futureofthebook.com

futureofthebook news insight

Adrian Johns is leaving CalTech where the future of the library is uncertain and going to the University of Chicago where the future of the library is assured, but where intellectual initiative can always preempt any agenda. The immense issue of the continuity of scientific reading methods and the future of the university presses hang in the balance with Johns providing strategic guidance. He will engineer a center for understanding the emergence and consequence of scientific reading and the future role of the book as scientific infrastructure. You heard it here first.

eBooks still taking off

“Keep up to date with the latest developments” at R2 Consulting. The next wave should be iBooks.

***a reader’s review for a reader’s book

“Johns wants to show how much of what we take for granted about a “print culture” might conceivably have worked out otherwise, how little came as a gift of the printing press and how much came as a result of efforts to fix the mess that the printing press introduced.”

D. Graham Burnett review in the New Republic

And, guess what! Adrian Johns will visit Iowa this Tuesday!

Adrian John’s book is both a reading pleasure and a
mighty exposition. It is titled The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making and it describes the environment of book publication in London in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Johns’ book is a counterpoint to print culture as a given. It reconstructs the role of print in terms of its textual mutability, exploitation of authors, captive production means and illicit and corrupting distribution; the dissembling role of print. At the same time this great story of the struggle to achieve dependable knowledge is also supplied with wonderful visits to print shops and coffee houses.

One of the insights that Adrian Johns brings to the reader is a realization of the extent of our own contrivance of the book as authoritative and immutable and how atypical such bookly dependability has been. It is also relevant that Johns’ reconstruction of the ifier earlier nature of print has an eerie similarity to a new context of digitally stored knowledge and to the advent of another new reading mode.

other churnings in the transmission of knowledge

“A refereed article published in a respected journal in a given field is the culmination of hard work by the authors, as well as the contributions by respected peers for their comments, suggestions and sometimes criticisms. It is not uncommon for an article to be published after a year or longer from the original date of submittal.

In the age of instant connectivity, information can be exchanged and propagated at the speed of light. To give and to get tidbits of inspiration, we need a cyber-space forum where ideas can be exchanged. It is a huge blackboard in the form of a chat room, a faculty lounge or a student union beyond campus boundaries. In this universe peers in your own specialties and from crossing fields can interact with each other without the tyranny of time zones, all taking place at Internet speed.

PreJournal.com is dedicated to such a proposition. We subscribe to the notion that knowledge is not gained in a vacuum, and that freshness of ideas is invaluable. You are encouraged to test, through services we provide, preliminary results of your wisdom in the community. You will gain further insights as well as receive a timely dose of rejoinder. Inspiration may also come to you by watching others engaging in dialogs on the subject.”
someone left the book out in the rain

“When did I lose whatever regard I had for a book as being intrinsically authoritative? Probably in my ol’ graphic production days when I learned how to spec type and lay out pages for printóif this is all it takes to get something in print, then any fool can get his or her words published. Caveat
Reader!”
(er, exactly )

***historical book reenactment link

shape of things to come

“Read much, but not many books.” Benjamin Franklin

***life is a memorybook

“Chapters of Life is dedicated to preserving the past, whether it be a special event or an entire lifetime. We can help you record your life for your children or grandchildren, preserving precious memories and capturing personalities in a beautiful bound book complete with photos. You can keep the book yourself or pass it on to others as a living legacy.”
crop circle books

“Wooden Books are designed not to date. The information contained within most of them will be as true in five hundred years time as it was five hundred years ago.”(something is going on here)

***Kerouac’s ‘Road’ scroll

“The single-spaced quasi-autobiographical ode to free living is nearly 120 feet long and pasted together in sections about a dozen feet long, the seams later reinforced with tape. A faint pencil line runs along its right edge, suggesting that Kerouac cut the paper to fit his typewriter. Darkened with age, the scroll is tattered near its beginning, probably from handling. (Kerouac was fond of showing it, unrolled and roadlike, to friends.) And its final paragraphs are torn away, a mishap that Kerouac attributed to his friend Lucien Carr’s dog chewing off the end.”from New York Times, March 22nd, 2001

Does the scroll both predate and postdate (connote a latter day composite, oral/written/print) reading (mode)?

mile high vision of libraries

The advent of a technology assisted, composite reading mode is transforming the library as a physical place, the use of its physical print and analog collections, the future of scholarly communication and the future of library reference services.

Comments on the ACRL meeting in Denver. (March 15-18)

its time

To be aware of new projects and timeless progress plan to check this site every year (for the next 10,000). Or go back a few.
Perhaps the three years that have passed since the publication of Time & Bits has provided a whole era of transition.

looking in the jar

The 18 month PEM Climate Notebook field trial program has approximately 180 participating institutions (including the University of Iowa and itsUIL Preservation dept). These institutions vary widely and maintain every type of stored collections. The overall effort will result in the first comparative survey of collection storage conditions collected via equivalent digital recording and reporting methods and compiled to a single database for further analysis. Resulting findings, reflecting national storage conditions, will be published on the internet.

all of your base are belong to us

The saga of the return of the sewn board binding continues. The phenomenon is attributed to alien contact and early experiments in Texas. For a few years a sewn board bindery was in operation 15 miles east of Utopia. Recent activity is reported in central Iowa. TeeShirts available at the Store.

whoa!

the story of 4 years either in the 360’s or the 370’s the Kellis agricultural account book. (from Craig)

an in-situ image is from Monash University excavations at Ismant El-Kharab Dakleb, Egypt. Want to see the opened book?

other texts of the period, including those inscribed onto wood, are found at the Advanced Papyrological Information System

the great Oz of bookbinding

Keith Smith
is the best kind of wizard; both hard working and far-out.
His next book will be “Smith’s Single Sheet Sewing” an exposition of his various thread bridlings of sheets into book works. His publications are based on both actual models and computer generated constructions and always convey the potent meaning of the physical book.

The visit with Keith and the chance to see his bridled leaves converged perfectly with my recent visit to the Regenstein Library where Anna and Shanna and I recorded examples of early Greek and Armenian bindings. Keith also demonstrated the FreeHand drawing techniques that will be necessary to illustrate an explanation of the turn-in sliting, darting and welting needed to produce the miraculous Greek caps.

mining referers

“Artificial light was rarely used, and silence was imposed upon the scriptorium, but copying was not silent. Silent reading was a development of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Before that time, each scribe essentially dictated to himself and the scriptorium was filled with a dull murmuring. In order to communicate, an elaborate system of hand signals was devised.” Richard W. Clement

“Gutenberg never intended to imitate anything or mislead anyone: he was merely making books by a new means. The end product was really little different than the product of the scriptorium. It was the means of production which was revolutionary, not the book itself.” Richard W. Clement

a wonderful narrative

The Online Resource Book for Medieval Studies (ORB) is a cooperative effort on the part of scholars across the internet to establish an online textbook source for medieval studies on the World-Wide Web.

tepee village in Wales

The Google crawlers and spiders work at night. The only evidence of their foragings and hoardings are the left over referers. A Google search for a Welsh tepee encampment demonstrates the resourcefulness of the wily bots. The composite required assembly of each keyword out of an entire narrative. What’s strange is that the narrative does consider books as a product of village life but it doesn’t say so and I didn’t fully realize that.

Is our own on-line reading behavior somehow a mimic of automated exemplars? Now I am going to set out some excerpt bait and see if I can entice the reading rats into another useful construence. .excerpts

This is not an idle exercise, except it is; an excursion into the on-line reading mode.