futureofthebook.com

dedicated eclipse

“Is the iPad going to take over e-books the way the iPod took over music? Will it kill the Kindle device, if not the Kindle bookstore?”

I have just returned from an in-store nook upgrade. It now provides a reasonable web browser and a screen contrast and sharpness better than Kindle 1 (which is better than 2). But all the front-lit electrophoric, dedicated reading devices may be eclipsed by back-lit multi-purpose devices. The constraints of print are attributes and that the constraints of dedicated devices may not be appreciated indicates the multi-purpose destiny of screen reading.

off to oz

FotB is off to AIC in Milwaukee. Only one enclave is even remotely interested in our “repent or burn” message. This is the library collections conservation discussion group. Our mini-moment is titled “Continuing Role of Print Collections in a Context of their Digital Delivery: Preservation Risks and Preservation Responses”. A better world will be visualized with Print Alcove, Leaf Master, and Strategic Future fulfilling the promised land for print. Next we go to an ALA/ALCTS:PARS-RBMS program at Annual (see below) and then to a whole fall seminar on the future of the book.

Strategic Future of Print Collections

This program, co-sponsored by PARS and RBMS, will be of interest to those concerned with long term access to and status of print collections. A summary bibliography will be provided.

(10:30am – Noon, Sunday, 27 June 2010, Washington Convention Center, Room #206)

affordances

Mystery about Print affordances came up in the last Webinar from ITHAKA S+R. It’s a bit amusing that there should be such mystery about how print could have exclusive attributes not inherently present in their screen equivalents. There really isn’t mystery about attributes exclusive to print, but what is a bit mysterious is why screen equivalents of print are so devoid of those same attributes. The print attributes that I have in mind come under headings of navigation, legibility, persistence, authentication and constraint.

Navigation: This is the attribute of haptic communication in which the manipulation of the mechanical format conveys additional meaning without distracting comprehension of content. Primate dexterity and a deeply embedded capacity for hands to prompt the mind are fully optimized by the codex mechanism.

Legibility: There is nothing more illegible than a black screen. Network loading and interruption, application, device and platform incompatibilities, battery drain and power requirements impair screen legibility. Browser default line length and justification distortions reach extremes of illegibility. The printed page is immediately legible.

Persistence: Print is passively persistent and provides both storage and display functions for a single, one-time cost Screen persistence is not assured due to content decay and mutability, provider interventions or demise and multiple media, software and hardware obsolescence’s. Fail-safe eye legibility is an exclusive print attribute.

Authentication: Print is self-authenticating with a capacity to sustain continued forensic and bibliographic investigation. The overt nature of print content assures a positive or negative result for queries. Print content and its material presence is inherently immutable.

Constraint: The constraints of print are attributes. The material constraint eases economies of authorship and production, and packages research and creative investment. Constraints of book design, typography, papermaking, printing and binding assure direct delivery to readers. Assured re-reading across time and cultures provide research validity and organization.

……………..(Addressograph)…………… Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1960 from wood s lot

about book reading

“Physical books and e-books are both text at their cores. Book designers long ago established rigorous rules for laying out text blocks so they disappear to the reader. They took pride in turning the physicality of a book into a tool for efficiently and elegantly getting information into the mind of the reader. As any good typographer knows: the best typography goes unnoticed.

Our e-readers seem to have forgotten this heritage. They’ve forgotten that their core purpose is simply to present text as comfortably as possible; to gently pull the reader into the story. Every other aspect of experiencing a book is predicated on this notion.” Craig Mod

The elegance of truth and an expose of the book reading distinction between back and front lit display. Here the more silent display of front lit (Kindle) is compared with the chattier back lit display (Apple iPad). There is the equally important projection of the ease and challenge of the destiny of electronic book delivery. All presented in fine style, good telling and clear graphic. A classic. See also Books in the Age of IPad and the endless comment scroll.

Also watch the Text 2.0 video.

book about book

The Thread That Binds tells of interviews and visits with hand bookbinders. The interviews are gracefully conveyed and written by Pamela Luetz and the editing flows along both as a road trip and a happy parade. The weaving of the stories is a happy work of bookbinding itself.

The book does tell a compelling story and the voices of Pamela’s subjects are each authentic. I have had the wonderful privilege of knowing and working with many of them and can I recognize them each. The compelling part is how tangential, yet fulfilling each of their lives has been. Each of these bookbinders has invented themselves and each has a deviant streak. This tells us all something.

indeed…

I have this note from Kristin: “I found this david levy talk on youtube… thought you might be interested…”

Layers of meaning here. Levy’s initiative to bring mindfulness to the on-line experience is so refreshing and suggestive; a sudden breeze. His identification of the library as a contemplative space that is everywhere rings a bell. His rapport with the Google geeks is way cool, his timing is impeccable and the voyeur youtube presence is fun.

homestead rocket

“Volunteers are invited to participate this summer in the operation of the 1950’s Print Shop in Homestead Iowa. We will be demonstrating small town letterpress and be printing our fifth edition of the Homestead Rocket. This is a great opportunity to learn and teach and feed the goats.

The Homestead Print Shop is a joint project of the Center for the Book and the Amana Heritage Society. We will be participating in a larger Saturday program of Amana heritage interpretation and we will also augment the Friday Farmers’ Market newly relocated to Homestead. The proposed dates for Homestead Print Shop operation are June 18/19, July 2/3, 9/10, 16/17, 23/24, 30/31, August 6/7, 13/14, 20/21 and September 3/4. Our sessions run from 10am to 4 pm. Homestead is about 14 miles west of Iowa City. To volunteer contact Gary Frost.”

Each time I step into this old shop there is a lovely surge of smell of animals, smithing and printing. We look out of the windows on scenes shared by the Amana Colonists; unchanged except for the location of the geese. The Linotype starts again and we publish all the News that can be gathered in that place.

scrivener

“New York-based theater collective Group Theory probes the psychosonic landscapes of Herman Melville’s classic novella Bartleby, the Scrivener in an intimate chamber ritual that transforms the private act of reading into a communal encounter. A strange literary-theatrical hybrid, this Bartleby is a performed palimpsest of rereadings, a hyper-lucid window onto a famously difficult text in all its haunting ambiguity and violent comedy.”

This off-Broadway production by futureofthebook.org refugee Ben Vershbow echoes Terry Belanger’s production of Samuel Johnson at home.

residual risks

An OCLC report rates risks of transition in the operation of US research libraries. Risks apparent are those associated with unexamined continuation of practitioner routines and collection agendas but corrective measures also engender their own risks. So the challenge is optimal navigation of the assured transition. So suggests the report.

Many other sectors have already encountered subtle and then disastrous consequence from transition of physical product to electronic delivery. So far the libraries have adventured as much as possible into on-line access and digital resource while continuing maintenance of print. Now the time has arrived for libraries to deliberately align or dis-align with the strategic plans of their parent institutions.

The most decisive position will be alignment with direct service to faculty first and administrative agenda secondarily. As with the canny local support for public libraries, faculty strategists are finding their best agenda is support of the library, not only as an expedient buyer of resources, but as a mediator of the compounding and shifting multiplicity of the media that scholars must now navigate daily.

The implication of the assured transition from print to screen is also theme to the skewed ITHAKA S+R faculty survey (see below). The “same direction” trend of all disciplines to increasing dependence on screen resources should be tempered by any relevance of growth from a zero base. Advent of telegraph resulted in wide ranging dependence too.

future history of publishing

A floating format, a serialized novela, on the history of publishing 2010 to 2020 is useful. The collapse of the large publishing houses echoes the subtle and then disastrous possibilities of industrial sectors that mismanage electronic delivery of physical product.

Other features of the future include the rise of smaller scale independent publishers who collude with freelancing application developers and authors to produce exactly the works that customer profiles outline.

It will also be a surprise to learn of the resurgence of the physical book.

logic of logic

Print books are manipulated directly as prerequisite to access. Interdependence of content and format is taken for granted and the print book reading experience rehearses and confirms a merge of artifact and information.

Does the logic of interdependence of material format and content reading in the print book template another interdependence between the print and screen book? Perhaps if print plays the role of artifact and screen plays the role of information.

ithaka s+r

The ITHAKA S+R Faculty Survey (April 2010) reflects responses on the role of the library, influence of digital research methodology and trends in scholarly communication. An assumption of transition from print to digital resources is projected.

The analysis can be considered skewed in terms of questions posed and results interpreted without due qualification. Skewed emphasis is illustrated by a focus on search and discovery components of research confirming that research begins with on-line resources but without due regard to subsequent components of the process.

The skew is also apparent with an assumption that monograph transition to digital equivalents will follow a model of journal transition. Here inertia, rather than circumspection, is attributed to faculty preference. The transition is represented as incomplete rather than conflicted. A logic of preference for screen access is quickly extended to a logic of format super-cession that extinguishes the function of print.

Consideration of an entire anatomy of interdependence of print and screen, of source and surrogate is avoided in this survey interpretation. The possibility that digital access augments the authentication role of print is absent. Just such a transaction from source to representation has long been modeled by language translation and the layers of such transaction, from underlying code to legible screen access or from print source to screen parsing, is avoided.

Another inversion of interpretation is support for preservation. Here a faculty advocacy for preservation is turned to advocacy for digital preservation without regard to distinction between owned and leased resources. The institutional burden of preservation has been assumed as a corollary of outright ownership of print collections. Subscription access re-transacts this logic of sustainability. Faculty advocacy for digital preservation may actually reflect a longing for institutional ownership of library resources.

Another amusing misconstrue is apparent in the positive faculty response for preservation of e-books even though there is little interest in their use. The reason that dedicated reading devices which most closely simulate their print sources are not preferred over print sources is just that; that they are most equivalent, yet inferior. As with surviving microfilm copies of disappeared newspapers there is a desperate need for preservation of the simulation.

Finally there is the ultimate skew of the digital transition. Here the advance of digital transition in scientific disciplines is posed as a challenge in library service. The libraries must not only chase the new paradigm of digital access to serve science, but also prepare for the on-coming “wind down” of print and super-cession by screen reading for humanist disciplines.

Has it ever occurred that scientific disciplines and practitioners may now lack exactly the humanist access and perspective that libraries are encouraged to discard? David Levy recently lectured on the topic and a larger challenge for scientific data sets posed by their very commodification of questions of source and simulation.

two nicks

There is a flurry of excellent provocation and excellent commentary at Rough Type. Discussion includes the advent of the post book where the book becomes an app or way of reading rather than the object for reading. The i-Pad is emerging either early or late in the evolution of personal electronic connectivity and the cloud indicates the storm of the digital darkage.

As a preservation prophet Nicholas Carr begins to appear as the digital Nicholson Baker. He senses threats and risks of culture transmission and sides with most precarious patrimony. But now the loss is not just the authentic newspapers but the authentic news; the actual truth or actual author’s intent or actual authentic source and trustworthy re-access. Nicholson and Nicholas suggest that we need to preserve preservation as a logic.

authentication

The authentication role is not as apparent when the focus is on outright paper to screen transition. However, the physical original will sustain continued forensic and bibliographic investigation. Another attribute of this capacity is the overt nature of physical evidence; the feature is either present or not present. Screen representation of documents cannot fulfill this role, even with more elaborate description.

In various sectors, from credit finance to elections to automotive controls, we have noticed a subtle and then devastating influence of loss of trust in products that transition from physical to electronic delivery. Libraries, archives and museums should be attentive to such outcomes.

As we move forward with certification of repositories, collections and items as accessed on the screen, we should also be alert for the efficient and economic roles that source physical collections can play in exactly that certification.

green i-pad

“With e-readers like Apple’s new iPad and Amazon’s Kindle touting their vast libraries of digital titles, some bookworms are bound to wonder if tomes-on-paper will one day become quaint relics. But the question also arises, which is more environmentally friendly: an e-reader or an old-fashioned book?” NYT

thresholding

In the book realm there is distinction between writing and reading. Perhaps this is legacy of manuscript and print as one signified writing and the other reading. Now it is fashion to reconfigure the book realm digitally. OK, why not synthesize book writing and reading? Writing was reading as the author rewrote and reading was writing as the reader overwrote, or re-visualized, the text.

We could begin a future of the book synthesis with a keyboard. That is, a device of revision distributed to each reader. Slates, tablets, pads and pods appear as pure delivery devices but can bring up a touch keypad. Print books appear as pure delivery devices but can be mirrored by such devices. Just what kind of distance is there between?

The distance between is a threshold, the difference between lurking and discourse. And thresholds encountered in books are there for a reason. We do not need to dissipate them, but engage them. Can we use the threshold between paper and screen? A perfect place to start would be textbooks where the paper book could sustain unison reading and the device mirror could correlate homework and in-class commentary. The same goes for the academic monograph engaging both the scholarly record and community discourse.

All the other genres could be tempted into this thresholding. FotB smoke and mirrors?; Read both books by Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, Print and the Digital World and Digital Technology and the Froms of Print. “Marilyn Deegan did her PhD at Manchester the same time as me, and Kathryn Sutherland was my eighteenth-century tutor! I’ll get the book.” Elaine Treharne, Florida State book studies program

i-pad footprint

“For all of this content to be delivered to us in real time, virtual mountains
of video, pictures and other data must be stored somewhere and be
available for almost instantaneous access. That ‘somewhere’ is data
centres – massive storage facilities that consume incredible amounts
of energy.” GreenPeace report

costing

A possible method of comparison of energy cost for paper or screen books is to discount the common overhead associated with both. Leave either a print book or a computer out in the rain and they become unreadable. Beyond that there is a difference in prerequisites for reading. Print books require space and screen books require electricity. Space for shelves and book opening are needed for print libraries. On the other side there is nothing more illegible than a black screen.

These prerequisite requirements of legibility may be a wash and the full life cycle costs of both products could be debatable and complex. Imagine mapping the life cycle costs of batteries! Other energy costs are in delivery, device display and data storage, especially in a longer term. Here print has a distinctive attribute that is a single one-time cost for delivery, device display and data storage while these costs are all separated and extendable with electronic books.

There are other kinds of costing as well. These are costs for sustainability in content certification and authentication and outright persistence of service. The research libraries have a good record of persistence and a preservation mission that is necessarily lacking in the corporate world. In other words, research libraries factor a “cost” for culture transmission provided by reliable reaccess. In this perspective print has yet to be obsolete and can bridge our cultural needs.

i-reader

“As a text delivery system, the iPad is perfectly suited to readers who don’t read anymore.” Nicholas Carr