NimbleBooks.com is back; the physical presence of books; and more
Dear fellow book-lovers,
I hope you weren’t too distressed by the disappearance of NimbleBooks.com over the last several months. I had some technical problems, then was swamped with another job. Anyway, it’s back now, with a bare-bones setup. I’ll gradually be adding features back in.
To begin, I reintroduce my January 2021 essay, The Longform Prospectus, which has held up remarkably well:
The immersive deep reading of high-quality books must rank among the most beneficial and broadly distributed technologies ever invented (see inter alia McLuhan, 1962; McDermott, 2006; Boorstin, 1992; UNESCO 2019). Yet this vital experience remains tightly constrained by scarcity: of classics, of representation, of accessibility, of sustainability, of time. It’s time to flip the script to a world of abundance.
A world where the dominant dopamine drip is not the addictive rage spiral of social media but the transformative insight and empathy of great books. A world where every culture and language can be represented in curricula with equal ease. A world where every author has equally powerful co-creators: new and globally available Muses. A world where every reader has an infinite bookshelf. A world where there are a thousand new Agatha Christies. A world where a helpful AI Muse saves George R.R. Martin from his tendency to be easily distracted. A world where our office learnings are instantly translated into immersive reading artifacts for our teams and our customers. A world where a group of Nigerian teenagers narrates their 4C story in a shared universe of novels that are read by millions.
Jim Huang on the physical presence of books
Swarthmore classmate Jim Huang recently shared an outstanding post on LinkedIn, responding to a “young people don’t read any more” article by Will Bunch in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Jim has been director of the Bookstore at Bryn Mawr College for the last 15 years. Here are a few key quotes:
… I’m even more concerned by something that’s more widespread, more pernicious, and more accepted: the simple removal of books from our presence.
The Inquirer is reporting again this weekend on the lack of libraries in Philadelphia public schools. The lack of books in schools and the lack of qualified librarians to help kids find books that will engage and excite them is an enormous missed opportunity. This is also taking place in higher education, where books are outsourced to online vendors — out of sight, out of mind — and college “bookstores” have become “campus stores,” reduced to peddling logoed merch…Even your own newspaper has more or less banished books from its pages. The Inquirer used to offer excellent coverage of books …
You get to a reasonable place, more or less, by the end of your column: yes, we need to instill a love of reading early. But this isn’t really about early, it’s about always. And if books aren’t always present, how is it that we can expect anyone to read them?
This is something I think about a lot, and I have some theories. I believe that for young people to begin carrying books around with them again, books are going to have to be the size of an iPhone, and just as beautiful. To me, that means a soft floppy leather binding, thin but strong pages, roughly a 4 x 7” trim size, and very high information density.
Newly published: lessons of the Yom Kippur War for NATO
Battlefield Air Interdiction in the 1973 Middle East War and Its Significance to NATO Air Operations by Bruce Brant is a 1986 thesis now available in hardcover from Nimble’s AI Lab for Book-Lovers. The thesis examines the Israeli Air Force’s battlefield air interdiction efforts, drawing on firsthand accounts and combat data, and connects these findings to NATO’s operational context, addressing terrain, technology, and tactics. This edition includes a sophisticated executive summary crafted by a state-of-the-art AI foundation models, a $200/month value. Buy direct from this newsletter and get 33% off list.
Future Issues of this Substack
All best,
Fred