Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 When Big Tech Met Books : The Publishing Industry After Google and Amazon
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'The first time I went to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2008, I had an appointment with Google. Its stand in Hall Eight was a shiny white pod with no retractable banners or cheap shelving in sight. The pod made a perfect background for the primary colours of Google's then-serif logo set out on its outer shell. Hall Eight was the English-language hall, though perhaps there were replica Google pods in all the other halls; they felt, even then, omnipresent. At our meeting inside the pod I remember talking about the Google Preview function, of which NewSouth Publishing, my employer then and now, was an early adopter. Analogue babes in the digital woods, my colleague Nella Soeterboek and I also discussed the Google Books Library Project, about which we were far more ambivalent. That Google wanted to digitise every book ever published didn't seem like a utopian vision to us. It was more of a statement of intent, the intent being to take over the world.'  (Publication abstract)

 

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Griffith Review The New Disruptors no. 64 30 April 2019 16455005 2019 periodical issue

    'There is something seductive about aircraft vapour trails, those long streaks – ice, carbon dioxide, soot and metal – that slice the sky. I’ve often wondered what the first person who noticed one thought it was, or what they’d look like to someone who didn’t know airplanes existed. Perhaps magical: linear clouds being drawn straight onto the blue; a symmetrical interruption to the random shapes of clouds. Or perhaps they’d be so unheimlich as to be cause for alarm.' (Ashley Hay: Introduction : Seeing through the digital haze : New perspectives for a new age)

    2019
    pg. 235-244
Last amended 9 May 2019 05:58:46
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