It just occurred to me that

the name of this site is ObsoleteTheBook, but it is not actually a book! It’s a site.  

When you can read a book online, I guess the difference is really minimal. But you can’t actually read this book online—at least, not yet—so it struck me as funny. Here is my one project, a site called “Obsolete The Book” and here is my book which is called an Encyclopedia. No wonder they keep putting it in weird sections at Barnes and Noble. It’d be nice if it were a site and not a book, because then I could go in and change parts I no longer like. Right? Or maybe I could just take the site and make it into a book? Okay, now even I’m confused.

I wasn’t being ironic when I picked that URL. Although I feel it’s now kind of its own thing, this site started as a web portal for my book, OBSOLETE. ObsoleteBook.com was taken, and, because their business is publishing paper books, the publisher wasn’t interested in my suggestion of TheObsoleteBook.com. So, we stuck the “The” in the middle. But do people really pay that much attention to URL names anyway? I imagine that as more are taken, they individually become less important. Perhaps as the name of a site migrates away from the http and the .com, URLs will become…obsolete!

But, as I was saying, OBSOLETE began as a book, and and it continues to be a book. The site started as a way to promote it, so, excuse me for a moment while I promote it.

Go ahead and buy it! My mom has described it as “very good bathroom reading.”  And everyone goes to the bathroom.

You don’t have to read it. You can just look at the nice pictures. But apparently, a few people have turned the paper. According to Western Illinois U’s professor David Banash’s recent review and subsequent essay at PopMatters.com the book is:

playfully illustrated, written with verve, and makes plain just how much has changed since the recent millennium. Grossman documents superseded technologies, explains how these obsolete technologies once organized social relationships, and reflects on how their passing marks profound changes in our lives.  She notes, for instance, that privacy is no longer an expectation at all, but that security is. In itself, this is hardly news, but since she adduces her evidence from often unremarked changes like the demise of diving boards and deep-ends in swimming pools, her book’s peculiar perspective makes the points newly forceful.

Thanks Prof Banash!