From the Blog to the Book to the Box

Last year I moderated one of the panels for the UC Irvine Design Alliance about "The Book, the Brand, and the Box," which dealt with how books are designed as physical objects that are part of both material and digital cultural ecosystems. It featured talks by Peter Lunenfeld and Lorraine Wild and considerable discussion about how MIT Press has been adapting to changes in print culture by offering books that do more to foster print sociality and brand appeal.

The big news for the week is that the Virtualpolitik book now exists as a tangible entity, one that arrived in three boxes at my front door this morning. The book represents ten years of research and encapsulates topics that I have been exploring during four years of blogging. Of course, readers of this blog are thanked in the first paragraph of the acknowledgments, as the excerpts in the online copy shows.

There's also a pretty cool little widget on the official catalog page from MIT Press that lets readers search through the entire book with keywords for relevant snippets.