futureofthebook.com

turning the corner

“Storage. preservation, access – book technology serves all these purposes well and, crucially, it serves them simultaneously. …To the extent that we carry over the same stock of assumptions into our attitude to digital objects, we risk endangering their very survival. This is a problem that computer scientists, librarians, publishers, scholars and funding agencies must all confront. What constitutes digital preservation? What distinguishes preservation from access, surrogacy or authenticity? How do we even know whether a digital object is authentic?” Marilyn Deegan and Katherine Sutherland, Transferred Illusions – Digital Technology and the Forms of Print

This is the greatest book I have ever read. And my awe is not just for the preservation insights and the whole chapter on “Durable Futures”. This is the study that defines the interdependence of paper and screen as we move forward with cultural transmission. We cannot have one without the other.

The authors’ argument for the strategic role of libraries is particularly well evaluated. “The problem here is that now the paradigm for the universal library is not a library at all, it is the Internet. The implicit question seems to be, ‘why can’t libraries be more like the Internet, filled with cool information that we can all have for free?’ Our response is ‘why can’t the Internet be more like libraries, organized, classified and with powerful filters in place?’

We appear to be turning a corner. Moving from inconclusive interplay between paper and screen, analog print and electronic digital transmission, to more of a death grip or lively interdependence. There are reasons that we need to convey conceptual works via physical objects. Separate functions of self-authentication of print and self-indexing of electronic text comprise a single transmission ecology. The stakes are high, defining “how readers think”. Save the planet.

Deegan and Sutherland turn other corners too. How did the “materiality” of print suddenly jump into focus in book studies? It was always there, but it appears that a struggle to assign materiality to electronic transmission has parsed it out of a previous camouflage. “Most unexpected of all is the way the materiality of our traditional literary culture (the functions of type, paper, format, book structures, and so on) has come into sharper focus in the new electronic environment; how the ‘going’ of the book and the ‘coming’ of the book share a moment in our cultural consciousness.” This is the first mention of “book structures” in the same sentence with “literary culture”. Can a further awareness of book action, navigational dexterity, adaptive neurology of reading, and pre-cursive cursors be far off? The authors do elegantly study why paper text typography features serifs and screen text is sanserif.

“This is a book, conceived in conversation, written on screen and delivered as paper, which proposes to consider the interpenetration of print and electronic representations of text since the late twentieth century.” The legacy profiles as well as some flings at media gurus are rich. The utilization of historical book studies narrative is lively and terse as are the contests between geeks and librarians and the inversions of assumptions and unforeseen futures are startling. There are very situated and strategic references.

This is an amazingly expensive book and the production is crappy. It is too bad that such a magnificent work toys with counter demonstration of its own premise. I hope it eventually goes to a trade edition where it can be used in course work.

iconic book cover, 1876

This image tatoo (at the top of the posting) is from Richard Minsky’s blog. This potent image counter narrates any text. Here is the same strength of art as exemplified by Richard himself.

interdependence of print and screen

“The examination and testing of these new possibilities opens up a new, promising direction for research, in the conviction that only an improved forms of low-level text representation can allow semantic and content-based text processing and afford an effective transfer of linguistic competence from the human reader to the machine. Without this decisive step, I fear that digital editions are doomed to fail in gaining generalized support or a discerning preference among textual scholars, and they will probably continue to lag behind in comparison or confrontation with the conventional form of text representation and transmission.” “Digital Editions and Text Processing” by Dino Buzzetti in Text Editing, Print and the Digital World.

What if the transmission of expression and content via digital text only lacks a millennium of practice and refinement? While digital files require and provide absolute fixity for transmission this is a by-product of alphabetic coding, display mark-up and retrieval and storage systems used as a technical infrastructure. This infrastructure operates without regard for semantic transmission for readers and this infrastructure has a very brief proven ability to transmit reliably across time.

forest gardening

“The next major stage in library collaboration will require a changed view of print collections, one that acknowledges the primacy of on-demand access in the online environment and the need to mobilize physical inventory more effectively across a much wider audience.” Managing the collective collection, OCLC.

The old ILL warhorse is still at the front of cooperative use of print collections. Of course the ILL on-demand model also featured an omission of re-formatting and retention. But that is now discounted as if sending a few pages is not different from archiving certified whole text.

Also interesting is the reluctance of discarding a cooperative “last copy” of print. Is this a tremor of concern for the continuing role of print? Is there a suspicion that the back-up, mastering and authentic functions may not yet be dispensable?

Another clue to the future is also suggested. This is the ambiguity that “local” print collection development will become irrelevant and indispensable at the same time. The cross-institution print duplication rate has diminished. If it begins to disappear the unduplicated sector will grow in meaning. And with the continuation of the use of print as a component part of scholarly research and publication, these small portion expansions will maintain overall physical collection size.

third mimetic fallacy

Willard McCarty mentions embedded fallacies of digital conversion. One is the “complete encoding fallacy” or “the idea that it is possible completely to encode a verbal artefact”. A second is the “mimetic fallacy” or “the idea that a digitized version will be able to replace its non-digital original”.

This suggests a third mimetic fallacy that may be even more embedded. The proposed third mimetic fallacy is that processes of reprography occur while the source and copy remain static and their roles fixed. More likely they can shift and exchange roles during the activity including a possible inversion with the source acting as the abstraction and the copy as a different original. So THE Book of Kells acts as an ideal and all its simulations, analog and digital, are individual things. This is the larger “leaf master role”; an ideal of authenticity with continually emerging new meaning displays.

(this discussion originated from “The Compleat Edition” by Mats Dahlstrom among the essays in Text Editing, Print and the Digital World)

coffee house connectivity

“Such was the central role that the coffee houses played in the life of the late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London that gentlemen were often associated more with the coffee houses they frequented than with the homes in which they lived.” from Life in a 17th Century Coffee Shop by David Brandon

“I go to Starbucks, sit down, open my laptop, turn it on. In the old days – ten years ago – I would be sitting with pen and notebook, partly concentrating on my writing and partly aware of the people in the room around me. I might see someone I know, or someone I’d like to know.” from Against the Machine by Lee Siegel

Much is made of the new social connectivity provided on-line. Any evaluation must note distinction between face-to-face analog connectivity and screen-to-screen digital connectivity and their mutually exclusionary natures. If they toggle back and forth there is the issue whether we deliberate with the switch and if we can encourage both kinds of engagement efficiently and without conflict.

homestead rocket

Each Saturday I heat the casting pot, turn on the keyboard, ink the press and print the Homestead Rocket. Curiously, since the news is the world seen from the print shop, any visitors are the very news they can encounter. Its an analog thing. Amana Heritage Society

analog computer search

My comparison publication is Empires of the Atlantic World by J. H. Elliot, Yale University Press, 2006. I have it in hard cover and on both Kindle 1 and 2. There was a disturbing moment just now as I made a Kindle search for “Boston”. The Kindle immediately listed instances of the word, but the print index listed contexts of the word. Both search mechanisms would take me to the text location, but the print locations such as “merchants”, or “slave populations”, or “up-risings”, were more efficient locators within the content of the Elliot history.

threshold certification

A good way to convert a p-book into an e-book is to make a paper copy first. The old “preservation photocopy” method for shelf replacement of brittle books is the model. This threshold step of image quality control and original-to-copy duplex collation assures a perfect capture. The perfected paper copy is then auto-fed through the copier/scanner to produce the computer media or network archive of choice.

This method is relevant beyond brittle books shelf replacement. It will work for e-reserves, on-demand ebooks and digital library book services of all kinds. The threshold is not an obstacle, it is a copy accuracy and copy quality certification.

Try it…we do it routinely in Iowa. And we are left with a paper master. Its easier that certifying a digital repository copy.

first book
The First Word is a magnificent exposition of the “search for the origins of language”. Such deep investigation, across time and disciplines, can also be a template of implication for the role of the physical book. The layers of bionic imperatives, individual initiative, community communication, cultural transmission and self-emergent systems can also color the nature of the book, especially as the book acts as a language by-product.

What do we know? The book is self-emergent; it refines us as much as we refine it. This less mortal entity is intent on our reading skill future, but we need not go there.

twit
“Smaller newspapers, those with circulations under 50,000, are considered the healthiest part of the industry. “They’re not making 30 percent profit margins like they once did, but most of them are doing fine,” John Morton, a newspaper analyst who has followed the industry for decades, told me. Most analysts predict that the papers with a national profile and brand — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today — will find a way to survive and stay in print. (It must be noted that few can say exactly how this will happen.)” New York Times

The format of news varies from spoken comment, to newsprint, to blog post. What is interesting are the thresholds that the communication must navigate. News transmission once meant paper format in hand. This particular validation required four physical thresholds each night. The thresholds were only partly assurances of truth, but like a medieval oath, they were attended by ritual and routine.

arcade and alcove
So now the Information Arcade will fulfill its destiny as a place for digital library research. It was named an arcade twenty years ago as a sampler of the instructional and navigational features of on-line resources. Now it will be a digital library services center. The information qualifier may be eclipsed too since the commodity is library based knowledge.

In the new era we will need some condescension to the strategic future of print and the prospects of interplay between paper and screen. Accordingly a Print Alcove is proposed to accommodate the interplay of print and digital research. The Alcove will also be a place; somewhere that undergraduates can look at real books.

As a starting gesture I propose the Print Alcove to be situated in the southwest corner of the Main Library entrance level. This gathering area will lend identity to the new print acquisitions, Daily Iowan print stack, the Zine Machine and, in the very corner, the mighty Columbian press (a recent donation to the Library). The Print Alcove will also give focus to the Library’s interest in the strategic future of tangible collections and the scholarly future of print.