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