Edge: What are you optimistic about? (More print views?)
By Robert Nagle
Every year for the last three years, I have manually cut and pasted the responses from the Edge’s World Question Center into an e-book. In the question for 2006 (What’s your dangerous idea?), the number of responses totaled 75,000 words…hey, that’s the size of a book! For the 2007 Question (what are you optimistic about?), the number of words is 110,000!
These are excellent short essays (my fave is Geoffrey Miller’s about why we haven’t met space aliens yet). The Miller link is interesting not only because of the content but because it is a print view of all the 2006 essays on a single page. That makes for easy conversion into an e-book. In 2007, this print view has apparently disappeared. I spent a good 10 minutes to produce a barely passable Mobipocket file without hyperlinks.
Here’s my question: how much would you pay for a correctly formatted e-book version of this discussion? (The raw text file is about 650K, with my Mobipocket version being 354 KB).
May 31st, 2007 at 4:55 pm
Geoffrey Miller takes many more words to say what Roger Waters told us long ago: ‘This species has amused itself to death’.
May 31st, 2007 at 5:17 pm
Oddly, in his magnum opus the Mating Mind (highly recommended), Miller explains why verbosity confers an evolutionary advantage. I remain skeptical…