Sarah Amsler on "Saving Philosophy"

5/20/2010

181 Comments

 
This may be of interest to some of you:

http://www.opendemocracy.net/openeconomy/sarah-amsler/saving-philosophy-from-suits

Tom
181 Comments

The Bookshop of the future?

3/22/2010

164 Comments

 
I just got back from Boston, where I spent most of spring break. In Cambridge, there is a great bookshop (the Harvard Book Store) where they have an Espresso Book Machine. I’d read about these things before, but this was my first chance to see one in action – and I was pretty impressed. 

Here's how it works. In the shop, they have a computer on which there is a searchable database of (type) books. You choose one, and the Espresso Book Machine prints out a token for you on the spot. I asked for a copy of Royce’s The Religious Aspect of Philosophy. They downloaded a scan of the book from Google, printed it out, and then charged me $8 for the book. This is a bargain – it costs $40 from Amazon. The whole process took about ten minutes; the book was still warm as I walked out of the shop. It’s a paperback, and it looks and feels cheap, but it’s hard to complain given the price. 

It seems to me that this is an exciting thing for people who do history of philosophy. Many old books – which are out of print and hard to get hold of – are actually in the public domain. From now on, it should be possible to get cheap copies of these books using an Espresso machine. 

According to Wikipedia, each one of these machines costs at least $75,000 – so a bookshop will have to get a hell of a lot of use out of one before it even makes enough to pay off the initial investment. And as I say, the books that the machine makes are of rather a low quality. However, if the technology improves, or gets cheaper, it may make a big difference to the way we buy books. Perhaps bookshops in the future will have just a few tables of books at the front (for browsing), plus the inevitable coffee-shop, and then a big printer in the back rather than rows of shelves.  

Tom
164 Comments

Welcome

1/31/2010

101 Comments

 
I’ve been saying for a while that we (grad students in philosophy at Rutgers) should have a blog. So here it is. You should all by now have had an email giving you the username and password (ask me if not) so you can start posting at once!

Here’s what I think the blog might be used for:

  • People might want to blog about half-formed philosophical ideas, which they want comments on.
  • People giving grad talks might want to post abstracts in advance, to get everyone interested.
  • We could use the blog to have follow-up discussions on grad talks, colloquia etc..
  • People could post questions (“Which logic textbook is best?”, “Where can I find this paper?” and so on).
  • Social events could be announced on the blog, as well as details of the successes of the departmental sports teams.
  • People who run reading groups could post reminders and links to readings on the blog.
Tom
 

101 Comments