It takes the average reader just seven hours to read the final book in Suzanne Collins’s “Hunger Games” trilogy on the Kobo e-reader — about 57 pages an hour. Nearly 18,000 Kindle readers have highlighted the same line from the second book in the series: “Because sometimes things happen to people and they’re not equipped to deal with them.” And on Barnes & Noble’s Nook, the first thing that most readers do upon finishing the first “Hunger Games” book is to download the next one.
In the past, publishers and authors had no way of knowing what happens when a reader sits down with a book. Does the reader quit after three pages, or finish it in a single sitting? Do most readers skip over the introduction, or read it closely, underlining passages and scrawling notes in the margins? Now, e-books are providing a glimpse into the story behind the sales figures, revealing not only how many people buy particular books, but how intensely they read them.
~ “Your E-book is reading you” @ Wall Street Journal
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When you adopt a tool, you also adopt the management philosophy embedded in that tool.
~ Clay Shirky
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Greg Lindquist, Spiderweb (If it’s raining, no one can see your tears),
Oil on linen, 16×24.5 inches, 2012
Let me start with an image that stuck with me from your last show. It may not have been the most consequential piece, but it was the piece [of an iPhone] that made me think about the difficulty of representing technology. I have a class on the subject of technology and painting at School of the Museum of Fine Arts; I always begin by cautioning students against making paintings of their cell phones. Dry humor aside, what is more interesting, the cell phone or the conversation on it? I want them to ask whether the measure of technological change is visually representable in the apparatus, or if it is something best made visible through other relations or means? But now, I cannot use that example any more, because you have painted exactly that in a way that works . . . I guess it’s a good filter.
~ Tom McGrath in conversation with Greg Lindquist @ BOMB