futureofthebook.com

less is more

“What are often considered the weaknesses of the old-fashioned book are in some ways its strengths. For instance, a physical book works with the body and mind in ways that more readily produce the deep-dive experience that is reading at its best. When you read on a two-dimensional screen, your mind spends a lot of energy just navigating, keeping track of where you are on the page and in the text. The tangibility of a traditional book allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden: you feel where you are, and this frees up the mind to think.” William Powers NYT

Constraints as attributes also plays into the functionality of hand-held readers. Here the haptics of touch screen present a wild card since they will engender a whole new finger based navigation. But it is also apparent that book readers may be allured by book reading alone, void of any connectivity, live link or non-text distraction.

“I believe that the electronic technology has taught us to value the reading on the page, and the reading on the page has taught us what we can do on the screen. They are alternatives, but they’re certainly not synonymous.” Alberto Manguel, PBS

transplant

The battery in the nook konked-out. I talked to “digital support” at Barnes and Noble with industrial spying in mind and he did say it has happened before. His suggestion was to go into the store and swap out the battery from the “display nook”. He wasn’t too concerned that this would impair the demo.

I went into the store. After a bit of passing around a person came out of the office. He said that he had one returned from a person “who didn’t like it”. I put the battery from the returned nook in and mine then worked fine. It had the connotation of an organ transplant.

Of course there is the question if a person can continue living if disconnected. Yes, but only in a limited, real state. I do know that a frozen nook is not engaging.

advent of the codex

The swirl of influences at work during the period of popularization of the codex format are attractively expressed by Stephen Emmel in his short article; “The Christian Book in Egypt, Innovation and the Coptic Tradition”. He points to three layers of innovation; the technological innovation of the format itself, the linguistic innovation of a written form of Egyptian language based on Greek alphabet and the spiritual innovation of the communal monastic movement. All of these innovations of later Antiquity are well evidenced by real codices from the middens of Egypt.

This conceptual grasp is now extended with a Roger Bagnall restudy of the advent of the codex; Early Christian Books in Egypt. Given the Emmel and Bagnall multi-dimensional and comprehensive review it is surprising that another sidetrack of influence is suggested. Strangely this suggestion also verges directly on correlation of codex format and early Christian texts which is a correlation that Bagnall gracefully and systematically diminishes in favor of wider Roman influence.

The sidetrack is the influence of a practice of exchange of folded and tied papyrus letters. Bagnall makes it clear that the earliest devotional life of the sectarian pre-Christians, before the turn of the fourth century, must necessarily have existed prior to institutional organization of any centralized Church. For the earlier period, and later periods as well, there is tradition and papyrus that evidences the exchange of letters between isolated congregations and their folded and tied format is confirmed by surviving artifact. As content extended to theology and liturgy is it too much to guess that the folded and tied letter acted as a default exemplar of codex format? Archaic methods of reading, copying and redistribution of early gospel can include this mimic and then refinement of the physical attributes of a folded and tied papyrus letter.

Google settlement, whatever…

“While Google and others are making these books discoverable online to a general audience, the University of California along with other peer institutions is creating a robust shared access and preservation service for our mass digitized books, one that adheres to professional standards, through our partnership in a ground-breaking enterprise called the HathiTrust. If you haven’t heard of HathiTrust yet, you soon will. No UC library user need go to Google to search the full text of our books, or to find accurate bibliographic information, or to view and download those that are in the public domain; s/he can go to http://catalog.hathitrust.org/ and be reassured that those books will be there, in ever-improved versions, for the long-term. HathiTrust now numbers 5.4 million volumes from 26 libraries and is growing at a rapid rate, all searchable, all viewable if in the public domain (or otherwise rights-cleared), and all designed to inure to the long-term benefit of the nation’s libraries and their users. The digital library of the future resides not with Google, but with us. And we are building it today.” Ivy Anderson

re-listening, re-reading

Comparisons between the music recording industry and the text recording industry are frequent whenever transitions from analog to electronic products are discussed. True, the pace and consequence of the transition has appeared first in music compared with the transition in books although this has not forestalled the linkage.

But let’s focus on re-reading and re-listening to provide another perspective. There is little question that users listen to given works of music over and over. It is possible that the greatest reward and appreciation of music is based on re-listening? The re-reading perspective is a bit different. With books the reward and appreciation is shifted a bit more to communities whose members may read a given book only once but they find reward and appreciation from multiple interpretations derived from individual readers. Such a dynamic of re-reading produces other books, engendering a cycle.

In both sectors there is a dependence on the assured recorded status of the music or text. As the recorded music industry, much to its un-profitability, has transitioned from analog to electronic product, the recoded status has moved from discs to clouds. If books also shift from print to screen in a similar way will print libraries be transformed into clouds?

It may resolve that users have some say in all this and the issues of re-listening and re-reading may be consequential. The multiple use function of music and books may be dependent on different kinds of recording. Why not transform all libraries, music and books, to the cloud? Here selection of the analog or electronic recording format may be influenced by efficiencies of re-use; of assured re-listening and assured re-reading.

see saw

It amazing how few books are produced on papyrus today and how few are not produced from digital files. Jason Epstein covers such inevitable divides of book production in his recent essay (NY Review of Books, March 11). He also manages the defenses of the physical book copy and laments the electronic mash-up of these entities. But this kind of marching gets us nowhere and certainly cannot advance a pro-print position.

Another approach, most obvious and promising, is to contend and illustrate the interdependence of print and screen reading. We intuitively know the screen attributes of self-indexing, live search and discovery and the print attributes of self-authentication, back-up and mastering. Print also fairs well in exclusive attributes of legibility, navigation and persistence yet concedes others such as finger moves for touch screen navigation.

The point being that Epstein could better invest in the logics of interdependence of print and screen and perhaps project the real revolution of print and screen as a single, composite text delivery system.

That said, we can counter list attributes exclusive to either print or screen books. Print attributes of fixity, mechanical navigation, materiality and persistent re-access across time all pair nicely with screen attributes of live content, automated search, cloud repository and electronic delivery. Another great pair of 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. The print book carries with it layers of physical evidence, overt content and bibliographic codes that reveal the source and intent of its production. Screen books have layers of codes quite different. In addition to enabling alphabetic screen display these codes also enable indexing of elements of content and electronically speed delivery of keyword search and discovery across collections of books.

What else? The fixity of print accords with reliable re-reading. A transience of screen content accords with a need for currency. Legibility is impaired by network interruption and browser defaults while print paginations and content parsing by manual indexing are limited analog aids. Yet both screen connectivity and print insularity resolve conflicting needs to maintain bibliographic entities and to dissolve them. Finally there is an inherent interdependence of screen simulation with print sources even as screen access supercedes print access. These functions of print back-up in case of server interruption and print mastering in case of new queries not resolved by the screen simulation provides a perfect indication of interdependence and a logic of a composite text delivery system.

if:book is

The US if:book is very quiet, almost a month since last posting. Meanwhile TeleRead roars on with a dozen posts per day. If you want some dot org Bookfutures action, go to the UK futureofthebook.

holding on to hand-held reading

Mobility is the distinctive allure of hand-held reading as the next surge, into portable TV, will demonstrate. When it comes to book reading you might imagine that the churn and competition is intent on eclipsing the core product. The iPad is now known as the e-book reader that can do every else and the dedicated, e-ink readers are supposedly doomed. But wait, when it comes to book reading constraints of delivery and display can toggle into attributes as the print book has long demonstrated. Maybe book readers just want to read books.

elderly bloggers

Nicholas Carr suggests that blogging is now old-fashioned. Eclipse is apparent in some of the futurist book blogs including the shutdown of Wikert’s Kindleville blog and the comatose dot org futureofthebook. Teleread, the geek journal of hand-held book reading, is going like gangbusters, but it is sold off in a blogger version of going public. Meanwhile the tipping point has tipped on e-book popularization. This small sector is now the only future for publishers; profitable print will just have to go away.

opt-out, opt-in

The Department of Justice has orphaned the orphaned works in the Google Settlement into either a fair use territory were rights holders can opt-in to screen simulation or into an orphanage where they are protected from adoption by a monopoly. Its a fork in the road for some 70% of the books to be Googlized.

Lurking here also is the first sale doctrine that has permitted unlimited circulation of a print copy. This privilege, however assured to print libraries, is assuredly not permitted to screen delivered libraries. And this fork in the road will ultimately return to the issues of equivalence of the print and screen book. The least agreeable library outcome would be restraint of both print and screen copy circulations.

the other

If you think about it the documentary world is another world; an underworld. It is a shamanistic realm, another version of reality. There is where society and its members go to ponder and ask questions large and small. When did the University of Iowa Highlanders become the Hawkeyes? In the fifties, of course. And what were the fifties?

The documentary world is where books are in an ecology of other recordings and artifacts. We are recognized there, we can go there, but it is a strange place. As a shamanistic realm it is an adventure to visit and there are risks and uncertainties. Theologies can turn on themselves, assumptions can be illusions and hallucinations of the mind can over power the tourist.

rules for anchorites

Proxima Thule has a strong thread going at her live journal. It begins to scratch the block of the role of print publishing as an infrastructure for authorship. And beyond that it begins to lift the curtain on the hidden skills, values and attributes behind the physical book.

“Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the market were nothing but self-published autonomous authors either writing without editorial or paying out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good product mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five seconds before someone came along and said: hey, what if I started a company where we took on all the risk, hired an editorial staff and a marketing staff to make the product better and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a percentage of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk and the initial cost? So writers could, you know, just write?

And writers would line up at their door.” Proxima Thule

ut portfolio

Students at the Kilgarlin Center have composed a book conservation portfolio.

“Archives and Preservation at The University of Texas School of Information is ranked number one in the country. As a part of their advanced training, students are given the opportunity to conserve books out of one of the several special collections libraries on campus. This exhibit showcases the conservation work performed for Tarlton Library 2008-2009.”

A highly structured program such as the Conservation track at Kilgarlin can also engender its own Nemesis. This would be the multi track or Amtrak program of endless workshops and webinars. The logic being that methodic education is inverse to specialization. And there is some practicality to ongoing kaleidoscope training for practitioners who must deal with daily chaos and endless novelty.

post e-book era

Let’s imagine that the publishing focus is currently on sale of print products. They could be wary of e-books as they observe reverses in other industries that have focused on electronic equivalents for previously mechanical features or products. Automotive costs of electronic hardware and software are now nearly as much as purely mechanical components and the downside of brake or acceleration failure is endless. Touch screen voting, electronic finance, and electronic music delivery have all had adverse effects on their parent industries. Is it any wonder that print publishers may have seconds thoughts over electronic delivery? Print publishers may actually be the visionaries.

Such a perspective may be another of the missing topics in debate over publishers’ regard for the e-book market. Why assume that the e-book is viable? Or, if it is, that it is consequential? There are many attributes of screen reading but they don’t necessarily convey to e-books. There is also the challenge, exclusive among electronic communications to the e-book, of outright attempted mimicry of attributes of the print book. Publishers know a bit about this.

scroll to codex

“We should thus in any event expect some rise in the percentage of the total made up of Christian texts in the late third and even more in the fourth century, and we do have such a rise. It is striking, however, that even in the fourth century classical literature and other types of non-Christian text make up something like three-fifths of the population of codices, and before that point non-Christian texts make up an even higher percentage of codices. This is part of the reason that it has become impossible to maintain that the codex was a specifically Christian book-form or that the move from scroll to codex in the Roman world was primarily driven by Christianity.”

In his new book Roger Bagnall goes on to disassociate the shift from papyrus to parchment with sectarian preference. Again he considers that transformation within a larger context of changes in reading. The scroll was a medium for recitation as its line length indicates, while the codex implemented textual communication and scribal copying.

So a larger Empirium, both of the Roman world and new reading behaviors is at work. And the paprologists can also look at the very mountain of their resources which are the middens of tons of papyrus letters, folded and tied, that suggest a further link of network exchange as a source of the advent of the codex.

(The illustration is an Ethiopian Koran from a recent link from Artes del Libro.)

november sales

American Association of Publishers reports that November book sales increased 10.9% to $808 million. Of that $18 million is accounted e-book sales, representing a fifth of sales increases. Meanwhile e-book advocates imagine that screen books are driving the industry and wonder why publishers remain interested in print.

E-book advocates cannot understand why dinosaur print publishers have not learned from the experience of the music industry. Well maybe they have; the music business is now worth half of what it was ten years ago and the decline doesn’t look like it will be slowing anytime soon.

“Overall CD sales have plummeted sixteen percent for the year so far — and that’s after seven years of near-constant erosion. In the face of widespread piracy, consumers’ growing preference for low-profit-margin digital singles over albums, and other woes, the record business has plunged into a historic decline.” Rolling Stone

Why does print provider prosper and music provider fade? One has a killer DMR which is the physical product of the print book. How does such a constraint toggle into an attribute? All of the traits of print are constraints and it depends on how you look at digital transmission generally. The recorded music industry is faced with the disappearance of physical media. This “download dilemma”, prefigured by the demise of the compact disc, looks like the fulfillment of the digital cloud. But it also prefigures the dissolve of the physical product that sustained recorded music industry.

dark bright side

Any industry that becomes overly dependent on electronic delivery of products is doomed. The recent examples of such collapse include sectors as diverse as the automotive, music, electoral governance and finance industries. Regardless of such indicators, every sector is under pressure to embrace economies of electronic products. Slow to transform, the print publishing industry remains focused on the physical print book and has elected to apply digital technologies to production rather than to transformation of the product itself. This may prove a visionary approach.