futureofthebook.com

authentication

Florida will return to
paper ballots. Paper in libraries and elections provides a trail of authentication displaced by screen based representation.

where is Waldo?

The Bill Gates posting of a
da Vinci manuscript illustrates a continuing question. As on-line representations of print and manuscript culture increase study and engender new meaning, where does this new meaning reside? FotB suggests that new meaning resides not in the on-line surrogate, but in the physical original.

fallicies

As a regressive print advocate I enjoy the many fallacies I encounter about new reading, new writing and new publishing. I actually have a list of these excellent fallacies, all of them too simple to be true.

Popular fallacies of screen reading advocates

1. There is an analog/digital divide in the technologies of information transmission. (If there is any divide at all it is between paper and screen based reading.)

2. There is something distinctive about being “born digital”. (All information is born digital. How it grows up provides the distinction.)

3. We are experiencing a one-way transition from paper to screen. (Its actually a two-way, not a one-way transition.)

4. Screen based books can be equivalent to print books. (This assumption overlooks legibility, haptic and persistence attributes of print transmission that are not achieved in screen reading.)

5. The only history is the future. (Every revolutionary functionality of the book awaits rediscovery out of the past.)

6. The print library is obsolete. (Knowledge is in between books. The physical print library can be read and studied across time and cultures as relationships between books.)

tips and deals, collect them all

“Which type of nothingness cleaner would you hold vacuum cleaners? It many carrycase, it will probably boil down to convenience and derogatory favorite oreck vacuum cleaners. Sucking up brace washers of distinctive sizes, Sucking up sea from a five vessel and then we unhurried the intensity while piece so burnisher.”
(tips and deals)

not middle, but midway

In between is new and consequential.
Impetus Press shows the way. For other connections to the Iowa media scene tune in every so often to
UICB. Another spanner is
Fade Theory.

“Can someone tell me the proper definitions for:
Readability
Legibility
As time goes on, I continue to find the two used interchangably. Can anyone relate this to semiotics?”
Typophile

national print repository

The dark side of the National Print Repository is that it will act as a “last copy repository”. What we really need is a leaf master precept enhancing the status of print collections everywhere to act, perhaps primarily, as sources for imaging. It is one of the dumbfounding attributes of print that it is as machine legible as it is eye legible. (FotB outlined the leaf master functionality in February 2001)

exciting PARS meetings

All of library preservation is collections based; collections care, collections management and collections advocacy. This premise provides the library preservation specialty with its own window on the analog-digital divide.

It turns out that there is continuity between preservation of persistent collections presented on paper and preservation of persistent collections presented on the screen. This is especially so with the realization that preservation of screen presented collections is already an established practice from the microfilm era. Continuity also derives from the shared keyword “persistent”.

Not all digital collections are persistent but, instead, are constantly changing and, so, there is far from a one-to-one correlation of preservation services and screen based readership. For some digital readership sectors preservation is irrelevant. Many digital collections are presented and discarded almost instantaneously. Some persist only for a glance at search results. Many digital collections are effervescent.

On the other hand, some digital collections are persistent or need to be in the same way that some print collections need to be persistent. These portions of the screen presented library need care, management and advocacy services of preservation practice.

ALA/ALCTS/PARS knows this. Accordingly PARS has assumed responsibility to define digital preservation throughout the library community. PARS assumes the responsibility for administrative practice of preservation generally and the responsibility for collections practice with a division between practice for screen presented collections and paper presented collections. For the wider ALA there is the larger PARS responsibility to bring forward policy on digital preservation. This is urgent since ALA does not even have a policy statement on the digital library.

bound and determined

Bound and Determined: Identifying American Bookbindings will provide an exhibit, lectures and a one day symposium at the Bryn Mawr Library. Conducted by the legendary scholar of American bookbindings, Willman Spawn, this gathering will echo another such meeting that he assembled in 1971 at the American Philosphical Society.

textual studies

Charting major happenings in the world of early textual studies, this
distinctive blog has kindly linked to FotB.

disconnectivity 2

FotB is going to the
Seattle meeting of ALA, but probably doesn’t need to. In addition to a meeting Wiki there is the Second Life desination for the same thing.

“One of the most popular sites on the Internet, Second Life is an online world – at www.secondlife.com – in which people from all over the globe can interact. There are myriad locations and users navigate through them via their “avatar” – or, digital version of themselves.

The
Washington Office is located in Cybrary City next to several other libraries. Cybrary City is one of several islands that librarians are using on Second Life to provide services to the users of this community. Traditional library services – such as collection building, reference, and community gathering – have all been incorporated into this virtual world. More information on activities can be found at www.infoisland.org.”

er, but actually I do need to go to Seattle for the
Banks/Harris reception in the Space Needle.

disconnectivity

“The Renaissance brought the end of direct relation between the crafts people and the source of their materials.”
Chris Clarkson.

Like the transition from primary orality to writing, this distancing of the originator from the materiality of communication and from the tecnologies of its delivery, continues. It continues layer on layer of transformation until only the shadow of the message can be claimed by the originator.

Worst case, the originators will no longer know themselves except by looking at their projections on the screen.

real screen reader

Garmin International of Olathe, Kansas now has 27 models of hand held GPS/GIS devices opening an entire sector of location prompted reading.

The needed realization is that the e-book device is really a blank book awaiting field notes and travel journal uses. Global positioning systems (GPS) integrated with geographic intelligence systems (GIS) could extend the content of electronic books by providing live position of the physical reader in strange cultural and geophysical environments.

cyborg beat

“After two and a half years of virtually non-stop blogging, my perception of myself as a distinct individual has dramatically waned. My interior monologue has virtually disappeared. I no longer have aesthetic-based epiphanies, and I almost never concern myself with examining internal passions or emotions anymore. Blogging has not just changed the activities in which I engage–the activities in which I engage in order to be a successful blogger have profoundly altered the way my mind operates and the way I conceptualize my agency in relation to others. In effect, I do not exist in the same way I once existed.”
Chris Bowers

new news

Looks like a newspaper, acts like a portal.
Arts & Letters Daily

networked worlds

“Two hundred years ago, roads and sailing routes networked the world. Wars and fortunes rode on timely news, but post horses and packet boats could no longer travel fast or far enough to beat the competition among nations or businesses. Then, beginning in the 1840s, a web of electrical wires overcame time and distance. The need to communicate had spurred people to create new technologies.
The telegraph and its heir, the Internet, gave rise to new networked worlds. Both technologies generated spectacular leaps in the speed of communication, and both quickly grew beyond even their creators’ wildest dreams.”
The Once and Future Web

All the great paradigm shifts happened in the 19th century. Photo-derived imaging, digital encoding, instantaneous and electrical communication are a few of them. And these paradigm shifts took place in environments that were truely unsuspecting. There has been nothing like this lately.

post-print

The easily displacement of handwriting or typewriter copy by the typography of computer display has disguised the fact that most on-line presentation is still in flux and not the author’s final word. Most on-line publication activities and applications are still presenting writing, editing and revision associated with collaborative authoring.

Why is on-line publication referred to as “posting”? Perhaps it is because “publishing” is still the threshold between manuscript and print and the on-line presentation, however final, is associated with traditional broadside posting on the great bill board of the web.

Today relentless, typographic rendering has made a holographic, authorial document indistinguishable from any other copy or republication. There was an ambiguity between writing and publishing in the manuscript era, but it was due to distinguishable copies.

new page

The sculptural, 3 dimensional potential of the print book is underutilized due to narrow conventions of print presentation. The concertina structure, for example, has been relegated greeting card functions when it and its derivatives can support layers of content and multi page displays. The old codex is also overdue for some innovation especially as regards the restrain of a single beginning. The 3 dimensional codex format can easily provide multiple entries. Best of all, the fundamentals of print navigation are so well assimilated that variations present little challenge to legibility.

Such a hybrid with networked writing and innovation in print presentation is a natural scenario for the digital book.

search for perspective

“There is way too much obsession with search, as if it were the end of the world,î said Esther Dyson, a well-known technology investor and forecaster. ìGoogle equals money equals search equals search advertising; it all gets combined as if this is the last great business model.î
NYTimes

“ChaCha is able to connect you with the somebody who knows the something you want to know. Not only can they point you in the right direction, we’ve often found that communicating with a Guide can expand your general knowledge on the subject or even turn you on to new or different information that’s even more relevant to what you’re searching for.”

Internet searching was free to invent itself separately from library reference models and so it is now free to return to traditional models of the research librarian as another innovation.

A further perspective needed is that the on-screen resources are in flux and as a result searching is the predominant access mode as contrasted with attentive consideration of print resources. In the on-line environment searching becomes the process of research.

“Neither project (Google Book Search or Microsoft Live Search) has any serious potential to disrupt libraries or make their print collections less valuable.”
Walt Crawford