futureofthebook.com

graphic journal

The most wily of all physical book innovators are the
Zine people and among them the
comic journalers.
Cody Gieselman is a heroic exemplar of the enclave. Don’t miss her
Portland workshop.
Or click
here to find a zine machine location near you.

Notice too, within the publc librarian section of ALA, the interest in Zines as a lure to unlibrary demographies like homeless teens.
These things mean something and Zine readings bring in strange new readers. And watch as all advocates of the physical book including scrapbookers and book artists and POD self-publishers realize their own convergences.

expresso book drop

“Our goal is to preserve the economic and ergonomic simplicity of the physical book,” said
Epstein

Its interesting how quickly paper books are being subsummed by the digital book category. It may even be that they are beginning to comprise the category. The alternative (paperless) book is now styled the networked book, but we should wait to see how these two terms define each other.

The pop-up hybrid of the
page/screen book converges with the trend. But who is hanging on by finger nails here? The first cursor was the pointed finger. That gesture is the precursor that now looks post-digital.

“In a matter of minutes, or the time it takes to drink an espresso, the new Espresso Book Machine, from On Demand Books, LLC, can print, bind and trim a book, producing a high-quality paperback book for users. The first Espresso Book Machine (EBM) was installed and is up and running at the New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library.”

book studies ellipse

The
Midwest Book & Manuscript Program is newly established at the Graduate School of Information and Library Science and the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois.

“Drawing on leaders in the field as instructors, these programs cover a variety of topics concerning (1) the history of manuscripts and books, addressing the unique skills and approaches to maintaining all types of special collections, and (2) preserving the fine art of bookmaking, including bookbinding, paper making, and letterpress printing.”

At the turn of the 20th century there was a railroad known as the “three i’s”. It was the Indiana, Illinois and Iowa. Perhaps this line can be rerun between book studies travelers.

lesser lesser used collections

The high density stack buildings show every sign of assimilating the storage and preservation of all tangible collections. The assured security and optimal environmental conditions now attract many more genres beyond “lesser used” collections including a good portion of new acquisitions and special collections.

The implication is a return to more traditional closed stack libraries, albeit with improved accesibility. Mobile high bay storage technology is converging with this trend to closed stack and digital delivery. MHBS helps reduce initial and long-term lifecycle costs because it enables a smaller building footprint and much more efficient use of HVAC building conditioning. (HVAC costs are 1/3 of overall stack building operation)

spod

Scanning for print-on-demand has now been assimilated into the larger agenda of retrospective book capture as a library service.

BookSurge, Kirtas Technologies and Amazon.com have just announced collaboration with university and public libraries to scan thousands of rare books and distribute them by printing-on-demand. This path to the digitization of books will provide revenue to the libraries and facilitate preservation of originals.

The challenge to ALA members was to find any ten books without errors among the 2 million so far posted by Google. Its a $100 bet. The collaborative intends to provide complete, error free copies.

“We believe that mass digitization and print-on-demand publishing is an important
new model for digital scholarship that is going to revolutionize the management of academic materials.” Martin Halbert, Emory University

scarith of scornello

The story of a 17th century forgery prompts this wonderful fabric of behaviors and emotions and Tuscan offense at the arrest of Galileo. The author Ingrid Rowland may even be a player in this
story of contending scholarship, early science and transgressions of religious belief. Its a timeless adventure of trickery and intrigue.

The suspect Etruscan inscriptions were not composed on linen cloth, but on paper. Oopps

global view hand crafts

On an eight day bicycle trip we suddenly turned off onto a non-descript gravel road for no reason but found the
home of world hand crafts. The circumstance of hand crafts in world is dire as the traditional cultures are hollowed out by economic desperation and social collapse.

We spent the morning at
Global View and bicycled away with flowing textiles, yak wool sashes, Nepalese paper and charmed palm leaf books; exemplars of wealthy cultures of poor people rather than the refuse of poor cultures of rich people.

Quality, skill and compassion is a better choice than junk.

robot book

E-books can be considered as a robotic device for reading. The difficulty is that eye reading cannot be automated. Since the reader is mobile, wireless connectivity is needed. Since the impulse and occasion to read is connected with behavior there is a need for content-on-demand and place based learning. A cultural tourism, augmented by on-line library access could provide more than niche appeal.

american bookbinders museum

For a long time bookbinding devices mechanized hand processes to alleviate fatigue and augment strength. Only subsequently did increased producion speed, printing trade like materials handling and feeding and purely mechanical products become the objective. This
museum tells the story.

artifact of the mind

The paper book is an artifact of the processing power of the mind and the internet is an artifact of the processing power of networked computers. That said, neither manages the social reassemblies or new behaviors that it engenders.

I searched “artifact of the mind” and the first results were diagnostic. The top result was a paper book, “Early American Drama” with its key phrase “telltale artifact”. The third result was “MIND: A Distributed Multi-Dimensional Indexing System for Network Diagnosis”.

“Our experiments show that MIND can detect and report network anomalies in about one second on an inter-continental backbone. We also analyze the efficiency of our load balancing mechanism and evaluate the robustness of MIND to node failure.” This sounds like a line from early American drama reflecting the first implications of magnetic message transmission.

The second search result is also a book.
Creations of the Mind –
Theories of Artifacts and their Representation. Looks like a primal FotB resource! A one click Amazon order.

undead readers

So Many Books has kindly linked to FotB.com. This is a lively, current forum for novel (exceptional) readers.

whatduhya know?

We know the presentational fixtures of paper and the screen are well established. We also know that the presentational formats of the book or visual broadcasting have significant conventions and momentum. There is also evidence that bionic processing capacity and efficiency has been rather stable across the history of literacy. Where then is the factor lending a sense of momentous change to the exchange of conceptual works?

The processing, connectivity and storage capacity of computer networks has compounded quickly lending a sense of momentous change to the exchange of conceptual works. Image tagging and mapping across networks, integration of stored data and more complex access applications continually expand and grow the automated comprehension of information. This dynamic benefits all the presentational fixtures of
paper and screen and all the presentational formats of book or broadcast.

But does it also expand bionic processing and efficiency? Perhaps the sensation and disorientation of the changing conceptual landscape is some discord between unchanging and changing capacities for conceptual assimilation.

complete, lights-out, book production

watch the video I can visualize micro book publishers, like micro breweries. In the world of print, on-demand conveys to endless demand. Now all they need are distributed “leaf masters” binned to the printer or even post-Google library captures of public domain works.

Its not post-digital, its post-screen digital book making. Every conceptual work is now born digital, its how they grow up that matters.

mechanical software

The computer quickly transforms mechanical prompts to electronic transactions. This obvious context for writing, publishing and reading is given better definition by earlier systems for writing, publishing and reading that transform mechanical prompts to mechanical responses. If a Linotype machine cycle balks the cause may be uncertain. But it is then possible to hand roll the great cam set both forward and backward through its cycle to reverse the program and discover the problem. The computer, however, balks on the other, inaccessible side of the manual prompt.

world of paper and print

third edition?

The classic Writing Space was first published in 1991. Jay David Bolter evaluated the advent and functionality of screen based hypertext in a context prior to the Internet. The 2001 edition was almost a
different book. There was a modified title and a different size and a completely revised content. The second edition suspended technological determinisms; “writing technologies do not alter culture as if from the outside, because they are themselves part of our cultural dynamic.”

We are now approaching the interval for another edition. It will be interesting to see of the consistent eclipse of print projected in the previous editions holds. Consistently Bolter has projected an “uncertain future of the print book” contrasted with the “bright future of digital media”. Although comparing apples and oranges, it will be interesting to see if the prospects are exactly the reverse.

Another consistency; that the “writing space” is the mind regardless of transmissions to papyrus or electroluminescence, may be more resilient.

a library of computers

Everyone knows that Google “actually makes a copy of the entire Internet ó every word on every page ó that it stores in each of its huge customized data centers so it can comb through the information faster”. The implication of this achievement is a facility of “hundreds of thousands” interactive computers, a library.

The
librarian search engines also differ from bionic librarians but the whole complex acts like a conventional library and the “bibliographers” and “catalogers” turn out to be as bionic as the millions of daily “patrons”. Perhaps the “search quality” divisions of Yahoo, Microsoft and Google are “library schools”.