Here’s 1984, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, The Great Gatsby and other classics boiled down to three lines, courtesy of McSweeny’s.
How’s This for a Book Trailer?
A couple weeks ago we talked about a new trend in the book publishing world — creating promotional videos for new books and letting them go viral on YouTube and other social video sites. Here’s one of the better examples I’ve seen. 12 books by Lemony Snicket get promoted at once. Lots of bang for the marketing buck:
Salman Rushdie’s Book Tour Rolls Through Google
Salman Rushdie’s latest book, The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel, has hit the streets. And it comes just three years after his last one, Shalimar the Clown, which makes him a good deal more prolific than many of his contemporaries. (A piece in The Guardian — The Great American Pause — notes that many celebrated novelists have been publishing books a bit more leisurely, often once every 10, 12 or even 20 years.) During his book tour last week, Rushdie traveled to Google’s HQ, where, among other things, he talked about how he used Google and other online tools to do the historical research for The Enchantress of Florence. The talk runs a good 70 minutes, and it takes you through the process that brought his work from concept to reality. Watch the video below.
Want to know how to add YouTube videos to your iPod? Then check out our piece: 10 Ways to Make Your iPod a Better Learning Gadget.
The Candid Side of George Carlin
A quick find … I wanted to flag a good interview with George Carlin where he talks candidly about his evolution as a comic and the strange trajectory of his career. The conversation was held at the 92nd Street Y in New York. You can download it here: iTunes — Feed — MP3 — Blog Post.
Also see the 92nd Street Y’s collection on iTunes here, which we mentioned in our earlier post today.
iTunesU Goes Beyond The Campus: Spotlight on the ResearchChannel
In case you haven’t been watching … Apple’s iTunesU has started striking out in new directions. When it launched a little more than a year ago, iTunesU served up free educational content exclusively from universities. Now, it has gone “beyond the campus.”
With this move, Apple is now featuring edifying material from such institutions as The New York Public Library, the 92nd Street Y (nice looking collection here), the National Science Digital Library, and the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Also in the mix, you’ll find podcasts from the ResearchChannel. Based out of the University of Washington, the ResearchChannel brings together content from leading research and academic institutions (see member list here), and then distributes it to consumers mostly through satellite and cable, but also via the web. iTunesU is a fairly new distribution channel. And even newer is YouTube. (See their channel here.)
What kind of content does the ResearchChannel serve up? Here’s a sampling of the programs you’ll find: Dark Energy, or Worse: Was Einstein Wrong?; Bioenergy and Biofuels: An Overview; The Psychology of Blink: Understanding How the Mind Works Unconsciously; The Teen Brain; and Mesopotamia to Iraq: Perspectives on the Middle East.
The ResearchChannel, I should mention, is not the only venture in this line of business. The UChannel (formerly the University Channel), coming out of Princeton University, offers a rather similar product: Web site — iTunes — Rss feed — YouTube . Likewise, FORA.TV does a good job of aggregating smart video: Web site — iTunes — Rss feeds — YouTube.
For more smart audio content, check our Ideas & Culture Podcast Collection.
RIP: George Carlin on the Tonight Show (1966)
Here’s the obit. And here’s Carlin with Johnny Carson over 40 years ago, sporting a very different look. Rather remarkable to look at.
Also worth a look is his famous piece: Seven Dirty Words You Can’t Hear on TV because it formed the basis for a first amendment case that went to the US Supreme Court in the 1970s. Obviously, given the very nature of the content and case, you should know in advance that the video is not exactly “family-friendly” video.
YouTube’s New Screening Room (Free Indie Films)
YouTube just launched its new “Screening Room,” and there’s a good chance that the Sundance Film Festival will never quite be the same again.
The Screening Room presents high quality, independent films to YouTube users and promises to roll out four new films every two weeks. Given YouTube’s immense reach, these indies will immediately find a vast international audience. Then, to sweeten the deal even further, YouTube will offer filmmakers a major cut of the advertising revenue generated by the viewing of each video. Plus, hard and digital copies of the films can be sold as well. If this new venture gains traction (and you have to think it will), YouTube could suddenly find itself the center of gravity for the indie world, displacing Sundance along the way.
The first four films featured in The Screening Room are hardly duds. The Danish Poet won the 2007 Oscar for best animated short; Love and War won the same award at the Los Angeles Film Festival; Our Time Is Up got an Oscar nomination in 2006; and then there’s Miranda July’s “Are You the Favorite Person of Anybody?. The next batch of films comes out July 4. For more info, see this piece in the LA Times.
Addendum: I have since stumbled upon this video that promotes/tells you more about the Screening Room.
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