Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

Via Buzzmachine, last week I discovered Wordle, a really great site/online application that generates “word clouds” from either text that’s pasted into the Wordle site, or else from words that are scooped from a website or blog. According to the Wordle site, “The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” Above is the word cloud I generated over two weekends ago from this site. And it looks like it’s scooping text from just my home page and not the entire site (I really don’t write about either Jonathan Franzen or Franz Kafka that much), but I still think the cloud is a pretty accurate representation of the overall feel of this site’s content and my own ideas. And because of that, what I really love about this is that the two biggest words that appear are “people” and “reading.” Yes, a few other book 2.0 terms are there like “screen,” “Apple” and “futurist” (as are plenty of book 1.0 words such as “writer,” “paperback” and “jacket”). But rising above all of that clutter are the two core terms and ideas which should always be at the center of the future of the book debate, the same way they’re front and center in the word cloud above: reading and people.