Download The Universe

A Year of Downloading the Universe

By Carl Zimmer

It's now been a year since we started exploring science ebooks here at Download the Universe. By the time we got the site off the ground, people had already started producing some digital gems. The first work reviewed at Download the Universe, The Elements, brilliantly dismantled the ingredients of a book and rearranged them to take advantage of the touch-sensitive iPad. In 2011 science writer Laurie Garrett had taken the leap to Kindle in order to write I Heard the Sirens Scream, a harrowing account of how the United States responded to 9/11 and the anthrax attacks.

Yet we were also dismayed to discover find a lot of wasted opportunities. David Dobbs delivered the first unbridled attack on a stinker, a silly pamphlet called Smile that promised that grinning will solve just about anything. Likewise, I reeled at The Demise of Guys, an incoherent ebook by a prominent psychologist convinced that men were lost to porn and online games.

Both of these books were published by TED, based on talks that they had hosted. While there's a lot of good stuff to be watched on TED, there are a fair number of talks that pretend to be based on solid science when, in fact, their foundation is a thin, cracking skin of ice. Smile and The Demise of Guys didn't seem to be carefully vetted by an editor who would push back against poppycock. Both ebooks felt as if they had been simply waved through like cars in a line of traffic. In fairness, we did give positive reviews to some other TED Books--Controlling Cancer, What's Killing Us, Living Architecture to name three. But that unevenness makes us wonder if the quality of ebooks depends on the author and the author alone.

Absentee editing was not unique to TED. Meandering Mississippi was based on a series of newspaper articles--by which I mean they were little more than cut and paste into a new format. An ebook about dinosaurs was little more than a digitized cable documentary. An ebook about the Titanic somehow managed to lack any passion.

It would be a shame if ebooks became nothing more than hastily assembled spin-offs of print books, documentaries, or lectures. Fortunately, as this past year progressed, we had lots of good reasons to keep our hope for ebooks alive. New ebooks turned up that exceeded our expectations, or simply popped up far off the grid, beyond our preconceived map of what ebooks could be. I still enjoy turning the pages of Leonardo's anatomical notebooks, intercalated with insights from modern anatomists. For some of the best ebooks the term "ebook" barely even functioned. Snowfall was a ravishing account of a deadly avalanche hosted by the New York Times web site. Ironically, when it was turned into a more conventional ebook (if ebooks are mature enough now to even be conventional), it became a far less satisfying experience.

This past year also offered hope in the form of new publishing outfits dedicated to ebooks, many of which were about science. They were few in number and small in size, but they typically showed a level of care and creativity that much bigger publishing companies lacked. Symbolia offers comics science journalism. Byliner and Matter produced some excellent pieces of "in-between" science writing--too long for a magazine article, too short for a book.

Top honors go to the Atavist, a Brooklyn publishing house that produced an impressive string of pieces over the past year, on subjects ranging from moon rocks to brain-controlled robots to the mysteries of consciousness to a hunt for tree kangaroos. While readers can buy a stripped-down Kindle version, they can also buy an edition with elegantly incorporated maps, audio recordings, and other features.

Like many other journalists and scientists, we also dipped our collective toe into the ebook waters. David Dobbs joined Download the Universe having already written the best-selling My Mother's Lover. Deborah Blum published an absorbing account of a sensational murder trial called Angel Killer. I helped build an app to accompany a textbook about evolution I co-authored. Seth Mnookin edited a Matter ebook about regenerating organs.

I expect we will delve deeper in the year to come, both as writers and as reviewers. Over the past year, we've published over 80 reviews and essays, and we've got a healthy inventory of titles we're looking forward to writing about in the months to come. The ebook business is continuing to grow, but it's still hard to find out about new science titles. We plan to keep making it a little easier.

 

Carl Zimmer writes frequently about science for the New York Times and is the author of 13 books, including Evolution: Making Sense of Life.

Do we really need to get personal about longevity enhancement?

When I'm 164, by David Ewing Duncan, Published by TED Books (Available for Kindle, iPad, Nook)

Reviewed by Annalee Newitz

Half cultural prognostication and half science journalism, David Ewing Duncan's TED Books longread When I'm 64 explores whether medicine will one day make it possible for us to live forever -- and what would happen to human society if we did. It's a hotly debated topic, and Duncan takes his time tackling every aspect of it in this lengthy essay. Engaging and often fun, the book takes us from the labs where scientists are exploring the genes that control aging, to brain-computer interface demonstrations where paralyzed people are learning to control artificial limbs with their minds. Whether we do it with biology or machines, it's likely that humans will artificially enhance our longevity at some point. Though the prospect of doubling our life expectancy seems crazy to some, Duncan argues it's not entirely implausible. Especially given how far we've come over the past century. 

Still, ethical questions plague the project. While researching his book, Duncan ran a survey online and in his lectures where he asked people if they would like to live beyond the standard 80 years. Most said no, though a significant minority said they wouldn't mind living to be 120 or 164. Those yearning to be immortal represented less than one percent of respondents. Many people felt that living longer than 80 years would mean depleting the Earth's resources even more quickly than we already are. Others worried that young people would have no chance at getting good jobs, since their elders could keep working for decades longer. Some simply felt that living for a long time would be depressing and boring.

Several sections of the book are devoted to Duncan's quest to understand how it would change humanity if we could live much longer than we do now. From the rational world of tissue engineering labs where researchers hope to use 3D printers to make healthy, new organs, he ventures into Singularity University where would-be immortals from Silicon Valley listen eagerly to longevity advocate Aubrey De Gray's prediction that the first person who will live to be 1,000 has already been born. These true believers imagine that science will solve our energy problems and economic difficulties long before overpopulation due to immortality becomes a planet-destroying problem.

As if acknowledging the mostly unscientific nature of the longevity project, Duncan explores its implications by discussing mythology and science fiction about immortality. We may not know what role telomeres play in aging, but we certainly know that The Matrix and Terminator warn against using technology to enhance humans. Given the speculative nature of his topic, Duncan's forays into fiction make a lot of sense, and help provide a cultural frame for debates over longevity enhancement.

Here on Download the Universe, we often discuss how a particular e-book makes use of the medium, whether with enhanced images, video, or even just a good set of links out to more sources. But with When I'm 164, I'd like to talk about a stylistic quirk of e-books that has nothing to do with format: the fact that it's become standard practice for online writing to include a lot of first-person, confessional storytelling. 

Should online writing always be personal? Certainly it's refreshing that online writers try to avoid some of the print media's fake objectivity. But should that always mean authors need to personalize their subjects?

Like a lot of longreads online, Duncan's book veers into the personal. He delves into his sadness at his parents' impending deaths, interviews both them and one of his sons about their views on life extension, and ultimately concludes the book by declaring that he's emotionally torn by the idea of living forever. In some ways, the climax of the book is Duncan's final declaration of ambivalence about scientifically enhanced longevity. I think this personal touch works in some ways -- it helps to draw the reader in, and acknowledges the highly personal responses that many people have to this area of research.  

But it often reads as cheesy and unnecessary, as if Duncan were just going through the motions of making his online writing more personal than print.  Of course it's easy to sympathize with his sadness at a parent's decline, but there is nothing particularly insightful or unusual to Duncan's first-person stories about these issues. He paints the scientists and thinkers he's consulted for this book in far more interesting detail than he paints himself. The first person bits just weren't necessary to make this story compelling.

Duncan is at his best when coaxing out intriguing speculations from scientists, engineers and philosophers about their views on life extension. Duncan's observations of their work form the meat of this extremely gripping tale about one possible future -- of enhanced longevity -- that could arise from contemporary medical science.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9.com, and the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction (coming in May 2013 from Doubleday).

Death and Other Options: How To Think (Hopefully!) About Global Health

What’s Killing Us:  A Practica Guide to Understanding Our Biggest Global Health Problems by Alanna Shaikh. TED Books 2012, Kindle, iBookstore, Nook

Reviewed by Tom Levenson

The last decade of the seventeenth century was a great age for London’s media junkies. Paper had become cheap enough to permit the emergence of the first  real newspapers in the English-speaking world.  The censors saw their reign end in 1696, the year after Parliament declined to renew the Licensing Act. With that, printers no longer had to fear harsh penalties for operating an unapproved press.  Free lance journalism was emerging as a plausible way to make a sort of a living – even if one of its most prominent practitioners, Daniel Dafoe, did do his stint in debtor’s prison.

Given all that, it’s no surprise that a torrent of what we may call new media poured forth. If you had something to say and even quite modest means, you could say it – and plenty did. Readers could lay their hands on learned disputes on the question of singing in church; coiners advising the government on the best methods to prevent counterfeiting; at least one poem by a law student on the subject of long vacations.

All of these appeared in the form that truly came into its own in the 17^th century. That would be the pamphlet: a modest tract, easier to write, cheaper to print, swifter to plow through than any scholar’s tome…

…All of which is to say that there is nothing new under the sun.

Flash forward roughly three hundred years, and lay your digital mitts on the subject of this review, Alanna Shaikh’s What’s Killing Us.  It is an e-bite of an argument, less than forty pages to cover Shaikh’s top-ten list of global health problems.  It is a pamphlet by any other name, and hence an example of one of my favorite everything-old-is-new-again gifts of the digital revolution. 

One note before getting to the meat of Shaik’s work. Sharp-eyed readers will see that I’ve left unmentioned one property of What’s Killing Us.  It’s a TED book, and TEDity has come in for its lumps here. This one doesn’t, or shouldn’t, in part because it does not attempt to reduce the difficult reality of global health to a trademarked Big Idea.  Instead, it is an example of what TED promises but does not always deliver – a guide to thinking about a the complexity of an issue that enables – really demands that -- the reader join in figuring out what the hell to do.

Deep Water: A Pretty Good TED Ebook (Really!) About Climate Change

Deep Water: As Polar Ice Melts, Scientists Debate How High Our Oceans Will Rise, by Daniel Grossman. TED 2012. TED App for iPhone/iPad, Kindle, Nook. Book web site

[Editor's note: John Dupuis, the author of this review, is the Acting Associate University Librarian at York University in Toronto. He's joined me and other Download the Universe editors on several panels about science ebooks, and he's tempered our optimism with thoughtful skepticism about how ebooks can add to civilization's body of knowledge. (What happens when no one makes Kindles anymore?) Recently, Dupuis wrote about a new ebook from TED on his own blog, Confessions of A Science Librarian. I asked him if he could write an expanded version for Download the Universe.--Carl Zimmer]

Guest review by John Dupuis

I feel a little weird reviewing this book. It's a TED book, you see. What's a TED book, you ask? I'll let TED tell you:

Shorter than a novel, but longer than an magazine article--a TED Book is a great way to feed your craving for ideas anytime. TED Books are short original electronic books produced every two weeks by TED Conferences. Like the best TEDTalks, they're personal and provocative, and designed to spread great ideas. TED Books are typically under 20,000 words--long enough to unleash a powerful narrative, but short enough to be read in a single sitting.

They're like TED talks, in other words, but they provide longer, more in-depth treatment than is possible in a short talk. On the surface, that's a really great idea. In practice, it can be a bit problematic--just like TED talks.

Carl Zimmer and Evgeny Morozov have gone into fairly extensive detail about the dark side of TED talks and TED books. Basically, the format encourages a kind of hip superficiality and fame-mongering. Ideas want to be famous, to paraphrase the famous saying that information wants to be free. In fact, ideas should be deep and well thought-out. And, you know, even perhaps a little on the valid side, too.

Which brings me to this particular TED book: Daniel Grossman's Deep Water. Here's how TED describes it:

As global warming continues, the massive ice caps at Earth’s poles are melting at an increasingly alarming rate. Water once safely anchored in glacial ice is surging into the sea. The flow could become a deluge, and millions of people living near coastlines are in danger. Inundation could impact every nation on earth. But scientists don’t yet know how fast this polar ice will melt, or how high our seas could rise. In an effort to find out, a team of renowned and quirky geologists takes a 4,000-mile road trip across Western Australia. They collect fossils and rocks from ancient shorelines and accumulate new evidence that ancient sea levels were frighteningly high during epochs when average global temperatures were barely higher than today. In Deep Water veteran environmental journalist, radio producer and documentary filmmaker Daniel Grossman explores the new and fascinating science — and scientists — of sea-level rise. His investigation turns up both startling and worrisome evidence that humans are upsetting a delicate natural equilibrium. If knocked off balance, it could hastily melt the planet’s ice and send sea levels soaring.