futureofthebook.com

iowa caucus

“The first-ever Iowa Book Festival in Adel on April 28, 2007 promises to be one of those rare and special events where everyone can have fun and learn something at the same time.”

We are off to Adel Iowa with Jeep and dew drop trailer for the
Iowa Book Festival. Who know what will transpire, but FotB suspects that this will be a gathering of the print, not screen, readers. Iowa has a knack for futurist selections.

04.29.07 Well, we are back and had a great time. The print world is swirling out in Adel and the square was filled with little publish-on-demand stands and corn dog venders.

other side of mirror

“Don could not get the 31 to go through a cycle. He called me and
after fifteen minutes, he had it to go. The next afternoon I called him
and told him what I dreamt about on how to press the first elevator
down as it descends the first time and it went through cycle, and he
got all excited. It just needed to be oiled a little on the V ways.

Checked the plugin and it was 110 on each leg. Took the plug apart,
and I had stepped on it about four weeks ago and the ground wire
came out of its leg and went over against the other leg, making 220
volts. Placed the wires back into the correct legs and the motor
starts and the heat comes up correctly.” Larry Raid

This computer presented mirror is different from sun rendered print. Another metaphor for the screen is the night sky, dots on black that require special encoded interpretation. But Ong’s Ramus “method” of deploying ideas in space is at work in both. Neither spacial depiction of ideas, print or screen, is self referencial (except by a presumptive observer). Both actually are two different methods of visualizing ideas that reference each other.

second life economy for the arts and crafts of the book

The
Codex Foundation has demonstrated the possibility of an invigorated market for the arts and crafts of the hand made book. This economy will ride the wave of another economy of screen based reading, but know its own future. Subversion even, as the paper book ends up the purchased product of free digital search and and quick screen discovery.

The murkier zone is refinding the skills needed to produce these things and rediscovering the will to lead a life of book making.

born and reborn digital

The final issue of RLG
DigiNews. One ten year transition has transpired. ” Feature Article 1: Digital Imaging – How Far Have We Come and What Still Needs to be Done?
Feature Article 2: A Digital Decade: Where Have We Been and Where Are We Going in Digital Preservation?”

names of the library

We have been warned; we cannot call the new building “remote storage”. These expensive new warehouses for lesser used collections must have a more appealing name. Why are we constructing new buildings to keep old books anyway?

Unfortunately Administration now wants us to call it an “archival library” which, of course makes no sense, confuses everyone and hardly has a more positive connotation. I say call it the “preserved collections library”. This name tells the truth and puts the focus on a positive university value.

Or, maybe “preserved collections center” since the library order of books is not preserved. Or “quiet media building”.

SHARP book

ìParticipants in this workshop will learn about ten historical bookbinding structures, from Antiquity to the present. Tips for structural identification and description of bookbindings will be discussed. Participants will produce an Ethiopian codex in a Mahdar. This amulet codex is perfect for SHARP conference notes.î

Dont miss the four days of
SHARP pagentry or the pre-conference including
Iowa Book Works at MCBA.

what if book

What if the massive efforts to bring print books to the screen resulted in their reprinting? Such a scenario is already suggested as the on-line print libraries act as bibliographic utilities, enabling searching but not reading. This divide of searching, but not reading is then accentuated by new print on demand technologies. The smart desk top printer with screen view print-preview will produce the desired paper book.

“Google Book Search project basically makes books more findable rather than replacing them.” Other print positive trends .in the context of digital delivery are summarized in the May issue of
Cites and Insights.

aliteracy and aculture

“Putting it too starkly, in the 1830s and 1840s the photograph overcame time and the telegraph overcame space.” John Durham Peters,
Speaking into the Air, A History of the Idea of Communication.

Was the paradigm shift of these precursors of photo imaging and instant communication accentuated with the advent of screen based reading? Well, yes and no. While space is ever more dissolved by computer connectivity, time has reasserted its grip. Not only is hourly currency a measure of meaning for screen readings, but the consequence of a time transcending witness, of archival persistence, has been demeaned and made impractical. Like aliteracy (a disinclination to read by those who can) this reversion may be a projection of things to come in a culture (or aculture?) without historical position.

font

The
ambience of a type font is as interesting to appreciate as the haptics of a book.

“Helvetica has played a crucial role in providing shape and tone to the modern visual landscape ñ the “perfume of the city” in M¸ller’s florid words. And Helvetica’s Q-Score will skyrocket next weekend when filmmaker Gary Hustwit (director of I Am Trying to Break Your Heart about rock band Wilco) screens his documentary Helvetica at Hot Docs (April 21 and 22).”

triads of the book

“The printing curriculum points in at least three directions,” said Matthew P. Brown, director of the Center for the Book. “The studios provide an historical awareness of how print shops operated in the past. They nurture fine press and artist’s book production in the present. And, through this creative practice, they offer research environments fostering innovations in design crucial to future incarnations of the book.”

This very useful triad of
UICB printing instruction can be extended to the other specializations of book making as well. Lettering and writing and book illustration, bookbinding, book papermaking and book designing all can move in at least these three directions.

And one good triad deserves two others. Such as the domains of book making, book art and book studies or another triad of industry supporters in book paper industry, book publishing industry, and book printing industry. There is also a triad of reading contexts for the book. The context of reading from paper, a counter context of reading from screen and aliteracy (the context of readers who choose not to read).

er, now we have four triads.

paper or plastic

Here is a
wiki presenting design philosophy for e-book viewer-programs and authoring-tools. The presentation format selected is the codex with 22 of the features related to page navigation. If the scroll format is considered other navigation options would be presented. But is there a native screen format possible? Yes, if the reading device is a presumed blank book awaiting browser rendering of any format. It may even be time to admit that default to browser presentation is the destiny of native screen format.

another great new book studies program

“The Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) and Illinoisís Rare Book & Manuscript Library announce the creation of the
Midwest Book & Manuscript Studies (MBMS) program. The program draws on leaders from the field to offer high quality, intensive courses on the history of manuscripts and books and the unique skills and approaches to librarianship that such collections require. Courses include the history of the book, special collections librarianship, archival studies, and printing history.”

visit the best book materials makers

New websites for
Pergamena and
Shanna give us a wonderful feeling that the craft skills for excellent book making are alive to this day.

will the real e-book pop-up all around us?

“Area residents and visitors to the
Amana Colonies can now explore the communityís heritage through a high-tech game of navigation and puzzle-solving using the Global Positioning System (GPS). The Amana Heritage Societyís ìPassport to Historyî GPS adventure is a fun, educational, and family-friendly activity. Itís a great way to tour the Amana villages. You can get started on your adventure by picking up your passport and instructions at the Amana Heritage Museum. Use your own in-car or handheld GPS unit, or borrow one from the museum.”

Get ready for this; the real e-book is a blank book. The hand-held reading device tour can also be the souvenir print-out. A personalized book-on demand. Or any travel log, or any family trip. This would appeal to the educational market including the home schooling community.

continuing role of original in context of digital delivery?

“Her attorneys have been engaged in a
battle with the court over documents that list the names and personal information of her clients. U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler has restricted access to the documents, but Sibley argued that the order applies to the (paper) originals of the documents, not to (screen) copies. Copies have already been given to a media outlet, he said.”

Where did the meaning come from, where does the new meaning reside?

“Mr. Imus is an old-school radio guy caught in a very modern media paradigm. When he started 30 years ago, if he made the same kind of remark, it would have floated off into the ether ó the Federal Communications Commission, if it received complaints, might have taken notice, but few others. But radio is now visible ó Mr. Imusís show was simulcast on MSNBC, and more to the point, it is downloadable. By Friday, reporters and advocates could click up the remark on the Media Matters for America Web site, and later YouTube, and see a vicious racial insult that delighted him visibly as it rolled off his tongue. The ether now has a memory.”
NYTimes

Mexico City WiFi hotspot

The implementation of
municipal wifi will be a dawning of the portable hand-held reader that has been so long suppressed by silly efforts to mimic the print book. The needed realization is that the hand held device is a book, but a blank book awaiting GPS/GIS live narratives. I have actually noticed cell phones used this way, the user coordinating to visible landmarks and getting live culture feature descriptions. Get ready for the real e-book.

book artist Richard Minsky maps new world

“RM – It will be primarily in-world and web based, with a periodical paper issue that will document the developments in archival form, so that the history of the developing SL art world will not be lost. Electronic media are transient, and ten years from now we donít know if SL will exist, or if it does, in what form. Itís a 3-D world, and currently is rendered in perspective on 2-D screens. In January researchers at the University of Michigan 3D lab made stereo projection of SL a reality, using the GeoWall technology [ http://geowall.geo.lsa.umich.edu/home.html ]. Currently SL is introducing streaming chat. You can put on a regular stereo headset with microphone and the voices of the other avatars will appear to come from where they are in space. When the 3D technology is implemented you will be able to wear VR glasses and be immersed in the environment in both video and audio. Having an archival paper edition of
SLART will insure that in 100 years people will be able to look back and find documentation of the beginnings of all this.”
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introducing the new visual printer

“Gary, There is no post-digital future.”

Well, work with me on this. What I am talking about is a printer with a screen. On that screen you would bring up the “print-preview” environment. A menu would provide previews of the web imposed into traditional as well as post modern print formats (including binding options for traditional books, scrapbooks and calendars). A four color engine and custom paper selection would complete the package. And everyone would already know how to use it.

It could be called a “visual printer”, much like we had in the old days. Or
TabBlog.

Is printing to paper obsolete? To answer that question you must first answer another question; “Is the web a manuscript?” Even
screen publications act like manuscripts before they are printed to paper.

Before the advent of printing, exemplars were circulated for making copies and the exemplars themselves were multiplied so that even though the copy work was accurate, the variation in exemplars induced differences. Word processing mirrors this historical model.

The advent of printing increased exemplars. There was the exemplar used for composition and there were the printed copies which themselves became exemplars. Especially in the earlier periods of print, the print copies parented many subsequent editions and variants. On-line publication somewhat replays this role of print in the early centuries whenever these publications act as exemplars for on-line copies.

question

Why do paper journalers never even mention screen journalers and why do screen journalers never mention paper journalers? It never even occurs to either party. When the paper journaler mentions “on-line” journals the assumption is
images of paper journals.

A definition of the inherent threshold between paper and screen is lurking here.

familiar navigation, inherent art

(go) link from
FotB.org

old future persists

“Loss of the book medium, loss of its credibility and usefulness, is possible. Due to an increasingly specific electronic query the text delivery systems must react on-demand at the page, paragraph or word level with precise extracts. Reader attention is then paced to fragments and webs of information. Request of a complete book unit is considered unnecessary. In this environment the paradox of book preservation is retaining formal conceptual works for fleeting, fragmentary access! The mismatch of book delivery units and electronic queries challenges the book medium.” February, 2001
(more on the leaf master)

story of the book

Let’s consider the attractor prospects of three themes; (1.) the making of books, (2.) the art and future of the book and (3.) the history of diverse book cultures.

(1.) The making of books includes the crafts and technologies of papermaking, writing and printing and bookbinding. These are the museum-like genres of presentation and include very dynamic activities such as paper sheet forming by hand or the miraculous eleven second mechanical cycle of the Linotype.

(2.) The art and future of the book crosses the boundaries of traditional graphic arts and computer arts and crosses between the book as utilitarian device and the book as art. Likewise, the technologies span from origami to electronic ink. Of particular interest is the role of the print book in future libraries and book stores and the interaction of electronic reading devices with the persistent paper book

(3.) The history of diverse book cultures includes studies such as the sociology and history of reading behaviors. Such abstractions have some vivid episodes in the history of our region such as those of early Mormonism, or the Pietists of the Amanas or adventures reflected in homesteaders guides and journals. This growing field of book studies provides insight and perspective to the current churn of media distribution and delivery technologies.

(FotB and
Iowa Book Works are on a municipal task force to propose the
STORIES exposition of Literacy, Literature and Language; an I-80 tourist attractor development.)

new age reading

The publishers’ device of including a CD in a printed book or URLs in a print bibliography have been bodily rejected by the print media. What enrichments have been problematic to screen presentation? Here we can see the problems that proliferation of channels brought to television, inducing a viewer behavior that disrupted sustained programming. The computer screen in essence has naturally induced a deconstructive reading behavior exemplified by dispersive linking and cultivating counter skills of deselection and inattention.
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