Here are a few stories to read this morning.
- Book people v. article people (Coyle’s InFormation)
- Don’t Be Fooled: Use the SMELL Test To Separate Fact from Fiction Online (MediaShift)
- Is Citation Theft? Google Bends to Publisher Accusations (Villagers with Pitchforks)
- Needing multiple reading apps — problem or not? (TeleRead)
- Respect the reader (Baldur Bjarnason)
- The Rise of Bounding Asterisks in Lieu of Italicization for Styling Text (Daring Fireball)
- Students Still Not Taking to E-Textbooks, New Data Show (DBW)
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The one grumbling about the use of asterisks seemingly in place of italics is a bit clueless… That became a convention online for two reasons:
1) Initially, everything was plaintext, so italics or boldface weren’t options. However, the asterisks originally denoted boldface — italics were written /like this/, and underlined text _this way_ — people started using it in place of italics perhaps 13 years ago, I believe.
2) In email, Usenet, and similar pre-Web services, people used the greater-than/less-than symbols around text to indicate that it was an action they were taking, like a more elaborate variant of an emoticon. When everything started migrating over to the Web, however, that stopped being an option as many sites would interpret the text as a HTML tag, so people shifted to using the asterisks for actions as well as for emphasizing text.