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This first book-length analysis of Amazon’s Kindle explores the platform’s technological, bibliographical, and social impact on publishing. Four Shades of Gray offers the first book-length analysis of Amazon’s Kindle and its impact on publishing. Simon Peter Rowberry recounts how Amazon built the infrastructure for a new generation of digital publications, then considers the consequences of having a single company control the direction of the publishing industry. Exploring the platform from the perspectives of technology, texts, and uses, he shows how the Kindle challenges traditional notions of platforms as discrete entities. He argues that Amazon’s influence extends beyond “disru...
This book explores the way that digital forms and methods are reconfiguring the foundational concepts of literary studies.
The surprising history of the Commodore 64, the best-selling home computer of the 1980s—the machine that taught the world that computing should be fun. The Commodore 64 (C64) is officially the best-selling desktop computer model of all time, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. It was also, from 1985 to 1993, the platform for which most video games were made. But while it sold at least twice as many units as other home computers of its time, like the Apple II, ZX Spectrum, or Commodore Amiga, it is strangely forgotten in many computer histories. In Too Much Fun, Jesper Juul argues that the C64 was so popular because it was so versatile, a machine developers and users would rein...
When violence breaks out at the stands of far-right publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Beatrice Deft is provoked into action. An alienated Australian high school teacher who finds herself at the centre of the global book industry, Beatrice encounters a cast of characters including the very hot Caspian Schorle (German police officer), Kurt Weidenfeld (left-wing German publisher), and White Storm (a neo-Nazi publishing organisation). Such is the premise of The Frankfurt Kabuff, a comic erotic thriller about the publishing industry originally self-published under the pseudonym Blaire Squiscoll. With The Frankfurt Kabuff Critical Edition, Blaire Squiscoll is revealed as the pen name of Beth ...
The curious history, technology, and technocultural context of Nintendo’s short-lived stereoscopic gaming console, the Virtual Boy. With glowing red stereoscopic 3D graphics, the Virtual Boy cast a prophetic hue: Shortly after its release in 1995, Nintendo's balance sheet for the product was "in the red" as well. Of all the innovative long shots the game industry has witnessed over the years, perhaps the most infamous and least understood was the Virtual Boy. Why the Virtual Boy failed, and where it succeeded, are questions that video game experts José Zagal and Benj Edwards explore in Seeing Red, but even more interesting to the authors is what the platform actually was: what it promised...
The essays in this collection are at the forefront of Pynchon studies, representing distinctively twenty-first century approaches to his work.
The engaging story of Intellivision, an overlooked videogame system from the late 1970s and early 1980s whose fate was shaped by Mattel, Atari, and countless others who invented the gaming industry. Astrosmash, Snafu, Star Strike, Utopia—do these names sound familiar to you? No? Maybe? They were all videogames created for the Intellivision videogame system, sold by Mattel Electronics between 1979 and 1984. This system was Atari’s main rival during a key period when videogames were moving from the arcades into the home. In Intellivision, Tom Boellstorff and Braxton Soderman tell the fascinating inside story of this overlooked gaming system. Along the way, they also analyze Intellivisionâ€...
This book begins a new and foundational discussion of maximalism by investigating how the treatment of detail in contemporary literature impels readers to navigate, tolerate, and enrich the cultural landscape of postindustrial America. It studies the maximalist novels of David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker, Thomas Pynchon, and others, considering how overly-detailed writing serves the institutional, emotional, and intellectual needs of contemporary readers and writers. The book argues that maximalist novels not only exceed perceived limits of style, subject matter, and scope, but strive to remake the usefulness of books in contemporary culture, refreshing the act of reading. Levey shows th...
Digital Milton is the first volume to investigate John Milton in terms of our digital present. It explores the digital environments Milton now inhabits as well as the diverse digital methods that inform how we read, teach, edit, and analyze his works. Some chapters use innovative techniques, such as processing metadata from vast archives of early modern prose, coding Milton’s geographical references on maps, and visualizing debt networks from literature and from life. Other chapters discuss the technologies and platforms shaping how literature reaches us today, from audiobooks to eReaders, from the OED Online to Wikipedia, and from Twitter to YouTube. Digital Milton is the first say on a topic that will become ever more important to scholars, students, and teachers of early modern literature in the years to come.
Reimagining the scholarly book as living and collaborative--not as commodified and essentialized, but in all its dynamic materiality. In this book, Janneke Adema proposes that we reimagine the scholarly book as a living and collaborative project--not as linear, bound, and fixed, but as fluid, remixed, and liquid, a space for experimentation. She presents a series of cutting-edge experiments in arts and humanities book publishing, showcasing the radical new forms that book-based scholarly work might take in the digital age. Adema's proposed alternative futures for the scholarly book go beyond such print-based assumptions as fixity, stability, the single author, originality, and copyright, rea...