futureofthebook.com

great book art site

Emily Martin shows us what a book artist’s site should look like and also what a multiplicity of activities is needed to be a book artist

UI LIBRARIES SELLS IOWA BOOKS VIA VENDING MACHINE

Two University of Iowa departments’ novel idea to use a vending
machine that typically dispenses candy as a book drop has been
modified by the UI Libraries’ Special Collections Department to offer
titles by Iowa authors David Drake and Leigh Michaels, a noted writer
of Harlequin Romance novels.

The Book Drop machine is located in the North Lobby of the Main
Library and continues to offer bookbinding kits and other book arts
prepared by the UI Center for the Book. The kits are described and
pictured at http://www.uiowa.edu/~ctrbook/ at the “Book Art$” link.

its not just read only

Write the Web has a thread going on the future of the book and they kindly link to FotB.

Ashcroft watching PCS

The meeting of the Preservation and Conservation Advisory Committee (GSLIS/UT) (March 22-23) went very well. It was thrilling, actually. Recommendations providing flexibility and reach of the curriculum, providing cooperative faculty development and providing reach of the program internationally were all efficiently presented, discussed and drafted. But what made it thrilling was the mixture of preservation extremists, both students and teachers. These radicals donít want to change the world; they want to keep the world changeable.

Karen gave me a bumper sticker for my Jeep: ìKeep Austin Weirdî.
PCS

post-its on the monitor

Malcolm Gladwell offers an essay in the March 25th New Yorker on “The Social Life of Paper”. The essay considers an MIT publication, “The Myth of the Paperless Office” by Sellen and Harper, but there is also commentary on the life of the reading modes thrown in. Of particular interest is the suggestion that electronic communication enables the effective filing of “papers” which so long frustrated librarians and office managers. Meanwhile, real papers solve the management of live, emerging transactions. In other words, paper attends to the process of thought on the fly while electronic communications solves the archive retrieval problem. This is just reverse of precepts of digital information , but it does accord with the interactivities of distinctly different reading modes. (from Craig)

this explains everything!

Tinkering teachers are at it again as FotB gets ready to go to a PCS advisory session in Austin. But wait .FotB has looked at library preservation through the rose colored glasses of the reading modes and seen the future. Maybe the “mirage of continuity” was right-on after all. Check out the diagram. Or, the whole story;
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haptics and reading

Its like living in a Max Ernst collage, but if you combine
haptic simulation with the
EBook Systems book action simulation you may be able to induce a crippled version of the clock of content phenomenon that occurs as we read a paper book. But its the long way around the (text)block. At least the word, haptic, is getting some exposure!
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book sectarians to finance their own program

In a modest beginning the book format sector of the University of Iowa Center for the Book is developing its own funding base. Using vending machines and on-line sales the Kolerick Bindery crew is marketing its own bookbinding kits.
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patent binds up ebook development

“EBook Systems has a patent (6,340,980 and the earlier 6,064,384), filed for in August of 1996, which covers the way a book looks on the screen of a computer. Basically, it appears to be a violation of these patents to simulate a book with two pages where pages ‘flip’ and where thethickness of the book is indicated by visual queues to the left and right of the pages, among other minor details. The patent probably shouldn’t have been issued since it is just a simulation of a physical object on the screen of a computer. Regardless of how stupid these patents are, they are legally very real.” from Paul Schmidt

The virtual print book format may not be as liberating as its physical equivalent. I donít suppose it has occurred to the ebook players that simulating print is the worst approach. Better to create a completely different haptic interface more in accord with the keyboard and the visual expectations of a layered screen presentation. Tiling and fanned decks are suggested rather than two page spreads, bring to front clicking rather than swing over leaves, live links and zooms rather than linear collation. Most of all, better to present a composite mode of oral/verbal, writing and print together rather than the partitioned parent reading mode of print alone.

thought for the day

The print original, its microfilm copy or its digital posting all provide access, but FotB suspects that CLIR (Chronicle of Higher Education, March 8, 2002 “The Preservation of Our Brittle Books Must Also Preserve Access” by Deanna B. Marcum and Anne R. Kenney) feels that the surrogate modes provide the “real” access, either over time as with film or with automated search and finding aids as with digital library building. The conventional print access from originals is discounted by disqualification of the source as “brittle” or vulnerable to deterioration. This consideration should really not disqualify print access in view of the relative impermanence of the surrogate media!

FotB suggests that the inherent attributes of print access, working directly from the source, need more advocacy, particularly in the changing circumstances of storage and retrieval technologies, akalization (both retrospective treating printed books and prospective printing books on alkaline paper) and advancing technologies, exemplified by digitized ILL services, of on-demand digitization and incremental and recursive options for digital conversion. (long sentence!) And we can act along this path of progressive use of print access while we strive for needed surrogate access. Initiatives for progressive use of print access would include purpose built storage assuring security and preservation of lesser used and endangered collections, retrospective alkalization of endangered paper materials, investigation and innovation in digital loaning to ourselves using the ILL model, innovation in augmentation of bibliographic utility with imaged excerpt of titlepage and table of contents, innovation in leaf master collection management, and so on.

In the end, the different types of access (print, film, digital) constitute different types of reading modes and different kinds of meaning retrieved from the same work. The different meanings only complement each other and the sum discredits any choosing between them.

gal noir is off to si

Follow the adventures of a
young library conservator.

wonderful blog design

Thanks for the FotB link from
Ike Log

disappearing growth sector?

“The world produces between 1 and 2 exabytes of unique information per year, which is roughly 250 megabytes for every man, woman, and child on earth. An exabyte is a billion gigabytes, or 1018 bytes. Printed documents of all kinds comprise only .003% of the total. Magnetic storage is by far the largest medium for storing information and is the most rapidly growing, with shipped hard drive capacity doubling every year.
Magnetic storage is rapidly becoming the universal medium for information storage.”
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return of the Book Drop

The
Book Drop vending machine is back in business with an exciting, new assortment. In addition to book craft kits there are now signed copies of publications by Iowa authors, Friends of the Libraries greeting cards, UICB book art class productions and handmade paper swatch books of prairie flower sents.We are also furbishing our second machine which will be used for vending Paper E-Books. Paper E-Books are 11 x 17 folded templates with instructions for producing copier ready booklets which will be vended in turn. Any UI student can participate.