-come.

These are two fantasmatic limits of the book to come, two extreme, final, eschatic figures of the end of the book, the end as death, or the end as telos or achievement. We must take seriously these two fantasies; what’s more they are what makes writing and reading happen. They remain as irreducible as the two big ideas of the book, of the book both as the unit of a material support in the world, and as the unity of a work or unit of discourse (a book in the book). But we should also perhaps wake up to the necessity that goes along with these fantasies.

Two fantasies! Both generative! Both probably unavoidable!

This is why Derrida is so good.