futureofthebook.com

try to get ready for this idea!

“The tendency of alphabetic writing to transmit the flow of spoken discourse was so strong that it long neglected to separate words and sentences. Finally, it never proved capable of expressing anything more than language, so that it was ill-suited to the task when it was called on to break out of the framework of language. This limitation is particularly noticeable in our own century.” Henri-Jean Martin

What if the infrastructure of on-line reading is malapropted on language when a decisive visual literacy is needed?

library school students interview FotB

What will be the continuing role of print in the context of digital research, especially in instances where the whole text of the print is imaged and available on-line?

As a starting point, why not assume that print will increasingly backup digital delivery? Lack of storage space is an excuse, rather than a rational, for limiting such a continuing role for print. Cooperative storage and shared repositories of paper collections create, rather than consume, storage space. This paradox is realized as last copy registration enables weeding of general collections. Leaf mastering or retention of print for on-demand scanning, elevates, rather than diminishes, the status of print. In addition to last copy registration, increased security and storage environments and trusted retention accord a credible backup role to print.

Do print collections have inherent attributes in the context of digital delivery?

All printed materials are originals and all screen drawings are copies. Print leaf master better controls authentication and augmentation or commercialization of content and it simplifies access rights and privileges when compared with digital surrogates.

Print materials have inherent legibility while screen legibility is impaired by loading delays, browser errors, navigational interruptions, and unwanted pop-ups. Such impediments will be dismissed by on-line reading advocates as temporary deficiencies correctable by the advance of technologies of connectivity. But the reverse appears to be happening. Link rot, application up-grades, email congestion and system cut-overs all load further illegibility to on-screen reading.

Print materials have persistence. Because the burdensome obligation of long term preservation is primarily assigned to research libraries and other intellectual property custodians, print can be given a leaf master status. In the leaf master concept, paper copies are held primarily for on-demand scanning or for backup of image files. This continuing role is already established in ILL service. Also, paper preservation and its retrieval over time are less mediated and less expensive than such requirements for computer media.
Print also provides haptic features that enhance learning and retention as the hands prompt the mind in an ergonomic of comprehension. At first it is odd that concepts should be conveyed by physical objects. Electronic transmission better mimics the neural connectivity of the mind, but the physical book better engages the hands to prompt the mind. We recall read precepts in their physical location on the page of a specific book. Other fingerings of page turning and manipulations of book structure work as prompts to our progression through content.
In contrast to the punctuation of the paper page, the on-line page is manipulated with impaired haptic feedback. The ìprevious/nextî click, the cursor slider and scroll tabs utilize grip and finger motion directed to the mouse and keyboard, but not to the substrate of the text. At least two other layers of interruption intervene. There is the electrified, rather than manual, instigation and an indirect interfacing via the navigational software. With a book, the reader is the interface.

Do print collections have attributes beyond inherent characteristics?

Print collections work well in tandem with digital research. Print materials lack search attributes and screen presented resources lack persistence. Utilized together they each tend to compensate each otherís deficiencies. But, such a hybrid use is not full evolved. Currently the scenarios for digital research involving books (i.e., Google Print) favor screen-to-print, and not print-to-screen routines. Use scenarios that visualize super session of print collections by digital surrogate are not as promising or as well indicated as continuing mutual enhancement.

Another, wider role of print is connected to its physical format and the physical place of the library. The strategic centrality of the library on campus is not distinguished by digital access, but by physical collections and their physical place. Crucial social behaviors, such as student peer learning outside of class, are well accommodated in context with the physical library and its print collections. Literacy instruction is discipline neutral and well situated in the library. The mandate of the library as a museum is not as compelling as the library as a setting for learning. The physical collections and the physical library engender scenarios for the centrality of the library on campus.

Finally, print cultivates a primary reading skill which with other classical reading skills of the verbal and visual domain are required, in their composite, to provide the needed on-line, screen based reading skill.

Amana Colony prints again

Today (May 25, 2005) letterpress printing was restored to the Amana Colonies as Larry Raid and Gary Frost revived the model 31 Linotype in the blacksmith shop in Homestead Iowa.

This project of the
Amana Heritage Society will recreate the historical printing operation that printed everything from hymnals to flour sacks.

The Amana Colonies offer a fascinating historical example of printing in Iowa. The community or sect had a printing tradition that stems back to its European origins in the 18th century. The community printed books, pamphlets and ephemera in its first American home in Ebenezer (near Buffalo) New York and later in Amana Iowa. Over one hundred different books were printed in Amana from 1865-1930! In addition the print shop printed notices and pamphlets for its church services as well as social organization and business ventures. Most of the material for community use was printed in German using a Fraktur type face. Many jobs were also printed in English. The type cases of the shop and the “job books” of the shop in which samples of the jobs are pasted still survive and are now in the museum of the Amanas Heritage Society. Examples of Colony publications also survive. The work of the Amana print shop is well documented and offers a rich example of the printing art and profession in Iowa.

planetarium of letters

This wonderful column of letterforms illuminates the summer evenings between the Library and Communications building on the campus of the University of Iowa.

The artist is
Jim Sanborn.

choosing book arts

Book arts are both timeless and modern. Many other attributes make the arts of the book strange and irresistible. First, the book arts teach that the hands prompt the mind. Second the field of book arts engages an expanse of technologies across history and into the future. Thirdly, the book arts challenge the creative person to share the aesthetic experience with a wider community of thoughtful people who are readers.
(more)

weirdly, books for ever

Here you see the younger Gary and older David in the Newberry Library conservation lab in the early 70’s. We have now changed places and Gary is the white hair. But the book work goes on.

Just out of the picture are Norvelle Jones and Paul Banks. Reggie Walker, the black book artist who introduced the legacy of African bookwork to us all, has already left for New York. John Dean is at work upstairs in the last in-house bindery in a US library and the Library is about to order the last oak card catalog cabinet ever to be produced. Only Bill Towner, Director of the Newberry, in his wisdom, would put up with such homage to the book.

two libraries are better than one

The
transliteracies conference is poised to consider the issues crucial to the future of the book. It will examine and compare print and screen based reading, looking for a basic taxonomy of reading behaviors. The accomplished participants are likely to map the needed research agendas.

The UCSB conference
topic of on-line reading is gracefully defined. We will watch this June conference closely and hope that it will find further development in the UI July conference (see side link). An underlying issue is the distinction between print and on-line research and the advisability of separating the print and digital libraries. Perhaps two libraries are better than one. Perhaps the digital library has been built within the print libraries by accident.

bookbinding across time and cultures

Everyone knows that books tell stories, but this
exhibit tells the story of books. The University of Iowa Libraries north Lobby exhibit presents this fascinating story of the making of books. You will learn about the structure of books across time and cultures and discover how the old fashioned paper book is moving into the digital future. You will also be fascinated by the replicas or models of important historical book bindings from the Libraries unique collection.

Through the use of book binding models the exhibit illustrates surprising current developments that point to a prosperous future for the old fashioned paper book. While 26 million enthusiasts have turned to the paper book format to produce family scrapbooks another enthusiasm of publishers for ìprint-on-demandî technologies has created a new readership for scholarly books.

Then view a desert landscape with the recreation of the books in jars found in Egypt. These Gospels on papyrus proved to be 16 centuries old, yet they were immediately readable to scholars. Donít count on our ìebooksî and their computer media lasting as long! When it comes to transmitting information across time and culture, it turns out that the ancient technology is more advanced than our own.

Over 70 fabulous replicas of historical book bindings and an array of other unique illustrations and information on the story of books awaits your visit.

POD distribution center

The
Chicago Digital Distribution Center of the University of Chicago Press is assuring the salvation of the university presses, their exotic publications and the future of the paper book.

Greer Allen, who has just passed on, would be proud that the University of Chicago Press which he directed continues to enable scholarly publication. In Greer’s day it was the syncopation of the dancing Monotype casters rather than the jet stream from the POD copiers that made it happen. But the expertise and leadership at the U of C Press was the same. And their dedication to the paper book is unchanged.

libraries without books

The
undergraduate library at the UT Austin will be emptied of books to convert the space into an information commons.

About time. Young readers no longer begin research in books. They may follow their on-line quiries to books, but they may also pursue purely digital research.

In other words they are skilled in both print and screen based reading modes. It is only appropriate that universities have dedicated facilities for each kind of reading, just as they have classrooms for live interactions.

What can be wrong with segregation in this instance? We should separate the library of books from the commons of terminals. The separation can enhance the learning environment for each type of reading.

blog/print hybrid

Dave Munger is formatting a blook. This screen presentation will present print content augmented with blog interactive features.

The result may be equivalent to an affectation of the manuscript era when content of the classics was presented with contemporary commentaries in the margins. The increasingly corrupting and disrupting commentaries were only purged in the 16th century when classic texts appeared in print, less their medieval commentaries.

If only Dave had positioned blogs between books, I would be more interested in blooks. What the multiple screen/print interaction needs is a new mediary format that captures the cogitations on the relations and implications of separate works.

There is no autonomous book and there is no autonomous blog. Moby Dick cannot be the first and last book that a reader considers. Instead the reader excerpts this work from the library and understands it in a context with other books. That phenomenon deserves blogging. In fact there should be a blog between every book.

***” and lightning so cheap”

“One isn’t a printer ten years without setting up acres of good and bad literature, and learning – unconsciously at first, consciously later – to discriminate between the two “

Here we see Sam Clemens at age fifteen as a type compositor in Hannibal Missouri. He has set his name in the stick. He knows he must set it backwards for the camera. A and M are symetrical, but the letter S will appear reversed regardless of how he turns it. So how did he do it?

Answer: He didn’t use an S. Quick young Sam went to the sorts and pulled out a squash ornament. As a piece of type, it just happens to look like an S.

(On April 30, Larry Raid and Gary Frost had the honor of demonstrating 19th century printing for the official opening of the Sam Clemens
Home Museum in Hannibal Missouri.)

Bookless Future

The ìbookless futureî in the David A. Bell essay (The New Republic, May 2&9, 2005) will be realized when scholarship finds itself incapable of producing persistent publications. It must be apparent that the three examples of on-line research in the essay describe access in ìtwo minutesî, ìin less than a minuteî and in a ìfew clicksî to call up texts that have persisted in print for over two centuries. So which attribute; the quick access or the long persistence is more crucial for the scholar? Scholarship must depend upon text transmission that is, by default, persistent. Electronic publication does not yet assure persistence.

The essay does project the importance of changing reading behaviors and the needed versatility of the scholarís reading skill. I feel that this premise is not emphasized enough. Who cares how nearly book-like the hand held reading device becomes, if the on-line reading skill is fundamentally different from classical parent modes of reading? Screen based reading now compiles elements of the verbal/visual mode, the written mode and the print mode of expression, simultaneously mimicking and mixing the classical formats in a single screen presentation. Add to this the layers and branching options for the reading pathway. Then add to all this, keyword searching and the real possibility of wandering off. Of course books have multiple readings too, but the reader is the interface.

One missed opportunity here is a better description of the emerging interactivity of print and screen reading. Search engines and data bases such as Google Print are moving quickly to interplay screen queries with print results, but the more scholarly path from print to screen is still mysterious. The search engines mine information, but only a librarian or scholar can build coherent collections and effectively follow the implications of books shelved or positioned together. Between each shelved book is another latent book and these multiple arrangements of books prompted the real revolution of print over manuscript.

There are a number of other fundamental attributes of the book as an ergonomic device for comprehension and there are deeply embedded reasons why we chose to convey conceptual works in physical objects. In my view, the booke vs. ebook contest is an arbitrary dispute unless the contest clarifies the attributes of each used together.