I’m going to be honest: I had a whole long post I wanted to write this week about ideas for working with writers, a whole “Open Book Quarterly” where, if this thing took off, we could use royalties from the book to commission short stories, and pay writers to publish new works for the Open Book and the world.

Alas, making this video completely took it out of me. 

It was a crazy weekend of soldering and screenshotting, building a second prototype with a camera in front of my face and enlisting the help of so many of my colleagues to film me even as I begged to film them. I contended with cursed text encodings (the Windows-1251 Cyrillic text file from a previous post came back to haunt me). I even managed, in the space of a half an hour, to design, mill out, assemble and demonstrate the first Open Book add-on board: a simple external input device with a pair of buttons that demonstrates how an accessibility add-on might be made. 

I want to thank several of my colleagues for making this video possible: Amrit Kwatra and Ilan Mandel for helping to shoot video, Evan Kahn for his advice and notes, and Zaq Landsberg for offering to be my hand model and ending up with a starring role as one of the readers of the Open Book. (I'm the other one)

Featured works in this video include the Odyssey by Homer, How Much Land does a Man Need by Leo Tolstoy, The Art of War by Sun Tzu, and the opening poem from Langston Hughes’ collection of poetry, The Weary Blues. 

The Odyssey I’ve loved ever since my high school hosted a weekend-long recitation of the work; we read the Fagles translation, but I’ve heard good things about Emily Wilson’s new version. How Much Land does a Man Need is a gut punch of a short story that feels incredibly relevant to our time. The Art of War requires no introduction. And Langston Hughes’ first book of poetry is as powerful today as it was when it was published in 1926.