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.