emerging technologies conference
Here is an interesting
format; produce your own lecture series with a focus on ebooks.
let Google digitize your brittle book program
“We are not interested in a fixed amount of spending for a set of titles selected by the University of Michigan from digitized versions of their holdings. We may be interested in purchasing individual titles of our choosing at about $40 to replace brittle or lost books or to fill in our collection with titles we would like.”
Collection Development Team, University of Iowa
old literacies and new ones
Another thing to mention is that the conventions of page layout are not as old as the propensities to identify and read pattern in the nature world. Actually exemplars of the papyrus page, beautiful Greek letter Coptic on the half square page, that are millennia old are only recent instances of pattern interpretation.
A much older convention of reading left no such trace. It initiated text interpretation and text sharing and helped to set the conventions of the page. It also diverted the hominid series from a strict behavioral path to a path of literacy. This early literacy was the identification and interpretation of animal tracks. This literacy of great works has disappeared.
What is odd is that we still know the exemplar of the papyrus page. We know it and have it in our catalog of pattern depiction because the exemplars actually survive to the present day. This is really odd. All of the conventions of writing and typography interrelate because the exemplars survive side-by-side.
I wonder if the exemplars, the conventions and esthetics of screen based reading best compile into a literacy similar to animal tracking. This would then be a literacy lost within each generation and conveyed only as a temporary exemplar without context in a persistent physical medium.