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.