futureofthebook.com

re-readers

Sophie based communal readings have a side bar. The participants are able to select print copies as their primary source. Especially suggestive was a re-reading thirty seven years later that motivated the deliberate Sophie review. Will the Sophie exchange summersault that far forward?

“One last note: This is not essentially an experiment in online reading itself. Although the online version of the text is quite readable, for now, we believe books made of paper still have a substantial advantage over the screen for sustained reading of a linear narrative. So you may also want to suggest to your readers that they order copies of the book now. Whichever edition of the book someone reads (US, UK or online), there is a navigation bar at the top of the online page will help locate them within the conversation.” from
Teleread

ostracon

“An Israeli archaeologist has discovered what he says is the earliest-known Hebrew text, found on a shard of pottery that dates to the time of King David from the Old Testament, about 3,000 years ago.”

(don’t try this with electronic media)

panoply

Skills of text encoding and pictorial encoding were extracted from skills of engagement of natural ecologies and transmitted to environments of synthetic technologies. A long practice of projectile defense and deliberate throwing conveyed ultimately to projectiles of text thrown across time and cultures and a long and attentive watching of the natural world conveyed to pictorial representation and ultimately to watching photographs and screens.The text skills derived from kinetics of projectiles and the pictorial skills from attentive watching, both engendering purely conceptual skills.

This little diorama is exemplified by the captioned image. The caption has text meaning and the image has visual meaning, but the real charm of the transmission of caption and image is their potent interaction; the caption says something visual and the picture says something textual. We have noticed this new meaning and clever panoply reading, but what does it mean?

At least this panoply suggests that the meanings of throwing and watching are intermingled in behaviors of reading and there is a possibly that skills of their synthesis is also so deep that it transcends technologies and partitions of textual and pictorial representation and of print and screen. The book, in its invention, evolution and modes of transmission is a great achievement of this synthesis of text and image and a great exemplar of the legacy of skills of reading. And so is the library.

metal clad

“The authors point out that
Latvian metal-clad bindings, produced in a
particular part
of the country and during a limited span of time during the c19, are
unique in bookbinding history.”

Well, not perfectly unique. We have them here in Iowa as an attribute of the material culture of the Mennonite and Amish communities. Our local Kalona Mennonite Museum displays many with the debossed metal hardware features of the Latvian.

google settlement

The Google Print
settlement opens copyright sectors to Google vended service. Curiously the target source material remains print originals and the target repositories remain libraries and not publishers.

This proprietary virtual library plan leverages almost every attribute of print source material including the attribute of their survival or preservation by libraries. It also leverages the work of authorship and the investment of publishers. It also leverages Googleís position as the most capable delivery infrastructure. As to which investors will benefit most by on-line access, it is likely that libraries may benefit least.

The library leverage still seems under positioned in all this. The preservation commitment and its cost, the collection building and classification, and the construction of access utilities have all been required to enable this on-line re-mining. Still other prerequisite services, known best by librarians and bibliographers have been overlooked. These are the contributions of producers of the print collections. Book designers, papermakers, compositors, printers and binders have not even been even acknowledged in this re-mining and revaluing of print collections.

The libraries can leverage the unrecognized and under-valued labor and skill of book producers. This can occur in context with on-line demand for print facsimile or on-demand book delivery. Here the resolution needed for paper delivery, the issues of permanence and durability, and the special appreciations of print production can be leveraged with library oversight and library revenue of facsimile print copy production. Such copy production may well require recapture from print masters.

behind the curtain

St. Gallen Abbey
library is imaged on-line with a view of the binding of each manuscript. It is such a pleasure to view these plain monuments still standing together.

“The digital world has in fact multiplied the number of facsimile representations of medieval texts, and yet in the absence of the effective power of the material book, these facsimiles are often a alienating as they are, apparently, exact.” Sian Echard, Printing the Middle Ages, 2008.

Turns out that print renditions of medieval manuscripts were affected, conveying the manuscripts as venerated antiques. Now we feel differently that digital imaging mirrors them truefully. But the inadequate letterpress facsimile was at least real and in that sense replicated the medieval book. Our face book facsimiles flicker on the screen.

” our current attitudes toward facsimile differ .and may in fact inhibit our ability to see the extent to which we too are re-creating medieval text-objects according to our own tastes.” Sian Echard

Turn-the-page software can even accentuate the unreality of a screen surrogate as we gladly attempt to trick our own mind and hands. So the risk is not the authentication of the image, but the authentication of our encounter with a medieval book.

“The medieval books are present to us in digital form, yet their absence haunts these recreations.” Sian Echard

parabook

“No technological innovation has more sharply raised the issue of the
potential and the limits of the book than the development of digital
textuality. While the eschatological promises of the late 1980s and
early 1990s may seem risible in retrospect, writing and reading digital
texts have become thoroughly normalized practices for much of the
western world, so that few books today are untouched by digital
processes. It remains to be seen whether this digitization will be the
destroyer of the book or the infinite extender of its limits.” anonymous

oprah reader

“Oprah has long been known as an avid reader with a keen eye for a good book. Authors whose books have been chosen for her book club have, over the years, enjoyed immense popularity. Thirty-five out of the sixty-seven books featured in Oprah’s Book Club are now available for our favorite reading device.”
The Kindle Reader

The Kindle is the ultimate fulfillment device. It is particularly suited to on-line retail of print books, but it works for any consumer product. The Oprah
endorsement will play-out both in context with her advocacy for reading, and also in her promotion of enclave fulfillment.

Will there be a Martha Stewart “print” backlash?

zine-ing

Catch up with the fast moving underworld of zines at the
ZineMachine. Zinesters are steam punkers and real squares, living in little cardboard art factories and wandering streets lit by flickering screens. Their adventure comics tell the story. New noir.

(The Zine Machine is a Sack Shop vending machine dedicated to zines, books, and minicomics. Run by students for students.)

“Let’s go back to that weird kid with the helmet to get our lemonade.”
Uptown Girl Comics

” Also, we have great news from the University of Iowa Library! The Special
Collections Department has taken an interest in the Zine Machine and would
like to create a permanent archive for all zines that have been in the
machine. “
Jessica White

and we are in
Zine World

too small a circle

Books as History, a rich
new publication “on the importance of books beyond their texts”, still draws too small a circle. The exposition is about the artifact, but not about the vehicle. How are conceptual works conveyed by such a graceful reading mechanism? Physical books invite contact, manipulative investigation and persistent re-reference. They echo our pace of comprehension and stand patiently among others keeping the reader company. This ergonomic is a larger circle, beyond text transmission. And why do we convey conceptual works in physical objects? Is a physical book a silent shape of ideas that we need to grasp?

And what about the less abstract issue? This is the
interplay of print and screen reading and where that new interdependence is going.
Here artifactual fades and the routes of the vehicles and their common and distinctive transmission functions become important.

intertype

Its such a pleasure to see a
line caster in such perfect running order such syncopation. The difference between Intertype and Linotype is the same as that between Ford and Chevy.

hardcover binding

The
library binding industry is responding to a migration of their market from libraries to print-on-demand. The product, a single title hard cover binding, is basically the same, but the books are sent to directly to the readers rather than sent via collections. Like other cloud dispersions the paper libraries are now everywhere. Of course too many clouds produce storms. The
Expresso provides local ATM like production. But this is not a hardcover.

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 of the physical book subtracts directly from efficiencies that have long enabled its success.
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googling

“Indeed, I wonder whether the fact that more brain regions are in simultaneous use during web use than during reading doesn’t illustrate (among other things) that concentrated thought becomes more difficult to maintain when reading online than when reading a printed work. Is the relative breadth of brain activity discovered by Small and his colleagues also a map of distraction?”
Nicholas Carr

Indeed. What if print reading is more efficient than screen reading? This is a fast food, slow food dynamic as well; if the screen delivers quickly it also induces quicker consumption. What if sustained quality nurtures comprehension, better than quick results, fries and shake and what if an attentive mind is as important as a quick navigator?

inlibri

The project to preserve historical libraries of Arequipa now has a
home on-line thanks to Jessica Peterson. Check out the great page composition on Peruvian binding.

earth book

The materiality of the book and the transmission role of that materiality is so nebulous it seems. Let’s imagine that the book is blank with no content, then what kind of artifact would it be? Would it be a coffee cup or a sofa? The natural world is devoid of text. In spite of metaphor, geologic formations or seashore ecologies don’t come with instructions. How would a book work without print?

Strange, it would still be here. It would still work, opening and closing, shelving and going with us on trips it would remind us of its provenance or some acquaintance. We would wake up and see it there, some kind of graceful companion. It could grow old and then outlast us. It could be discovered again in the future and be re-interpreted for what it is. Layers of manipulated investigation, many as simple as fanning the pages, are afforded by the hand held codex. It can seem inefficient to convey conceptual works in objects, but tactile authentications produce a performance space for acts of reading and retention.

turing test

“Where the machines were identified correctly by the human interrogators as machines, the conversational abilities of each machine was scored at 80 and 90%. This demonstrates how close machines are getting to reaching the milestone of communicating with us in a way in which we are comfortable. That eventual day will herald a new phase in our relationship with machines, bringing closer the time in which robots start to play an active role in our daily lives.”
AP press

What if the venerable book is also a robot; a device simulating human behavior?

advent of news

“At 10:10 we find that fourteen pages have been locked up and sent to the stereotypers. Twenty-six pages remain, and we must get the news into them and get them away at a rate of about one a minute. Type is scattered all over the room, coming hot from 80 type-setting machines. The minutes are flying by with the speed of a robot bomb; but so also are the pages. They must not be bunched in closing as that would choke the stereotyping department and delay the edition. At 10:30 there are ten pages to go; at 10:35 there are six pages; at 10:40 the last page has been locked up, and the edition has gone to press on time. In twenty minutes it will be selling on the street. “ from The Newspaper, Its Making and Meaning, 1945

The expectation of hourly news had its advent in the hot metal era. The many hand-offs from typewriter to Linotype setting to stone composition to plate casting to press rolling to street hawking were not necessarily more or less complex than digital transmission. But they were accomplished, at each step, with physical manipulations and human transactions.

palm reading

The i-Pod has germinated its own library of
reading applications. Meanwhile, according to
Teleread, p-books are apparently out-alluring e-books at the Boarders concept store. Why the divide between dedicated and undedicated hand-held devices?

authentication

“Certainly if a monk from seventh century Lindisfarne or Egypt were to come back today it is probable that he would find much more that was familiar in the practices and beliefs of a modern Muslim Sufi than he would with, say, a contemporary American evangelical. Yet this simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a Western religion, rather than the thoroughly Oriental faith it actually is.”
William Dalrymple

authenticated tabulation

“There is no time left between now and Election Day for states and localities to upgrade their machines or even to fix the vote-dropping software. All they can do is double-check their vote totals, audit their paper trails and be on the lookout for the next, as-yet-undiscovered computer glitch. After that, Congress must require that all states adopt voting systems that include voter-verifiable paper records for every electronic vote cast.” New York Times

Another example is presented by the crisis of bank liquidity. The 2nd and 3rd party derivatives are easy to track and tabulate with computers, but impossible to understand. They lack authentication of value.

Of course the simple solution is for everyone to pay off their credit cards. That infusion of hard cash would liquify banks! Too bad there is no leadership to mention such an act of citizenship.

luvi

Linotype University 6 was another encounter with the other. Jessica White has some terrific close-ups that the real operators can see in their sleep.

native allure

We need a renewed amour for print reading, so let’s advance the allures native to the physical book. Almost always these will now be colored by their contemporary repositioning as disadvantages, but we know better.
There is assured re-reading from a physical, eye readable media. The allures of such re-reading have been well appreciated in the past, but overlooked. Likewise the intimacy of print reading can be enjoyed as well. With the print book the reader is assured authentic seclusion with him or herself. There is the excellent portability of conceptually heavy books. There is a pleasure of energy independence from battery charge or wireless and the pleasure of reading in daylight rather than in the dark.
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still strong

Bud Lang’s Model #5 is the oldest working Linotype in the country. It was built in 1905 in an era when keyboard automation was still science fiction. Now it is running one hundred and three years and many industrial revolutions later. And strange to say, it can still spit out the news of the day without hesitation. From telegraph to internet, it is all letter setting and line casting for the Model #5. Both modern and antique, when you watch it in action and prompt the keyboard the performance space of change is quiet and unchanging.

taking off again

“Hoping to stir the sleepy electronic book market and steal some of the spotlight from Amazon.comís Kindle, Sony Electronics is unveiling its latest
Reader Digital Book this evening in New York.”

lightning source

30,000 to 35,000 books each day with an average run of 1.8 copies per title and same day fulfillment to Amazon shipping in the back room. Interact this with screen based review, customer profiles and access engines and the prospects for print fulfillment of Kindle orders is rather real.

What if screen based book indexing and book transactions essentially overcome constraints of print marketing and distribution?

beyond google print

Google Print has popularized previously unknown print books. Now the CIC, big ten plus University of Chicago, are visualizing their own digital repository to curate their Google books and improve long term access to their own book digitization work.

Well and good. The assured authentication of the university virtual library brings up a small point; if the digital hit of the surrogate is equivalent to a circulation of the print original why not count that in circulation statistics?
Suddenly we will have a surge in access of real libraries and a new validation of the continuing role of print in a context of screen delivery.