Peter swung by NYU this week to make the first purchase of Goodbye Madame Butterfly at the university bookstore. He was thrilled enough to send us this pic. Thanks Peter! And folks, keep your eyes peeled, because GMB is popping up in bookstores across the country (and in Japan).

Buying Books by the Foot: New Yorker

"Since the program’s inception, in 1986, the Strand has built scores of imaginary reading rooms, from the prison library in “Oz” to the Barnes & Noble clone in “You’ve Got Mail.” Clients also include window dressers, commercial architects (the Strand furnished each floor in the Library Hotel with a different Dewey decimal category), and people with more shelf space than leisure time. Kelsey Grammer requested all hardback fiction in two of his homes."

Decorating with books: Design Observer
Somewhat related to the above: The Design Observer on books and the shifting of their usage as decorative objects.

'“There was a time, not so very long ago,” wrote Betty Pepis, author of interior decoration books, in the introduction to 65 Ways to Decorate [published 1956], “when books had little to do with the decorating of a home. Banished from the front parlor or the formal living room, they were confined to a den or a library reserved for the purpose... But homes have changed a great deal in the past two decades. Space is tighter.'

Typographic Art: bantjes.com
Marian Bantjes makes beautiful covers, posters and other visual artifacts exhibiting a strong typographical influence.

Five-thousand metal buck$: The New Yorker
On the cult of Leica (oh how I want an M8, tradition and mechanics be damned):

"If you can conquer the slight queasiness that comes from walking about with seven thousand dollars’ worth of machinery hanging around your neck, an afternoon with the M8 is a dangerously pleasant groove to get into."

There's a nice little review of Goodbye Madame Butterfly on the Lost in Translation blog. Check it out.

Hitotoki New York is now live. Over the last few days we've managed, covering them in sweat and blood and Dotour Iced Coffee, to break many keyboards in our Tokyo offices.

Putting a site like this together is sort of like finding out you're giving birth to triplets in the middle of the birthing process. That is to say, something that seemed like it should have been a simple process was anything but simple.

The stories for this launch are fantastic. Thanks much in part to the diverse and delicious literary community in New York, and to our New York editor Matt Rand's word kung-fu. Matt was so scarred by the production process, he's run off to Africa for two weeks, freeing himself from email and computers fast enough to load hitotoki's home page.

Some highlights from the launch include:

Hitotoki New York 007 by Khoi Vinh: "Port Authority is an ugly building. About that there can be no debate. It has the kind of facade people can’t bear to stare in the face of for very long, like a scarred victim. But that perceived repulsiveness is rooted, I’m sure, in the services in which it deals. Is there a form of transportation known to Westerners that’s held in lower esteem than the bus?"

Hitotoki New York 002 by Kseniya Melnik: "A boy threw a ball my way, but I was too slow to catch it. The chess-playing men looked at me with suspicion. A pack of pigeons took off into the sky. I felt suspended between worlds."

Hitotoki New York 008 by Michael Maiello: "Lying on the cement steps across from us, shirtless Boris Yeltsin’s skin reddens as he reads a book. His lips move as he peruses the pages. We sneak toward him to see what he’s reading. It’s a book about how to flip real estate for profit."

Hitotoki is a collaboration with the pixel pushin', sushi eatin', monkey slappin' folks at AQ.

Cannedcoffee.com features a little video from Japan to whet your appetite for that afternoon latté.

Some 'official' Goodbye Madame Butterfly book porn over on my portfolio site. Taken on the high-class, high-quality plywood tables in the glowing Friday afternoon light at Co-lab.

Wow, talk about conflicting emotions. I'm at once in awe of the beauty of Brain Dettmer's "Book Autopsies" and horrified that he murdered these old books.

From the artist:

I cut into the cover of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and other surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each page while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose a book’s hidden, fragmented memory. The completed pieces expose new relationships of a book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.

Amazing.

More images + background information: here and here.

(Via Design Observer)

As Bruce mentions in a previous post, the NYTimes ended their Times Select pay program. Most content is now available free of charge, including huge sections of their archives. Here's what The Times has to say:

In addition to opening the entire site to all readers, The Times will also make available its archives from 1987 to the present without charge, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain. There will be charges for some material from the period 1923 to 1986, and some will be free.

Kottke, does all the heavy lifting for us and digs through the archives picking out some of the more interesting articles that hitherto were unavailable.

Ross brought to my attention an interesting concept from Live Ink. The company claims that laying out text in a cascading format improves readability. Check out the samples on the company's site.

First The New York Times announced this week that it would stop charging for access to parts of its website, then yesterday Rupert Murdoch talked about how he was leaning toward making the Wall Street Journal's website free as well. Subscription-based online news is on life support.

The NYT and WSJ were two of the only newspapers turning a profit on subscriptions to their websites (perhaps the Financial Times makes money as well?). If Murdoch decides to make the site free, then the subscription-models will be a thing of the past for news sites. That means readers get better access to mainstream media reports and online advertising gets a big boost. It also means that both the NYT and the WSJ have a chance of maintaining their dominant position in newsgathering even after the newspaper is a thing of the past.

I know I heard about these little Moleskine city notebooks ages ago but I only recently handled one in person. They're impressive. Small, but packed with great little details. The maps of the cities are beautiful, easy to read and elegantly designed. They smartly offer transparent overlays to place over the maps for tracing walking routes about the city. There are also public transportation details and maps. And lots of compartmented space for jotting notes about shops and restaurants.

Overall, it had a great feel and I'll be looking into picking one up on my next trip. It's this sort of well conceived functionality that inspires use. I brought a blank Moleskine on my recent trip through Tibet, China and Vietnam and, despite a good effort, was only able to fill up a third of it.

One downside in the series is the rather limited city list, with Tokyo (or *Asia* for that matter!) nowhere in sight.

1: Friend and writer Roland Kelts contributes a review of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz. Publishers Weekly also ran a write-up of the cover a few days ago.

2: You've probably heard about it but The Thing is shipping. As the site says:

THE THING is an object based quarterly publication. Each issue of THE THING is conceived of by an individual artist, wrapped by the editors ( Jonn Hershend and Will Rogan ) and sent to the subscribers. The first four artists creating objects for THE THING are:

Issue 1 by the eminent Miranda July is a giant window shade with the phrase "If this shade is down I'm not who you think I am."

3: This man stayed up for 11 days straight by swtching concentration between his left and right brain hemispheres. Eerily similar to the protagonist in Murakami Haruki's Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.

Japan seems to be light years ahead of the US when it comes to innovating with digital publishing. In part, that's because text messaging and web browsing via the cellphone took off in Northeast Asia like nowhere else in the world. The latest innovation is to give people who purchase new books access to the electronic version as well:

In concrete terms, this means those who have made a purchase will be directed to a special link on the Chûkei Publishing Homepage, where they will input the last five digits of the ISBN code found on the last page of their book, and a registration number for each volume. Next, they will answer a question which only a person in possession of the book would know, such as, "what is the first letter on the second line of page four?" Then after inputting some basic information such as name, e-mail address and password, they will be given access to the electronic version with functions such as a digital keyword index, memo, and bookmark functions.

Here's the rest of the article. Sounds like something Chin Music should try.

Here's something from the New York Times on virtual book tours. This piece lays out very straightforwardly the constraints small publishers are under. Book tours are next to impossible for us to finance and coordinate unless the author is willing to foot part of the bill and do a lot of the legwork. When you're running a one- or two-person shop, that's just the cold reality. But then, this virtual tour idea gives you hope that we're going to be able to find alternative avenues for marketing our books. Maybe we should create a Sumie Kawakami avatar, put her on Second Life and have her give advice to distraught couples.

The New York Times may be an old media giant, but they're doing excellent things online -- perhaps better than any of their competitors. Besides having an exceptional website with rich media companion content to their articles, they've also embraced blogs. For example, David Pogue's blog, Pogue's Posts, has become a standard for the tech blog community.

But I want to point out a new NYTimes blog by documentary filmmaker Errol Morris: Zoom. One of his first posts is a superb analysis of photography and its social and journalistic implications using the Abu Ghraib image of the hooded prisoner as a focal point.

Having now spent close to a month in Shanghai, I've seen The Great Firewall in action. It is frustrating in ways those of us living and accessing the internet outside of it can't comprehend. The seemingly arbitrary and on/off nature of the censorship makes accessing the web a neutered and unpredictable experience. A lack of access to Wikipedia, Flickr, Blogspot, and most recently, the popular RSS feed serving site Feedburner, has pushed surfing in China to new levels of braindeadness.

However, this censorship can be completely circumvented through a couple of simple pieces of technology. Having found no non-techie friendly step-by-step guide or explanation to getting around the blocks, I'd like to try and provide to anyone who is living in China or planning to visit China the steps necessary to have a normal browsing experience.

Many foreigners in China have told me they use proxy websites to access blocked content. The problem with this is that your browsing experience is no longer seamless. If you encounter a blocked site you have to go to the proxy, enter the URL and view the censored content that way. This is especially unreasonable when you're dealing with reading RSS. Now that Feedburner is blocked, half of the links in your reader will no longer function. As such, my goal was to attain the most seamless and simple combination of software to achieve browsing normalcy.

1) Download Firefox. Firefox is an open-source, multi-platform browser.

2) Download and install TOR.

3) Download and install TORbutton for Firefox.

TOR is, fundamentally, an IP anonymizer. I'm sure I'm simplifying the software greatly but the one other huge benefit is that it acts as a sort of roaming proxy. Proxy servers often get quickly blocked in China and this keeps you from having to constantly search for and enter new proxys. Once TOR is installed and running you never have to think about proxys again.

TOR, when activated on your computer, turns your localhost into a web-proxy, filtered through the TOR network. This proxy is located at a default port of 9051 on your machine. The TORbutton simply shifts Firefox's web access from going direct over your internet connection, to being filtered through localhost:9051.

Why not simply keep TOR turned on all the time? Well, because it uses proxys and because your traffic is being routed in convoluted ways, it does slow down the browsing experience. So it's nice to be able to browse non-blocked content using your normal connection. When you encounter blocked content you simply click the TORbutton at the bottom of Firefox and view the blocked content. You can also keep it turned on when using an RSS reader or viewing Flickr to ensure all links will seamlessly load, Feedburner fed content and all.

Regarding Flickr, there is another Firefox plugin which will allow you to use your normal, non-TOR connection to access and view Flickr content (nice because Flickr is image heavy (obviously!)): Access Flickr!. Originally written for accessing Flickr in Flickr-censored Iran, it also works perfectly in Flickr-censored China.

I hope these notes will be of use to anyone trying to achieve free access to information. Feel free to add other tips or notes in the comments.

Here is a thoughtful, well-written piece from the Columbia Journalism Review on the history of book reviews in the US, the digital shift, anti-intellectualism in American newsrooms and much more. Too bad the people who most need to read this will find it too long. Here's a teaser:

And the book itself—compact, portable, sensuous—has yet to be bested as our most important information-retrieval system. Even Bill Gates, that Yoda of the virtual world, has been unable to resist its seductions. When, in 1996, he wanted to tell us about “The Road Ahead,” to commit the vision thing, what did he do? He had the Viking Press publish his book. He did not post his Delphic pronunciamentos on his Microsoft site. For Gates knew then—as he knows now, despite his recent insistence that the digital future will carry the day—that the book still retains the patina of authority that only time and tradition can bestow.

Check out this comprehensive piece on OhmyNews, the citizen journalism site from Korea. It's interesting to see how the site keeps going financially and is able to reimburse its writers. Another interesting tidbit: almost 70 citizen journalists have been offered book contracts.