futureofthebook.com

on the road

“During the next six months, with support from the Mellon Foundation and outside experts, the iSchool faculty will embark on a planning process and budgetary review of our certificate program. Current students will continue their programs as we move to our new facilities this summer. Please watch for progress in this planning process on our web site and check back for further details on future admissions.”

The Preservation/Conservation program has already outgrown one library school and it can outlgrow another. There is no reason not to consider relocation if only to unlock options for program development in Texas. The GSLIS at Illinois provides just such a foil where there is “Groundbreaking research to advance preservation of and access to information in both traditional and digital libraries and in the many settings outside of libraries where large amounts of critical information are collected”

sustainability

The measures of sustainability include not just closed cycle production and operation efficiency but also sustainable discard. My three year old computer went “blue screen” and I was given another. I was overdue for up-grade anyway.

There must be 500 computers in the library building and I wonder where they go. 500 books could go into the river with no lasting effect. Or, if the books are kept, they will not need replacement, every three years, to remain readable.

pbi soliloquy

FotB offered presentations on comparative 1 and 2 Kindle fulfillment and on a retrospective of the future of the book. We also provided a cartonnage and free leaf investigation of the design traits of papyrus book making, a tutorial on post digital sewn boards binding and a take-home exemplar of the mobility of the book at the close of the wooden board era. That was during the Paper and Book Intensive, 2009, at OxBow.

historical printing anchor

This press is being re-assembled at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. It will be a resource for a new historical printing course. It looks ugly. It came apart with a little tap, tap, tap Amtrak hammer.

lively zombie

“A full-colour UV printer, the EagleJet C4200 has been developed for on-demand commercial print markets in China. Production flexibility enables duplex mono and two-colour printing simultaneously, and duplex four-colour printing with a tandem configuration. The precision imaging capability of the industrial-strength Xaar 1001 printhead produces amazing print results (1080dpi apparent resolution) across the 420mm paper web width at speeds of 25 metres per minute.”
Digital Print

Printing technology is advancing as quickly as in the 19th century. All the implications of web feed, simultaneous duplex and color are in continuous advance.

presence

Screen reading advocates find print books inconvenient when they should understand them as essential. Screen reading is counterpart to print reading; they derive from each other and feature surprisingly counterpart and interlocking attributes. Why is this obvious interlock invisible? It is not improbable that automotive travel engendered road maps or gps devices, but that print books engendered screen books as a counterpart development is frequently overlooked.

At if:book the print book is conceded to have “presence” and so its continued role in context of digital delivery is explained and dismissed. But beyond presence, specific print attributes of fixity, navigational and haptic refinement, materiality, and reliable re-access across time, all pair nicely with screen attributes of immediacy, automated search, electronic delivery, and live content. Another crucial pair of inter-functioning print and screen attributes is revealed by the self-authenticating nature of the print book contrasted with the self-indexing nature of the screen book.
Just such factors are relevant to the future of books. Forget about legacy and what has gone before; now the issue is assimilation of screen books and print books into a single transmission mechanism. Let’s go directly to the
work ahead.

new kind of science

Steven Wolfram, author of the self published, self designed and awesome compendium of science
yet to come that visualizes time and space as dimensions of information, will now engineer the
next generation Google engine.

“The thing that truly sets Wolfram¦Alpha apart is that it is able to do sophisticated computations for you, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas you enter, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its repositories.
Why does computation matter? Because computation is what turns generic information into specific answers.
To give an amusing example, every school child has at one time or another written a report on the moon, and they probably included the wrong figure for how far the moon is from the earth. Why wrong? Because the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant: it changes by as much as a mile a minute.”

fotb to pbi

We will participate in the 26th session of the
Paper and Book Intensive sabbatical. We will investigate the four P-modes of the book: papyrus, parchment, paper and phone.

canticle for kindle

“Congratulations on your purchase and welcome to Amazon Kindle 2.
We built Kindle 2 with the goal of creating an exceptional and hassle-free reading experience. Kindle Team

It is interesting that the Kindle 2
prospectus includes a critical, one star, review. Evidently the auto-review postings are unmoderated. (see Gadget Queen at the bottom of the scroll). Anyone prompted to a one-click purchase is quickly dissuaded.

This must be a post-apocalypse advertising world as in “Canticle for Leibowitz”. The 1959 futurist novel visualizes rudimentary cultures mystified by the accidental survivals of paper documents. Since post electrical life would certainly have no evidence or suspicion of digital culture, the antique visualization is still authentic.

worlds made words

Anthony Grafton, co-author of Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, concludes his latest book with a dangling chapter about the Codex in Crisis. He presents many nuanced expressions of the attributes of paper and screen books and many nuanced expressions of the worth of libraries. But each is studied as a separate topic without a single suspicion that paper and screen books maybe fulfilling counterpart and interdependent roles. And there is no indication that libraries are the implementers of this cohesive transmission ecology. The interlock between self-authentication of paper books and self-indexing of screen books is not even suggested.

uncanny valley

“I
discussed
TTP (turn the page) book models in the context of the so-called “uncanny valley” -
this is the theory that as robots become more and more human-like,
they reach a point where we become disgusted by them – they are too
much like us and yet we understand they are not us. I’m not sure how
the comparison holds up but I think it’s an interesting and perhaps an
important point. TTP models are designed to be “true facsimiles” of
books, but they’re really just generic computer models with images
attached to them.” Dot Porter

A more and more comprehensive simulation of a manuscript book, either a digital or a physical facsimile, exists in an uneasy relation with the original. While the simulation can be authentically delivered, it lacks the defining capacity of self-authentication inherent in the source.

Curiously, a capacity of self-authentication begins to emerge only as a simulation distances itself from a unique original and begins to present a model or prototype of a more abstracted simulation. Then it begins to present unique characteristics all its own.

like life

“Fly into
Rome as it looked in 320 AD.” If not diverted to Indianapolis for refueling, we expect to land at our destination on time. Google Earth is providing options to this expectation. Their flight to late Antiquity Rome swoops down into town for a look around. Soon we can wander about as avatars not quite like life.

But we will spend real vacation time. Are we tourists or are we being toured? Some simulations suspend disbelief and visitors become natives. Perhaps there is time to write a book on papyrus.