Books

I just got my copy of Shift Happens, an absurdly overengineered, utterly lovely, two-volumes-and-change book by Marcin Wichary on the history of the keyboard. It’s astonishing.

A small number of extras will be available soon.

The Verge’s Jon Porter spoke to Wichary last February just as the book’s Kickstarter launched. Check it out.

When season four of Netflix’s The Witcher drops, folks are going to be tuning in to see what’s what about Geralt of Rivia’s new face.

But as curious as everyone is about the pseudo-new witcher, it feels safe to assume that Laurence Fishburne’s turn as the (presumably vampiric) barber surgeon Regis might be what keeps people watching.

Netflix’s adaptation of 3 Body Problem from David Benioff, D.B. Weiss, and Alexander Woo is going to feature more than a few major differences from Cixin Liu’s original sci-fi novel.

But in a new piece from The Hollywood Reporter, Woo says he and his collaborators received Liu’s blessing to adapt the show for an international audience “in the way that we saw fit,” which could be a sign of interesting things to come.

China Miéville, the phenomenal novelist, took on a new writing partner, Keanu Reeves, for a novel called The Book of Elsewhere. I would be hype for this if it were Miéville alone — The City and the City is a personal favorite — so I’m curious to see what Reeves adds to the mix besides publicity and being very good-looking.

One of the bigger takeaways from Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One was how nightmarish it would be if the internet of the future ended up being a corporate-owned amusement park built around an eccentric billionaire’s obsession with IP they loved as a child.

But that isn’t stopping Cline and Warner Bros. Discovery from trying to launch the Readyverse — “a destination for fans to explore their favorite stories and IP in the metaverse” — which is absolutely a thing people people are going to sign up for.

Verge alum Zoë Schiffer just announced her new book, Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter, which will expand on her reporting from Platformer, New York Magazine, and of course, this very website. Here’s what Bloomberg’s Matt Levine has to say about it:

Zoë Schiffer has written the definitive book on perhaps the weirdest business story of our time. A fast-paced and riveting account of a hilarious and tragic mess.

The book comes out next February. Pre-order it!

Netflix’s adaptation of author Leigh Bardugo’s Shadow and Bone series seemed like it could have been the streamer’s next big hit when it was first dropped back in 2021. But after just two seasons, Netflix has done what Netflix does, and announced that the show has been cancelled.

The scale and gravity of the imminent danger everyone is in isn’t clear to humans in Netflix’s upcoming feature length adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s novel Leave the World Behind.

But in a new clip from the film, every single forest animal living in the northeast coast seems to know what the deal is, and that they need to get the hell out of dodge before whatever the danger is gets them.

“If I were a juror, I would rather hear my story than either defense or prosecution,” Lewis tells Andrew Chow at Time. Also:

I want to ask about some details that appeared in various charging documents and complaints against Sam but are featured less prominently or not at all in your book. One is that Bankman-Fried allegedly bribed Chinese officials to release money from a frozen Alameda account.

I know too much about that, and it seemed like a distraction.

Amazon has released a new Kindle app for macOS, reports Good e-Reader. The new app has been redesigned to look more like iOS and now supports new features like a reading ruler, more fonts, a full-screen view, and page-turn animations.

You had me at page-turn animations, Amazon.

In this entertaining excerpt from Zeke Faux’s forthcoming book, we get a glimpse of the crypto Bahamas conference before Sam Bankman-Fried’s fall. Pretty fun stuff! Seems like Michael Lewis was all-in on SBF, among other nuggets here.

The famed horror author, whose body of work is weaved (in a multi-verse-before-multiverses-were-popular way) around a fantasy series about a gunslinger in a post-technological society that incorporates a sentient AI train (who is a pain), wrote for The Atlantic that he isn’t worried about AI supplanting him.

At least, not yet. This abridged passage illustrates why:

A character creeps up on another character and shoots him in the back of the head with a small revolver. When the shooter rolls the dead man over, he sees a small bulge in the man’s forehead. The bullet did not quite come out, you see. When I sat down that day, I knew the murder was going to happen, and I knew it was going to be murder by gun. I did not know about that bulge, which becomes an image that haunts the shooter going forward. That was a genuine creative moment, one that came from being in the story and seeing what the murderer was seeing. It was a complete surprise.

Could a machine create that bulge? I would argue not, but I must—reluctantly—add this qualifier: Not yet.

Delany, who is seriously one of the greats, is “willing to discuss nearly anything but his own literary significance. Openly sharing the most intimate minutiae of his life—finances, hookup apps, Depends—he recoiled with Victorian modesty whenever I asked why he’d written his books or what they meant to his readers.”

The profile is a delight all the same.

#BookTok is evidently a big thing, and seeing how influential its platform is, TikTok owner ByteDance has begun to court writers to publish their books under its new 8th Note Press, according to The New York Times.

Not everyone sees this as good news. Though it is offering rates “competitive with industry standards,” some worry ByteDance will push its own books at the expense of others.

Hello, fellow olds. Let’s help solve a mystery. Remember that cover of A Wrinkle in Time with the centaur that’s got wings for arms? The nightmare-fuel one? Okay. Does anyone know who designed it?

Check out the new Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy collectible edition being released tomorrow by The Folio Society. Gizmodo has some of the artwork in a slideshow.

The hardcover five-part trilogy set features new art from series artist Jonathan Burton, colorful metallic folio paper tops, and a handmade presentation box. Just 750 sets are being made, and you can pre-order one now but it will cost you $875.

The actor Edward Herrmann, who died in 2014, is still the narrator for newly-published audiobooks. His family has used  DeepZen Ltd, to reanimate his voice, and presumably make more profits from his synthetic narration.

DeepZen says it has signed deals with 35 publishers in the US, but I didn’t have much trouble distinguishing the AI from the live read in the audio quiz.