"Pulse" the book/blog

Hey, so check this out.

This fellow, Robert Frenay, is having his book "published" online via the blog of his publisher's (the firm Farrar, Straus and Giroux) website. The book is a huge survey of what Frenay calls "the new biology" — "the coming age of systems and machines inspired by living things". I'm not sure I understand what this means, and I must say that the two chapters I glanced through didn't prove exceptionally enlightening. I think I'd probably have to start from the beginning.

But the thing is pretty long--it grows by two installments (posts) every week day and one every weekend. Somewhere I read that it's over 600 print pages at this point. So I don't think I'll scroll back and begin at post one any time soon...!

But I feel as though this project is something that is perhaps only possible on the internet. As Frenay admits on the site: "Am I qualified to author this book? True, I hold no scientific degrees; my training was in fine art. But I think it’s fair to say that no scientist or academic would write a book like this. None could afford to risk their reputation by ranging so far outside their specialty. In essence, PULSE is a big homework assignment—needing someone willing to do the work of sifting through vast amounts of research, then to summarize it in literary form..." Basically, there's no way he could make this into a journal article... so why not try the web first? I don't know. It's either inspiring or cheating.

Frenay talks elsewhere about how he'd like to put a free version of the book online someday: "At some point I’d like to experiment with putting the full text of Pulse online in a form that anyone can link into and modify, possibly with parallel texts or even by changing or adding to the wording of mine. I like the idea of collaborative texts. I also feel there’s value in the structure and insight that a single, deeply committed author can bring to a subject. So what I want to do is offer my text as an anchor for something that then grows to become its own unique creature. I like to imagine Pulse not just as the book I’ve worked so hard to write, but as a dynamic text that can continue expanding and updating in all directions, to encompass every aspect of this subject (which is also growing so rapidly)."

Now doesn't that sound like an ultimate hypertext?

Anyway, it's sort of a nifty experiment. And I think the logo is kinda cool.