futureofthebook.com

ergonomic of comprehension

“This superiority is understandable. The more involved we are in an activity, the better our memory works. When we enter completely into the gestures of writing our memory automatically records the characters; no prompting is needed. But if our activity slackens, our body forces are demobilized, memory tends to do its work less well. Chinese teachers have always known that in the beginning of writing was gesture. So it is that Chinese children tranditionally begin learning characters by tracing them rythmically in the air with broad gestures of arm and hand.” Jean Francois Billeter, “The Chinese Art of Writing”

from
A Book of the Book (”In a moment when irresponsibly inflammatory ravings about the demise of print rage through the cultural landscape, this collection offers serious reflection upon the real profundity of the book as a symbolic force within the poetic and spiritual imagination that remains the wellspring of human culture.”) Johanna Drucker

news of the weird

Adventure in the
rain forest of some past postings.

false ambivalence

As the university librarians sat in a large circle, electric surges of ambivalence toward “e-books” ran between them. While they acknowledged the continuing ineptness of the reading devices they also longed for the advancing power of inside-the-book searching.

In the FotB perspective the stifling restrain for the advance of hand-held reading device is exactly the simulation of the print book. Simulation of the print book is a fundamental error of the conversation. More promising is the purely live, connected, streaming, queried content of authentic screen based reading.

Another restraint is the assumption that screen resolution and legibility are inadequate. This is an illusory restraint as the cell phone confirms. But, by far, the most mis-conceived aspect of the conversation is an assumption of a contest between screen and print over equivalent functionality. Screen reading has its own, native functionalities as Wiki composition, miraculous search capacity and place based learning illustrate. Print retains exclusive attributes for methodic presentation, haptic efficiency and persistent access.

At the same time the interplays between screen and print functionalities are evermore evolved. Here the screen serves as the bibliographic utility for discovery of print while print serves in a mastering and back-up role for screen based transmission of culture. Digital technologies have brought on a Renaissance of print while new screen reading skill and connectivity have engendered a different Renaissance culture.

death of print sick

“Book sales tracked by the Association of American Publishers
(AAP) for the month of November saw an increase of 8.0 percent for the month; yearly sales were up as well with an increase of 9.0 percent.” The number of books in print has doubled since 1993.

get the grain

Suzy Morgan has kindly provided a
tutorial for Google Book printing

paper based culture

The paper based
literary revolution of the Beats remains a cohesive presence. The manuscript layer is extant; cheap scratch pads, typing paper post cards and school journals. At least we have a witness to this cultural germination. Will this be the last literary movement with a physical archive? from the new
HRHRC site.

cellular book

The incubation niche for the hand-held reader is the cellular phone, or so FotB has long projected. The
Radius awaits service features such as live subsciptions to the newspaper in the city that you are visiting. These subscriptions would auto commense and auto terminate based on the changing location of the phone. And then there are restaurant
guides.

The cellular nature of the connectivity is crucial. Like the structure of chapters in a traditional book, the cellular connectiity lends the adventure of linear story while it also cohesively
builds a personal narrative for the reader.

And then there is the physical possession of a growing conceptual stance in the world. The cellular book becomes a companion.

***where’s the remote?

Sid Caesar has said that the invention of the TV remote control (late 1960’s) began the decline of attention span by eliminating the need for patience. Perhaps Sid’s insight can also be conveyed to an impatience with print. Perhaps channel surfing and web surfing are related. And does the action of surfing itself, become so addictive that it precludes programmatic meaning or the appreciation of a sustained comedy routine?

grasped

“Yet with an ironly we may never fully grasp, the
Palimsest forces us to take it apart before before we can make it into any kind of whole. It obliges us to acknowledge the disunity of the text. Its authors never saw it whole, and its owners can never read it whole. Noel calls it the greatest manuscript ever, but it may instead be the greatest book – the one that most fully achieves the potential properties of the book.” Avi Davis, “The Brain and the Tomb, Adventures with the Archimedes Palimsest”, The Believer, January, 2008.

structures for book conservation

The FotB
SLIS class concerning the
efficacy of the codex will begin in just a few days. We will adventure in an environment of hand craft and its strange relevance to context of electronic transmission, surrogate presentation and network augmented meaning.

This course will present principles and practice of book conservation. There will be a focus on prototypes for conservation rebinding with discussions and demonstrations featuring the University of Iowa Libraries
Bookbinding Model Collection. The course will also include book craft projects to develop book structure skills. In addition, students can develop career skills. Career interests include those of library preservation, book production by hand and academic book studies.”

letterpress facsimile

One of the esoteric genres of book production is the letterpress facsimile, especially when the means of production mimics the exemplar. Here is a Lee County Iowa
example. FotB and
Iowa Book Works is producing the 500 facsimile bindings.

it almost seems

“People in virtual libraries spend a lot of time simply finding their way around: in fact they spend as much time finding their bearings as actually viewing what they find.

The average times that users spend on e-book and e-journal sites are very short: typically four and eight minutes respectively. It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense, indeed there are signs that new forms of `readingí are emerging as users `power browseí horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.” via
British Library via
Rough Print

“Why is it that, even when Iíve realized that the book Iíve started reading isnít the text I actually need to be reading ó either it doesnít do the thing I thought it did, or it occurs to me that my attention would be more fruitfully placed elsewhere ó I nonetheless feel the need
to finish the thing before moving on to another book?”
Kathleen Fitzpatrick

strange kindle

The Evolution of the Book by
Frederick Kilgour, Oxford, 1998, looks like a publication from the 1920’s as rendered on the Amazon Kindle. That is strange enough, but it also reads like a composite of book history episodes of the 1950’s. Add to this, the illustrations trigger new page advances and every so often a pixel register will climb or decend in a given line and look exactly like a bad lock-up of metal type.

The Kindle is delivered without instruction and there is no apparent navigation to its internal help. It does communicate well with the Kindle Store and Philadelphia Inquirer, except in the wilds of Pennsylvania. There must be an entire array of keystroke commands, but these must be discovered.

Among the constraints to haptic efficency is the need to “turn” every page. The codex only requires turning between two page spreads. Added to this is a compound opportunity to mis-read transition between electronic pages. The refreshment pause must be coordinated with the sentence break without inducing skipping or back-track.

preservation post-it

ALA ALCTS PARS mid-winter meeting is over. Everyone had a great time. You can sense the immersion in digital library services but you can also feel the same momentum now validating preservation agendas.

Some 800 pound gorillas have been observed in the room. The number of books in print has more than doubled since 1993. Another interesting realization is that large scale commercial posting of print books has so far produced no assurance of continued web access. It is becoming apparent that ìfreeî commercial reformatting will impose surprise costs of management and archiving and that cost accounting lacks a fourth dimension of sustained access over time; exactly the cost allocation associated with preservation.

While the ìpubic goodî is well aligned with libraries, it is not yet aligned with digital libraries and the United States is disorganized compared with Europe in terms of coordinated advocacy and funding for cyber infrastructure. The FotB concept of the ìleaf masterî role was formally mentioned as a needed layer in the library management of mass digitization as well as the FotB precept that commercial and preservation selection for digitization complement each other and validate the preservation service of selectively reformatting damaged items.

Preservation has always been in the technical services sector of library operations. This means that it is increasingly situated in digital library services. This is exactly the context in which to confirm the continuing role, both mastering and back-up, of the tangible collections. And commercial mass digitization programs need to be aware that high standards of reformatting quality and authentication are imbedded in library service.

inverse selection

Mass digitization programs move through the stacks scanning books in good condition and by-passing those that are badly damaged. This selection bias is just the opposite of preservation reformatting that, on the contrary, selects the ìbrittleî and damaged books. So preservation reformatting sustains subject coverage while commercial reformatting breeds a curious subject coverage deficiency. Who can qualify the bias of omission of publications inexpensively produced and now deteriorated? Possibly the cheap productions include genres of social, economic and political subversion.

Another factor emerges. This is the inherent complement between the two selection agendas if they work together. The titles reformatted by preservation programs exactly compensate the titles avoided in mass digitization selection. But, this inherent coverage attribute can only be realized by cross-access of the two resources.

Finally, another factor is a validation of the role of preservation in the context of digital delivery. Preservation reformatting programs select titles at risk to assure comprehensive subject coverage and access. Commercial reformatting need not assure such comprehensive subject coverage and may have reason to avoid it especially if the expedient omissions are not apparent to the user.

regional repatriation

“British Library chiefs labelled a
bid to return the Lindisfarne Gospels to their North East home as “regionalism gone mad,” it was revealed today.”

It is interesting how preservation is invoked as a decisive constraint. Little recognition that conservation is obsessed with change while relevance of preservation depends on wider and wider meanings generated from source originals.

dress code enforced

FotB (who caucused for Hillary because the election will inevitably be a referendum on good governance) will represent the future of the print book in the context of avid counter advocates in the decorums of Philadelphia. ALA Mid-winter is the small working annual with only 10K librarians expected.

touch screen books

The name was there; the candidate was wrong. ìHe apologized to me,î Sancho recalls. ìAnd thatís what you canít do with touch-screen technology. You never could have proven to that personís satisfaction that the screen didnít show his name. I like that certainty. The paper ends the discussion.î
New York Times

The tabulation function and the authentication function can be laborously fulfilled by a paper ballot. Allocating tabulation exclusively to computers and authentication exclusively to paper is another option. What has not worked is exclusive electronic authentication, although electronic assisted authentication of paper is an option.

“The scheme is low-tech. Paper ballots would be tallied by optical scanners or even by hand. The results would be then posted on a Web site. Using a serial number assigned to each ballot, voters could check the site to make sure that their random ballots were posted and had not been altered or misread.”
New York Times

Perhaps the same dynamic, tabulation vs. authentication, is present in the functionality of library collections. There is no shorter description of the conundrum of computer assisted meaning than “touch screen”. Watch this distracted reading:
touch screen book

collections 2.0

Advocates for library collections were once concerned with physical holdings. That is not as likely now as a
new blog indicates. Attention at ALA Mid-winter will also focus on screen delivery. Is FotB just a marginalized, burned-out hippie to advocate for a continuing role of physical collections in the context of digital delivery? We are going to Philadelphia to find out.

sustainable networked screen book

” is constantly revised, but never needs to be reprinted (or repurchased); one that is lean and simple and doesn’t require a small server farm or a special device; one that makes an enormous impact, but leaves a teeny tiny carbon footprint; one we can live with for ever and ever without getting bored or satiated.”
Kim White

The sustainable networked screen book doesn’t inevitably distinguish itself in comparison with the paper book. This is because contrasting functionalities of the paper and screen book mirror each other while their compatibilities overwhelm their differences. As such it is curious that screen reading advocates always pose one as revolutionary and another as regressive.

Reflect that a fixed reference of printed text, identified author and acknowledged edition are not in themselves inferior qualities. And at FotB we contend that conveying conceptual works in physical objects is a comprehension strategy and that physical books are enhanced by new relations with on-line bibliographic utilities. As for carbon and energy unit costing, the evaluation crosses so may layers of life cycle definition, technological reliance, social benefit, efficiencies of comprehension and cultural transmission method that it is probably a comparison that can be made to support either screen or paper delivery.