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.