• Bruce Sterling on the normalcy of the future – [See also our recent interactions piece: We Are Living In A Sci-Fi World]
  They’re phantom far-out notions gobbled up by the real world. They packed in there so deep that nobody notices them. So, yes, I can write about it. It’s just: it doesn’t look futuristic. It looks way too real.

  Why isn’t it grand? Why isn’t it as fantastically grand as the spectrum of all possibility? Well, why isn’t today grand? Why didn’t we wake up this morning in direct confrontation with the entirety of past and future? The present day is the only day we’re ever given.
  (via BoingBoing)

• An interactive map of more than 52,000 prose-literacy profiles across Canada – The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) defines the following five levels of literacy:

  * Level 1—Very poor literacy skills. An individual at this level may, for example, be unable to determine from a package label the correct amount of medicine to give a child.
  * Level 2—A capacity to deal only with simple, clear material involving uncomplicated tasks. People at this level may develop everyday coping skills, but their poor literacy makes it hard to conquer challenges such as learning new job skills.
  * Level 3—Adequate to cope with the demands of everyday life and work in an advanced society. It roughly denotes the skill level required for successful high-school completion and college entry.
  * Levels 4 and 5—Strong skills. An individual at these levels can process information of a complex and demanding nature.

• Canadian authors to pen easy-to-read books – Several Canadian authors are joining forces with a literacy group to launch a set of easy-to-read fiction books for adults with poor reading skills.

  The project in Britain engaged the services of bestselling authors such as Maeve Binchy and Ruth Rendell to write simpler stories. As a result, adults with minimal literacy abilities said they wanted to read more after picking up the books.

  Eaton says the Quick Read Canada books will be available next fall in libraries and literacy centres for free or, in retail stores for about $10.

• Seen Reading – a "literary voyeruism blog" set mostly (I believe) in Toronto – What is Seen Reading?

  1. I see you reading.
  2. I remember what page you’re on in the book.
  3. I head to the bookstore, and make a note of the text.
  4. I let my imagination rip.
  5. Readers become celebrities.
  6. People get giddy and buy more books.

  Why do you do this?
  Readers are cool. Authors work hard. Publishers take chances. And you all deserve to be seen!

  (Thanks Suzanne Long!)

• Choose What You Read NY – Choose What You Read NY is a non profit organization that offers free books to New Yorkers, encouraging its residents to read more, giving them an alternative to the free papers that get tossed out and even the digi-trash that crowds our time. In doing so, we help to recycle used books that would have unfortunately been thrown away.

  You will find us near major subway stations on the first Tuesday of each month.The idea is that once someone is finished with a book, they either drop it off in one of our conveniently located drop boxes or back to us at a station. Unlike a library, there will be no due dates, penalties, fees or registrations. We only ask that you return it once you are done so that the same book can be enjoyed by another commuter.

• What was the last book, magazine and newspaper you read on the subway? – 6000 people respond and the New York Times posts the results
• How and what people read on the New York City subways – Plenty of detailed examples of people, their books, and their travels: "Reading on the subway is a New York ritual, for the masters of the intricately folded newspaper, as well as for teenage girls thumbing through magazines, aspiring actors memorizing lines, office workers devouring self-help inspiration, immigrants newly minted — or not — taking comfort in paragraphs in a familiar tongue. These days, among the tattered covers may be the occasional Kindle, but since most trains are still devoid of Internet access and cellphone reception, the subway ride remains a rare low-tech interlude in a city of inveterate multitasking workaholics. And so, we read.

  There are those whose commutes are carefully timed to the length of a Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker, those who methodically page their way through the classics, and those who always carry a second trash novel in case they unexpectedly make it to the end of the first on a glacial F train."

  (thanks Avi and Anne)

• Lego grabs ahold of customers with both hands – From 2006, great Wired piece about Lego's approach to involving ardent fans/customers in developing future products.
• Noting:books – the simple yet dynamic way to track your reading, from the dates you start and finish a book, to your thoughts along the way.
• CourseSmart brings textbooks to the iPhone in PDF; major readability challenges ensue – “It’s not the first place to go to read your textbook,” Mr. Lyman said of the iPhone app. But he said that it could be helpful if “you’re standing outside of the classroom, the quiz is in 10 minutes, and you want to go back to that end-of-chapter summary that helped you understand the material.”
• Nice profile of Lego’s business culture and the tension between growth and losing track of their legacy – But the story of Lego’s renaissance — and its current expansion into new segments like virtual reality and video games — isn’t just a toy story. It’s also a reminder of how even the best brands can lose their luster but bounce back with a change in strategy and occasionally painful adaptation.

• Industry-Backed Label Calls Sugary Cereal a ‘Smart Choice’ – The program was influenced by research into consumer behavior. That research showed that, while shoppers wanted more information, they did not want to hear negative messages or feel their choices were being dictated to them.

  “The checkmark means the food item is a ‘better for you’ product, as opposed to having an x on it saying ‘Don’t eat this,’ ” Dr. Kennedy said. “Consumers are smart enough to deduce that if it doesn’t have the checkmark, by implication it’s not a ‘better for you’ product. They want to have a choice. They don’t want to be told ‘You must do this.’ ”

• New England prep school Cushing Academy gets rid of printed books – With more than 20,000 books, officials decided the school no longer needs a traditional library. They have decided to discard all their books and have given away half of what stocked their sprawling stacks.

  “When I look at books, I see an outdated technology, like scrolls before books,’’ said James Tracy, headmaster “This isn’t ‘Fahrenheit 451’. We’re not discouraging students from reading. We see this as a natural way to shape emerging trends and optimize technology.’’

  They have spent $10K to buy 18 Sony and Amazon electronic readers which they’re stocking with digital material for students looking to spend more time with literature. Those who don’t have access to the electronic readers will do their research and peruse assigned texts on their computers.

• Neil Gaiman’s Bookshelves – Photographs of author Gaiman's extensive collection of books (via BoingBoing)

My latest interactions column, We Are Living in a Sci-Fi World has just been published.

Science fiction (also known as SF, which for many purists refers instead to speculative fiction) has taken on both of those pillars. But to the uninitiated, it’s presumed to consist only of the “stuff” -robots, aliens, gizmos, spaceships, and lasers that go pyew! pyew! (the noise that every boy can make from birth). To those of us who navigate interactions with people, a consideration of the future stuff is interesting, but exploring the future selves can be transformative

Get a PDF of the article here. To receive a copy of the article, send an email to steve AT portigal DOT com and (if you haven’t given us this info before) tell us your name, organization, and title. We’ll send you a PDF.

Other articles

• Persona Non Grata
• Everybody’s Talkin’ At Me
• The Journey Is The Reward
• Hold Your Horses
• Living In The Overlap
• Some Different Approaches to Making Stuff
• Poets, Priests, and Politicians
• Interacting with Advertising
• Ships in the Night (Part I): Design Without Research?
• Ships in the Night (Part II): Research Without Design?
• On Authenticity
• The Hard Work Lies Ahead (If You Want It)
• What to Expect When You’re Not Expecting It
• Elevator Pitch
• Never Eat Anything Raw
• Content, the Once and Future King

• Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood says MP3s sound good enough – [In ReadingAheda we explored the "Gold Standard" of previous generations of technology]
  SASHA FRERE-JONES: Is the MP3 a satisfactory medium for your music?

  JONNY GREENWOOD: They sound fine to me. They can even put a helpful crunchiness onto some recordings. We listened to a lot of nineties hip-hop during our last album, all as MP3s, all via AirTunes. They sounded great, even with all that technology in the way. MP3s might not compare that well to a CD recording of, say, string quartets, but then, that’s not really their point.

  SFJ: Do you ever hear from your fans about audio fidelity?

  JG: We had a few complaints that the MP3s of our last record wasn’t encoded at a high enough rate. Some even suggested we should have used FLACs, but if you even know what one of those is, and have strong opinions on them, you’re already lost to the world of high fidelity and have probably spent far too much money on your speaker-stands.
  (via kottke)

• Yoostar lets anyone act opposite Hepburn, Brando – It's a consumer-level greenscreen system, so you can record video of yourself composited into classic movie footage. While it's amazing that this is being productized at a consumer level, the reviews make it clear that it's riddled with difficulties and limitations.
• Microsoft tries Tupperware-party-esque promotion for Windows 7 – If you can find 9 friends and provide a decent pitch, you could be chosen to host a Windows 7 House Party and win a free signature copy of Windows 7. There are four pre-defined categories for the party: PhotoPalooza, Media Mania, Setting up with Ease, and Family Friendly Fun.

• Sterling Brands supports RoomtoRead – In 2008, after the successfully funding the construction of two, brandnew school libraries in Nepal and Cambodia, Sterling Brands made the decision to ally itself once more with RoomtoRead and give the gift of reading to a school of nearly 600 students in rural South Africa.

  We are happy to announce that this summer, we received a completion report on our latest project with RoomtoRead, which provided for a refurbished library, a full-stock of both English and native-language books, and training for the library staff at the Kennen Primary School. The school is in the tiny rural village of Violatbank G, in the province of Mpumalanga in eastern South Africa, which borders on Swaziland and Mozambique.

• David Byrne’s Kindle experience – One of Amazon’s selling points is instant gratification. You want a book and you can have it in about a minute.
  Here’s where the rub is. This machine only reads Kindle files and PDFs. And nothing else out there reads Kindle files. It can read other types of files — Word DOCs, MOBI, TXT etc. — but you have to go through Amazon via email, where they’re converted for a small charge, then sent directly to your Kindle. And, you can’t share a book with your friends, even if they too have a Kindle.
  The slightly strange electronic ink system in the Kindle (and in the Sony Reader) has no backlight — so, like a book, you can’t read it in bed at night without a nightlight.
  Do I miss the “physical experience”? I will certainly miss being able to read books from my personal library, but if the title I want to read is all text it doesn’t make much difference to me. The smell will be a bit of nostalgia, as will fading and water damage.

(Updated to include slideshow with synchronized audio track)

We’re very excited today to be posting our findings from the Reading Ahead research project.

Lots more in the deck below, but here’s the executive summary

• Books are more than just pages with words and pictures; they are imbued with personal history, future aspirations, and signifiers of identity
• The unabridged reading experience includes crucial events that take place before and after the elemental moments of eyes-looking-at-words
• Digital reading privileges access to content while neglecting other essential aspects of this complete reading experience
• There are opportunities to enhance digital reading by replicating, referencing, and replacing social (and other) aspects of traditional book reading

We sat down yesterday in the office and recorded ourselves delivering these findings, very much the way we would deliver them to one of our clients.

Usually, we deliver findings like these to a client team in a half day session, and there’s lots of dialogue, but we tried to keep it brief here to help you get through it. (The presentation lasts an hour and twenty minutes.)

It’s been a great project, and we’ve really appreciated hearing from people along the way. We welcome further comments and questions, and look forward to continuing the dialogue around this work.

Audio