futureofthebook.com

the last book & the end of time whatever

The March/April Utne Reader has an enclave of items on “The Last Book”, “Cyber-gizmo gurus say that in the next 20 years, they’ll put the world’s libraries in your pocket, but what will happen to culture when they do?” (get the paper copy). I am just losing my patience with the forever soon to be take-off of the e-Book. The reality is that the hands prompt the mind when it comes to reading and there is a million years of the evolution of conciousness to prove it.

Check out this perplexed quote:
“Using the page-turning button, I clicked nicely through the story. But it wasn’t capturing my attention. It may have been the writing, but maybe my brain’s receptors were failing to find whatever part of the book makes them books. I think it was all that glass. Reading the story was like watching a fish in an aquarium tank. I wanted to swim with it.”

zipperjamas

The New York Times has an an item on increasing academic interest in material culture. Material culture includes physical books. Henry Petroski’s work on bookshelves is mentioned. I found this a catalog of historical incident and didn’t get much on first reading. My nomination for the book on the material culture implication of the book is Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, Print and Knowledge in the Making, University of Chicago Press, 1998, isbn 0 226 40121 9. .

preservation for kids

Everybody knows that books tell stories. What everybody does not know is that there is a story to books. It is an amazing and almost secret story and here is how it begins.

plain talking

This is really pretty cool since you can convey speech silently using handwritting with a ball point pen on a tablet and radio transmit to a swivel display screen that projects the image of the handwriting where it can be cut and pasted as an image file to an email. Then you close the book format pad with a not clam shell configuration laptop disguised due to the smart portfolio styling with flexible spine.
The CONCEPT LAPTOP ThinkPad TransNote by I.B.M. (review from New York Times)

enhance vortal experience while dissolving the bibliographic entity

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***rain taxi

<NB: I’m tapped out with the library controversy for the time being. The whole fuss with the San Francisco Library ended happily in that the library director who was responsible for dumping all those books has been fired, and the second in command person has resigned, but I lost a lot of time being an activist. I feel I’ve said what I have to say about the fact that the paper archive is important. It’s fine to have silicon conduits to get you the information, but it’s important to hold onto the paper source as well, whatever it might be–book, card catalogue, run of an old newspaper–those things are being thrown out much too casually. I have gotten a little weepy about the British Library because what they did was so stupid. It’s the intellectual center of the world–that domed reading room, and all the stacks underneath it–it’s the place where Swinburne had his seizure and innumerable people wrote books, researched books. And they’re destroying it. They’re moving it to this brick modular thing that looks like some midwestern university library that could have been knocked off in a day and a half. It’s pathetic.>

codex, companion of consciousness

For now and far into the future the physical book is our only
companion of consciousness. Connecting the work of Antonio Damasio with the role of the physical book.

long stitch

Learn to make five different historical bookbinding prototypes at UIL/UICB workshop classes.

patent pending

These
books can be cleaned in the diswasher rinsing away any disturbing content and providing great peace of mind.

“This is a fairly mature industry and it’s not too often that anyone comes up with a new way to make a book.”

***binder’s ticket

railroads and reading and preservation of the guided way

persistence of the changing book

“Books24×7.com is the web’s premier professional reference resource for IT professionals who want to work smarter. Books24×7.com partners with the world’s most distinguished book publishers to digitize their latest technical reference books for immediate online availability to subscribers of the service.
Books24×7.com offers publishers these important benefits:

* Generate incremental revenue from existing book content
* Drive complementary hard-copy book sales
* Increase your brand awareness within the IT community
* Protect the brand integrity of your content when delivered digitally”

The precept of the eBook at
netLibrary is that all books exist only at the moment of transmission. A perfectly reasonable idea that accords with the Books24×7 notion of “exisiting book content”. NetLibrary does work from paper leaf masters. Its all metamatter to them; waiting to be born again digital.

The difference between mining and making books is considered in Jason Epsteinís
Book Business, Publishing Past Present and Future , W.W. Norton, 2001, isbn 0-393-04984-1. While obstacles are imposed between readers and writers by publishers, these same managers also manage the long before and after of the moment of transmission. Even in an on-line reading mode the publisher remains at work on ìeditorial support, publicity, design, digitizing, and financingî.

Epsteinís view of the post transmission role of the publisher is highly developed and must certainly imply persistence ( er, preservation) of the ìannotated universal catalog of digitized titlesî or backlist. He also offers hopeful perspective and prospective on the continuing design and execution of retrospective literary series. This book is the first in a series to be published in association with the New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers.

(Jason Epstein may also offer a preview of NEH critique due to show up in Nicholson Baker’s next book. er, that NEH and its advisory agencies are publishers of the authorized approach to preservation of culture.)