futureofthebook.com

wily coyote moment

“Most attention is paid to the cost of scanning (photographing the pages and processing them), but I cannot emphasize enough that the greatest costs of building a digital library are those borne by the brick-and-mortar libraries. Libraries spend billions each year building, curating, and maintaining their collections. So, the real value, and costs, are in the books and the libraries. This aspect is too often overlooked and undervalued.”
Open Content Alliance

Advocates for digital research and screen reading are oblivious of the functionality of physical books and print libraries.

epiphani

Nicholas Carr at
Rough Type is adventuring among simulants with wonderful insights. I have purged my watch list down to authentic content of Carr, Demsey and
Woods.

not one url

The awesome
bibliography of G. Tom Tanselle presents 370 pages of citation without a single url. FotB received two citations well undeserved in the company of the others.

busy original

Back-up, copy master, and reality check; the source original is always busy. Library digitizers snicker that physical copies are inaccessible and never used but they don’t appreciate the dependence of screen simulations.

Physical originals back up the screen simulations providing a low cost mirror of digital content. They also stand ready as the source for re-simulation. The old saw of a “one-time capture” is increasingly inept in context to changing research needs and churning access technologies. Finally, physical originals are the only format that will sustain deep authentication. Only the real thing will withstand the forensic and intellectual pursuit of evidence of provenance and the intentions of authors, publishers, producers and readers.

affordances

“JW: If you could wave your magic wand, what are the top 2 or 3 features you’d love to see Amazon add to the Kindle?

Second, I would love to have a device with a much bigger screen. I mean big enough to show at least two pages at once. Because then you could do a lot of productive cross-referencing. This is important when you’re reading something like an O’Reilly programming book. You need to be able to cross-reference the table of contents, the index, and multiple chapters really easily. Until then, I’ll keep buying print copies of books on software programming.”
Kindleville Blog

The Kindle is not a transformer that can take on the visage of a superhero or battle destroyer. Kindle is a reading device, just like a book. Physical books are not mutable either. The difference is the grasp, manipulation and hand-off of content. Here the paper book affords a persistent performative space while the Kindle affords a momentary screen image.

long term access

“Clancy observed that these discussions need to be reframed. Weíre too stuck in the embodiment of today to understand what the future might be. He thinks libraries were about search, access and preservation. He thinks the crowd has become the authority, access will be dispersed to many places and the really unaddressed and scary problem is preservation. It is no oneís job right now.” (Dan Clancy is Engineering Director, Google Book Search)
hangingtogether

Screen information specialists consider permanence as a post delivery accessory. Print information specialists consider permanence as a developer issue. For long term access permanence must be built in before delivery dependence. Print, well refined for persistence, has a special attribute of default preservation.

It is refreshing to hear from someone who knows that Google Print simulations are not real and delivered in non-persistent arrays. It is refreshing to hear that the absence of preservation service is of interest and relevant to long term access. It is refreshing to hear that there is no IT sector awareness of who is to provide preservation and that there is dawning cluelessness.

parable

“In every age, humankind imagines itself to be moving through a period of transition so acute that the effect borders on the dysfunctional. Our own age is no exception. We long for a simpler past, or for a more focused future, but the fact is that every era is one of profound change, and it is now our turn.” Ross Atkinson

Early north and eastern African bookbinding methods are continued in Africa and in Israel by Ethiopian crafts people. This survival is an exception to an entire Eastern tradition of book craft that has disappeared. Yet the perennial features of the earliest codex are still with us. Now the qualities of the sewn boards binding type with its easy opening action and flush edge cover and text has reappeared in high speed binding for computer publications which must lay flat at the keyboard. The adaptability of this ancient structure to face-down scanning for conversion to digital images is also relevant.

As important, the role of the early codex as both transmitter and witness of content suggests the self-authentication of the physical book which has re-emerged as a crucial attribute in our own era of screen simulation and transient messages.

april workshop

History, Art and Technology of the Book; The story of the book is 2000 years old and there is no conclusion. This workshop will explore the invention, evolution and refinement of the familiar book. We will also consider the prospects for the future of the book including a happy compatibility between the physical book and its other presence on a computer screen.

flour sacks

Job printing in small towns included printing flour sacks with eye catching design. Today the t-shirt is the printers’ medium.
Cafe Press
The identity of the commodity is more ambiguous.

planet book

In a book store each one is in competition for recognition. Each book stands alone just like the shoppers. As we read we also notice this exclusion. Even though multiple copies can be read simultaneously by many people, we read books one at a time. Rereading also has constraints and a century could transpire before a book is reread. This arms-length, one-on-one with readers is a dynamic of self-regulation and a sign of life. A graceful companion. And even when we look into the book store at a window, as if seen on a screen, we are still standing on planet book.

rebound

The easiest discredit of the typical monograph in a research library is that it is never used. Any assumed obsolescence of print in comparison with digital delivery only adds to such devaluation. But what if print in context of digital delivery is actually an engine of its new relevance? Even though few physical books are actually read, each and every one of them is needed to authenticate the screen simulations. The entire physical collections back-up, master and authenticate the validity of digital research.

Another discredit of the physical book is even more suspect. This is the fantasy that digital copies can be more easily preserved. Physical deteriorations pose risk, but the multiple hazards afflicting digital preservation favor long term survival of the print book. Digital preservation has yet to assimilate the well established premise of print preservation; that persistence should be built into a format before, not after, scholarly transmission is committed to it.

Print preservation is also a time vector of access. Search results are delivered in centuries as well as in micro-seconds and it is appropriate to consider how many searches of different kinds can occur and recur over the longer periods. Here again print books in association with their electronic finding aids, scan-on-demand and print-on-demand options present an efficient transmission system.

two-bit, ink on paper

“Side-by-side, the K1 text is bolder and jumps out at you. It’s as if the low fidelity, dot-matrix-like typeface of the K1 is better suited for the reading experience than the feathered, crisp, 16-shades of gray of the K2. After 30 minutes of reading on the K2, my eyes get tired and I actually experience mild dizziness, headaches. Never experienced that with the K1.” (from
Kindle blog)

FotB on continuing role of print book collections

Evolving and emerging digital delivery of books has prompted re-evaluation of print collections in research libraries. Are the physical book collections experiencing research displacement and devaluation? Or have appreciations of the role of print books been accentuated by their screen delivery? Or, both? Such questions will be discussed in the ALA/ALCTS/PARS 2010 program, “The Future of the Physical Book”.

We begin the discussion with an annotated bibliography of recent reports and publications that verge on and begin strategic evaluation of relations of print and digital book collections in research libraries.

reality check

“Abandon all technology and live in the woods for a week and see if it’s your laptop you miss most.” Bob Seidensticker, “Future Hype: The Myths Of Technology Change”
scholarly communication news

“In 2008, nearly 480,000 books were published or distributed in the United States, up from close to 375,000 in 2007, according to the industry tracker Bowker. The company attributed a significant proportion of that rise to an increase in the number of print-on-demand books.”

The news portal at UI Libraries is a well sifted link list for momentum toward the authentication role of libraries and the continuing role of print.
(link)

wave of the future

Tonight I had a class on the Kindle with over a dozen students in our library school. At one point I mentioned that the average age of a Kindle buyer is probably 40. I guessed this because Kindle readers would need to be adept at reading paper books. The students each had a computer at their seats and most were searching for an actual result. The result was 49.

scan on demand

SOD has an earthy connotation, familiar and persistent. Perhaps print libraries are re-finding their social mission through on-demand printing from public domain books. This could adventure in many ways through the rich research library collections and re-adventure through as well. The premise of the leaf master includes the endless, quirky rescan.
SOD

syncopated reading

Enjoyable book reading requires navigation skills (turn to the previous page) and text decoding skills (the young aborigine was lost in the city). In both screen and paper books these two reading skills are syncopated and interdependent with the navigation skills applied to the physical device and the decoding applied to the content. (was lost in the city-turn to the previous page-The young aborigine)

Generally readers consider the content the most important aspect of books but perhaps they don’t fully appreciate that there is no reading without navigation of the devices. The position of the page button is a prevalent discussion issue with the Kindle while its linked page count between phone and device display is an attribute. The lack of “folders” (the simulation of classified inter-shelving of paper books) is considered a Kindle deficiency. Navigation ownership issues also pop-up over digital rights management where content is owned by the screen as contrasted by content ownership on transferable paper. Yet another navigational issue is purchase of content. Purchase for screen display remains in flux while purchase of paper is an established navigation.

A current interest in attributes of “materiality” of the paper book may have emerged with new navigational challenges of non-material screen books. If book content dominates reader interest the equal importance of refined navigational attributes may be obscured. Such navigational attributes include transmission across time and cultures.