nah. if you were _really_ “serious”, you would collect those
2400 blog “entires” and print them up in a book for people…

-bowerbird

It’s been years since I printed out articles from the web to read them.

I had not read Moby Dick & W&P before reading them on iPod, though I had a paperback copy of Moby Dick and bought a paperback copy of W&P. But I read them exclusively on the iPod. It was a joy.

If the reading environment on the screen doesn’t work for you, you might try this great plugin:
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

And you might try loging in to bookoven.com and checking out our reader.

” I’ve found & read more insightful articles/essays on the internet than anywhere else, by orders of magnitude…”

But I cannot READ them on the screen. I must print them out and read them at home later. on paper.

“On the other hand, I’ve read War and Peace and Moby Dick on an iphone, so maybe it’s just our reading tools.”

REALLY, but you RE-READ them right? you had already read them in paper print long time ago. SO this was not really READING WP and MD, you were just scanning and skimming to see the feeling. but imagine an entire new generaton in 2050 who never read a book on paper print. THEY WILL NEVER know the beauity and magic and mustery of true literature….

am i right or am i wrong.? that is why I hate these screens, they maean the END Of critical thinkibng for future gens who never knew what a print book or mag or newspaper was like. Thsi is the end . Hugh. I am serious. see my blog entires, all 2400 of them

One more thing, semi joke semi serious. have you head of the BINDLE which I copyrighted and trademarked this week? it is a reading device for reading in the pre-Kindle days. call it a BINDLE. google it and you will see what i have created.

danny

On the other hand, I’ve read War and Peace and Moby Dick on an iphone, so maybe it’s just our reading tools.

By “fluff piece” I meant the content/subject of the piece, not the writing or the research, all of which are fine. Shapira is in fact apologetic when he introduces his article about the article:

“The story wasn’t Pulitzer material; it was just a reported look at one person capitalizing on angst in the workplace.”

He goes to pains to make sure we understand that he understands that the piece was not a work of great import, but something of value nonetheless.

Yet I would argue that newspapers should perhaps not be investing in this kind of content; it’s just not worth their investment. Other people are doing it better, for cheaper. So journalists/newspapers should:
a) focus on their strengths – aka stories that require in-depth reporting
and
b) leverage/license existing content out there produced by bloggers

I screen, you screen, we all screen
by Dan E. Bloom

Alex Beam, writing in the June 19 issue of the Boston Globe, in a very interesting column titled as above by a savvy copyeditor (is that copyeditor or copy editor?) began his piece by asking:
“Do we read differently on the computer screen from how we read on the printed page?

He then quoted Jakob Nielsen, a Web usability researcher, who reported that humans generally read 25 percent more slowly on a plastic pixelated screen, also known as a PPS.

Beam said he reads more quickly on the screen and edits out about 40 percent of what appears before his eyes. And then he warned readers online and on paper in the printed edition of the Globe: ”

“If you haven’t told me what you want by line four of your e-mail, trust me, I didn’t get the message.”

Beam then tells us about Dr. Anne Mangen of Norway, who has asserted in an academic paper that screen reading and page reading are radically different. (emphasis added by Danny Bloom on screen)

“The feeling of literally being in touch with the text is lost when your actions – clicking with the mouse, pointing on touch screens, or scrolling with keys or on touch pads – take place at a distance from the digital text, which is, somehow, somewhere inside the computer, the e-book, or the mobile phone,’’Dr Mangen wrote in her paper published in London last year.

And she concluded: “Materiality matters. . . . One main effect of the intangibility of the digital text is that of making us read in a shallower, less focused way.’’

When Mr Beam asked Dr Mangen if she thought there might be a future convergence of Kindle reading and Gutenberg reading, she told him:
“Reading digital text will always differ from reading text that is not digital (i.e., that has a physical, tangible materiality), no matter how reader-friendly and ‘paper-like’ the digital reading device (e.g., Kindle etc.). The fact that we do not have a direct physical, tangible access to the totality of the text when reading on Kindle affects the reading experience. When reading a book we can always see, and feel with our fingers and hands, our progress through the book as the pile of pages on the left side grows and the pile of pages on the right side gets smaller. At the same time, we can be absolutely certain that the technology [the book] will always work – there are no problems with downloading, missing text due to technical or infrastructure problems, etc.’’
Dr Mangen also said that the e-reader experience introduces “a degree of unpredictability and instability’’ that influences reading, even if we are not aware of it.

Beam then quotes William Powers on Cape Cod, who wrote a romantic defense of the ancient medium called Mr Paper. Powers’ 75 page essay, “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Why Paper Is Eternal,’’ — set to be come a book in the middle of 2010 from HarperCollins — was widely quoted in the blogosphere, with this one passage often noted:

“There are cognitive, cultural, and social dimensions to the human-paper dynamic that come into play every time any kind of paper, from a tiny Post-It note to a groaning Sunday newspaper, is used to convey, retrieve, or store information.’’

Powers concluded: “It becomes a still point, an anchor for the consciousness. It’s a trick the digital medium hasn’t mastered – not yet.’’

So the final question, now that you have scrolled down to the bottom of this seemingly endless bottomless page — another of the drawbacks to reading on screens, it might be noted — is this: are you screening this on a screen (see the UrbanDictionary definition of screening to understand this question better) or are you reading it on paper?

There is only one answer. Dish!

But that brings up my main point, Hugh, why do you call Ian’s lovingly transcribed and well-written WAPO news article, a feature really, a fluff piece. Why did you choose the word FLUFF? That was not very friendly to Ian. Why are people so mean online when they don’t even know other people and they throw words around like pieces of, well, fluff. Calling his piece a fluff piece is pretty insulting and you don’t even know the dude. That’s is the problem with screening. SCreening, btw, means reading on a screen, versus reading on paper, where better manners prevail.

When you called Ian’s WAPO piece a puff piece did you mean puff piece or fluff piece? May I apply for the copy editor job if still open? SMILE

Danny

RE:

Puff piece–
Puff piece is an idiom for a journalistic form of puffery; an article or story of exaggerating praise that often ignores or downplays opposing viewpoints or evidence to the contrary.

The Daily Doubter: New Yorker publishes fluff piece on Michael Savage