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This week, On the Media is re-airing a show dedicated to one of our favorite topics – books. From Oprah's Book Club to the Google Library Project, the way we buy, search, read and even discuss books is changing. And so we begin with a look at some of the forces now tugging at the industry.
I like seeing the broadcasts broken up in this form. I am able to get easy access to them if I miss the broadcast or want to hear it again.
your team failed to do some rather basic research, otherwise you would have found there was one obvious example of new-media-married-to-old-media
www.baen.com
check 'em out... they have been free-posting of novels for years... and they are one of the most profitable indie publishers in the USA... I have been buying their stuff for years... and I got to wonder if Random House is gonna buy Baen or the other way around...
FASCINATING. THANK YOU SO SO MUCH.
I read War and Peace between junior high school and high school. I read the unexpurgated version, which I will avoid the next time I read it. Every few hundred pages, there is an essay on war, history and man.
It would also have helped to know the history behind the book. I enjoyed it, but plan to read the edited (no essays) version now that I have a better understanding of Russian history and culture.
It would also have helped to know that the characters in the book are given three names - French court, Russian and pet. It took me a few dozen pages to figure that out.
I would recommend reading it, if only to expand one's knowledge beyond traditional western literature.
A segment on the show spoke of the fondness of books and good old days when people read Don Quixote. What I remember from reading Don Quixote is that the eponymous hero has his brain addled by reading too many books on chivalry. From wikipedia: "He has become obsessed with books of chivalry, and believes their every word to be true, despite the fact that many of the events in them are clearly impossible. Quixano eventually appears to other people to have lost his mind from little sleep and food and because of so much reading." In the book Don Quixote's priest and the housekeeper go through his chivalry books that have turned him mad and burn them. In other words - people have also had a beef with the media as the media is a reflection of us.
At my suggestion, my book group read War and Peace this winter. For several of us, it was a second reading. There is a wonderful new translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky. We thought it excellent and absorbing. Two of us also read biographies of Lef/Leo Tolstoy and his extremely hard-working wife Sofya/Sonya, who has often been bad-mouthed in biographies of Lef.
I had not heard your program before, and just caught a snippet of it on my way into the library.
We also read Middlemarch last fall--another superb book. Crime and Punishment is on our schedule for fall.
I am trying to locate the rest of this program. I remember hearing much more than the above post includes. Can I still find that information? And if so, why is it not posted here?
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