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James Gleick signing

I went up to Kepler's in Menlo Park to see James Gleick talk about his new book, which was a collection of his essays from the past 10 years or so about the internet. I had really enjoyed his biography of Richard Feynman, Genius, and had read good things about his other books, so I figured I would check it out. He spoke a little about the reports of "the death of the internet" and said he didn't agree but felt silly talking about that in the middle of silicon valley, so he read an excerpt from the book written in 1995 about all the crazy devices people were making available for control through the internet. It was kind of funny - I remembered a lot of those things, and the feeling of the internet at the time, some interesting new thing with a lot of potential that no one seemed to know what to do with just yet. He then opened the floor for questions, but no one really asked anything too exciting. Some of the older people in the audience wanted to complain about the complexity or speed of technology, and he was generally sympathetic but said that was part of what made it unique and worthwhile. He also mentioned blogs at one point, which made the three people in front of me turn and look - did they look familiar to me? like some little cropped photo on some blog I have seen? who knows. One younger woman tried to ask about how things would be different for people growing up with this technology, and he didn't really seem to answer the question. Ah well. It was still fun, but I do sometimes wish authors prepared a little more to talk about and they didn't spend time on the questions. Maybe have a mike up during the signing time, and people can ask their questions there and have other people hear things.

It was also a little weird because CSPAN's BookTV taped it. And I guess his name is pronounced "glick" and not what would be the german pronunciation. Hrmm.

And my final note is that Kepler's is a really nice bookstore.