Muse: Inspiring Ideas for the Creative Small Business Owner

I have just finished Ken Auleta's wonderful article in the 4/26/2010 issue of the New Yorker about the continuing revolution in the business of getting an author's words into the hands (already a wrong word?) of her audience.


Harvard Magazine has an article in their May/June 2010 issue about the future of libraries. This article on their web site leads to their Open Collections Program and a discussion of the history of reading. I love the idea of a history of reading, to try to comprehend the psychology of the written/read word. Many brilliant business minds are exploring this topic, pondering the impact of reading on all the senses.The introduction of the iPAD and the hefty star-quality competitive display between Steve Jobs at Apple and Jeff Bezos at Amazon does not dig deep into what motivates the human reader -- what does the written word mean? Why did we evolve out of oral tradition (which the Wiki world is related to) and the archival world of words etched in stone or scratched on animal hide (did you know that is what parchment is? I learned that from reading People of the Book, a great novel available at http://www.amazon.com/. )



Did you know, also, that the physical production of books in the early part of the twentieth centure, at least, was done by women. Some of the first factory jobs for females were book-binding because -- guess what -- we could sew. I learned this from following Harvard's links to photographs of women working -- a huge and gorgeous digital archive from Harvard's library collections (Baker Library).


Digital books mean books -- like the front page of the newspaper in Harry Potter stories -- can have movement, urgency, the ability to change. Are books games? Movies? constantly changing news media? or artifacts of moments of time and sectors of an author's psyche that deserve to be Widener-ized (Widener is the name of Harvard's main library) in archival eVaults (the Google Books Project)? A beautiful conversation to have, and the history of reading is essential to the subject. Thank you Harvard for providing this vehicle. And thanks Steve and Jeff for giving it muscle.