futureofthebook.com

(paper) comic books for super readers

“Teachers are finding it easier to teach writing, grammar and punctuation with material that students are fully invested in. And it turns out that comic books have other built-in advantages. The pairing of visual and written plotlines that they rely on appear to be especially helpful to struggling readers. No one is suggesting that comic books should substitute for traditional books or for standard reading and composition lessons. Teachers who would once have dismissed comics out of hand are learning to exploit a genre that clearly has a powerful hold on young minds. They are using what works.”

Comic Book Project

the great unbundling

The Big Switch by Nicholas Carr describes the advent of the World Wide Computer as the coalescence of electronic data processing into centralized information utilities. The history of electrical power utilities provides the precursor to this evolution. All the direct influences are magnificently interpreted and many of the side issues are explored.

We already realize the direct influences on the print book. The on-line resources pointing to print books act as powerful bibliographic utilities yet do not supercede qualities of legibility and re-access, qualities of haptic efficiency and capacity for persistence that remain exclusive attributes of the print book. Carr also describes the on-line unbundling of print content. He recognizes the dissolve of bibliographic entity in the churn of on-line searching and parsing and in the filtering and embedded selection and de-selection routines.

The wonderful quality of this book is its balance and grace in attempting to appreciate all the interactions to come. Carr consciously compares the wish that the Internet will prove a liberating influence with the contrary role of the computer, in past and future, to control society and manage behaviors. Will bionic intelligence act as a willing accessory in computer imposed command of society? Is Google really imaging books, not for bionic readers, but for an engine that can extract meaning? Is the fact that we have a book to consider such topics worth mentioning?

“Kindle NowNow – You pose a question and hit submit. Within a few minutes, you get several responses – for free sent to your Kindle. This was extremely helpful when I was away from a computer and just needed a quick answer. This was actually easier than googling because I got three very good answers for every question that I asked.” Kindle user

start of keyboard mediation

“Indeed, compared to the cataclysmic changes in society and business brought about by the new technologies of the end of the nineteenth century – not just rail, telegraph, telephone, and electricity but also the internal combustion engine, refridgeration, air-conditioning, photography, and indoor plumbing – the changes wrought by new technologies of the late twentieth century seem modest, an extension of the past rather than a break with it. Life is unthinkable without the advances of the nineteenth century. The same can’t be said of information technology. Ask yourself which you’d rather do without: Your computer or your toilet? Your Internet connection or your light bulbs?” Nicholas Carr,
Does IT Matter?

And reflect that the advances of the late nineteenth century, such as instantaneous communication, occurred in a context of authentic paradigm change. And the sidebar of the era was keyboard prompting of programmed technologies.

end of history

The
Internet Imaginaire, MIT Press, by Patrice Flichy is a wonderful critical history of socializations associated with on-line communication. The salient mediation studied is a threshold that disembodies the reader or participant. Why should this mediation, so typical of print reading, seem so distinctive on-line? Evidently both the persona and the social engagements on-line are much more hygienic.

There is magnificent review of the emergence of the Internet and the role of Wired magazine as of 2001. It is curious how adequate and complete this history, as of that date, feels. Perhaps the rapture merging the virtual and real, disembodied and embodied, utopian and commercial, has since occurred.

green reading

There is an extensive discussion of the comparative carbon emission associated with print and screen at
Long Tail. The FotB question here is what if the comparative energy accounting is based on a per-read unit over time? Remember that paper publications can be reaccessed for centuries. If you discount the housing overhead common to both servers and print books, a lower energy is allocated to sustained reading in print as compared with sustained reading on screen, especially as projected in centuries.

blogging the stacks

“At BookPeople in Austin, Tex., local authors have been putting bookmarks advertising their own works in books on similar topics. At Macís Backs Paperbacks, a used bookstore in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, employees are dealing with the influx of shopdropped works by local poets and playwrights by putting a price tag on them and leaving them on the shelves. At Powellís Books in Portland, Ore., religious groups have been hitting the magazines in the science section with fliers featuring Christian cartoons, while their adversaries have been moving Bibles from the religion section to the fantasy/science-fiction section.” New York Times, 12.24.07

“Shopdropping” is perhaps another reflexive reading skill looping from screen discussion to print discussion.

power of the paratext

“The information highway has no destination, and the sense of travel it provides is pure illusion. What matters is how the information is arranged, how it is understood, and to what uses it is going to be put. In short, what matters is the book the data’s in.” William Gass, A Defense of the Book

primary, secondary, tertiary

Walter Ong suggested a that a secondary orality (augmented by television) could arise within the context of text literacy. Such layering could also be continued to visualize a secondary text literacy (augmented by personal computer screen) emerged in a context of tertiary orality (augmented by cellular telephone).

A secondary text literacy would also emerge as new skill sets of on-line navigation, selection and discovery are directed back to print assimilation. Such a reflexive interaction could grow, and not diminish, the role of print. Likewise increasing levels of skillful comprehension, as required of quick, compressed and nuanced screen presentation, can also be reflexed to print.

Certainly there is no simple arithmetic that requires increasing screen based learning to be directly linked to diminishing paper based learning. Or is there an arithmetic that requires that increasing formats for oral (aural/visual) communication need to be linked to diminishing formats for text literacy (print). Or will increasing screen readership and diminishing print readership necessarily relate to measures of reading comprehension overall. More likely increasing skill sets for comprehension of conceptual works will layer and accumulate and feature increasing varieties of technological mediation. This has been the norm across media history.
Reports of withering reading skills may be based on a arithmetic which delivers the
wrong answer inverted.

elegant proposal

With little recognition or remark, the print and paper artisans have produced a
proposal for UNESCO. It doesn’t matter what it is about, it looks worthwhile, it looks and feels magnificent!

still old

One post lost in the migration mentioned the fact that FotB is now nine years old. The very mention of the ancient server caused it to start crashing.

networked book

Evidently there is something better than the ebook which is the
networked book. Both are presented on the screen and both require some instruction and electricity, but the networked book expands on the idea of a simple mimic of the print book. The networked book grows as you read and react. It evolves like a wiki or knol and it gets bigger and bigger. It actually gets bigger than a book and more like a networked library and the reflexive commentaries on the root text are like book clubs or school classes. Whole communities of authors are brought together in interactive anthology. Its an entirely (not) new concept.

But wait maybe there is something more in play here; what about copyright?

“The license Wikipedia uses grants free access to our content in the same sense as free software is licensed freely. This principle is known as copyleft. That is to say, Wikipedia content can be copied, modified, and redistributed so long as the new version grants the same freedoms to others “

Google
Knol is trying a more hybrid approach. So the consequences of all the disputations concerning copyright violation in screen presentations are becoming moot as screen presentations evolve beyond copyright.

And one more thing .maybe screen publication is more available to authors who do not have access to print publication. Maybe there is an allure of the salon de refuses. Maybe screen publication is a kind of audition. Or maybe, in a future era of text expression in which screen publication overarches print, print will return disguised as a new format. Can the paper Wiki be that remote?

the return of FotB

Following an extended migration cut-over we have returned. Some postings were dissipated but here is a news summary.

The age of missing information; postings of December 2nd and November 27 evaporated in the cut-over. The Google cache is so attentive that it overwrote the drop-out within 24 hours .compromising any back-up logic in redundant cache posting. Of course FotB maintains hard copy archive as well

Anyway, the news was that we returned from Arequipa after submitting a plan for preservation and setting in motion the funding and implemetation of summer project workers. The flight of the condor has just begun. The church libraries of Arequipa house collections spanning five centuries including materials produced in Peru where printing was introduced in the 16th century. Three summers of project preservation should assure us of collection and historical library persistence across the next three centuries.

The other positings related to Kindle, NEA reading assessment and the interesting news that the old testament was written down after the new testament which had to do with communication technology risk taking.

“The Torah as thus a transendent reality embodied in two earthly forms: a written scripture and an oral tradition. Both came from God; both were necessary, but the rabbis priviledged the Oral Torah because a written text could encourage inflexibility and backward-looking orientation, whereas the spoken word and the ever-shifting currents of human thought made the Word more sensitive to changing conditions.” Karen Armstrong from her book The Bible

This is an inverted, but relevant metaphor for our own transitions. In late Antiquity writing was the new technology and what we would call blogging or oral transaction was the old.

reality check

“What’s really going to happen is that the real and the virtual will blur together, become indistinguishable, as more of our experience becomes computer-generated. Eventually, there won’t be any reality to escape from.”
Nicholas Carr

What fabric will this be? The mediated presentations will interplay with unmediated, intended meaning will mix with the unintended meaning and the mastering and back-up formats will fluctuate with their own simulations. These are exactly the interactive roles already pioneered by the print book.

What do we know? The physical codex is uninhibited by mediations since it comes directly to hand and eye while at the same time book discovery and parsing is easily mediated, layer on layer, by screen utilities. It is rich both in author’s and publisher’s intended meaning as well as in unintended meanings of its material and cultural nature. The codex is also a reliable performer in both mastering and back-up roles to augment its own simulations on the screen. In these respects the codex in its print format is a comprehensive medium for transmission of knowledge.

Today screen delivered works are transacted through many hand-offs of recording, processing, transmission, decoding, and rendering. But note that the layers of mediation, not the format are in flux. We layer on this mediation not necessarily to deliberately distance our selves from the direct experience of real books or live music. We layer on the mediations because we construe the mediations themselves to be new and preferred formats. This is some kind of conceptual buffer, and perhaps deception, at work.

“Texts are material artifacts that take many different forms: cave paintings, tattoos, stone tablets, clay tablets, papyrus scrolls, manuscript books, musical scores, maps, printed books, engravings, newspapers, photographs, films, DVDs, computers.”

This excerpt from the blurb for
HOTT (History of Text Technologies) suggests more concerning the taxonomy of media. Not only is the array differently mediated to the senses (try reading a film or DVD by looking at them) but there is at least one other layer in the taxonomy. Which examples embed their text in a presentation format that itself is as rich in unintended material and cultural meaning as it is in authorial and publisher meaning?