futureofthebook.com

reality check

A
Kirtas type scanner will do 1200 pages per hour straight flipping. If you ran one 24/7 (never stopping to change books) you could do a million books printed between 1918 and 1923 (average page count 300) in about 30 years or if you had ten scanners at work 3 years. In three years another million books would be copyright accessible. Every subsequent three year period the million book increment will prove less adequate. To sustain the project a different technology scanning the closed book will be needed. But raw capture time does not include image processing or reformatting for the web. And so onÖ

Anyway, even if we are talking about the speed of light and all print is suddenly simulated on-line, there are still other thresholds to consider. These are constraints of bionic eye reading, ergonomics of comprehension and retention and haptics of specific reading formats. I am not convinced that the codex mechanism, refined across cultures for over two millennia, can suddenly be superceded by screen based presentation, That is something like imagining cars superceded by the airplane.

institutional digital repository

Clifford Lynch provided another Iowa big heads
power conference on the latest Google immunization for libraries. They must grab back their content since they have already lost proprietary access services.

slugline hotmetal type composition

“Keep burning polymer for line art, but entrust your text, the letters you press, to a source for things, not pictures of things.”
Linotypesetting.com

paper or plastic?

Contrasts between
paper or screen presentation are churning the scrapbook community. As with other graphic production, its not the underlying production technology, but the delivery format that imposes choice and changes meaning.

the greatest story ever told so greatly

The
History and Power of Writing by Henri-Jean Martin is as compelling as scripture, as exciting as the Iowa State Fair and as filled with ideas and wonderful understandings as the mind of a great scholar can be. Best of all the 591 pages tell a story if the first importance to all those curious about the future of the book.

What a magnificent landscape across time and cultures! Beyond aphabetic writing to musical annotation, the periodic table, website animation or Asian pictographic character mutually readable by people who cannot understand each other’s dialect; the sweep of this narration of communication invention is awesome. The ideas are dumbfounding and twist and exercise the reader with each theme.

“As the centuries passed, written discourse in the strict sense, with its full freight of rhetoric, was more and more clearly inadequate to deal with advances in knowledge.” Henri-Jean Martin

Here are the parables of the future of the book.

past as preface

Composite instruction, presenting both the history and future of a subject, may be a developing idea for book studies courses. (1) The commodification for instruction is similar; both past and future are projected based on existing evidence with agreement on general themes, but with tangents of specialization. The hybrid curriculum may also have appeal to the students. (more)

speed text faster than pop-ups

“Is Google holding off on image ads because of inadequate infrastructure? No, responds Ms. Mayer. She says Google uses
text for ads because of cognitive science: text has the highest information density and allows users to scan a lot of information at the highest speed, or, as she phrased it, “the bit rate on text is very fast.” Anything that gets in the way of speed-reading must go. “

Walt hammers hyperbole

A magnificent critical commentary Library Futures, Media Futures on blog exchanges relating to the
advent and functionality of the ebook is now posted by Walt Crawford in his
Perspective format.

The inappropriate obsession here is that the future of libraries will be determined only by their response to digital delivery systems. That’s loony. The future of libraries will be determined by their interweaving of digital finding aids with print resources just as it has been for the last 40 years.

The digital revolution as a displacer of the functionality of print does not exist. Ebooks simply compile various arrays of the parent reading modes into electronic presentation formats. Look at the book store chains for a demonstration of this; they treat non-paper book products, each in turn, as a sales fad, At the same time they expand their print sales as their core product.

“In 1992 we were told repeatedly that by the turn of the century print books would be passÈ, with most people reading from ebook readers. The century mark came and went. Ebook sales failed to reach 0.1% of the book market. A decade came and went. Ebook sales still havenít approached 0.5% of the book market and dedicated ebook readers continue to be essentially dead.”
Walt Crawford

Could there be a deep embedded
ergonomic of comprehension at work here?

blooks, blog binders

Printing blogs as books. Its a
two-way street.

See also New Publishers
Journal

Walt and Sam

With a book, it is initially a paradox that we convey conceptual works via physical objects. But that paradox pales in context of another; that there is little correlation between the activities of making that object and the concepts conveyed.
(more)

revenue stream for the future of the book

The Annual Conference on the Future of the Book is selling
by-product.

tips on talks

Power Point is an interesting exemplar. As with the Carousel projector and the
teleprompter, the technologies augmenting recitation or oral delivery do provide examples of spontaneous and then persistent delivery accessories.

But I would hesitate to apply the transitions in oral delivery as a model for print to screen delivery. It’s a question of establishing the taxonomies of the reading modes before recognizing your exemplars.

The Power Point printout is also not a prompt to print, but to manuscript annotation. This is an important threshold distinction, which has been considered by the great investigators of reading mode thresholds such as Walter Ong, Henri Jean-Martin, Roger Chartier and others.

“GET SLEEKER – Nothing sucks the life out of a meeting quite like a flat, boring presentation. To sharpen your show and keep yawning at bay, try Ovation ($100), a new software tool that takes your existing PowerPoint file and morphs it into a professional-looking talk. It even lets you create a scrolling teleprompter onscreen to help you deliver your message more effectively.”
Times