futureofthebook.com

new historic and artistic works

“The book is an ingenious invention. Compact and portable, it has been the primary means of transmitting and preserving mankindís accumulated knowledge for hundreds of years.Throughout that time, printers and bookbinders have used a wide variety of materials and structures. Some have proven to be remarkably durable; others have been vulnerable to chemical deterioration and mechanical stress.”
AIC

lightning expresso

“We see the Espresso Book Machine as an innovative and exciting way
for publishers to get their books out into the market,î said David Taylor, President of
Lightning Source. ìThere is clearly a place for the
in-store print on demand model in the
emerging landscape of globally distributed print.î

It is remarked that desk-top printers increased, rather than diminished, production of paper in the “paperless office”. The Expresso machine will do the same, sidebar to print, for digital books.

“The EBM marks a new era for publishing and book retailing. It will enable publishers to cut out supply chain costs, match consumer demands and therefore eliminate unwanted returns. The EBM also removes the need for transportation, adding green credentials to the already impressive list of benefits saving on CO2 emissions and the pulping of unwanted books.

Blackwell predicts the EBM will increase shop sales due to being able to provide a far greater variety of books and popular titles to customers. Books neednít be out of stock again and the need to wait for books to arrive from a publisher should be a thing of the past. In addition, the EBM is able to bring rare texts back into production. As a committed supporter of small & independent publishers, the EBM allows Blackwell to provide a distribution channel for smaller publishers and hopes to attract a new audience of eager, budding authors and self publishers keen to see their work in print.”

Notice that there is no reluctance to imagine print as a future delivery format. Regardless of any increase in retail of screen delivered books or Google simulation of books, print format will continue to hover at 98 to 99 percent of all titles delivered.

end of the university

“I continue to believe that young people who have a hands-on understanding of the traditional book crafts, but are also skilled at book making using new digital tools, are a necessary element for keeping the codex book format alive and healthy.” Lance Hidy

When I read the Marc Taylor NYT editorial on the end of graduate education I was struck by the decompression of the concept from an assumed future to a complete disconcertion .sort of like the disappearance of GM. The realign to float departments of Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water is certainly appealing, especially since book studies subsumes eight of the twelve domains.
Lance Hidy and
Lorcan Demsey also were taken with the editorial which certainly crosses two horizons of expert opinion.

The sudden collapse of the finance sector is probably a blip in contrast to the collapse of other sectors such as education, politics, social norms, ecologic consciousness, tourism, humanist research, on-line shopping and religion.

Peru

We can admire any of the imperial invaders of Peru for the energy needed to travel and communicate across the most awesome landscapes and seascapes. It is similar to an uninhabited, earthlike planet somewhere else. The only familar feature is the old library.

As we complete two weeks of projects here in Arequipa there is a sense that more will follow. The Convent of the Recoleta is hospitable to an ongoing base for book studies and book work. The San Pablo University has hosted a well attended workshop. And the
INLIBI connections are facilitating donations and logistics.

certification

The CLR work of certification and assessment of Portico and Haithitrust as digital repositories is to assure the same persistence and delivery dependability of digital resources that is familiar with print.

An interesting aspect here is that the print collections were self-certifying for persistence and dependable delivery through the simple act of acquistion into a research library. Digital simulations of print do not provide this assurance and to some degree may not be capable to do so.

The CLR agenda includes co-ordinate acquisition of digital with disposal of print providing “last copy” repository for physical print to provide the needed back-up, mastering and source authentication for the digital simulation. Certainly such an agenda should include certification of the last print copy as well as the digital copy. The digital copy should be certified for persistence and delivery dependabilty. The print copy should be certified as back-up, master and source authenticator.

So it comes to this; we are now certifying the reality of the physical collections. Only overt dependence on digital resources could result in such oddness.

people of the mirror

We can look to the features of the screen as a new reading mode and a new culture with its own religious views. While religious cultures keep a book at hand, a newer culture will be reading from the mirror of scripture. A culture of the screen will discard its scripture every five years and redraw it every few seconds. This new culture and its religious concerns will be known as ìpeople of the mirrorî.

peru

We are back at work in the
library of the Recoleta, Arequipa. The 17th century library and its later acquisions are now one year older. We have advanced from a preservation focus to a book studies agenda with visions of exchange and research. Another test case for the future of the book where the past is already bizzare, momentous and alluring.

A new goal will be design, curation and reinstallation of the central exhibit ìBooks in the Recoletaî with sub topics; ìHistory, Art and Technologyî. Thirty six case displays will be illustrated with items from the collection. Another goal is promotion and instruction based on the new exhibit. There will be on-site interpretation for young learners, tourist visitors and others.

A more developed facility for book conservation and library preservation will be established at the Recoleta. Instruction sessions on bibliographic description of the library of Recoleta and the role of books in Arequipa will be associated with the opening of the new exhibit. In 2011 there will be an institute for specialists and a sustainable education program. The institute will draw on existing organizations in book studies, book arts and book and library preservation to provide participation from the region, country, and the Americas.

late age

The Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas, 2009, proposes a pivotal role for physical books in the ìdensely mediated landscapeî of communication media today and concludes that “books and book culture (are) at the forefront of contemporary historical process.î

The wobbly mediation of academic book study with skills of book making can use the Striphas concept of a ìsingle bibliographic economyî, familiar to neither camp. This is an economy of sustainable production, controlled consumerism and vocational and domestic familiarity. Both camps, academic and craft, need to share advocacy of transmission via physical objects and the alluring possibility that print libraries are mechanisms for culture transmission in the future.

double your pleasure

The CLR project to
certify digital repositories will link that effort to disposal of “redundant” print. Perhaps the project should also look at distinctive functions of print (back-up, mastering, source authentication) relative to digital delivery. The immediate targets may be serials, but there is already speedy termination of print in preference to screen delivery. The wider prospective linkage of growing digital resources with disposal of print resources needs more careful mediation.

open library

“We are excited to announce a new program to allow users and patrons to “scan-on-demand”. It’s simple to use: just search for a public domain book on OpenLibrary.org and, if it’s at the Boston Public Library and hasn’t been scanned yet, there will be a “Scan This Book” button on the left-hand side.

When you click the button and follow the steps to confirm, we’ll have a librarian go and get the book from the stacks, bring it to our scanning center, and have our team of scanners digitize it page-by-page. When the scan is completed, you should receive an email follow-up with a link to the newly-digitized copy, complete with PDF, online flip book, full text (using OCR technology) and more, all thanks to your request!”

Scan on demand will further confirm the continuing role of the print collection as back-up, master and source authenticator. There is also the possibility that libraries will stumble on an entire transmission ecology based on machine reading.

ethiopian culture in italy

Carlo Mori has sent this aventurous link http://www.nigrasum.org/ “sacro e bellezza dell’Etiopia cristiana

flight of the condor III

“Arequipa is considered the most beautiful city in Peru, in itself a good reason to relocate, but for my purposes as a librarian, of equal importance is that it is an almost perfect locale for books. Apart from periodic earthquakes which dump entire collections to the floors in a few seconds, the climate is moderate and dry and the altitude at 8,000 feet discourages all nature of pests. Arequipa is, in historic terms remote, and marauding soldiers such as those from Chile which plundered Lima of much of its bibliographic patrimony in the War of the Pacific of 1879-84, bypassed this high plains community. In like manner Arequipa has been outside the normal traffic of urban culture and its libraries have not suffered the damages which can be wrought by
marauding librarians. Rather, grand collections from Europen and Latin American publishing centers have been well protected from all such incursions. The padres, who have been guarding their collections for almost 400 years, are also a formidable bulwark.” Helen Ryan

The FotB team is off again and beyond the reach of electric media as we know it. Rather we will be establishing workshop book studies in the Convent of the Recoleta. This flight of the condor will be a reverse course into the future with focus on book studies rather than library preservation.

Arequipa is a great place for book studies. Cultures of Antiquity exemplified by Greek and Roman empires and indigenous cultures exemplified by empires of the Americas were both transformed by evangelistic Christianity. This great drama is recorded in the historical libraries of Arequipa. This is also a perfect place to study historical technologies of the book including calligraphy, hand papermaking, vellum making, letterpress printing and hand bookbinding and to discover historical book that was not imported but made in Peru. Another attribute of Arequipa is its community of specialists in library and book history. So there is a convergence that includes key people, organizations and motivations.

template

“To me, the most interesting factor is the way instant communications lead to unconscious conformity. Youíd think that with thousands of ideas flowing at light speed around the world, youíd get a diversity of viewpoints and expectations that would balance one another out. Instead, global communications seem to have led people in the financial subculture to adopt homogenous viewpoints. They made the same one-way bets at the same time. Banks got too big to manage. Instruments got too complex to understand. Too many people were good at math but ignorant of history.” David Brooks

It is always exciting to experience how little awareness the IT sector has of print collection usefulness. They are focused on the current transaction and on-line traffic. There is no regard for sustainable, long term access. The current financial collapse may be a template for other system wide reverses in governance, sciences, social cooperation or libraries.

duh

“Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, says: ìData rot refers mainly to problems with the medium on which information is stored. Over time, things like temperature, humidity, exposure to light, or being stored in not-very-good locations like moldy basements, make this information very difficult to read. The problem, strangely enough, is not so bad on the older stuff, but quite bad on the more recent stuff. So we can read tapes here at the museum that are 50 years old. With a CD or a DVD, if thereís an error, often itís nonrecoverable, and youíve just lost all your information.î “

“It was, I think, a titanium disk about the size of a long-playing record, and it was supposed to last 10,000 years. But then they realized that there were some assumptions that weren’t right, and that it would not last 1,000 years, it might only last 20. Otherwise, as far as I know, no one is working on this problem.”

covers with no books

As research libraries project management of print collections there is some hurry to disregard their role in screen delivery from print sources. These print collections continue to serve as back-up, master and authentication source (each distinctive functions) for their screen simulations yet there is an inclination to regard their role as over. (Virtual libraries will easily provide sustainability and the overhead of print collection storage must certainly be more than digital preservation!!)

In a recent post
Lorcan Dempsey mentions a facsimile publication of Raymond Chandler novels that could not locate the original cover art. This is a small instance of the continuing role of print to enable subsequent recapture from a print master. This example of books without covers is strangely related to covers without books. These are the color cover thumbnails used to retail black and white Kindle titles. It appears that the package is even more useful when the product is an electronic transmission.