futureofthebook.com

lay literacy

“Only after several years of reseach on the history of that conceptual space that emerged in archaic Greece did I grasp the depth at which the computer-as-metaphor is exiling anyone who accepts it from the space of the literate mind. In retrospect, Orwell appears to some of us as an optimist; he thought that the cybernetic mind would spread only as a result of intensive instruction.”

“In fact, many people now accept the computer as the key metaphor for themselves and for their place in the world without any need for “Room 101″. Surreptitiously. they cross over from the mental domain of lay literacy to that of the computer. And they do so often with as little competence in the use of the machine as the thirteenth century layman had in the use of pen and parchment.”
Ivan Illich

cascading style sheets

Emma at
Strange Girl continues her natural bookbinding. I also love the way Keith has annotated his thumbnails of paperbacks to make them look like live, living books. But, of course they are live, living books by the great Master of the book about books.

legacy dot com

The Future of the Book website is now six years old. In all that time the paper book has not disappeared and the electronic mongraph is still taking off.

All of the support and most of the motivation for this website is provided by BookNotes blogger
Craig Jensen at the
BookLab.

paratext paradigm

” The absence of interword space and interpunctuation at the end of antiquity was a reflection of the particular relationship of the antique reader to the book. The reintroduction of word separation in the early Middle Ages by Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes marks a dramatic change in that relationship. It is, therefore, the introduction of word separation that constitutes the great divide in the history of reading between antique cultures and those of the modern Occident.” Paul Saenger

AsPaulpointsoutimaginehowimpossiblethedevelop-mentofspellingsoftwarewouldbeiftherewasnoprompt ofthefinalspaceendingtheword!

Turns out that the paradigm shift away from scriptura continua also relocated the physiology of reading to a different region of the brain. Just a space at the end of each word. Makes the advent of writing and printing and the invention of the codex appear trivial!

îclutching the intangibleî

The new
Institute for the Future of the Book appears to be searching for the epistemic break that will define the relation of the paper book to its electronic analogs. That is a difficult business. The transitions are occuring in many layers.

Better to take the FotB approach and look away from the churn of formats and into reading behaviors. The cascade of reading modes clearly indicates the future. The cascade illustrates the persistence of the parent reading modes and, at the same time, allocates the hybrids and composites . The habitats of composite reading skills are all around us.

But the virtual library and its composite presentation confirms, rather than denies, the future role of print. If projectile predation set the neurological future of the hominids, the paper book remains the tangible conceptual work that our specie tosses across time and cultures. Which is not to deny the silicon based neurologies their own scrapbooks.

google the virtual library

“But Paul LeClerc, the president and chief executive of the New York Public Library, sees Web access as an expansion of libraries’ reach, not a replacement for physical collections. “Librarians will add a new dimension to their work,” Mr. LeClerc said. “They will not abandon their mission of collecting printed material and keeping them for decades and even centuries.”

The New York Times
reports the Google agenda to image research libraries. The time line is a decade.
What they are actually accomplishing is a browser version of ILL or interlibrary loan which usually never requires a whole text reply. The Google research library data base also confirms the continuing role of the paper collections, illustrating their capacity to compound meaning via multiple reading modes.

UICB historical printing studio

Here you will see three machines in action, each representing an important era of printing from metal type. The Reliance iron press represents the early centuries of letterpress printing, The Star Kelsey jobber recalls the work of innumerable small town trades people who printed everything from flour sacks to wedding announcements. The Model 31 Linotype line setting and casting machine commemorates the technology and operators who produced daily newspapers and popular books at lightning speed.

Reliance Iron Press

The earliest printing presses were made from wood. ìCommon pressesî were in use from about 1450 until the end of the 18th century, when it became possible to manufacture iron presses that were far more durable and precise. Iron hand presses were themselves replaced in the course of the 19th century by larger, faster rotary and platen presses, but presses for hand use like the Reliance continued to be made into the early 20th century. This Reliance was made in Chicago just after 1900. It was previously owned by R. Hunter Middleton, a type designer for Ludlow Typograph Company and fine press printer. In the 1970s, as he retired from printing, Middleton sold this press to cartography historian and amateur printer David Woodward, who used it in his Madison, Wisconsin, workshop. Woodward presented the press to The University of Iowa Center for the Book in 2003.

Star Kelsey Jobber

Do you recognize the distinctive tinkling of the ratchet of the inking plate and the whirl of the S spoke flywheel of the Kelsey Star? This is the same jobbing press that appears in the background of scenes from the Gun Smoke series. The Kelsey manufacturer is most remembered for small table top presses that enticed young printers in an era before electronic communications. With a Kelsey they could produce real print publications, however modest. Our floor model 7î x 11î Star is rare, but it represents the innumerable small production presses used in one or two person shops everywhere, at least in the United States. The platen jobber design was an especially American contribution to letterpress printing.

Mergenthaler Linotype

In 1885 Ottmar Mergenthaler developed the independent matrix typesetting machine. In 1890 Ottmar again improved his machine, creating the prototype for all subsequent Linotypes. This ingenious machine design for setting and casting individual lines then remained in use for over a century, establishing an enviable record in the fast moving printing technologies. For a skilled keyboard operator, the Linotype key arrangement still remains twice as fast as the keyboard arrangement attached to most computers!

By 1916 over 39,000 Linotype machines were at work with numerous machines in every large newspaper office composing room. A Linotype operator could set copy in one hour that would take a full day to set by handÖ and the machine then automatically distributed the mats while type had to be distributed piece by piece. In motion the Linotype is a mechanical acrobat of tumbling cams, manouvering elevators, dancing type mats and revolving mold wheel. It was the syncopation of the Linotype composing room, not just the whirl of the rotary presses, that produced the revolutionary new commodity of latest, up to the minute, News.

cell phone book

We always knew that cell phones were cameras and texting keypads, but now they are books as well. Sarah Glazer provides an
essay in the NY Times Book Review on the ultimate hand-held transformer that figures into the ebook future.

But wait, these minature displays should merge reading modes as well as their larger screened precursors. Forget the ebook premise; cell phones may be the ultimate exemplar of the composite reading mode intermingling verbal/visual, written and print parent modes,