futureofthebook.com

tablet pad

A Columbian Press (1843) has been donated to the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa. This rare small size Columbian represents an early American contribution to world-wide printing technology. Loaded with ornate hubris of U.S. independence, it is well known for its dancing Eagle counter weight.

This innovative U.S. export product, introduced in the early 19th century, was destined to capture a huge market in England. That product success occurred at a time of outright war between the two countries and the ornate motifs of U.S. ascendance could hardly have been more distasteful to the English. But the allure of new technology was just irresistible.

The introduction of Apple tablet pad replays many of these themes. At a time of economic adversity an innovative media technology again attempts to succeed wildly.

Both technologies teeter on various ambiguities. The tablet slate book pad awaits more definition of the delivery products. The content delivery of the Columbian was paper and its many changing formats. In both cases the important function was not the technology of the device but the applications and their use. This is so because the Columbian and Apple iPad are both blank screens. The Columbian succeeded in a fabulous environment of type faces, illustration cuts, publication growth and increasing literacy. Likewise the Apple device emerges in its own environment of graphic richness, richness of connectivity and spread of new literacy.

electrophoric

As a counter point to multi-purpose mobile display there is an option of dedicated hand-held readers holding their own in niche sectors such as genre avid readers, children, seniors, and academics. But the most dedicated hand-held reader is the print book and it is especially dominant in such niche sectors. I was recently through a print on demand factory and the revolutions there are surprising. New papers, printers, the PUR binding adhesive, text trimming and color cover options are magnificent. All this plus the tracking and fulfillment services are digital technologies.

On the bittersweet front it will be appropriate for print book craft, book art and preservation activities for physical collections to watch for redefinitions arriving from outside these practices.

At the turn of the twentieth century the Amish farmer was not that different from any other Iowa farmer, but today this is not so. The weird contrast now is due exactly to the persistence of the Amish way and their notoriety now can sometimes be confused with a fringe of low-impact, organic growers with political agendas. Or as tangential, the Amish way can be viewed as Biblical fundamentalism that self-sanctions remnant believers regardless of how they behave in a larger society. Legacy book skills are admirable as is life-way of legacy devotional societies. But these enclaves must also keep their connectivity with wider society.

a new way to be

The iPad announcement presentation was a dream and fascinating in the way that watching a movie inside of a dream can be. Holding the wide web in your hands was a more kinetic and wide awake suggestion and side shots of the touch screen finger moves provided clues to a whole haptic interface. What a treat it would be to have access to the Apple inside analysis of manual intuition.

ALA mid-winter meeting, 2010

The mid-winter meeting provided three 10-hour days of symposium and conference on library and archival preservation. Interest sectors included administration, digital conversion and digital preservation, conservator/curator forum, book production, media reformatting, collections storage and practitioner education. In all sectors, reports of fundamental transformation resulted in the most intensive mid-winter in a decade.

Recent transformations have inverted established concepts. For example, digital preservation practice now drives physical collection practice; emerging standards, methodology, influence, funding, and staffing. Other inversions include redefinition of print book production by electronic on-demand technologies and the dissolve and decommission of curricular education for practitioners in the wake of immense redefinition of skill sets.

The rapid build-out of infrastructure is pretty amazing in context of current economics and paradoxes are popping up everywhere. Risk assessment for high density collection storage has undergone revision following adverse fire, water, smoke damage simulation. Tools and agencies for certification of digital repositories have emerged and are now evaluating persistence of content in domains such as Google Print, HathiTrust, Portico and Jstor. Library binding is disappearing by double digits every quarter but the industry is thriving with reinstallation for print-on-demand technology and with new market interfaces such as LuLu, Lightning Source, (Amazon) BookSurge and all kinds of POD publishers. The digitization infrastructure for conversion from analog sources is also now building out a vender and service base and industrial NISO standards. Even Boston taxis now provide navigation screens for the passengers.

What does it all mean? For the library it means a revamped preservation policy and some relevant strategic planning. For the classroom it may mean some repositioning to turn both book studies and book arts toward a different humanist issue in which simulation supplants its sources. Physical books and their associated crafts and arts may be redefined.

On both library and classroom fronts there is uncertainty of the continuing role of physical media in a context their own screen simulations, displays and deliveries. I suggest that a keyword here is continuing. We need some demonstration of the persistent interdependence of print and screen. We probably need, for example, a logic connection between book crafts and computer navigation or some wide perspective on the imperatives of the keyboard or hand-held ownership contrasted with lecturn or desktop reading devices. We need some consideration of mobile reading behaviors. The interdependence logic can follow the self-authentication of print and the self-indexing of screen reading. There is also the print confirmation contrasted with screen dissolve of the bibliographic unit. When Google displays three million print books it is really suggesting that it displays and parses a single book.

We are in some kind of surge in new reading behavior and an associated technology build-out unmatched since the end of the 19th century. And a whole ethical dimension of stewardship of the cultural record is now drawn in. In my view, a useful alignment here is with the destiny of the book. This is a timely cause in the hybrid situation between print and screen. Apt or inept, it will still be useful to have a concerted center of advocacy, education and practice that is focused on persistent function of physical books and a persistent interdependence of print and screen.

book to nook

Why is it that the churn of dedicated hand-held reading devices can side step the most obvious opportunity? What is needed is a direct interface between such devices and print books. …Duh, a copier/scanner that captures pages from bound books and streams them directly, port or wifi, into a hand-held reader. One sweet aspect here is the sale of print prior to device display. Another is the invigoration of print library collections. Another is a side step of paper waste.

I saw all the latent technologies and applications on the exhibit floor at ALA midwinter…but the dots were not connected. Most arrays had output to desk-top, not hand-held, and used face down, not face up, book capture.

finger sweep

Have you noticed how the hand-held reading devices are scrolling off the black e-ink screen as the LED color screen encroaches from below? Finger sweeps have already flicked off the keyboard that was the vestige of analog automation. Soon these readers will be next generation color screens streaming from the cloud.

The connected hand-held reader wants to be something else and not a book. It could be that the construct of the book is tied to the constraints of paper. Absent such constraint the connected screen, search parsing and wiki volatility could dissolve the bibliographic unit.

low-cost sunlight readable hand-held device delivery of full color books in the cloud

Liquavista was well received at the Consumer Electronics Show and many other hand-held devices suitable for book reading have emerged. I still like my idea that there may eventually be as many devices as book titles. This would not resolve their display format incompatibilities but it would provide a richness of literature itself.

A useful suggestion is to identify e-readers by their format and not by their simple contrast to print. This would classify those that are open-source e-Pub readers, PDF displayers, DRM publisher displayers and/or retailer portals.

The only way to focus in this vortex is to narrow your view, and here at FotB we remain focused on device simulation of print and the continuing role of print in a context of its screen simulation. Can we stay on course as consumer electronics goes nuts over reading devices? Stay tuned.

“Amid a crowd of promising new electronic readers at CES, this one stood out. This software application, built in part by futurist-inventor Ray Kurzweil, turns almost any laptop, netbook or smartphone into an image-rich, full-color electronic reader. Blio uses publishers’ original PDF files to preserve the exact format of books and magazines while supporting interactive multimedia, including video and Web links. It will launch with an online store featuring more than 1.2 million titles. Best of all: It’s free.” CNN

Blio begins to look like the screen equivalent of print-on-demand. It is a second life for books with a familiar, accentuated landscape. As for the side-step of the physical, we can disregard that, for the moment.

midwinter

I am off to Boston for Mid-Winter ALA. ALA is the place to be. It is there that the destiny of books is being hammered out. And that future of books is the ultimate library preservation issue. Go to AIC to avoid this.

Randy Roeder’s guest editorial in LRTS prompts the destiny of cataloging and the issue of the persistence of bibliographic entities in a context of parsing of each word and phrase ever composed. Here is another ALA indication of book futures. Myself, I still see researchers composing books, but catalogers see them composing searches.

mobility and portability

“Driven to Distraction:To the dismay of safety advocates already worried about driver distraction, automakers and high-tech companies have found a new place to put sophisticated Internet-connected computers: the front seat. Technology giants like Intel and Google are turning their attention from the desktop to the dashboard, hoping to bring the power of the PC to the car. They see vast opportunity for profit in working with automakers to create the next generation of irresistible devices.” NYT, 01.07.10

While Google moves toward computer mobility markets, Apple shifts to computer portability markets. Content and services merge across both precepts, but Google is focused on bodily location and relocation, wearable computing, while Apple relocates devices to sustain avatar computing. Apple projects the simulation of the world on the screen while Google projects continuing physicality of the world.

The cool thing is that print books mediate both domains and they especially dominate the synthesis or interdependence of on-body and away-from-body experience. And now the Kindle is disadvantaged for being simply book-like, a one-note text reader.

It’s amusing to consider the evolving criticism of the Kindle. First it was “It will never replace the physical book!” Now with Apple’s digital marvel on the way, the Kindle criticism has turned into “The Kindle is too much like a real book! All it does is display text!” Kindleville

the L word

The I-school at UT has shed the word library and can now discard the word preservation. This is apparent as the preservation training program is dissolved. Perhaps it is interesting to consider the other discards possible with a shift from librarianship to informationship.

Certainly collections, built and curated organizations of physical media, can be discarded. Also any physical, personal mediation of the collections. And physical space for such mediation can be eliminated. All that is needed is electricity and network connectivity and these are free, sustainable and pre-destined.

Meanwhile the Kilgarlin Center options are endless, every narrative with a different resolution. From an extension course at the University of Illinois, to the SLS death star, to the restaurant at the end of the Universe and now into a phantom. The only future is what it could have been or should have been. Stay tuned.

empires and books

There is an interesting thread of relation between computing empires and the print book. Amazon and Barnes & Noble are defined by print book retailing and their reading devices demonstrate this focus. Apple is defined by an escape from print and after using the cover of the power “book” it now projects screen based phones, tablets and slates. Apple is inventing screen reading without canonic precedent. Google acts as if it wants to be a library and its use of print books is another cover for mediation of all media including maps, images, video and news.

What does all this suggest about the future of the print book. It suggests a thread of relations between print and screen reading; an interdependence, that is self-organizing, elaborate and mutually exciting. Screen and print may be a single empire.