futureofthebook.com

cascade

A very active event and trend mapper is
Fade Theory

hand on the trottle, eye on the rail

“A very entertaining podcast by SF writer, Net activist, and uber-blogger Cory Doctorow covering copyright, concentration, print-on-demand, the future of the codex and more. The problem with electronic books, he suggests, is in part that they are extremely good at distracting you – you need ‘monkish, iron self-discipline’ to read a long work online. Hence he suggests, one of the best things about the codex is precisely that it isn’t electronic – it can’t distract you with emails, phone calls, IMs, RSS and all the rest, and is therefore the best tool available to help a reader concentrate on a sustained piece of writing.”(podcast link at)
Institute for Future of the Book

letterpress day

The first day of the Historical Printing Seminar and then job printing and Linotype composition in Homestead. The connection with the past is completely surreal but the connection with the future is immediate. How better to understand the momentum toward keyboard prompting, automated production cycles and efficient communication. And the charm is that revolutions of media history have proved themselves as additions, not subtractions, from richness of content.

Galley Gab

link logic

Library Preservation has kindly linked to FotB, as a reader choice

pilgrim and bee

Mat Brown’s
book exemplifies the insights, discoveries and connections of book studies.

“To Brown, seventeenth-century devotional readers are both pilgrims, treating texts as continuous narratives of redemptive journeying, and bees, treating texts as flowers or hives, as spatial objects where information is extracted and deposited discontinuously.”

bookbinding motivation

A Wiki Book on
Bookbinding is bound to set you free.

mobility and function

Reading the codex is a physical act. While the mind is assimilating the conveyed content, manipulative hands, finger dexterities and progressive eye tracking work together to pace and advance a mechanical structure. That these two progressions of comprehension and manipulation merge so well in the codex is one of its special attributes in the context of other reading modes. By contrast, screen based reading requires a variety of prompts and screen loading and drawing transmissions many of which distract from attentive reading. Continual de-selection and deletion of unnneeded content is required. Screen text navigation can require a conceptual exercise in itself, at the expense of content assimilation.
(more)

negative entrophy

Almost all expression is non-verbal which means that the book is some kind of exception. The simplest message transmitted by an artifact is, “Something manmade is here”
Visit the Center for Nonverbal
Studies.

still running hypercard

This 12th century book is BOTH eye and machine readable; face-down or face-up capture.

future of the future of the book

The center for research on the prospects for the book and its destiny as a format of cultural transmission has kindly linked to FotB at its
if:book blog site.

grey to green

If every there was a premise to be reconsidered it is the accommodation of collections and library activities in antiquated HVAC environments. The Kilgarlin Center
conference will openly examine this malapropt, returning to the classical Tim Padfield precept of cellulosic buffer responding slowly and gracefully across the seasons. The targets need accommodation to the planet.

Just today I was sent to an HVAC system failure accentuated by three days of rain. Damper stuck and 100% outside came into a fishbowl building. Guess what mold bloom and the old ecology of the jungle, suddenly. Just what makes us think we can cool summer and heat winter without some side effects?

Be there or be square .Austin in November.

no further discussion needed

I couldnít agree more as well. Survival of print can only be attributed to any exclusive attributes of print in the context of screen presentation. Unfortunately such exclusive attributes boil down to only three; legibility (not resolution but immediacy of meaning), haptic efficiency (conveying concepts with physical objects) and persistance (default preservation and reaccess).

Will such attributes assure print survival? No, because the screen based reader is no longer independently self interfacing or even assuredly bionic.

futurist scenario

Today rail passenger service was revived in the Cedar Rapids to Iowa City corridor. The old interburban service died out in the 1950’s due to the increasing use of cars. Now the same service is being restored due to the same reason.

What happened is that continuing change produced recursive complementary change and old solutions proved to be new solutions. The paper book is a product of digital text and screen reading.

old fonts

See
echoes of the future of print.

incubation niche

“Morrisville, NC ó Italian author Robert Bernocco has amazed the literary world by publishing the worldís first book written using a mobile phone. Bernocco published it on
Lulu.com, the online marketplace for digital content.”(from)
print-on-demand

The cell phone is a hand-held reading device. It is also a hand-held writing instrument. It is also, with GPS/GIS and internet connectivity, a place-based learning medium. Only the portable book is precursive to such extensive communication actions.

The key is personal expression and individual, in the pocket connectivity to conceptual exchange; a medieval girdle book, a personal book of hours, an amulet codex in telescopic mahdar.

big heads

“Wonderful exchange. Is Google Books more like a library (Paul) (Duguid), or more like a search catalog (Patrick) (Leary)? I find Patrick closer to the mark, in that Google Books is a hybrid between a catalog and a library, or what I think of a networked universal text. Its value lays in the collective, even if the individual units are imperfect — and they are very imperfect. The new text is searchable, actionable, and animated in a way that neither libraries, books, or even catalogs in the past were.” Kevin Kelly

arch-ival

SLART will soon assume the avatar of print, Ink-Jet. Experience this transcendance.

equal time

Advocates for screen based reading should advocate equally for print since any trend away from the skills and exercise of print reading will also signal a trend away from reading in any mode.
Under the News (”A Nation of Non-readers”)
Print is Dead (”Better Dead Than Read”)

The same goes for
advocates of diversified scholarly publishing who should also demonstrate correlated support for libraries and their missions to expand reading and literacies.

linked links

The
Banff Centre has kindly linked to FotB and MIT Preservation has also linked to our little outpost.

university publishing beyond books

The University of Michigan
Ithaka report is awaiting comments in
CommentPress format.

A discussion on academic publishing without books is as possible as a discussion of publishing confined to print. Meanwhile a discussion of the relation and possible symbotics of screen and print research goes on at SHARP-L.

another new book studies program

Edinburgh

hot ghetto mess

Paul Duguid
on Google Books. But error free capture is not even the significant issue. The closer screen imagining comes to print presentation the better it will serve as a bibliographic utility of print. The screen presentation acts as a discovery device for print.

And you know why? Because screen navigation is itself the act of comprehension that assimilation of content is in print. Screen navigation, and its distractive activities of de selection and deletion of search results, compile into an activity unrelated to learning from print.

Surely this cannot be! Surely digital technology can simulate the attributes of print. Well, it can and does, but on paper.

the future continues

“More cellphones have screens with a resolution fine enough to rival that of the printed page. The bright virtual pages, along with other advantages like weight, capacity and a built-in reading light, are gradually drawing readers from paper books, one of the last holdouts against digitization.”
IHT

The future of the hand-held reading device continues. These projections are always crippled by false assumptions. The paper books is far from a holdout it is a digital output. Weight is actually an attribute of the physical book creating its own semblance without dependence on software. It is an attribute, not a disadvantage, that the act of paper book navigation is not different from content assimilation. It is a disadvantage that the screen device requires the separate conceptual act of navigation and the distracting need to delete and deselect prior to assimilation. And of course the issue of resolution is inconsequential in relation to legibility or the immediacy of meaning. And who needs a reading mode that works best in the dark?

paranormal

ìThese are the kinds of things that booklovers never seem to mention; in all of the arguments about book being the ìperfectî technology, itís never talked about how ó if you want to carry around three or four books at a time ó youíd better have a big backpack and a strong back.î
Print is Dead

I certainly see your point. In fact you can ask why carry arround all the pages other than the ones you are reading? Even one book can be pretty heavy. Actually, not much reason to carry even a few pages if you can display the one you are reading at the moment, not even a whole page then, since we read only a line at a time. Yes, on the weight front the hand held reading device is much better. I mean, how much does a thought weigh? Shouldnít books weigh not much more than conveyed content? Who ever dreamed up this notion of conveying conceptual works with physical objects anyway? Its a paradox!

(Of course the real mystery is why the paradox is not. Electronic transmission better mimics the neural connectivity of the mind, but the physical book better engages the hands to prompt the mind. With a print book, the reader is the interface.)

bound book

Why is navigation for screen reading so varied and variable across applications and platforms while navigational for print reading is so constant? Perhaps this is because print navigation and print content assimilation prompt each other, while in screen reading acts of navigation and acts of content assimilation must be separately transacted.

reading the book

“This FREE one-day symposium will feature four scholars presenting a broad historical overview of the evolution of the book as an object, with a nod to how the physicality of the book (and actions such as conservation) can impact its use as an historical/literary tool.”
Intermuseum Conservation Association

libraries in timbuktu

Take the
picture tour and you will just be able to see the history of the codex. New York Times

book matrix

“You’ve come to a friendly place, and we welcome you to our book-lovers’ community. Our members love books enough to let them go ó into the wild ó to be found by others. Sharing your used books has never been more exciting, more serendipitous, than with
BookCrossing. Our goal, simply, is to make the whole world a library. BookCrossing is a free online book club of infinite proportion, the first and only of its kind. Inside, you’ll find millions of book reviews and hundreds of thousands of passionate readers just like you.”

The truth is out there. The act of book abandon is a counter part of book possession and leads to realization that each book has its own life.

in print

Parlor Press offers books about the nature of books.

“Our most distinctive offeringsóour first releasesówill be “book events.” Born on blogs as massive, multi-reviewer online seminars, the book events are hybrid creatures, unknown in a paper age. We are proud of the critical work they do, the range of participants they have attracted. And, after the fact, they look quite nice on paper. “ Parlor Glassbead series

improvisation

Every so often the
if:book:blog arrays into a pattern of excellent commentary on connected and layered issues concerning the future of the book. There is such a pattern at the moment.

history of text technologies is HOTT

Its a question if a line is being crossed or moved, but the stance of analog text technologies in context with digital text technologies is providing a new platform for book studies. There is a tinge of nostalgia as all text technologies, print and screen, move to digital text technologies, but there is also authentic interest in revolutions in communication and text technologies that have occurred before. As such they can provide exemplars for the current churn of media transformation.
HOTT

“Students interested in HOTT should contact Professor Treharne at etreharne@english.fsu.edu. This year, students will need to apply to a traditional department (English, Interdisciplinary Humanities, etc), for studies beginning in fall 2008; for subsequent years it may be possible to apply directly to HOTT.”
Textual Studies