futureofthebook.com

we pause

TeleRead and if:book both have technical problems. This interrupt is considered opportune since the breaking news is of e-book screen failures. Of three most popular reading devices, screen failure is approaching 25%.

No news is good news from the print sector which has not reported a single page display failure. The situation crosses into script act theory where unrealized meanings are consequential. Evidently print has reported no incident of lap heat or fan buzz or charge drain either.

infrastructure

All books are electronic. They are delivered to either screen or paper or both. Either way, if electronic versions are products of print production or print production is a by-product of electronic publication, the whole activity is digital and the whole outcome is readable content. So the scholarly interest in editorial control has already crossed into new territory. But it is surprising that there is no sense of chaos. The chaos arises when editorial control long associated with print is applied to electronic editions or when a new absence of editorial control associated with on-line publication is applied to print editions.

From Gutenberg to Google by Peter Shillingsburg invokes script act theory to examine the situation of scholarly publication with an unjustified disposition to orderly transition. The potential of disjunction and a more promising future of scholarly print is discounted.

The bias is well expressed by an exemplary ambiguity; “It can be questioned whether textuality, in the constrained form of print, has been allowed to reveal its nature fully.” (p.85) Does this statement pose a visualization of print escaped from its analog constraint to its digital fulfillments? Or is the meaning a contrary visualization of the future of the print attribute of constraint liberated to self fulfillment and to a bright future as a re-preferred context for scholarly publication?

And what a long dance around the distinctive strengths of self-authenticating print and self-indexing screen reading without clearly allocating these attributes to their transmission functions and to their formats.

contemporary bindings

For a book conservator “contemporary” means bound in the period of the book’s printing. This reference site is exemplary for its easy navigation, clean design and magnificent subject. Scott Husby has provided an adventure among these fascinating 15th c. survivals.

always on

One of the draw backs of screen reading is the need for electrical power. The device needs more than wireless connectivity for content, it also needs wireless connectivity for energy as well. The energy node could be at the consumer end, but to fulfill portability, it would be optimal to have mobile reception.

This precept could transform the obstacles of storage battery development for larger devices as well. A synthetic metabolism based on kinetic energy transmission would be a growth industry. By instigating such a revolution the e-book reader could go down in history, finally.

drm sturm und draug

A given book content can be rendered on any number of devices and any screen based device can render a number of contents. With a paper book a given content is captive in a single reading device and there is little opportunity of transmission of the work from one device to another. In a sense DRM (digital rights management) is even more effective in paper than on screen.

E-book advocates visualize books as effervescent content that can be rendered to any reading device. Restraint of multiplicity and migration of content from one device to another is blamed on DRM but the underlying frustration is with lack of possession of content. E-book readers wish to own, not rent, books.

The frustration should be attributed not to DRM but to illogic. Possession is a feature of the device rendering, not the state of ownership of un-rendered content. Possession is best assured in paper rendering and least assure in screen rendering. The more fixed and material the depiction, the more owned. The more variable and immaterial the depiction the less it is possessed. Such contrast may even extend to conceptual possession of content.

For more DRM anxieties visit
teleread

google smart, not

“In Googleís view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can ìaccessî and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.”
Nicholas Carr

Before Google we could harbor questions, reformulate questions, compile questions and discount questions without being able to arrive at an answer. Before Google there was a longer cogitation of questions.

So the benefit of an immediate Google answer then should also weigh if the skills of harboring, reformuating, compiling and discounting answers, as well as questions, is useful.

bound to be free

Craig will offer a life changing tutorial on the essence of bookbinding. Experience the post-digital shift; Be there AND be square!

Linotype revival

The
Linotype used for the printing of the Daily Iowan is now safely relocated to the Johnson County Historical Society museum. Rigger Larry Raid and Printing department regulars skillfully defied gravity and brought the 3,300 lb. machine to its new home. At JCHS the Linotype will again compose and cast lines of type and inform students of the
University of Iowa Center for the Book that there is a whole century (1880 -1980) of print production that they missed.

reality based

How is the digital inventory of every consumer item identified? With a bar code printed on paper. How is the inventory of knowledge managed? A portion is printed on paper and that portion also is bar coded joining the universe of consumer items. Economic transactions keep the paper book viable and so does its place in the inventory of real things.

digital print 2.0

“Ingram is the owner of Lightning Source, the largest printer of books on demand in the world.
But Lightning Sourceís expensive, factory-based equipment which requires the services of
skilled operators, prints titles on demand within the existing supply chain. Lightning sees our
machine, which bypasses the entire supply chain and delivers a finished book directly from the
digital file to the end user, as a forward looking adjunct to their traditional technology. Our
machine is small enough to function in a library or bookstore or school or hotel. It is as easy to
operate as an office copying machine. It prints and binds a high quality perfect bound book in
minutes automatically on demand at point of sale for less than a penny per page and trimmed to
infinite sizes between 8.5/11 and 4.5/4.5 inches.”
Jason Epstein

default preservation

The Kindle does not archive. Week old newspapers, blog scrolls and magazines disappear as new material is posted. This is an attribute. Deletion of paper is crucial as well. The difference is that a physical action is needed since the default is preservation. One attractive aspect of the default preservation of paper is that storage does not require media other than the delivery medium.

i-pod moment

” And with the Amazon Kindle selling steadily in the USA, and available soon in the UK,
the talk is of whether the publishing industryís ëiPod momentí is finally at hand. Are books, like vinyl records, soon to become a collectorís curiosity? Or will readers remain loyal to paper? “
Read:Write Report (8.2)

Advocates for e-book transmission to reading devices look to an approaching “i-pod moment” when the book reading preference will tip to electronic device delivery. But the equivalence of text and sound delivery should be questioned. Audio delivery, live or synthetic, is transmitted through air. Text delivery is transmitted visually. So the relevant comparative genre for music transmission would be delivery of on-line scores. This is a much smaller enclave of readership and the comparison, between books and musical scores, does suggest disadvantages and attributes of paper based delivery.

Musical performance would be enhanced by screen delivery of scores. The need to turn pages is not appreciated by performers. But note the domain of one-time presentation where device connectivity is an exclusive attribute of screen delivery. In performance the relation of the performer to a rehearsal or annotated paper score could trigger another preference.

Re-readings of all kinds, audio and text based, shift appreciations, associations and meanings of the delivered content. But longer term re-reading is more dependent on media persistence and here the music listener is much more vulnerable than the print reader.

if:FotB

if:book
mission – “to investigate the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens”

FotB mission – to investigate the evolution of intellectual discourse as it shifts from networked screens to printed pages

The consequence of the digital revolution for the future of the print book and the special new relations between screen based access to print books and screen based conversations about print reading is a different topic than contests in the technologies of text transmission.

digital print

“Consumer-level print-on-demand, as exemplified by the Espresso, is
a hybrid of P and E that brings the availability advantages of an e-book to the form factor of a paper book. It it means that people who prefer not to read on a screen need not be left entirely out of the digital revolution.”

And so the “form factor” is in play for regressives who do not “prefer” screen reading but also wish not to be “left out entirely” from the digital revolution. Well let’s see if there may not be exclusive attributes of print, decisive reading behaviors based in print, and some momentum of print into the digital future.

the voice of type

“If ‘the tone of voice’ of a typeface does not count, then nothing counts that distinguishes man from the other animals. The twinkle that softens a rebuke; the scorn that can lurk under civility; the martyr’s super-logic and the child’s intuition; the fact that a fragment of moss can pull back into the memory a whole forest; these are the proofs that there is reality in the imponderable, and that not only notation but connotation is part of the proper study of mankind. The best part of typographic wisdom lies in this study of connotation, the suitability of form to content.”
Beatrice Warde, The Monotype Recorder, spring 1933.

And so how dilute is the default text of an RSS reader or how unreadable is an endless browser line length? How ephemeral is the screen or how illegible switched off?

fast food

“Ironically, my research suggests that one of the chief values of print library research is its poor indexing. Poor indexingóindexing by titles and authors, primarily within journalsólikely had the unintended consequence of actually helping the integration of science and scholarship. By drawing researchers into a wider array of articles, print browsing and perusal may have facilitated broader comparisons and scholarship.”
James Evans

As with “fast food”, the implication with screen based research is not only that the content is served quickly, but that the user is encouraged to consume quickly as well. Print libraries engender much slower research with citations and text persistent over centuries. Across the career of the researcher, any reference can be re-examined in wider or newer context with assurance and the pace of discovery is not time graded. Print research compares with “slow food”.

As with fast food or slow, the p-book and e-book modes each provide a different experience and there are exclusive attributes and limitations of each. A lively interaction of the two modes is in motion. The surge of advance and use of screen based reading confirms its complementary fulfillment of print and a surge and advance of print confirms its new dependence on digital technologies.

art, fact, and artifact

“Roused by research into the materiality of texts, humanities scholars and institutional curators have summoned new facts to explain communication technologies, writing an alternative history of word and image in the book format.”

Be
there and be
square, January 8-10, 2009.

makes sense

So many projections of the future of the book just toy with the contrast of the print book and the screen book. Every popular discussion questions which reading device is best at the beach, on the subway or in the tub. And then there is endless evocation of the smell and feel of old books. Meanwhile, many other discussions are biased by presumptive projections of digital advocates. Print advocates are frequently cast as misguided and regressive. Perhaps a more effective approach is needed to distinguish print and screen books by weighing their different transmission attributes and by realizing their very promising interactions.

The mediation of the print and screen book, getting from one to the other, is efficient and pervasive as libraries have demonstrated for decades. Services of bibliographic utilities, smart search applications and screen delivery have repurposed print libraries. Print attributes of fixity, navigational and haptic refinement and reliable re-access across time, all pair nicely with screen attributes of immediacy, automated search and live content.

Another crucial pair of print and screen attributes is revealed by the self-authenticating nature of the print book contrasted with the self-indexing nature of the screen book. This means that the print book carries with it layers of physical evidence, overt content and bibliographic codes that persistently reveal the source and intent of its production. Such features of self-authentication, confirmed with ease of re-readings across time and cultures, give the material book its special role in transmission. But print books resist indexing and have been compiled into libraries only with great effort or with the help of on-line cataloging and finding aids.

By contrast the screen book is self-indexing because the encoding or production process that renders books to the screen also enables their keyword search routines. However, the effervescent screen books resist authentication. Screen books, like touch screen voting, remain vulnerable and un-trusted with ease of unmonitored deletions or revisions and uncertain provenance. And expectations are very different with screen based research. The content is served quickly and the reader is induced to consume quickly as well.

Now such eerie counterpoints of print and screen works should be observed in detail to better understand their interaction for cultural transmission. Going forward disproportionate dependence on a single mode is too hazardous. Cultural transmission has always relied on composite modes and transitional hybrids such as e-book devices, print-on-demand, electronic ink, and page and scroll screen navigation all signal momentum toward more mature and elaborate interaction of print and screen.

And they are eerie counterpoints. It is as if the screen is filling a transmission void of print and as if print is founding its own more essential, less ramified, role. So simple competition between the print book and screen book is an illusion; each has a different function and there are exclusive attributes of each. A lively interaction of the two modes is in motion. Mirror attributes, rather than contrasts of advantages and disadvantages, have emerged and mutual redefinition is at work. The surge of advance and use of screen based reading confirms its complementary fulfillment in print and a surge and advance of print confirms its new dependence on digital technologies.

Least of all should the print book be implicated as obsolescent in a context of frustrations or aspirations of advocates of screen delivery. Although the print and screen book are now defining each other, they both have their own futures.

paper authentication vs. touch screen indexing

“Voters cannot trust the totals reported by electronic voting machines; they are too prone to glitches and too easy to hack. In the last few years, concerned citizens have persuaded states to pass bills requiring electronic voting machines to use paper ballots or produce voter-verifiable paper records of every vote. More than half of the states now have such laws.” New York Times, August 3.

The drama of electronic voting mirrors larger issues in cultural transmission including the future of the paper book.