futureofthebook.com

haptic efficiency

“The online reader expends a great deal of mental energy just navigating. Paperís tangibility allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden, freeing up the brain to think.”

William Powers‘ essay comes close to describing the haptic efficiencies of paper. But notice his list of disadvantages of paper that are actually attributes. The evaluation of paper should not be positioned as an absence of screen attributes.

“In a digital world, paper actually has quite a few limitations: (1) It takes
up physical space; (2) It can only be in one place at a time (virtual media can be
accessed from anywhere); (3) It is difficult to alter or edit; (4) It does not play
moving images or sound; and (5) It cannot network or connect to other media.
The mystery is why a medium with so many disadvantages is still all around us.”

The physical space actually enables rearrangement in library organizations, the linear circulation is a premise of slower paced evaluation, the persistence enables scholarly interpretation, the lack of high density, visual content enables economy and durability, and the lack of connectivity is augmented by bibliographic utilities such as the web.

The disadvantage of paper most frequently mentioned is its lack of connectivity and auto-searching. Digital content is self-indexing. The encoding that enables screen presentation also enables searching. But this disadvantage of paper hides an advantage. Because paper cannot self index, it self-authenticates. Which attribute figures in the transmission of culture?

repatriation

Note the diminished
cultural respect extended to print collections in the context of on-line resources. This eclipse is apparent in the lost of status associated with storage of ìlesser usedí collections regardless that the print collections are increasingly serving a mastering and back-up role for their screen delivered simulations. Instructional and research agendas are also relegating print to a format obsolescence that does not recognize the exclusive attributes of print. Finally, library services are swayed by service agendas and service metrics that favor digital services at the expense of print.

Such developments demean print and tangible collections in general within a cultural context that privileges digital research and resources. We need advocates for print repatriation.

omnibility

“The emphasis is not on ‘mobility’ but on permanent connectivity in an environment where computational and communication capacity is increasingly pervasive. What is our world like when the network is not something that is ‘out there’ but when potentially all that we do is network aware.”
Lorcan Demsey

book blog

Jeff Peachey has kindly linked to FotB from his excellent
book blog.

store for hand made objects

Etsy “your place to buy and sell all things handmade” has a book and zine department. Look through a crack in the screen and see the glimmerings of post-digital enclaves. Be there and be square.

aic 36

The 36th annual meeting of the AIC was a wonderful pleasure. The conversation was intensive and productive, the General sessions contrasted meaningfully with the array of ten specialty group presentations and increasing PowerPoint expertise is finally producing highly efficient and engaging presentations.

The capacity of conservation practice to lend historical perspective and a sense of cultural persistence and risk was just as engaging as the allure of new methods and instrumentation. It is actually surprising to realize that such an introversive profession can be so loaded with social implication, especially as the wider connectors to tangible collections are obscured by popularities of their screen simulations.

The students are now the “big heads” and the older generation now relegates itself to a ceremonial presence except when irritated by vanities repeated. The loony certification tableau, honorific receptions, and a too swanky officer corps, entertained the old wranglers.

self-indexing or self-authentication

Digitization of paper books has a particular advantage as the bit stream processing renders both content and indexing. Content and indexing actually merge into a single commodity, dissolving individual books and library classification systems.

Physical books also merge delivery components, but they merge content with authentication. This attribute is contrasted with digital systems that easily self-tabulate or self-index, but cannot self-authenticate. Distrust of touch screen voting or the failures of 2010 census automation both exemplify risks of focus on content and index merge alone. Perhaps we should consider attributes carefully as we select between functionalities of screen books or paper books.

community service

Across the street in this high end, high priced district there is a small, red pushcart hotdog stand. Each day I break away from the $6 hotel coffee shop and cross over to get a hotdog. They are spectacularly good, grilled and seasoned. They cost $1 exactly.

Then I noticed that there is a “Jumbo” on the menu, $2.50 so I got one. It is the same hotdog about one inch longer. The bun is the same, the grilling is the same, the relishes are the same.

What this street vender is providing is a magnificent service for the community providing the same meal for both those who have too little money and for those who have too much money.

orphan masters

“The Preservation Department is pleased to announce the establishment of the Preservation Masters Collection which is noncirculating and contains items that act as backup to digital and nondigital items in our collection. The InfoHawk record will indicate that an item is in that collection using PMC = Preservation Masters Collection as a collection code and in sublibrary MAIN.

This list will continue to grow and could include LPs, CDs, U-matics, audio cassettes, etc.” Nancy Kraft

orphan parents

The exclusive attributes of tangible books; immediacy of meaning, haptic efficiency, persistence and self-authentication, these attributes also apply to AIC Members. These are the conservators, the secluded enclave that actually does the work, the activists behind curtains, who save art and evidence of the past.

Curious how they work and curious how cool they are. They have orphan roles but families of legacies and skilled communities of persuasion both with objects and with policies. They do not let adminstrators forget that one of our service sectors is the artifactual world. All the new meanings still reside in the source original.

aic certification

This September the AIC membership will vote, up or down, for a practitioner certification program. I am still not sure if the certification function is at home in the organization, but maybe it is. One functionality that is at home in AIC is the practice called ìtraining the trainersî. This is the routine training for those who must manage others in preservation activities. So my question is if the AIC would have more self-validation with a process of certifying the certifiers.

All the organization would need to do is to point to programs and apprentice opportunities that meet excellent performance for education and accreditation of students. This different agenda would have a distinct advantage of pointing to responsible educational opportunities without the need to implement de-certification. It would also perform a recognition service that is not redundant or ambivalent, expensive or unsustainable.

been there, done that

“I don’t want this to lapse into the well-worn trope that conflates literacy with moral and civic value – but I’m unnerved by the notion of a fully post-literate world, and by the Flash applications and APIs that inhabit it.”
Sebastian Mary

It really doesn’t matter if the larger culture lapses into chaos. What is important is that cloistered enclaves responsibly transmit patrimony and efficient reading behaviors to a more receptive future. These enclaves, such as those immersed in the future of the paper book, have the capacity to outwit trends by their very seclusion.

inter library loan

“We have access to indexing and abstracting of EVERYTHING in the world. We only pay for what people actually USE. Some variation of this is possible for ebooks now. I think it should be the case for journals as well. Pay-per-use. Scary to some folks. Hard to budget for. Requires all kinds of new user education activities. Requires all kinds of different collection procedures. Maybe collection development as we know it disappears. Shiver!”
Collections 2.0

The library as screen is prefigured in eILL agendas. At the moment both lending and borrowing is based on differences in collections. How persistent is difference? Will collection differences save libraries? This is a larger question than the digital dissolve of the entity of a given book.

On the other hand,
BooksFree

flight of the condor II

An exciting project is underway to conserve antiquarian libraries in the highland colonial city of Arequipa, Peru. These libraries house collections spanning five centuries including materials produced in Peru where printing was introduced in the 16th century. The July 2008 project is a joint effort of book preservation specialists from the Universities of Alabama, Iowa and Texas. There is a
PowerPoint introduction.

post digital book

“Cracking the Code with Mixmaster Scrap June 10th and 11th; June 13th and 14th
Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday; Saturday, 9:00-5:00, Art and Architecture Building , University of Utah

Get your swerve on with this inquiry into the uses and utility of the
artist’s sketchbook, a venerable tool with the dexterity to act as
planner, journal and muse
Timothy Ely-aka, Mixmaster Scrap-began making books as an errant child.
Interest in UFOs, alchemy, comic books, bones, and arcane religious
artifacts led him from painting and design work to bookbinding.”

two circles

Off to Denver for the 36th annual meeting of the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works. Future of the book advocates are fewer in
AIC but the great circles of AIC and ALA overlap just slightly where the weird advocates are.

I was at the 1971 and 1972 meetings were the AIC was established from the International Institute for Conservation with I believe 271 members and maybe 8 book conservators. Today there are 3,300 members and maybe 30 full time book conservators. This indicates a shrinking growth of practitioners specializing in books. Over the years the AIC has divided into ten speciality groups.

Meanwhile ALA/ALCTS/PARS, with too many specialty enclaves, is downsizing to just four discussion groups. Regardless of the naming confusions they should end up with an administrative discussion group and analog collections, digital collections and reformatting discussion groups.

And just as the universe is lumpy, the AIC/ALA circles overlap at various sites. But the future of the book overlap is easy; its a sub-set of “book and paper” in both organizations.
But we are also industrial spies in all of AIC/ALA/ALCTS/PARS.

overhead

“Google’s capital expenditures, the lion’s share of which go to building and outfitting data centers, soared to a record high of $842 million in the first quarter of this year, up from $678 million in the fourth quarter of ‘07, notes Data Center Knowledge. Should the company maintain its current pace of investment, its spending on data centers and related infrastructure will surpass $3 billion this year, a remarkable total.”
Nicholas Carr

I love it when screen reading advocates discredit paper books by mentioning the cost of their storage. Research libraries store books for pennies per centuries. And with no high cost IT staffing needed.

reading between the lines

The Kindle froze. No way to navigate, no way to force quit, just screen froze on a page. Many such Kindle experiences provide a tutorial in the performance attributes of paper books. For example, the kindle needs prompts for each page while the paper book presents a two page spread.

The freeze episode suggested that many prompts of books are not related directly to reading. With a paper book or among various paper books or in the stacks of a library the ease of such non-reading prompts makes them invisible.
The very act of consulting two books side by side is quite natural with physical books. Even the more complex acts of perceiving an unpublished, potential book between books on the shelf or conceiving a realization between the lines are experiences smoothly sustained by physical books. And you can close a real book.

unknown future

Always thoughtful, balanced, poised and complex, Ben Vershbow is leaving the
Institute. He made the if:book blog a lively place for futureofthebook advocates.

Ben has been there from the start. Even though this FotB site has been here three times longer, the Institute FotB has now been running over three years. So my question is what has happened? Is the future always insulated from the present? Can’t be. For example the screen reader as dedicated to textual works has gone through many evolutions of genre and connectivity, but the Institute is adamant about discussing projections and developing futurist applications. At least Ben understood that you occasionally need to watch your tracks.

faulty assumption

It is frequently mentioned that a constraint on the market for dedicated text readers is the relative lack of available titles. More likely the significant constrain is the same one that exists with all screen based reading; too much content rather than not enough. The limited resource is actually time for reading.

Such a faulty assumption is then compounded whenever advocates imagine that reader and author interactivity and continuous revision is an attribute rather than a disfunction of the e-book.

“When I write a book, I do not want to maintain a ìtetherî over the long haulóand, as reader and writer alike, I most certainly do not want a future where the book I read and possibly disagreed with on February 27 is no longer the book on my virtual shelf
on February 28.” Walt Crawford, Cites and Insights, 8/4, 2008

preservation masters collection

In a new research environment of delivery surrogates, screen simulations, replacement copies and their discovery keywords, search tags and metadata, a more deliberate and yet expansive designation of self-authenticating source originals is needed. The Preservation Masters Collection is non-circulating and contains items that act as back-up to digital and non-digital access items in our collection. With this master collection designation the researcher can look across various delivery formats and arrive at a self-authenticating source item. This source original can confirm questions of resolution, fidelity, scale, color, vintage, haptic function, material fabric, association, collation and content. A provenance of the original can be constructed and the material existence and extant condition of a surviving artifact be established.

The preservation master concept has already been adopted in other domains of patrimony. Wilderness areas, historical sites, antiquarian machines, endangered species and other national treasures are designated as self-authenticating patrimony. Now the concept and its implications are apt for certain library materials. The mastering functionality must not be taken for granted or discounted in a newer environment based on screen delivery of these primary sources. (see also
Afterlife of Media)

(The University of Iowa Libraries is currently establishing a Preservation Masters Collection based on five years of curation and maintenance of a leaf masters collection.)

April start of printing in the Amanas

Print is connected to things and not just to a computer screen. It is connected to the goat yard. It is connected to the fire set in the huge shop stove, hail on the windows and melting type metal. Its actually almost a question of prayer to send an assembled line because the line will transfer or will not and the great cam set halt or tumble and the cycle will be forced forward just by will. Mats and space bands suddenly on the floor, all sorts of things connected to print. Fingers look pale. This is some kind of grandmother story as capital GGGGG cascades into the assembler.

An aunt who could not read or write made meander lines on a piece of paper and asked my grandmother what she had written. My grandmother told her that her drawn lines were not writing.

“How can this be, my lines look like writing?” “Well, what did you mean?” asked my grandmother. “I don’t know, I was in hope you could tell me.” “No, writing doesn’t work that way.”

be square

Its a bit refreshing to discover weird
enclaves that consider connectivity uncool and screen reading crappy. They love in stead old weedy, wily, homemade print. For them it is Be There and Be Square; be square as in out-of-step with the digital age and square with the paper too. Same for
us.

Remember, all the digital advocates are old now.

unmirror

“The case also explores the line between free Web content created by fans and a commercially published book. Ms. Rowling has openly praised the Web site on which the Lexicon is based, giving it a ìfan site awardî in 2004 and commenting in interviews that she even relied on the site ó which provides an annotated catalog of characters, spells, magic potions, locations and events in her books ó while writing. It was only when RDR decided to transform the site into a book that she objected.”

Many have remarked that the Potter series was distributed and read in traditional book format and that this indicated the continuing future of the book among young readers. The infringement suit now contends that while on-line popularity is a desirable accessory to the series a print reference work will too closely mimic the original print work.

What could be lurking here are exclusive attributes of the physical book, haptic possession of conceptual works, and the still relevant economy of physical consumer goods.

words, words

“wouldn’t it be great if textbooks were published online with dynamic comment fields so that students like Matthew LaClair could raise these sorts of issues directly in the margin of the book. what a great conversation might ensue?” if:book

er, since when is a entry in a “dynamic comment field in the margin of the book” a “conversation”? This category of communication used by screen reading advocates is more akin to talking to a nearby driver. Let’s not assume that multiple keyboards produce conversation.

***all the news that’s fit to print

“I think that newspapers still have a future if they stop trying to compete with the net. Printed editions cannot match the speed of the net and publish -almost by definition- old news for an increasing part of there potential market. Therefore I suggested that they use their journalists and experience to add value to news stories by adding background information, by running more extensive stories. Long well-balanced stories still read better on paper. Their readership might be smaller, but could prove to be more steady in the long run.”
Kurt

kindle disguised as e-book

“One of the more intriguing aspects of the Kindle’s initial rollout in November 2007 was the degree to which Jeff Bezos and Amazon played the Kindle’s most revolutionary feature so close to the vest. By marketing the Kindle as an e-book reader, Amazon kept the public focus away from Kindle’s stunning EV-DO woreless connectivity.

Did I just tell you that you could buy a mobile computer for $399 and never pay a dime to connect to the web?”
Stephan Windwalker

“Kindle is a whole new class of device. Thank you for being an early adopter.” (Kindle screen saver)
KindleKorners

Kindle is engendering its own functionality. One posssibility is a screen transition away from books emerging directly from legacy book formatting. For example, only the cursor scrolls on Kindle, all the content navigation is paginated. Its a blink rather than a slur of text. This blink does play seemlessly with a link, essentially integrating web surfing with pagination. Can collation be far behind?

art, fact, and artifact

“The art of the book has been at once visionary and documentary, imagining a future that has yet to exist while finding inspiration from the resources of the past. The first biennial conference of the College Book Art Association seeks to bridge the worlds of book art, book history, cultural criticism, and curatorial work through appreciation of the book as an aesthetic sensorium.”
Matt Brown

The College Book Art Association Biennial Conference,
Art, Fact, and Artifact: The Book in Time and Place will occur January 8-10, 2009. The conference will be hosted by the University of Iowa Center for the Book. Presentation Proposals due June 1, 2008.

Iowa has more to offer than the firery heat of summer as presented in the 2005 Changing Book conference. Try us in January. Be there and be square.

books threatened by new format

Early in the 18th century journals, newspapers and other periodicals emerged to capture the attention of readers. Book and stationers shops were suddenly magazine stores and newspaper stands appeared in the streets. Coffee houses opened in London where readers scanned the freshest dispatches. New scholarly journals enlivened communication and debate.

But books continued to flourish alongside the new format and in context with new readership. Books flourished as a complement of the changes.

“The implications of communications technologies will, of course, be wide ranging and significant, but they are unlikely to be monolithic or hegemonic. They can best be understood and mastered with an appropriate knowledge of the cultural dynamics involved, and an appreciation of their appropriations by users as well as their impositions on them. History can make a contribution to this debate.”
Adrian Johns

secret and overt

Our own
Emily Martin is revealed as a book artist of secret powers in the excellent exhibit
Secrets and Lies.
Alex Appella of
Transient Books is the winner of the Purchase Prize.

inert

“Although the locus of scholarly discourse is slowly but clearly moving from bound/printed pages to networked screens, weíve yet to reach the tipping point. The printed book is still the gold standard of the academy.”
if:book

Notice the loaded language of screen reading advocates. (Of course, we do the same.) Notice that “gold”suggests inert, though well regarded, “bound” suggests intellectually confined, ‘tipping point’ suggests screen reading will suddenly win big, and “academy” suggests backward looking. And “slowly but clearly moving from” wishfully projects that screen reading and print reading are functionally equivalent. Defining only to discount is not helpful.