Books for the News, Commentary

#UPWeek: FF is really TBT

Today is the last day of #UPWeek—so goes with it another successful tour of university press blogs. On that note, Friday’s theme is one of following: What are your must reads on the internet? Whom do you follow on social media? Which venues and scholars are doing right? University of Illinois Press tracks the geopolitics of imagination, University of Minnesota Press (hi, Maggie!) author John Hartigan explains the foibles of scholars on social media, University of Nebraska Press delivers another social media primer, NYU Press teaches us Key Words in Cultural Studies, Island Press tracks the interests of its editors, and Columbia University Press talks their University Press Round-Up.

Us? We’re running with the idea that history and progress aren’t synonymously bound. The way forward with media is often the way back or through, or at least a trip to the past demonstrates that the seed for new forms of mediation are (apologies for this) always already planted. I realize this makes Follow Friday a bit of Throwback Thursday, but here’s a great photo from UCP author Alan Thomas that has been making the rounds on Twitter of the very first e-book we published. Richard A. Lanham’s The Electronic Word required 2 MB of RAM and a floppy disk reader, yet in its “out-of-timeness,” we can already see the othering of the book-as-object and our desire to store information in as portable (and small) a capacity as possible. Kindle Fire quivers. We keep moving.

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For more on #UPWeek, follow the hash-tag on Twitter.