futureofthebook.com

digital renaissance of print

“In 2006 Americans purchased 575.1 million copies of mass market
paperbacks. In 2006 Americans purchased
418.2 million
copies of adult trade paperbacks.

For those who are interested, 583.5 million mass market paperbacks and
420.6
million adult paperbacks will be sold in the U.S. in 2007. Those numbers
will grow to 601.7 million mass market paperbacks and 429.3 million
adult trade
paperbacks by 2011.”
Book Industries Study Group

And remember this increase is in context with diminished genres of print. Compiled airline schedules, phone books, encyclopedias and other formats no longer appear in print. So the expansion is in context of a new found print functionality in context with digital delivery.

And these stats don’t even tally the fastest growing sector of print; print on demand using high speed copiers.

from portrait to landscape

Galley Gab has tumbled from an up-right print page to a wide-ways screen page. Truth be told; its letterpress news. Also, from the FotB perspective, the Galley Gab readership does not have an old readership for a young on-line medium. After all almost everthing is now born digital, regardless of how it matures to print.

book studies on-ramp

“Book history is not merely a product of other disciplinary traditions. The recent proliferation of book history research has taken place in conjuction with the rapid expansion of the Internet and World Wide Web. During this period many established book historians, including Robert Darton and Roger Chartier, have begun to write about the effects of new media technologies. Simultaneously media studies scholars have turned back to studies of the book and print culture to search for ways to understand this period of rapid technological change.” Kate Eichhorn,
L&CR

Its actually a two way street. Recall that the precursive on-line economy was based on print (Amazon) and material culture (eBay).
It may yet turn out that the paper book is accessorized by the screen as well as the reverse

arabesque

“What seems unique about our age, however, is that social interaction is a form of content itself, and itís up to librarians to take an active role in the creation and collaboration within this ethereal ìuser generated content.î It’s more than just guiding patrons, but making this guidance contribute to the new substance of interaction.”
Future of Librarians

nothing darker than a dark screen

“Whatever the reasons behind the failure might be, yesterday was a rude reminder of how fragile our digital lives are. The seemingly invincible web services (not to mention the national wealth they signify) vanish with a blink of the eye. It was also a reminder, that all the hoopla around web services is just noise – for in the end the hardware, the plumbing, the pipes and more importantly, the power grid is the real show.” (from
Rough Type)

current book typography

“In 2004, he purchase a first edition of the Swedish version of The Lord of the Rings (1959-1961) and was amazed by the excellent flow and presentation of the text on each page. He realized that several major foundries had already done interpretations of Weiss – all of which were more or less true to the original. He didnít want to add to that list. Instead, Stefan has tried to find his own path with
Anziano and hopefully people will think that the design lives on its own.” (from
Typophile)

publishing hybrid

“I have been thinking a lot about why
Harry Potter has done as well as it has over this particular time
period. Of course, I don’t have any actual answers, but it does strike
me as not a coincidence that when the first book was published in 1997,
it more or less coincided with the first wave of widespread acceptance
of the Internet. Thus, it is likely that the “word of mouth” spreading
of excitement about the books was assisted from the beginning by that.” Gail Chester

A very lively thread on
SHARP has discussed the vortex of promotion and obsession over the latest Harry Potter book.

homestead jobbing flies everywhere

An orphan slug, “jobbing flies everywhere”, made sense as the bugs invade from the goat yard and the press is marching (not rolling) and the Linotype is dancing out the lines. All in the summer heat and fires as we put out the latest Homestead Rocket and print posters for the baseball game.

Faithful students Bethany, Jessica and Cody are now among the Colonists as they bring continuity to the long tradition of printing and cooperative work in the Amanas. And perhaps the Center for the Book has entered through another
doorway into the study of the book.

dancing around the inevitable

“Courant also backed the idea that itís time to think about the book in different ways ó without fearing that this means the demise of the book. ìIf you actually want to read a book of, say, 370 pages, there is no good substitute for reading a book,î he said. But thatís not what most scholars are looking for. ìIf you canít search it and index it and access it with tools, except in a small number of areas, itís not nearly as valuable,î he said. If you add those tools, different people will make use of different parts of what are now thought of primarily as books in their entirety.”

The
destiny of the university presses may not be too different from book publishers generally. As they engage the technologies of PoD and maintain their distribution and retail presence for paper books the leverage of on-line discovery and searching of these works will become evermore extensive and cooperative. But that’s the point; the hybrid is a screen based bibliographic utilty combined with print copy.

latterday book work

If reconstruction of the sequence of fabrication of a medieval binding is challenging, imagine surmise of the rebindings from the middle 20th c.
Ekthesis

a mouse for paper

ExBiblio, the blog, has an informative lecture on the analog/digital bridge and the promise of paper 2.0.

pamplona symposium

With wonderful intonations, Roger Chartier described the arrival of Don Quixote in a town where he notices a print shop. He and Sancho enter to find two books being printed. One is a book of piety, but the other is ìThe Adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha, Part Twoî. Don Quixote takes offense at this prescription of the future and decides not to fulfill the adventures described in Part Two. Specifically he will not win the tournament at Saragossa or be shut up in a mad house at Toledo.

opened ocean

Each book is imprinted, exactly, aesthetically and taxonomically, with the time and circumstance of its production. Each book is an indigenous product of its parent culture. Because of this imprinting it is strange that each book quickly becomes an orphan, displaced from the time and circumstance of its production and, as it survives, it becomes an alien visitor in the future. There it doesn’t have a known role to play and it may now have meanings completely different and unimagined. Readers mention their own travel in books, but books meet them on an opened ocean.

zero sum

Why do screen reading advocates frequently assume that continuation of print genres is at the expense of screen reading? Why do
they assume that any shift away from capital intensive printing will never shift back to less centralized, less costly local print genres? And why is the rapture displacement to screen reading always 12-18 months in the future?

medieval book

“The digital Dark Age is a term used to describe a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical documents, because they have been stored in an obsolete digital format. This could cause the period around the turn of the 21st century to be comparable to the Dark Ages during the Middle Ages in the sense that there will be a relative lack of written record.” Wikipedia

But if the Western middle ages were dark there was also the bright spot of the medieval book. If our own digital culture is to be conveyed forward we will also need such a legible, impartial, efficient and dependable device. For reliable transmission of knowledge across time and cultures, which technology, that of the medieval book or that of computer media, is more advanced?
(more)

realizing bibliographic utility

“The question then becomes, “How much of a paper document do you need to ‘capture’ in order to identify the digital version of it unambiguously?” The answer is quite remarkable. In most cases, instead of scanning and processing every page of a document, you only need to capture about six words. In short, any snippet of already-existing text in a document becomes an identifying barcode. Because the capture involves only a small amount of text, it identifies both the document and a location within that document.”

Exbiblio confirms the premise of screen based library utility based on discrete screen search of print.

Satie of the book

“Far from being writers – founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses – readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves. Writing accumulates, stocks up, resists time by the establishment of a place and multiplies its production through the expansionism of reproduction. Reading takes no measures against the erosion of time (one forgets oneself and also forgets), it does not keep what it acquires, or does so poorly, and each of the places through which it passes is a repetition of the lost paradise.” Michel de Certeau

same text, different meaning

“Textual criticism is not a branch of mathematics, nor indeed an exact science at all. It deals with a matter not rigid and constant, like lines and numbers, but fluid and variable; namely the frailties and aberrations of the human mind, and of its insubordinate servants, the human fingers.” A.E. Housman

crossing the divide

Print is Dead

“It is very satisfying that reading people are engaging in discussions about the future of the book inspired by this project. However, I think the future of reading habits cannot be easily foreseen. The future is not monolithic, or a matter of dominance of one medium over the other. Instead it is a matter of co-existence. “ Manolis Kelaidis

The innovative way forward is to accept the book as it is and build on that. Take Manolis’ insight and invention just one step more and it will be apparent that any print book is discrete enough to provide its own coordinates to its own (subscription) engine. The touch prompt is not needed since it is too restricted as a query.

blooks

The blog postings of FotB are now in print. Don’t hesitate to order copies if you can figure out
how to do that.

rare books in the open stacks

“BookSurge is pleased to be partnered with Kirtas Technologies to offer organizations a state-of-the-art, nondestructive digitization service that produces superior scans while gently handling your rare books and documents.”

This is the pathway to repropagation of the open stacks. And the best part is that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo book search engines will serve as the bibliographic utilities for the new print collections.

shape of the page

Papyrus of Antiquity was sold in rolls. When preparing sheets for a codex book the roll was cut into squares and these were folded to produce a half square. The vellum books of the middle ages were based on the quadrants of animal skins which yield a more square shaped folded page. To us both formats seem strange; the elongated rectangle of the papyrus page and the squat shape of the medieval page. Perhaps this is because later printed books were folded from the size of sheets optimized by a third shape determinant; the paper mold.

The sectarian codex of papyrus was also optimized for portability while the medieval book became more sedentary. The shape of the page reflects this functionality. The iPhone, optimized for portability, is proportioned exactly to the half square of the papyrus codex. Likewise it reflects the nomatic and conceptually possessive character of its users.

non-commercial media

“If nothing else, these Zine kids are making their own magazines, their own music and their own culture. And that, in and of itself, is something worth fighting for.”
Microcosm

teaching football players calligraphy

Glen Epstein teaches students how to write by hand, that is write without a keyboard. Calligraphy is actually not a new method of networked communication but it is expressive and useful. Many students today have never tried it and many have never properly touched a pen to paper.

homestead print shop and bindery

Faithful Bethany ran the Linotype today as every Saturday showing visitors from everywhere how letterpress printing was accomplished by the colonists of the Amanas. The shop is filled with flies, the heat from the pot and from the blacksmith mingles with the coal smoke and with the smell of the goat yard. Yes, this is what mass media once was.

UICB Historical printing

mcba/sharp/ibw workshop

Iowa Book Works will entertain
SHARP book studies instructors this Tuesday at
Minnesota Center for Book Arts.

“Participants in this workshop will learn about 10 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.”

Discussing book binding history with book studies instructors will be simple, but not discussion of the overwhelming bright prospects of the future of the book.

start publishing

LuLu now has a
picturebook processor. Don’t leave home without publishing your trip.