Hello everyone,
My name is Kevin McCormick. Undoubtedly, you remember the half dozen emails I've harassed you with trying to put the group together. Sorry, for spamming your inbox. From now on, I believe I will just spam this blog.
I am a first year student in the ARM stream and I am also in the book history and print culture collaborative program. I came to the iSchool with an English and classical studies background from uOttawa, mostly interested in medieval and classical literature. Since I've been at UofT, my interests seems to be changing everyday. In fact, yesterday I became interested in marginalia in popular culture - think about Harry Potter finding Snape's heavily annotated text book in the Half Blood Prince or how Edward Norton realized Anthony Hopkins was the cannibal in the Red Dragon because he saw the word 'Sweetbreads' written in the margins of one of Hannibal Lector's anatomy books.
As for the future of book, I am interested in e-readers. Though I do not like e-readers. I'd become upset when I found out that several of my authors (Kevin Hearne and Veronica Roth, to blame a few) have been publishing novellas, some strictly with Amazon, on e-book format. (Finding torrents in .pdf form has become increasingly difficult and bothersome.) They used to publish their short stories and novellas on their websites, available for free download. Those blissful days have long past. So of course the logical thing to do was to buy the $125 device so I can buy the $0.99 30-60 page novella. But I'm not bitter. In fact, I've really switched to the dark side on the e-reader front. I use Goodreads a lot and found a number of books that I really want to read, but are either out of print, exclusively published through Amazon, or too obscure to be shelved in most book stores of libraries. The saving grace of the e-reader is that these obscure books are readily available from the comforts of my bedroom, through my Kindle Book Store-thing for $2.99 (no tax).
Ok, this post is devolving into a rant. I'll cut it off here. I look forward to blogging with you all.
- Kevin
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