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 Even the more complex acts of perceiving an unpublished, potential book between books on the shelf or conceiving a realization between the lines are experiences smoothly sustained by physical books.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.)