futureofthebook.com

year to date sales

Screen book sales climbed to over 1% of print sales ($16m compared to $1,260m). Almost all screen books will have print delivery option. Overall sales of all delivery formats combined is up 3.6%. A relatively large portion of this %, in .1% points, must be screen books since they have grown recently from a zero-base at about 170% per year.

quick role of the artifact

This old rant, wandered on forever, ten years ago. Here is a quick revisit.

fungible

“Google is not really trying to be an e-book provider—it is a search engine and an archive.” TeleRead

The less equivalent are the print and screen renderings of a given title, the more apparent is a logic of their interdependence. Also less intractable any Google copyright violation and the more credible an authenticated research library screen delivery of books.

content, content, content

“Of course, there has always been a way to break out of the prison: If a critical mass of newspapers were to opt out of Google’s search engine simultaneously, they would suddenly gain substantial market power. Newspapers are struggling, but they remain, by far, the world’s dominant producers of hard news. That gives them, as a group, a great deal of leverage over companies like Google who depend on a steady stream of good, fresh online content. Google needs newspapers at least as much as newspapers need Google – a fact that’s been largely hidden up to now.” Nicholas Carr

Perhaps newspapers will note the exploitation of library content by Google and reposition themselves. Then libraries, saving and advancing their print collections, can reposition themselves around a HathiTrust type service with certified screen delivery from fragile originals.

“HathiTrust is a digital repository and research management tool for the United States’ great research libraries, focused on providing scholars in the digital age with the largest collection of electronic research material this side of Google Book Search, large-scale full-text searching and archiving tools to manage it, and the ability to very easily flip through and purchase full titles in both print and electronic form.”

laptops top desktops

“Google made clear at its event yesterday that the OS has been designed from the code up for low-power computers, specifically netbooks. Requiring flash memory (”No rotating hard drives allowed”) for super-fast boot-up times and utilizing exclusively cloud-based apps, Chrome OS has almost no identifiable need for any but minimum amounts of local storage—or hardware that can do much more than just turn on. Google claims it’s seen the future, and it’s on the Web.” ExtremeTech

Laptops now outsell desktops. This echoes a transition from lecturn books to personal books. It also points more clearly to the use of a personalized hand held reading device as a daily, interactive communication medium. But as the transition of social communication to machine mediation progresses, the reading of books remains self-mediating and reflexive.

readers of graceful script

“Information Technology Minister Tarek Kamel said at a U.N. sponsored Internet conference that his government had filed an application to register the domain “.masr” – or “.Egypt” — written entirely in Arabic,”

It required a painful transition to bring Arabic script into print. It was only accomplished with hundreds of letters and refined design in the twilight of the Linotype Corporation in the 1960’s. Now we have the advent of this script read by readers of many languages as an internet domain …for the first time.

ur-equivalence

“The Google settlement’s fatal flaw is that it violates every copyright law ever written, including international treaties signed by all but a handful of tiny nations. Copyright law simply doesn’t make the distinction Google wants to make between in-print and out-of-print. That would be nonsense. If it did, the most out-of-print works of all, those that have never been published, would have no copyright protection.” Mike Perry

Another unmentioned is the presumed equivalence of print and screen renditions of a given work. How this assumption became embedded is curious, especially as Google, to some extent, wishes the book simulation service to be perceived as innocent remote display without any physical pretense.

manifesto

The Florence Declaration, signed by 271 archivists, begins the definition of the interdependence of source and surrogate in terms of the analogue photograph.

on ramus

An innocent re-reading of Adrian Johns Forward to the new reprint of Walter Ong’s Ramus Method and the Decay of Dialogue provokes a tipping point. But this is the most magnificent essay in all of book studies!

So many revolutions of media history have gone mostly unobserved. The casual assimilation of the 16th century Ramist gimmick is one example and the casual assimilation of screen reading is another. Who is crafting such revolutions into a useful transmission ecology? In place of a diagram of print and screen relations we need a construct with the book entity in the center and the far boundary of the habitats of reading. This is a zone of interdependence; orality, audio of silent reading, visual, print and screen with a book pivot.

Ong was was McLuhan’s student and then became his teacher as he revealed how the page space became a dramatic stage for the history of thought. This was diagrammatical space accentuated by the grid of the type but it was also a three dimensional stage of the codex. Now we adventure in the two dimensions of the screen and binary code looking for another transmission matrix.

Perhaps we are now looking for a missing third dimension of the screen. Word processing, hypertext, then Wiki, social Twitter, intelligent searching and the Web suggest an added dimension. So does the churn of reading devices, contentions of stakeholders at play in the Google Book “settlement” or the tumbling roles of the library. Then there is the loan of materiality from print to screen which has not gone well. We still need a more cohesive stage for the history of screen thought.

storage and display

It is sometime remarked that the paper book provides both storage and delivery display in a single format while screen books require different formats for storage and display. With this duality in mind other possibilities emerge including paper storage and screen display for any given book.

But what are the actual attributes of each of these states, storage and display? In all variations the display function correlates with the volitions and incitements to reading; we only use display when we read. Likewise we only use storage when we do not.

Reading device advocates may contend that the most efficient book would be one that displays during reading but requires no inert storage. Reading is the purpose of books, is it not?

But perhaps there are other functions lurking in the storage phase. In the legacy of paper books it was the storage phase that gave rise to libraries and to classification of knowledge by librarians. Automated indexing of electronic text appears to dispense with this…… But another hidden function of storage is authentication. The stored master certifies the text of the screen surrogate. This appears to be a somewhat more significant role in context of responsible delivery.

Another surprising attribute of paper storage in direct interdependence with screen delivery is that the paper master can confirm that a given screen delivery is not there! The public or a researcher can discover what is deleted or only selectively displayed. Such a role, exposing censorship or corporate agenda, begins to add luster to the storage function.

way back

The Memento solution is based on existing HTTP capabilities applied in a novel way to add the temporal dimension. The result is a framework in which archived resources can seamlessly be reached via the URI of their original: protocol-based time travel for the Web. [Memento]

historical printing seminar 2009

Lee’s M & H replay was anything but; this internship experience brought out the real passion between ATF and Monotype and the high drama of high technology. Beth’s description of inequities of the printing apprentice system portrayed societal inequities that confined both sexes in the not-too distant past. Elizabeth’s Wapsipinicon tableau illustrated what can be done with letterpress publication, even inside a distractive churn of contemporary media, if a workshop has dedicated people. Katie’s insight into architectural lettering was very exciting. The legacy of incised calligraphic lettering is contrasted with raised lettering, spacing, and punctuation evocative of metal type. And our own Iowa City has such fine and horrid examples! Trillian’s carefully constructed talk about the Swifts did a wonderful thing by making the bygone compositors compete again. We all enjoyed the giddy flare that she gave these printers. Islam wowed us with his spectacular show on Arabic printing. What an immense challenge it was to print languages among readers who depend on graceful calligraphy. And Tim and President Hoover had a story at the heart of our letterpress era! While various Presidents have academic skills, it was Jefferson and Hoover who mastered high bibliophilia in a letterpress world.

analog computing

“Some of the most successful recent developments — Google, Facebook, Twitter, not to mention the Web as a whole — are effectively operating as large analog computers, although there remains a digital substrate underneath. They are solving difficult, ambiguous, real-world problems — Are you really my friend? What’s important? What does your question mean — through analog computation, and getting better and better at it, adaptation (and tolerance for noise and ambiguity) being one of analog computing’s strong suits.” George Dyson, from Edge

The print book is an analog computer. The pace and transaction is programed bionic mediation, not binary.

future of the book seminar

This seminar will investigate the nature, preservation and future of the print
book in a context of its digital delivery. Wide redefinition is in progress in
fields as diverse as neurology of reading, digital preservation, e-book
marketing, and technology of print on demand. Discussion extends from standards
and certification of print originals to blog rants on the death of the book or
favorite screen formats. Over arching this dynamic is the canonic role of the
physical book and its imprint on the future of cultural transmission.

Students will survey issues and experience distinctive attributes of the paper
and screen book. The sessions will include visiting specialist lectures as well
as student presentations. This seminar will be of interest to those in book
studies, communication studies and library and information studies.