I pre-ordered John Battelle’s new book, The Search, a few months ago, and returned home on Friday to find that Amazon had delivered it. I took it with me to the beach on Saturday and got the first two chapters in before some ankle-biters took up camp behind my beach chair and tried to bury themselves in a storm of flying sand.
First impressions — good book on the way to becoming a great book as I read further. I hope to knock it off this week and will post a full review when I’m finished. The first chapter tries to put a big too heavy an import on the role of search as the ne plus ultra of all technology. While I certainly won’t contest that search is central to navigating information, I think the next book should be titled The Understanding, following through with the ever brilliant insight by Danny Hillis that it isn’t the finding and locating of information that is important, but ultimately leading the seeker to some understanding that is the driving goal.
This has been a good year for tech writing with this and Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said making for some great reading these past six months.
