futureofthebook.com

FotB announces the future

An Exposition of Exhibits, Short Seminars and Opportunities; July, 2005, Iowa City, IA, “Preservation of the Changing Book, Perspectives in Book Conservation”
This exposition will celebrate both the legacy and the future of the paper book. The Retrospective Exhibit of the work of Bill Anthony as well as other exhibits at the UI Libraries will provide historical perspective. A gathering of accomplished book conservators, educators and specialists will interact with students, practitioners and preservation librarians. Students will receive support to attend and study and career opportunities will be described.

rant goes to North Bennet Street

Follow the adventures of a
weblogger on the road to Boston to attend the
North Bennet Street bookbinding program.

Zimbabwean BookArt

EcoAfrica has produced a series of book products from local hand mande papers. High Energy!

FotB interview

Question: Why did mechanical typesetting and the typewriter develop concurrently, yet completely independently?
Answer: They are technologies associated with completely different reading modes. The typewriter conveys letters to recipients, the typesetter conveys print works to libraries.

er, electronic books soon?

“One thing preventing electronic books from competing more directly with traditional books is that they aren’t enough like old-fashioned paper. It seems backwards, but so many things in technology are. Sure,
e-books can store huge amounts of data in a relatively small device, but they don’t offer the same comfort and pleasure as reading a regular bound book. Fortunately, that is likely to change around mid-2003, when electronic ink finds its way into e-book readers.”(more)

(”Fortunately”, the expression “e-books” will be forgotten by mid-2003.)

wildlife refuge for technologies

The largest collection of typesetting equipment in Iowa is in Denmark just south of Mediapolis. There are 10 Monotypes, 9 Ludlows, 14 Linotypes all with huge mat libraries. There is also the whole needed infrastructure of casting, machining, electrical maintenance since much of the collection is fully operational. The museum building is well constructed and the equipment carefully rigged into working arrays. Oh, yes, and there is also someone there ready to sit you at the keyboard. This is
Larry Raid, a cunning machinist with an incredibly kinetic insight into the mechanisms of mechanical type setting.

Larry’s museum is actually a kind of wildlife refuge for the analog technologies of letterpress printing. As with endangered species, it is disturbing to see how exotic and rare this once common technology has become. Even more disturbing is the dependence of this legacy on the skills of living people. Larry is aware of these vulnerabilities and he is also trying to collect and preserve the craft skills themselves! He is gathering old friends and co-workers in the printing, needlecraft, ceramic and machine trades to his protective enclave in Denmark. At the same time, Larry enables kids to print, through his school programs and county fair demonstrations.

Larry is strange, very strange. His mind pictures the mechanisums of typesetters and his hands perform that knowledge to the tumbling machinery itself. It is a wonderful experience to watch him straighten a bent type mat in the dark or watch him demonstrate exactly how to strike a key.

paradox wonderfully compounded

“I want to entangle abstract form and material particularity such that the reader will find it increasinglyly difficult to maintain the perception that they are separate and discrete entities.”

A whole narrative of the co-dependence of the cyborg and the physical book is already composed by Katherine Hayles in her great and wonderful work titled; How We Became Posthuman. There must be a direct tunnel between this work and the Nature of the Book by Adrian Johns.

Nancy gets vinyl apron

Nancy Kraft has been our Preservation Librarian for one year now. So the preservation department gave her some new gear. That’s Sharim Rainwater, Kristin Baum, Susan Hansen, Bu Wilson, Sara Sheller and Jay Woodson with Nancy seated.

Why not visit us at our Preservation department
web site?

***real reading link from
Gal Noir

Meanwhile, The Sims Online, which could be launched as early as this fall, will take Sim
psychology in a far more complex direction. Because it’s an online game, those won’t
be programmed pixels you’re interacting with — they’ll be actual human beings,
speaking English (or whatever language they choose) via an in-game
instant-messenger system. “The first time we all kissed someone else in the game, it’s
just the strangest feeling,” says Wright’s Sims Online co-designer, Chris Trottier,
referring to the in-house testing currently in progress. “It’s like: That’s a real person on
the other side.”
(more)

grid computing rules

Ever notice how political leaders are becoming obsolete? Its happened previously in history as when a whole class of religious leaders were relegated to the background. But now its the turn of national presidents. They are relegated to a hollow management of events that they do not understand and cannot control, especially the violence of mis-behaving members of society.

So which new sector is assuming control at the moment? Not scientists, not economists or capitolists, really. The assumption of authority is now in the hands of grid computing. See M. Mitchell Waldrop on
Grid Computing in Technology Review, May, 2002.

craft-critique-culture-conference

Great events are always transpiring in Iowa. Read about reading from two of twenty six sessions at this weekend’s conference.
(more)

blah, blah, blah

The FotB editor has distilled the entire, mangy run of Commentaries into one astute, less mangy narrative which is styled;
Booke & eBook. Don’t miss this adventure in the print reading mode.

reading mode enron scheme that works

Amazon is selling like-new books for their customers. Amazon contributes nothing to the production and royalty costs, but competes directly with new book retail sales. They take a commission on the sale of the same copy again and again. And the “used” copy sales begin the same day as the publication date. Amazon is morphing into a “publisher”. Shows you what enterprise in a different reading mode can do. See the New York Times, Business Day, Wednesday April 10; “Online Sales of Used Books Draw Protest”.

equipoise

Here is a content rich logger site with a wonderful balance of cultural/political/bibliographical report.
wood s lot. Thanks for the link to FotB.

FotB projection

By 2000/whatever ebooks will be relegated to genres abandoned by paper such as travel reference, instructional manuals, textbooks and encyclopedias. On the other side, the growth of paper publications will be augmented by print on-demand technologies (PoD) that will assume 50% of the print mode for book reading. These PoD technologies will be coupled and de-coupled into numerous production arrays and distribution systems, including utlilzation of book vending machines.
(more) (link from Craig)

Russian book action

Have fun turning the pages among the
Russian Avant-Garde books of 1910-1934. This is site provides a visit to the Judith Rothschild Foundation gift to the MoMA of some 1,100 books of the Russian avant-garde.

OldWays TimelessTech

The special TimelessTech workshop of the series does not appear at the OldWays website, but FotB readers are invited.
(more)