futureofthebook.com

curiouser

I cannot understand why screen based reading advocates consistently want to “eclipse” a format that is irrelevant to their visualizations. By imagining a print supercede scenario they choose a frame of most constraint for the promise of e-literature. There is no necessary connection between mutual re-definitions of two modes and their presumptive completion.

drucker share

“Many aspects of traditional codex books are relevant to the conception and design of virtual books. These depend on the idea of the book as a
performative space for the production of reading. This virtual space, like the e-space, or electronic space of my title, is created through the dynamic relations that arise from the activity that formal structures make possible. I suggest that the traditional book produces this virtual e-space, but this fact tends to be obscured by attention to its iconic and formal properties.” Johanna Drucker

The convergence of this essay with the
performances of Susan Share begins to map the dimension of the book. Now if only, the laundry list of the constraints of print would be realized as the exclusive affordances of print that set the stage for the reader and for the playwright.

And here is another
performance of the physical book. (from Kilgarlin
Denizens)

keokuk

We will offer a
talk “Bookmaking in the Era of young Sam Clemens” at the public library in Keokuk, Iowa which is just up river from Hannibal and just across the Iowa line. These were the boyhood haunts of young Sam Clemens. He soon grew up and left, but ever there after used his elaborate memory of that time and its characters as the pivot of his writing and his humor.

art, fact, artifact

A wonderful January
conference in Iowa.

silent movie

Watch this 1947 movie without the narration. Do not listen to the sound track. Listen to visual roar and syncopation. The last episode of
letterpress book making.

share in california

” I appreciate you putting my work in context of the future of the book, it’s kinetics, physicality, materiality and the inherent ritual involved in opening a book. Your thinking gives me insight.” Susan Joy Share, 09.21.08

The Susan Share visit to Scripps College started with her talk and a photograph looking out to the Diomede Island in the Bering Strait. Such a departure from a place no one knows is typical of Susan. Yet anyone curious about the future of the physical book should adventure with her.
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nevermore

intense and elegant
hand bookbinding

eerie counterpoints

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 technology, 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.
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authority x files

The historical evaluation of the mutability or stability of print transmission and the appraisal of the role of print in knowledge assembly and the component of print in culture change and individual reader reception, interpretation and valuation all begin to interplay in book studies. And then there are the relations to literary studies, bibliography and history. Finally there is the kaleidoscope of the book itself.

The position of book studies is carefully examined in
An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture, by Leslie Howsam, 2006. And our own Matt Brown is quoted remarking that book studies re-enliven literary research.

e-babel, p-babel

” Why buy an iLiad, Sony Reader or Kindle, with their restrictions, when you can buy a laptop for nearly the same price free of the formatting hassles? Similarly, with the increased use of PDAs and Blackberrys and quick technological improvements in mobile phone technology, which again largely bypass format issues, will the iPod moment for e-readers actually be the iPod?”
Tom Tivnan

The endless saw of the e-book device advocates is their frustration with proprietary DRM formats. There are 3 or 4 related to 3 or 4 devices. But if these proprietary formats were eliminated tomorrow, nothing would change. Screen based reading would remain with the various attributes and limitations that it has already and the larger adaptation of print to screen would continue its course.

Actually e-bable is nothing compared with p-bable where a single paper reading device can only display one content! So the e-babel discontents should pause to ask if there are any attributes, as for example physical libraries, of non-universal device display.

dual display halfway there

Dual display, with permutations of flip scroll and side-by-side reference, begins to mime the codex. Kindle type page-by-page navigation is not a basis for codex handling or even diptych spread.

beyond textbooks

“The Industrial Book is a stunning work of compilation and erudition. It succeeds in delineating the cultural, political, social, and economic history of the mid-nineteenth-century book while also capturing the intellectual vitality and innovation that characterizes this increasingly influential field of study.”
–Joshua Brown, The Graduate Center, City University of New York

A History of the Book In America is a five volume project with volume 3, “The industrial Book, 1840-1880″, now in print. This is a wonderful, layered encyclopedia of graceful essays, with revealing interpretation of the role of books as material culture. Four other book history readers, companions and introductions have also appeared, one now in second edition, since 2002. These publications will act inside and out of classrooms, supporting the research agendas, ulterior motives and specialized interpretation of any reader’s interest in book studies.

“Reading is at once one of the most ubiquitous and one of the most elusive of human activities.” Shafquat Towheed
Abstract

“In this paper I would like to explicate the theoretical principles that underlie the electronic hyper-text edition of Constantijn Huygensí Ooghentroost. The governing idea behind the project is the hypothesis, formulated by Jerome McGann, that new technologies of textual presentation may enable us to derive a clearer understanding of traditional, early-modern notions and practices of textuality.” Jurgen Pieters
Abstract

“As a result, at least to a certain extent, the e-book became part of history of printed book and rather than the opposite.” Miha Kovac
Abstract

top down, face up

the planetary capture format with the book in up-right reading position and the scanner overhead has long been the conservators’ preferred alternative to flip-flop of books on copiers. Face up copying is just like reading; speedy, kinetically easy and intuitive.

The Minolta DPS 3000 introduced the hope of non-damaging capture from bound materials. We got one for the preservation department almost ten years ago. It was riddled with video errors and was a black, bi-tonal scanner with a crippled grey scale capability. But it was a Streamliner; top-down.

Now we have a new Zeutschel OS12000. It is an even more elegant Streamliner. It is a color scanner with software that can intermingle insets at various bit levels. The Zeutschel is very smart. On its first scann it overshot the easel and pictured our shoes as it tried to learn something about its new coworkers. It doesn’t just capture, it observes.

And the variety and quantity of capture from tangible collections is increasing rapidly. Simulation is the new way of reading and the Zeutschel is the new reader. But with a backward glance, the old Minolta went to the interlibrary loan department where it will labor on, on-demand. Perhaps it is the real reader, sending a page or two from print to screen and never, never looking back.