genie of the book
Here we can use the ambiguous English word meaning both genius and Jinni;
Chris Clarkson is on-line! The book conservator’s book conservator and advocate for all that is wonderful. Protector of Mysteries. Medium of the book of the past and the future.
rain clouds
“Cloud computing is ideally suited to these so-called cybernomads, as it can provide them with, in essence, a computer to call their own – a virtual desktop, or “webtop,” that exists entirely in an online data center and hence can be accessed from any PC. Cybernomads can use their password-protected webtops to run applications, store data, and share files with others. Virtual PCs are more energy efficient than real PCs, they don’t wear out or require physical maintenance, and they can often be provided free, through ad-supported or other subsidized programs.”
Nicholas Carr
As the screen becomes more Jinni than jar, the electronic book will also be better perceived. The familar trope of the conceptual work not yet resolved into physical form will be easily recognized for what it is.
at home with Tschichold and Schmoller
“Stockhausen indeed used colour in some scores. The (notorious) Helikopter-Streichquartett score is in four colours; you can take a look at the
first page. There was another score, one of the scenes of Mittwoch aus Licht (Michaelion I think, but I might be wrong) which used colour for the dynamics, with gradients from one colour to another for crescendo/diminuendo.
Thomas Adesí piano piece íDarknesse Visibleí (based on a song by John Dowland) is also printed in different colours, with the colours distinguishing different transformations of the original material which overlap. (Then thereís a nice touch at the end where a fragment of the original appears verbatim, extremely quitely, which is printed in grey.)” ingemisco – general discussions forum,
typophile
unintended consequences
“What seems to be happening is that Google is searching over its entire
corpus with lines from the book at hand to see where else its passages
occur. From the results, Google assesses popularity. It’s an
interesting tool. The strategy fails to recognize, however, that
books contain ads. Thus what would appear, by Google’s critera, as a
most popular passage, oft repeated, is merely a set of publishers ads,
oft reprinted. this is
not a direct assault on the usefulness of Google books, merely a way
of highlighting limitations of the designers’ assumptions about
difference between “the book” as a text and the book as a physical,
commercial object; and about what makes for popularity.”
Paul Duguid
Print books are not designed to be read indiscriminately. Much of the para-text, such as the repeating page headers, are not intended to be read. Illustrations as well. The reader may be presented with a figure in a landscape and read only a facial expression. In both text and illustration, the bionic reader “zooms” to elements of meaning. Machine reading is not that discrete and conveys an endless commodity.
What the search engines distort is the quality of print books as multiple media works and the quality of bionic reading as discretely focused. The obstacle that automated search entails, including the unannounced expanses and contractions of the commodities searched, is the unexplained expanses and contractions of the results delivered.
the book look
“THE BOOK
For the past five hundred years, humans have used print ó the book and its various page-based cousins ó to move ideas across time and space. Radio, cinema and television emerged in the last century and now, with the advent of computers, we are combining media to forge new forms of expression. For now, we use the word “book” broadly, even metaphorically, to talk about what has come before ó and what might come next.”
mission statement; Institute for the Furture of the Book
“For now, we use the word .” Behind this disguise is notbook, another jinni. But who is making the wishes and which room, the future of the book or the book look, is haunted?