Sunday, September 7, 2008

e-babel, p-babel " Why buy an iLiad, Sony Reader or Kindle, with their restrictions, when you can buy a laptop for nearly the same price free of the formatting hassles? Similarly, with the increased use of PDAs and Blackberrys and quick technological improvements in mobile phone technology, which again largely bypass format issues, will the iPod moment for e-readers actually be the iPod?" Tom Tivnan The endless saw of the e-book device advocates is their frustration with proprietary formats. There are 3 or 4 related to 3 or 4 devices. But if these proprietary formats were eliminated tomorrow, nothing would change. Screen based reading would remain with the various attributes and limitations that it has already and the larger adaptation of print to screen would continue its course. Actually e-bable is nothing compared with p-bable where a single paper reading device can only display one content! So the e-babel discontents should pause to ask if there are any attributes, as for example physical libraries, of non-universal device display.

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

dual display halfway there Dual display, with permutations of flip scroll and side-by-side reference, begins to mime the codex. Kindle type page-by-page navigation is not a basis for codex handling or even diptych spread. beyond textbooks "The Industrial Book is a stunning work of compilation and erudition. It succeeds in delineating the cultural, political, social, and economic history of the mid-nineteenth-century book while also capturing the intellectual vitality and innovation that characterizes this increasingly influential field of study." --Joshua Brown, The Graduate Center, City University of New York A History of the Book In America is a five volume project with volume 3, "The industrial Book, 1840-1880", now in print. This is a wonderful, layered encyclopedia of graceful essays, with revealing interpretation of the role of books as material culture. Four other book history readers, companions and introductions have also appeared, one now in second edition, since 2002. These publications will act inside and out of classrooms, supporting the research agendas, ulterior motives and specialized interpretation of any reader's interest in book studies. "Reading is at once one of the most ubiquitous and one of the most elusive of human activities." Shafquat Towheed Abstract "In this paper I would like to explicate the theoretical principles that underlie the electronic hyper-text edition of Constantijn Huygens’ Ooghentroost. The governing idea behind the project is the hypothesis, formulated by Jerome McGann, that new technologies of textual presentation may enable us to derive a clearer understanding of traditional, early-modern notions and practices of textuality." Jurgen Pieters Abstract "As a result, at least to a certain extent, the e-book became part of history of printed book and rather than the opposite." Miha Kovac Abstract top down, face up the planetary capture format with the book in up-right reading position and the scanner overhead has long been the conservators' preferred alternative to flip-flop of books on copiers. Face up copying is just like reading; speedy, kinetically easy and intuitive. The Minolta DPS 3000 introduced the hope of non-damaging capture from bound materials. We got one for the preservation department almost ten years ago. It was riddled with video errors and was a black, bi-tonal scanner with a crippled grey scale capability. But it was a Streamliner; top-down. Now we have a new Zeutschel OS12000. It is an even more elegant Streamliner. It is a color scanner with software that can intermingle insets at various bit levels. The Zeutschel is very smart. On its first scann it overshot the easel and pictured our shoes as it tried to learn something about its new coworkers. It doesn't just capture, it observes. And the variety and quantity of capture from tangible collections is increasing rapidly. Simulation is the new way of reading and the Zeutschel is the new reader. But with a backward glance, the old Minolta went to the interlibrary loan department where it will labor on, on-demand. Perhaps it is the real reader, sending a page or two from print to screen and never, never looking back.

Sunday, August 31, 2008

we pause TeleRead and if:book both have technical problems. This interrupt is considered opportune since the breaking news is of e-book screen failures. Of three most popular reading devices, screen failure is approaching 25%. No news is good news from the print sector which has not reported a single page display failure. The situation crosses into script act theory where unrealized meanings are consequential. Evidently print has reported no incident of lap heat or fan buzz or charge drain either. infrastructure All books are electronic. They are delivered to either screen or paper or both. Either way, if electronic versions are products of print production or print production is a by-product of electronic publication, the whole activity is digital and the whole outcome is readable content. So the scholarly interest in editorial control has already crossed into new territory. But it is surprising that there is no sense of chaos. The chaos arises when editorial control long associated with print is applied to electronic editions or when a new absence of editorial control associated with on-line publication is applied to print editions. From Gutenberg to Google by Peter Shillingsburg invokes script act theory to examine the situation of scholarly publication with an unjustified disposition to orderly transition. The potential of disjunction and a more promising future of scholarly print is discounted. The bias is well expressed by an exemplary ambiguity; "It can be questioned whether textuality, in the constrained form of print, has been allowed to reveal its nature fully." (p.85) Does this statement pose a visualization of print escaped from its analog constraint to its digital fulfillments? Or is the meaning a contrary visualization of the future of the print attribute of constraint liberated to self fulfillment and to a bright future as a re-preferred context for scholarly publication? And what a long dance around the distinctive strengths of self-authenticating print and self-indexing screen reading without clearly allocating these attributes to their transmission functions and to their formats.

Thursday, August 21, 2008

contemporary bindings For a book conservator "contemporary" means bound in the period of the book's printing. This reference site is exemplary for its easy navigation, clean design and magnificent subject. Scott Husby has provided an adventure among these fascinating 15th c. survivals. always on One of the draw backs of screen reading is the need for electrical power. The device needs more than wireless connectivity for content, it also needs wireless connectivity for energy as well. The energy node could be at the consumer end, but to fulfill portability, it would be optimal to have mobile reception. This precept could transform the obstacles of storage battery development for larger devices as well. A synthetic metabolism based on kinetic energy transmission would be a growth industry. By instigating such a revolution the e-book reader could go down in history, finally. drm sturm und draug A given book content can be rendered on any number of devices and any screen based device can render a number of contents. With a paper book a given content is captive in a single reading device and there is little opportunity of transmission of the work from one device to another. In a sense DRM (digital rights management) is even more effective in paper than on screen. E-book advocates visualize books as effervescent content that can be rendered to any reading device. Restraint of multiplicity and migration of content from one device to another is blamed on DRM but the underlying frustration is with lack of possession of content. E-book readers wish to own, not rent, books. The frustration should be attributed not to DRM but to illogic. Possession is a feature of the device rendering, not the state of ownership of un-rendered content. Possession is best assured in paper rendering and least assure in screen rendering. The more fixed and material the depiction, the more owned. The more variable and immaterial the depiction the less it is possessed. Such contrast may even extend to conceptual possession of content. For more DRM anxieties visit teleread

Monday, August 18, 2008

google smart, not "In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers." Nicholas Carr Before Google we could harbor questions, reformulate questions, compile questions and discount questions without being able to arrive at an answer. Before Google there was a longer cogitation of questions. So the benefit of an immediate Google answer then should also weigh if the skills of harboring, reformuating, compiling and discounting answers, as well as questions, is useful. bound to be free Craig will offer a life changing tutorial on the essence of bookbinding. Experience the post-digital shift; Be there AND be square! Linotype revival The Linotype used for the printing of the Daily Iowan is now safely relocated to the Johnson County Historical Society museum. Rigger Larry Raid and Printing department regulars skillfully defied gravity and brought the 3,300 lb. machine to its new home. At JCHS the Linotype will again compose and cast lines of type and inform students of the University of Iowa Center for the Book that there is a whole century (1880 -1980) of print production that they missed.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

reality based How is the digital inventory of every consumer item identified? With a bar code printed on paper. How is the inventory of knowledge managed? A portion is printed on paper and that portion also is bar coded joining the universe of consumer items. Economic transactions keep the paper book viable and so does its place in the inventory of real things. digital print 2.0 "Ingram is the owner of Lightning Source, the largest printer of books on demand in the world. But Lightning Source’s expensive, factory-based equipment which requires the services of skilled operators, prints titles on demand within the existing supply chain. Lightning sees our machine, which bypasses the entire supply chain and delivers a finished book directly from the digital file to the end user, as a forward looking adjunct to their traditional technology. Our machine is small enough to function in a library or bookstore or school or hotel. It is as easy to operate as an office copying machine. It prints and binds a high quality perfect bound book in minutes automatically on demand at point of sale for less than a penny per page and trimmed to infinite sizes between 8.5/11 and 4.5/4.5 inches." Jason Epstein default preservation The Kindle does not archive. Week old newspapers, blog scrolls and magazines disappear as new material is posted. This is an attribute. Deletion of paper is crucial as well. The difference is that a physical action is needed since the default is preservation. One attractive aspect of the default preservation of paper is that storage does not require media other than the delivery medium. i-pod moment " And with the Amazon Kindle selling steadily in the USA, and available soon in the UK, the talk is of whether the publishing industry’s ‘iPod moment’ is finally at hand. Are books, like vinyl records, soon to become a collector’s curiosity? Or will readers remain loyal to paper? " Read:Write Report (8.2) Advocates for e-book transmission to reading devices look to an approaching "i-pod moment" when the book reading preference will tip to electronic device delivery. But the equivalence of text and sound delivery should be questioned. Audio delivery, live or synthetic, is transmitted through air. Text delivery is transmitted visually. So the relevant comparative genre for music transmission would be delivery of on-line scores. This is a much smaller enclave of readership and the comparison, between books and musical scores, does suggest disadvantages and attributes of paper based delivery. Musical performance would be enhanced by screen delivery of scores. The need to turn pages is not appreciated by performers. But note the domain of one-time presentation where device connectivity is an exclusive attribute of screen delivery. In performance the relation of the performer to a rehearsal or annotated paper score could trigger another preference. Re-readings of all kinds, audio and text based, shift appreciations, associations and meanings of the delivered content. But longer term re-reading is more dependent on media persistence and here the music listener is much more vulnerable than the print reader.