futureofthebook.com

nail in the tub

“The announcement this morning of the launch in the UK of a new waterproof laptop looks like another nail in the coffin of the traditional paper book, as the new device at last makes it possible to read a downloaded electronic fiction while relaxing in a hot bath.”
if:book

It is silly enough to define the network book as a paper book mime. But to define the network book as bathtub and beach ready is doubly lost. But suggestive. Who would prefer a bath or beach online? And does time at the screen subtract from existence?

For a decade hand held reading devices have been introduced to simulate paper books. These e-book readers are continuously taking off, but have not yet found their market. Perhaps the drag on their acceptance is the obvious one. Perhaps the e-book is frustrated precisely because it attempts to simulate the paper book.

The model for the electronic reader and networked book is elsewhere as the cell phone and distinctive formats of on-line discussion have long demonstrated. It appears that connectivity will always supersede content in screen delivery. And doubly wrong is the premise that the e-book reading is linked with paper book reading and that growth of one will be at the expense of the other.

Certainly the physical book is in a new and lively competition for market and reader attention but the real spoiler for the future of the paper book is not book mimicry on a screen. The much more serious threat is faulty “on-demand” production of the book itself. Poor quality subtracts directly from efficiencies that have long enabled the success of the physical book.
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i-book

“What Gutenbergís press did for Europe in the 15th century digitization the Espresso Book Machine will do for the world tomorrow. Library quality paperbacks at low cost, identical to factory made books, printed direct from digital file for the reader in minutes, serving a radically decentralized world-wide multilingual marketplace.”

Lightning Source is now backing Jason Epstein’s Expresso Book Machine
EBM. This is the Kindle Store for real books. Which surge, the e-book or the i-book (instant book), will prove the concept of the future of the book?

text book

The Changing Book monograph is out from Haworth Press. Filled with eighteen engaging essays and exemplifying new levels of insipid “demand” production, the wild and unruly future for the physical book is well presented. This book provides the souvenir of a wide ranging
UI conference on the future of the physical book, summer of 2005.

Happily, I was unable to find any online presence for this publcation.

e-book surge

Suddenly there are innumerable hand-held devices designed for book reading. This reflects a new momentum of development. Now will confirmation of wide adoption follow and if so for what reading functionalities really? The surge of GPS applications for cell-phones may be more relevant than new titles for Kindle.
booklab blog

Whatever the functionalities, increasing screen reading has not been linked to print decline. U.S. publishers had net sales of $25 billion in 2007; a 3.2 percent increase from 2006 with a compound growth rate of 2.5 percent per year since 2002.
publishers’ blog

e-book manuscript

“Random’s announcement follows on the heels of similar initiatives at other big trade houses, all of whom are buying Sony’s e-book readers for their sales, marketing and editorial staffs in order to reduce paper waste and expense, to expedite a manuscript’s passage through various hands and departments, and to lighten the bags of employees used to carrying three or four heavy piles of paper every day.”
Publishers’ Weekly

The manuscript stage of book production encompasses many processes. With electronic format and screen delivery it is possible that these processes can be continued following publication and the work will be ever changing. The other option would be production of works that will not change following publication.

The dynamic of such choice is sustained by technology; either continued change or un-change in the context of change. The crossovers positions between paper and screen continue to change as well. Manuscript, print and network stages are open to interplay, but the function of each persists. And it isn’t an issue if the manuscript is created by one person or a Wiki coalition. All publications are resolved from relative uncertainty to relative stability

rote connectivity

“Somebody, in the name of contrariness if nothing else, should be making the argument against reading.” Dan Visel,
if:book blog

Dan’s wide-ranging exposition of the ideology of reading may mask an ideological agenda of connectivity. Classical education was based on rote memorization. Print delivered a new premise of rote reading. Distancing learning from these presumptions is fine, but not if we exchange them for a presumption of education based on rote connectivity.

Memorization and reading had, at least, the virtue of engaging the student’s own mind. The choices for thoughtful escape were there because all the processing was going on in the person. The counter part of GPS is TPS (thought positioning system) in which search and discovery and evaluation occur outside the student in online educational resources.

looking forward to winter

“I am pleased to announce that the 2009 Conference meeting of the College
Book Art Association will be hosted at the University of Iowa in Iowa City,
January 8-10. “

Be there and be square.

There is no website. It seems that the last time I mentioned this kind of exclusion was twenty five years ago.
There is only one subject in the Universe that should not be considered on-screen and that is appreciation of the not-screen physical book.

acrl environmental scan

Environmental factors now swaying strategic research library administration sound no different than environmental factors swaying management of a restaurant or auto repair shop or any other service enterprise. The university library is viewed as a business, the students as customers and the service as network driven.

The library staff, meanwhile, is buffered for displacement and reassignment. The whole context is dynamic demand for new access, online learning and technology rich use. A relentless churn is moderated by debate over intellectual property versus presumed free access.

Collections sustaining this new age appear forgotten. They too are configured for displacement and reassignment, but they are also positioned for sudden disregard. Strangely this new disregard is occurring as the collections continue to grow in size and meaning. They are positioned to appear lacking in continued function.

But they have continued function and it is a basic functionality to sustain research across time and cultures, to organize and authenticate products of scholarship and creativity, and to preserve tangible objects that convey conceptual works. Is that functionality still relevant to the growing array of delivery mechanisms and service demands?

It is if the tangible collections are both mastering and backing-up these new consumer services. It is if the tangible collections are self-authenticating, are default and cost free persistent, are reliably legible and have exclusive attributes for learning. And it is if the research libraries have a different purpose than a restaurant or auto repair shop or other or any other service enterprise. Even the preservation department and its specialists may have work yet to do if tangible collections still define a research library.

In a surprising future the books may move out and the screens may move in, but the library will relocate with the books.

e-mode

Have you ever noticed the reading mode of the Times Square news marquee? It scrolls in line axis and turns the corner. So far the hand held reading device has crippled itself in simulation of page rendering when it should be considering line axis scrolling with a pace, rather than page, control. This would also eliminate the need for eye scanning, achieving a strategic advantage over print reading.

But no, there is far more focus on modes of connectivity than on modes of legibility.

good looking

” some telegraphic code dictionaries (and the naval signal books that preceded them, back into the 17th century) are stunningly beautiful. The most beautiful, often, are those that are soiled and marked up through a decade or more of daily use, falling apart at the seams — indeed, much of their beauty may derive from those signs of quotidian usage for mundane and long-forgotten instances of communications. They are “typographically beautiful,” I think, but perhaps not in a conventional sense : their typography is heroic for being so functional, yet demonstrating the printer-typographer’s pride in subtleties and self-effacing engineering solutions to the challenges of ‘difficult composition’.” John McVey, SHARP-L

It appears that the SHARP membership is the least likely to resolve a list of the “100 most beautiful books”. Turns out there may be more than 100 kinds of good looking books.

size of a pocket

“The explosion of a star halfway across the universe was so huge it set a record for the most distant object that could be seen on Earth by the naked eye. The aging star, in a previously unknown galaxy, exploded in a gamma ray burst 7.5 billion light years away, its light finally reaching Earth early Wednesday. The gamma rays were detected by NASA’s Swift satellite at 2:12 a.m. “We’d never seen one before so bright and at such a distance,” NASA’s Neil Gehrels said. However, NASA has no reports that any skywatchers spotted the burst, which lasted less than an hour.”

It is useful to notice the background. The convergence of the cell phone and hand-held reading and network utililities appears to advance halfway across the universe, but it is a distant signal of the future.

All the dedicated, hand-held book simulators appear inconsequencial against this background. The constraint appears to be the size of the pocket. The cell phone is a small pocket device that has engendered more small pockets than the pocket watch. The book simulators are big pocket items. This is a legacy feature from the convention of the “pocket book” which was actually the “paperback” as introduced in the 1930’s. It was small, but it is too big now.

And then there is the half-square shape. The iPhone is the same proportion as the papyrus codex of late Antiquity. This followed from the cross-thatch of the papyrus cut from scrolls as perfect, grain-neutral squares folded into book folios. It was designed to be read by sectarians in the opened country. These sectarians were very possessive of their gospel which they carried in a telescoping mahdar pocket.

re-remediation

“Borrowing and refashioning the conventions of one medium in another opens the risk ignoring what unremediated features are lost.”
Or more subtly: reading online isn’t the same as reading on paper, yet we continue to treat the web as a distribution tool rather than as a medium with its own material constraints, both suited and unsuited to certain kinds of content.”
Ian Bogost

This discussion is filled with clues. To begin with there are exclusive, native attributes of paper and the same for screen. And the dismissal of these distinctive traits as paper is suited-to-linear reading and screen-to-ramified reading is way too unexplanitory.

FotB visitors know of the trilogy of legibility or immediacy of meaning, haptic efficiency and persistence as exclusive paper traits, but these are inadequate by themselves. A more curious dependancy is at work. One aspect is the curious difference between attentive regard for content and an attentive ulterior motive for reading. A distinctive paper affordance is an easy capacity to track both author content and reader ulterior motivation in a sustained, long paced exchange AND to afford assured re-access to any specific concordance between.

analog link

“The first-ever
National Train Day is on its way, and thereís never been a better time to celebrate. With passenger ridership growing every year, more and more people recognize that trains are the best way to relax and enjoy the ride. To
read, talk, work or snooze the time away.”
“The date of National Train Day, May 10, holds special meaning as it is the anniversary of the completion of the first transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869. At Promontory, the east coast and west coast were connected for the first time by rail. From Promontory in 1869 to the creation of Amtrak in 1970 to the launch of Acela Express in 2000, Amtrak employees across the country will celebrate the history of train travel while looking towards the future on National Train Day.”

bridges

“The success of libraries is not to be counted by the number of books, either digital or paper, held by libraries or the number of pretty pictures that libraries can put online. Libraries are successful to the extent that they can bridge communities and can leverage the diversity of the quest, the research, and the discovery. Libraries are successful when they offer new services and when they help others discover services provided by others. By building bridges among these various sectors, libraries will be able to define themselves in the next generation. They will become the architects of collaboration.”
Peter Brantley

Be honest, does this really sound new? Isn’t this what libraries do anyway? What is different is that the librarian’s old skills suddenly have new relevance and value. Think of the librarian’s strange skill at evaluating an unread book! That’s exactly what is needed to measure the quality of a website or compile relational citations of links.

What has also changed is that the conceptual works that librarians evaluate and organize are now more mortal than they are. This adds a futility to the work of librarianship. The churn and transience is regarded a virtue of electronic discourse. But, unfairly, the futility involved is allocated to librarianship.

Next librarians will be blamed for biased, ethnic-like enclaves of political action and partitioned virtual community exactly at the moment when the librarian’s over-arching and discipline-neutral approach to information is what is needed. Here, again, the allure of wide, global connectivity is allocated to the electronic discourse and the disconnections left to librarians.

honorable mention

Perhaps the book conservator should contend that the physical book should now perform as a master and back-up for digital delivery. This is not that different from defense of the long reliability of book transmission, but we appear to be in an era of new doubters and discounters. Book conservators now work in the shadow of an anticipated rapture when screen reading will displace reading from paper.

But physical books transcend both old and new technologies and come to hand with astonishing directness. They require minimal decoding centuries later and they authenticate themselves. Because they are refined for bionic reading rather than for electronic transmission, they are immediately readable in both modes. And that refinement has dimension as well. Physical books can have elegance not only as delivery devices, but as exemplars of legibility, easy navigation and visual and tactile beauty. Finally, physical books perform in an ergonomic of comprehension. Just how this works, how concepts are conveyed by physical objects, is not that apparent, but they have a role yet to play.

e-book diagnostic

FotB got the top italic lead-in to a detailed
study of the prospects for the e-book. In the study various complications for the wider adoption of e-books are considered. Proprietary formats, digital rights management, i-pod equivalence model for the reading market, and culture resistance contrasting student and faculty preference are all posed as nearing remediation.

“So is all of this talk of change just hype? Or is real change around the corner? What has happened to e-book technology and markets to suggest that we may be nearing the end of two decades of e-book anticipation? Prior to this point, we can see a handful of distinct reasons why e-books have failed to take off as expected. In the sections that follow, we will look at some of these barriers, related recent developments, and, where possible, projections for the future.”
Educause

In every consideration a broader factor is unmentioned; p-books may continue to grow even as their share of the reading market declines. Remember that growth is measured from installed base and e-books began at zero. It is also useful to more accurately contrast p-books (delivered to paper) with s-books (delivered to screen) since all books are now “digital”.

With the individual complications there are also side-bars. P-books have long since resolved the proprietary platform issue by subsuming the very real proprietary formats within a seamless delivery mode of paper. As for digital rights management, p-books resolve that with linear circulation of a physical object; a truly clever solution. The i-pod equivalence model overlooks legibility and haptic efficiencies, default persistence and differences in musical and textual delivery paces. As for culture resistance, the notion that we will outgrow an antiquarian interest in print overlooks the timeless differing preferences between younger (more visual and audio) and older (more textual) readers.

living display

Our library has installed a “living display”. Like the tableau vivant or motionless live mannequin, the open shelf displays real, motionless books. A banner describes the authors and explains that the exhibited books can be immediately taken and checked out by the passing student. So as the students pass by to on-line access, the books are relegated to reality. This is a useful, instructional outcome.

bright site

“I am an advocate for book art. My greatest pleasure and satisfaction comes when I capture the haptic qualities that animate artists’ books, when the senses of touch, sight, sound and even smell converge in the world of an artist’s book.”
Betty Bright

extreme materialist

“I am thrilled to report that we are the participants for the University of Iowa Obermann Center 2008 Summer Research Seminar on Medieval Manuscript Studies and Contemporary Book Arts: Extreme Materialist Readings of Medieval Books. Meanwhile, I will be getting back to you soon with a very approximate schedule to give you a sense of what we will be up to for two weeks, and a list of shared readings to give us all some commonalities before we start.” Jonathan Wilcox

openlibrary

“The
site contains some 20 million bibliographic records from LC and participating libraries, and some of the leading lightsósuch as Karen Coyle, Roy Tennant and Brewster Kahle–are helping to shape the vision of a networked, wiki-style catalog that will be shared by libraries, publishers and the general public.”
” I donít know if this particular venture will succeed, but the ideaówiki-style cataloging by multiple contributors in a networked environment (directly on the web)–is surely in our future.” Randy Roeder

age of large-scale digitization

The suggestion for libraries, as conveyed by the CLIR
paper on ìPreservation in the Age of Large-Scale Digitizationî, is that the books are moving out and digital resources are ìmovingî in. This is considered an inevitability. No one would guess that the libraries could actually follow the books. No one can imagine that digital preservation services can be built on a premise of print mastering. No one can imagine that a scenario of back-up reliance on screen surrogates is much more implausable and unsustainable than a scenario of back-up reliance on paper.

And another premise is not yet fully emerged. ìGarbage in, garbage outî is a dictum from the old days of early computing. ìQuality in, garbage outî could emerge in the new days of screen delivery of print. On the positive side inherent complementaries and syncopations between commercial and institutional digitization of print could result in a momentous, unbiased advance in access to printed works. On the dark side, the only un-conflicted attribute of large-scale commercial digitization of print appears to be its large-scale. Institutions, accomplished in their standards for reformatting, have abandoned both standards and scholarly obligations, and now appear transfixed by size alone.
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