futureofthebook.com

used book copyright clearance

This is an interesting
vector of the physical book as conveyed to online access. While screen or e-book copies can be extinguished at the end user, physical books can be re-circulated to a string of subsequent readers. Print libraries are based this unlimited, linear circumvention of copyright. The library circulation has been considered a social good and no money is involved, but I would not be surprised to see jobbers and bundlers appear selling discount new copies as “used”.

So now we finally know the textual “ipod” counterpart of digital music distribution. It is the print book digitally produced, digitally distributed.

hypermedia, multimedia

“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. Scholarship, artistic practice, and the digital age have evoked for us the multimedia nature of the book experience.”

The print book is quite a work of multimedia, once called hypermedia. That legacy has driven the book arts past digital revolution as if it was just another technical innovation. The
conference will bring 170 book art instructors to the University of Iowa Center for the Book. The College Book Arts Association is a new colony of the
SHARP empire. This whole universe side-steps digital connectivity and transmission and goes directly to the role of the book.

last cyborg

The Shallows, Mind, Memory and Media in an Age of Instant Information by
Nicholas Carr (new book) coming.

The last authentic cyborg was one of the first; the Operator and Linotype. The newspaper could not be produced by the man or the machine, but only by their interaction. As we default further to machine dependence the relationship sours. Will instant information transform to instant programming?

in camera

“Cold-blooded blogs during the last year have dished about Polaroidís leaky developers and the impossibility of making copies from instant film prints or of fiddling with them, which, by the way, was precisely why police photographers long ago cottoned to them for crime scenes and mug shots.” Week in Review, New York Times

The demise of the Polaroid Camera has evoked warm evaluations of the 1970’s and of the instant photo technology. But it is surprising that the attribute that most distinguishes a Polaroid print from a digital shot is not accentuated or even mentioned. This is that a Polaroid shot could not be manipulated or replicated and the surviving print, as with a Daguerreotype, is an artifactual witness to the depicted subject.

It is, like, curious how we so easily let go of our grip on, like, the past.

reading agenda

“Hint for Obama: Maybe the Obama-ized FCC can at least go on go on record as encouraging phone companies to promote e-books. And no need for just iPhones to be involved. Perhaps Google can encourage the Android handset-sellers and telecom allies to act to couple the phones with literacy.” David Rothman,
Teleread

Great connection! The literacy advocation includes the role of hand-held and head mounted devices. This will also drop into re-skills and up-skills for the younger labor force.

In my view, this is a much more needed agenda than development of the advanced reading applications at other book future discussions. You have opened an authentic incubation niche for the social agenda for screen reading. Keep the momentum.

raw deal

A further
frustration of the exploitation of libraries by Google can be posed as an exploitation of the collections made available by libraries. That includes disregard of the value of contributions of paper makers, book designers, printers and binders still completely unrecognized in all this re-delivery.

Imagine Google running the front desk of the on-line, world library and in walks a provider who simply wants to use the digital content of all the books. Let’s call that service Boggle and what it does is deliver a unique para-book of running text per each query based on world content and user profile. Such a book service would supercede the Google citation scrolls and product eclipse the ever increasing mash-up of content. Then Google can feel abused and exploited.

..humm

“Craft stores, from giant chains like Michaels Stores to small scrapbook supply shops, are reporting that sales are higher compared with the last holiday season, and online marketplaces for handmade goods, like
Etsy, are seeing a boom in listings and transactions.” New York Times, Business, 12.23.08

For example;
Moon Bindery

truly dead

As Kindle passes a first year anniversary its Amazon library has grown from 75K to 200K titles. The suggestion is that Kindle, as a provider, can stream a lifetime of reading to the small screen. The pause here is what that means. Can we honestly sustain a full lifetime of reading without a single physical evidence of its passage? From time to time we should glance at a dark Kindle screen and realize the vacancy of it compared with the graceful, arrayed companionship of physical books.

Letís go beyond that; how will we enjoy an entire culture as transient as the evening news? All these devices are gadgets; the paper book as well as the hand-held electronic reader. But their uses for culture transmission vary. I am always amused when the death of print books is mentioned; I have a whole collection of truly dead e-book readers.

paper history channel

The machines and people who made
paper history and set the stage for the future of paper based media. Both photo and book output still include paper base markets, but very different.

flight of the condor 3

We will return to
Arequipa for Easter processions and library preservation. Enjoy this timely story by Archival Products Editor, Janice.

inert

Among attributes of the print book is an energy nil, inert state. Physical books can be stored without regard to battery leakage. They can be put in a pocket without any need to disable buttons. They can even be left, disregarded for centuries, and then be picked up and read whenever a new relevance emerges.

This energy cycle is actually the reverse of electronic transmission. Electronic transmission requires energy when not in use. More importantly, the energy of active content assimilation and thought is applied only when it returns meaning.

a single transmission ecology

“In our new universe, the content encased in a well-formed XML file is the sun. The book, an output of a well-formed XML file, is only one of an increasing number of revenue opportunities and marketing opportunities revolving around it. It requires more discipline and attention to the rules to create a well-formed XML file than it did to create a book.”
Publishers’ Weekly

The XML format is a common parent of both print and screen book. They are simply two of a variety of output “transforms” from a digital stock.

word a day journal

Enjoy and learn from a sharp teacher and Super Advocate for the Book. Notice the careful presentational resolutions and vivid haptic approach.

preservation and scanning

The Google book model is influencing
special collections scanning. The emphasis is on production and coverage that will enable the much larger audience an opportunity to discover and signal the hidden values in the collections.

Such an approach more clearly assigns the mastering function to the source originals, especially as on-demand scanning plays a role. But there is even a further implication as the leaf master capture is extended to unused and undiscovered materials.

What at first appears to be a move away from the preservation agenda of higher quality, one-time capture, is more likely a move toward authentic mastering from sources better preserved as their values and new meanings are discovered.

caption

“I sat down in one of the iron-armed compartments of an old sofa, and put in the
time for a while reading the framed advertisements of all sorts of quack
nostrums for dyeing and colouring the hair. Then I read the greasy names on the
private bay rum bottles; read the names and noted the numbers on the private
shaving cups in the pigeon-holes; studied the stained and damaged cheap prints
on the walls, of battles, early Presidents, and voluptuous recumbent sultanas,
and the tiresome and everlasting young girl putting her grandfather’s spectacles
on; execrated in my heart the cheerful canary and the distracting parrot that
few barber’s shops are without. Finally, I searched out the least dilapidated of
last year’s illustrated papers that littered the foul centre-table, and conned
their unjustifiable misrepresentations of old forgotten events.” Sam Clemens

strange and obvious

At the turn of the 20th century the manufacturers and operators of composition and type casting machines were the IT geeks of their era. Keyboard prompting, programmed automation and electronic displacement of manual composition changed text transmission. Now this “revolution”, as assimilated into letterpress history, is almost invisible.

Today instruction in mechanical composition and type casting is needed, not as a specialty of letterpress transmission, but as an instructional exemplar for the current “revolution” of text transmission. Enclaves of print and screen transmission need the connectivity of their tangents.
(more)

for a while to come

“The ebook market is in a transitional phase today. The majority of people still read print and will continue to do so for a while to come. However there are a growing number of early adopters who are reading ebooks. Most continue to read a mix of both print and digital formats. The main advantage of ebooks at the moment is distribution – both in terms of speed and cost. However the reading experience is still poor compared to print, unless you have an e-reader with a new e-ink display.”
Mark Gladding

The twilight of the book includes a curious glow. It appears that many of the extinctions are occuring in the emerging species without otherwise disturbing evolution. Will the paper book have a different niche in the new ecology that the screen book will provoke?

commemoration

This site has been posting now for ten years.

carbon footprint

“I donít buy the argument that the best way to save the planet is to eliminate print publicationsóor books, for that matter. Paper, when made right, is a renewable, recyclable, biodegradable resource, unlike the must-be-replaced-every-three-years computers, hand-helds, and other petroleum-based products we put our trust in.” Leonard Kniffel

There is energy cost to screen display including the server farms and it is cost compounded rather than diminished over time.

creative cities

The new designation UNESCO world city of literature has not disturbed Iowa City. The writing of literature is a fairly invisible activity and it is unlikely to have much more substantiation if the emphasis only accentuates the web presence of the
Writing University. Perhaps some transaction with the Center for the Book could result in physical books.

recommended for you

Now let’s use the Kindle to comparison shop between print and screen. (You will need to bring up both your screens.) McCleery, History of the Book is $32.35 new print, $28.76 Kindle screen and $24.62 “used and new” print.

Now let’s bring up the first page of the index in print and search on Kindle screen. Now let’s search “Ambrose” imagining that we can find Augustine’s remark on the saint’s silent reading.

Now let’s mention what we saw; on screen an excerpt with a location marker, in print the indented remark, embedded in text, recto and topic break verso of the spread all below chapter heads. For some reason this physical configuration is remembered. “Writing, authority, and the individual” and “From Orality to Literacy”
“Going into it I knew there would be some print content that wouldn’t make it into the Kindle edition and I was OK with that. What I wasn’t expecting was the awful formatting and complete lack of personality that seems to come through in the Kindle version. It’s like trying to read a bad RSS feed. I’m talking about awkward line wraps, figure/image callouts that appear in the wrong place and disrupt the reading experience, etc.”
Joe Wikert

“This notion of “music without metadata” is a fascinating one. As another example, I would suggest that the move from vinyl to CD to digital download has, in some ways, distanced us from the metadata. When I transitioned from vinyl to CD in the late 80’s, I started to notice that I no longer knew the titles of songs. It dawned on me that the difference was the medium. When listening to a favorite record, I was forced to pick up the record and flip it. While flipping it over, your eyes will naturally scan not only the titles on the record, but the grooves. You would make a connection between the two — the big, fat groove on side one of Atomizer is “Kerosene.” The very physicality of the vinyl and the flipping over served to reinforce the names, the length, and the sounds of the tracks. Once I moved to CD, you rarely handled the disk. CD’s are longer, so you listen for a long time without referring to the jacket, hence forgetting which song is which. You couldn’t “see” the songs or physical tracks (the CD is hidden inside a machine whereas the record is ON a machine). Digital download goes even further — there’s no physicality at all. No cover, no track listing. Nothing to visualize about the track (music may be aural but its metadata is visual). To this day I can tick off the titles on my favorite vinyl LPs from the 70’s but have trouble remembering any track names on more recent digital or CD albums — even ones that I listen to over and over.”
Brett Bobley

opportunity

Physical books are graceful companions; dependable and engaging when needed and otherwise tranquil. Our exchanges with books have a life of their own and the meanings of reading include that attachment.

A special trans-disciple program at the university of Iowa explores our relations with books. The qualities of books, their uses and material anatomies and their transmission functions are all studied and experienced in course work of the
UI Center for the Book. The component disciplines include book and paper
production by hand, library and bibliography work, graphic, calligraphic and printing arts and social and technical book history. The Center brings specialists from a dozen departments for integrated, book studies research.

By the end of the twentieth century the UICB was positioned between its own legacy, including the millennial heritage of the codex book, and the future of the book. The emerging environment of screen based reading and digital research accentuated a contrasting materiality and attribute of print while changes in publishing, migrations of print genres to online formats, Google searching and visual literacy shifted the mood of companionship with the book. Changes in reading terrain happen before they are mapped.

An agenda for the UI Center for the Book must now consider if the physical book is mainly defined by its legacy arts and crafts or if it is now evolving a new role in the context of screen reading. Is the screen filling a transmission void of print and is print founding its own more essential, less ramified, role? Are larger issues of efficient legibility and learning driven by the future interaction of print and screen? Are screen and print really a single transmission ecology?

Such a reading terrain is now emerging. It would be strange, in circumstances of economic and ecologic dysfunction, if the physical book proves to be the incubation niche for sustainable culture transmission and a synthesis of print and screen reading.