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The article reviews the book "L'industria della carta nelle Marche e nell'Umbria: imprenditori lavoro produzione mercati: secoli XVIlI-XX," edited by Giancarlo Castagnari.

Both the American books reviewed in this paper - Nicholas Carr's The shallows. What the Internet is doing to our brains, and David Weinberger's Too big to know. Rethinking knowledge now that the facts aren't the facts, experts are everywhere, and the smartest person in the room is the room - deal with the issue of how the internet is changing the way we learn and communicate. Still, they come at diametrically opposite conclusions. Carr claims that the excessive use of the Internet may limit our concentration and understanding abilities, making it more and more difficult for many of us reading and writing those long and complex texts that are the basis of human culture. On the other side Weinberger thinks that the Internet - thanks to the multiplication and celerity of its communication channels - is unfolding new and exciting perspectives for human knowledge, no longer adequately supported by traditional documents and "experts". In the author's opinion both these theories are erroneous, being too radical and sharing a number of fallacies, e.g. a technological determinism, and the tendency to consider certain characteristics as peculiar of a very few media, while they actually belong to a lot of different media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines Alberto Salarelli's book Introduzione alia scienza dell' informazione ("Introduction to Information Science", Milano, Editrice Bibliografica, 2012) with particular attention to the location of this disciplinary field within the wider context of bibliography and library science. The first part briefly discusses how the author presents the discipline's key concepts (data, information, document), and examines the theories and meta-theories that identify its context, taking into consideration the studies of Luciano Floridi, Maurizio Ferraris, Michael Buckland, Wolfgang Hofkirchner. The second part deals with some theoretical and ontological issues concerning the relationships between objects in the physical world, documents, and their bibliographic representation, finally proposing a new location of Information Science into the wider frame of bibliography in its historical and cultural dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her last book Divine art, infernal machine. The reception of printing in the west from first impressions to be sense of an ending Elizabeth Eisenstein - already known in Italy for her previous works on the early days of printing - has further widened her research field by investigating diverse source materials: historical, literary, scientific and iconographic. Treading on the chronological path indicated by her book, the paper describes the most significant steps, personalities and peculiarities involved in the circulation of printed products and in the evolution of publishing within the western hemisphere, underlining the most significant and relevant phenomenons of each phase. Catching just a few of the most intriguing and original junctions, this synthetic and schematic picture is meant to address not just to specialists, but also to a wider and diversified audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]