futureofthebook.com

last straw

The United States papermaking industry may be the last to decline to Chinese imports. The
NewPage mill in Luke MD represents a remnant industrial economy.

pdf galley gab

Here is a hybrid, a pdf
news sheet exemplifying conventions of both paper and screen to mutual advantage. Its loaded with fascinating discussion to dwell on.

non-news

“The dusty world of book publishing has taken a
step into cyberspace as Random House and HarperCollins letting customers browse books online.

Random House, whose writers include Danielle Steel and Norman Mailer, said on Tuesday it will let consumers search and browse through more than 5,000 of its titles on the Internet through a new service called Insight.”

From the perspective here this
development is akin to the advent of publishers’ catalogs; of interest to readers and book retailers, but not changing the landscape of paper and screen transmission or subtracting from the functionality of print.

slow dancing

“The digital talent for short-term solutions was understood as itself a profound long-term problem.” Stewart Brand, 1998
Time and Bits

A discordance between cultural transformations paced in centuries and a churn of cutural transmission technologies with a backward compatibility of months produces the uncertain functionality of the screen based book. The book was invented, to begin with, to match the pace of cultural transformations. Once achieved it became an engine of those transformations and many new futures were engendered. I suspect the print book will surprise us again generations from now.

ancientmoderntimeless

The elegant
sewn boards binding structure is now 20 or 1200 years old, depending on how you count time. Based on the Coptic double cover of the 8th century and reinvented on-stage at an
LBS conference in 1987, this timeless structure prefigures the future of the book.

Get the
kit. Get the
card.

building a bridge to the 18th c

Return with us now to those golden years of yesterday, brouse the 18th c.

HA! haptic

“There is no reason they should be harder to understand. But we think readers develop strategies about how to remember and comprehend printed texts, but these students were unable to transfer those strategies to computerized texts.”
readability study

The duh moment was picked up from an
IT blog with kindly reference to FotB.

(I am convinced that the
YouTube skit has been there over a year but not discovered by the IT help desk audience. The first exposure was to the theme of the scroll to codex transition a dead end, but the metaphor to screen text navigation training is both relevant and profound.)

art of the book

Book artists accentuate and define their practice in the context of the
narrow discipline of when they should project in the much more comprehensive and lively domain of the art of the book. This is where a much larger community of content providers operate.

Environments such as the
writing university or the
literacy and literature center can position book art in a more generative relation with the domain of the transmission of conceptual works. The WU even positioned Richard Minsky as a content provider.

origone ioway

The
library of the University of Oregon has kindly posted links both for FotB and UICB.

gift economy publishing

“In their terms, it’s pretty hard to argue that a search index such as google is a transformative use of the OW, because it only has meaning to the extent that it guides one accurately to the literal text of somebody elseís work.”
IFotB

The interface of bibliographic utilities with bibliographic works engenders authentic new meaning but where does the new meaning “reside”? Weirdly it resides in the source original. In essence protection is conveyed to suddenly extended content stuck onto the parent format.

This is how the gift economy of on-line content search profits print publishers way beyond simple promotion.

iowa book arts caucus

First in the nation, in a strange way, the
UICB. Now at this scrolling news watch.

university of book arts

The
University of the Arts London has kindly linked FotB to its select web resources for the book arts.

the failure of fine printing

A recent
essay discounts fine printing because it does not induce, and frequently distracts from, efficient reading. But any innocuous literary and graphic content can be compensated by graceful physical qualities and elegant production skills. The materialities of the book can be read as well and can produce very rewarding stories and adventures.

a well observed bad opening

But when particular goals of graceful physical qualities and elegant production skills are unachieved in fine printing, they are unachieved exactly in the context in which these qualities can comprise the content. For example a crippled structural action is rather typical of fine press books; the cover falls away while the text pages remain wedged closed. Or the text block is raggy with deckle edges when trimmed edges would better reveal the drape and spread of the opening, or, there is too much margin whiteness for the little blackness of the printing. Such stilted material features make the fine press book haptically unreadable. This is much more serious than any skimmed poetry.

stay tuned

The Codex Foundation symposium is in progress. A wonderful array of Centers and Presses will ask each other how letterpress book making will advance beyond the challenge of doing it at all.

It is a strange feeling to see a conceptual work of imagination and expression set and locked up in metal. Its a fixture of thought and then the press is worked and the reading begins all over again. The printing is an interlude of art and action.

imprimatur

The second edition of
The Book History Reader is bigger than the first. This textbook for book studies courses now includes a completely new section titled “The Future of the Book”. Three essays by Mark Poster, Paul Duguid and Geoffrey Nunberg provide the substance with introductory supplied by the editors David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery.

The editors have also published a stand-alone
Introduction to Book History which also features an essay on the future of the book.

Anyway, it about time. The legacy of the book is the futures that it has engendered across the centuries. Many would say that the future of the book is even more relevant now in the context of digital delivery, but, really, the future of the book has always been relevant.

searching for the engine

Search engine accessory is not peculiar to screen reading. The precursor paratext and matrix text format goes back to Origen and his
Hexapla. What is more and more novel is the
automation of prompts to reading uninitiated by the reader. This diversion has advanced to activities of artificial or machine reading.

radio with video

Screen presentations do not mimic previous presentation conventions, materials or formats and they donít mimic them in a very interesting way.
Screen presentations compile audio, video, text, and navigation, writing and reading interfaces with increasing disregard for boundaries previously imposed by precursor media. In this context they have skipped the mimic phase of incunabulum. But composite screen based presentation may not skip another phase exemplified by the print book as it progressed in uses and refinements across centuries. This trait is even stranger.

It is now recognized that books printed in the 15th century are, to this day, exemplars of what the print book can achieve. They were not primitive but elegant, robust, legible, efficient and persistent. Why this maturity should be projected by the first productions is a bit of a mystery, but that mystery may also be a clue to the as yet unrecognized maturity of computer screen presentation. What you see is what you get.

Side effects of the influence of composite presentation are emerging beyond the domain of the screen in
radio. Can print be far behind?

magicians of the codex 3

“One major consequence of the shift to digital is the addition of graphical, audio, and video elements to the written word. More profound, however, is the book’s reinvention in a networked environment. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is not bound by time or space. It is an evolving entity within an ecology of readers, authors and texts. Unlike the printed book, the networked book is never finished: it is always a work in progress.”
IfotB

One question is how many defining charateristics of a shoe horn can be discarded. It may also be relevant that a shoe horn isn’t everything.

magicians of the codex 2

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.

“Harry Potter has much to tell us about the ways in which the arcana of intellectual property and industry-specific security and logistical
concerns have come to infiltrate broader practices of everyday life. The UI
Communications Studies Department and
UICB partner to bring Professor Ted Striphas to share his award-winning research.”

magicians of the codex

“Origen’s Hexapla made innovative use of parallel columns to enable students of the Old Testament to move from version to version. Immense in size, fabulously expensive to produce, the multiple volumes of this great compilation were the most celebrated single possession of what, in Eusebius’s time, became the great Christian library at Caesarea. Origin’s Bible, laid out in columns, seems the most obvious prototype for Eusebius’s effort to lay out time in the same way.”

Origen at the turn of the third century and Eusebius at the turn of the forth, in monumental scholarly acts, invented the codex as a gymnastic reference tool. Learn the epic story in graceful, clear and electrifying detail in Grafton and Williams
Christianity and the Transformation of the Book.

Baghdad librarians

These
exemplars do the best they can without hesitation. No sick days. If they can save the books they will save their culture . They work alone and abandoned and terrorized. No sick days.

event unfolding 3

The chaos of the web and collaborative web writing is real. Try any kind of physics based on innumerable observers. The secret of print is the direction of innumerable observers to a fixed array. Another secret of print is the presentation of the conceptual work in a physical object. The physical object acts as a karaoke cursor and each reader appears to be in possession of the conceptual work. Its the wave of the future of the book.

event unfolding 2

A strange enough event unfolding; one of those IT specialists with beads of sweat came in today and wants to vend print cards from the
Zine Machine. It happens that the transaction needs dispersion so that hard copy can be better infused to the digital library. And evidently we are a rare rabbit hole between screen and paper; a SnackShop 110-112
gravity drop vending machine converted to sell free Zines. Any environment is special to the observer. I said that our key will open any machine on campus.

extra bound

All the news items that pop-up on the Sony Reader are now one year old. It may be an indication of desperation that there is now an extra bound,
leather covered version. The more it mimics the paper exemplar, the quicker it will disappear.

And this is in context with a dire need for a portable, hand-held with live connectity for reading environments such as instructional class support, cultural tourism and neighborhood shopping.

last mile

There are 800 million personal computers in the world, but only 280 million are connected. The rest are ìstuck in the 1980sî.
The advent of
universal connectivity will open the “digital library” and that event will reopen the print library.

Historical Printing: a seminar on letterpress transmission, Fall 2007

This one hour credit seminar course will introduce the experience of letterpress printing in relation to its historical consequences. Students will pursue fieldwork and workshop production related to a specific historical technology, society and publication genre and present this research to the class forum. This seminar will establish student understanding of the historical and contemporary consequence of letterpress printing in a context of changing transmission technologies.

Introductory readings and tutorials as well as access to collection resources and workshop facilities will be provided. The class forum will meet one hour a week, during an evening session in the Conservation Lab of the Main Library.

Class forum facilitators will include Lanny Haldy, Director of the Amana Heritage Society, Larry Raid, Director of the
Working Linotype Museum, Bethany Templeton, Linotype compositor,
Joint SLIS/UICB program, Gary Frost, Conservator,
University Libraries Preservation department. The seminar is produced within the program of the University of Iowa
Center for the Book.