futureofthebook.com

hybrid strategy

Maybe local utilization was always inherently mismatched with local print while wider, electronic demand for print is also inherently mismatched with local print. In the first case demand was too narrow and in the second case demand is too extensive. It is beside the point that electronic access and ILL delivery can supply the needed response from somewhere. The challenge is justification of maintenance of local print collections that are both too large and too small.

Physical collections should not necessarily be managed as if they were electronic collections. It is only recently that we can even conceive of them or transact their access in that way and there are features of physical collections that have no counterpart in electronic access. For example, physical collections have overt content; you can confirm what is there and you can confirm what is not there. They also differ from their electronic simulations in features of navigation, legibility, persistence, authentication and display constraint. Another obvious difference between print and screen resources is that physical collections require physical space and electronic collections require electricity, display facility and connectivity.

Whatever the consensus on their maintenance, we should probably not accept a premise of simple equivalence of print and screen delivery of research library books. Given that condescension there is still the question if both print and screen collections need somewhat equivalent maintenance as a strategic hybrid library service or should one kind of collection prosper at the expense of the other? This is like the outdoor parka that is 60 % synthetic and 40% natural fiber: even as the percentages shift we can still advocate for hybrid strategy. It is appropriate at the moment.

niche

Bob Stein talks with Dan Visel and opens an immense niche. While engaging a great interview session in the Voyager tradition, the back story plays out. Here the history of the future of the book becomes the mandate so long in limbo for the Institute for the Future of the Book.

…ok, ok…

Kindle 3 has wi-fi, black chop sticks contrast, and battery shelf life. But most interesting is return from diversions of i-Pad. The Kindle 3 remains constrained by the attribute of the constraints of print. That decisive stance can also reflex back to attribute of print itself and an exact interplay well suited to Amazon. Books still have thickness…of one third of an inch.

(Kindle and nook remain fulfillment devices; the retailers don’t care if you read books as long as you buy them. There may even be a clever reverse relation here as retailers induce more alluring single click book purchase habits that are fully decoupled from any book reading.)

century

“In 2010, Ox-Bow is strong. Ox-Bow’s programs and classes are up to the highest educational standards, our students and our artists in residence are making compelling, challenging, and innovative work, and our facilities continue to improve, while maintaining the historic nature of the campus. With a deep and constantly resonating connection to our past, a sense of pride and excitement for our present, and the knowledge that this special place will exist and continue to fulfill the core of its mission, we invite you to join in celebrating 100 years of history, 100 years of artmaking, and 100 years of changing how artists see the world.”

In 2011 OxBow will again host Paper and Book Intensive and PBI will be there for the next two years beyond. So PBI and OxBow begin to invigorate each other again as they did in the early 80’s. PBI, strange to say, once managed to engage hand papermaking, hand bookbinding and permaculture of literacy without cell phones, wi-fi, hand-held reading or real toilets. That will not happen again, but perhaps Richard will return to reteach Tango.

unplup your books

Library circulation statistics may miss this back current of desk-top imaging. The threshold is there for a reason; to give us that moment to realize an interdependence of print and screen.

ipad magazine

“The Amazon Kindle, released in ‘07, lacks the multimedia capabilities of the iPad with its HTML5 video, color photos and ability to run complex interactive apps. One of the the Amazon device’s advantages when it comes to text — that its screen doesn’t act like a glowing computer screen, but like a faithful electronic reproduction of a physical book — becomes a disadvantage with next-generation formats. These formats attempt not only to port the reading experience onto an electronic device, but to take fuller advantage of the capabilities of modern phones and especially tablets, with their larger screens.”Wired

Its no accident that magazine format migration to iPad is reported by Wired. High fashion has it that the Web is so over for serious reading. For librarians there has always been another skew. This is that journal trends need not prefigure book trends which, even together, need not prefigure trends for magazines. The periodic, elaborated reading experience of a well designed magazine is unlike other format genres.

The small question is if the iPad presents a “next generation format” or if the magazine was just momentarily sequestered in print.

forgotten characters

“As software obviates the need for Chinese to sketch by hand the characters that make up their written language, they are coming to realize that those characters are being erased from their memories.” Nicholas Carr

Meanwhile back in up-start Western reading, the real template of print, exemplified by the lock-up of metal type, has vaporized from our understanding of the image of text. As we watch silent delivery from the copier, sheet after sheet, it is mildly curious that they are all different.

“Does the page look like an original? A good page of letterpress is an original. It is not a picture of a page of type…” Warren Chappell

” Books are communicative instruments so vital to civilization that their production must not be consigned wholly to automatic means, whether industrial, technological, or economic; in the process of transmitting culture, they embody it, and therefore need to undergo the vicissitudes of the human condition so that they will reflect our common experience truly.” Harry Duncan

arl statistics

The Association of Research Libraries has been gathering statistics on unit time production of preservation department treatments. This has been going on for 25 years and absent a conversion to digital time measure, the unit durations of 15 minutes, 1 hour and 3 hours have not changed one second.

I suggest the ARL choose a standard treatment for each of twelve months. March can be drop-spine boxes, July can be recording disc or magnetic tape cleaning, and September can be book repair board rehinging…that’s the idea. Each library simply watches and counts that one procedure each month. At the end of the year we start through the same count categories again. In 25 years it will be easy to track trends in treatment services.

Such tabulation also generates incentives, treatment diversity and fun.

sharp

The long awaited revamp of the SHARP web site is realized.

ipad

“E-readers Should Be Worried: The biggest category that has been affected by the iPad is that of standalone e-readers. Beyond just Resolve’s own survey results, we’re already seen evidence of this in the marketplace; both Barnes & Noble and Amazon recently slashed the prices of their e-readers.”Mashable

“It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to serious learning.” David Brooks

I have the i-book library building on the i-Pad. The downloads come up within the same book as the Contacts motif, but a single page rather than a spread. Just as interesting are the tangled smudges of finger marks when the screen is off. These are better than eye trackings and show how busy our fingers are during reading.

There is also a strange ghosting of recto print on the verso during page curls. This must compensate for the otherwise blank which you can pause in mid change. It is also fun to curl the turn on a skew, playing with differently prompted contours all along the foredge. But be careful with your left hand thumb in the gutter; it can trip you forward 2 or 3 pages.

“Here’s a weird bit of news. In a patent application filed in January, 2009, Microsoft laid claim to the idea of virtual page-turning, the way iBooks does it—creating a visual facsimile of a turning page, complete with transparency to see through to the words on the back of the page as you turn it. Obviously, Microsoft originally intended to use this with its Courier tablet, which it recently axed. But could Microsoft go after Apple for infringement if this patent is granted?”Teleread

My next escapade will be setting at a Linotype from a live i-Pad feed. I may be the first.

tramps and boomers

One day Otto walked into the book bindery in Austin. He was a tramp compositor and told us that he had set type in all 260 counties of Texas. He was a legendary character like the boomer telegraphers who wandered the pre-telephonic railroads. Both tramp compositors and boomer telegraphers were media technologists of their era and their skills made them mobile across the networks of type setting and train dispatching.

This mobility was real in a sense that computer work station mobility is not: it required physical relocation and tramps and boomers were addicted to constant movement and wandering. They were allured by endless places rather than endless connectivities. These traveling compositors and telegraphers worked within an infrastructure of wire and rail. The wire conveyed the news and dispatched the trains and it was a third rail of the track. Another layer of the infrastructure consisted of rooming houses and railroad hotels.

Today a railroad and print shop continues to operate in Homestead Iowa. There is also an old rooming house. Legend has it that Die Heimat was the original stagecoach stop for the Amana Colonies. As early as 1858, it was used as an inn for travelers. From 1906 to 1932, Die Heimat operated solely as a communal kitchen. Even today a wandering compositor will find a room and breakfast at Die Heimat. I was there one morning and the cook mentioned that the old Colonists ate in the same room and “went out that back door to their farm work”. She described the old German communalists as “60’s hippies except without the sex and drugs”. They were from the 60’s….1860’s.

Students in the University of Iowa Center for the Book only need to experience the trip to Homestead once. Afterward each of them can reflect on the long legacy of digital encoding, network connectivity, instantaneous transmission and texting.

booklab ii

Be sure to visit the redesigned and revised site of BookLab II. Craig has achieved elegance and precision in his edition binding. Long work, concentration, clever intelligence and quick sense of proportion; all there. The new BookLab catalog echoes Doors of Perception as another classic.

“Perhaps to conceive of useful things as objects of integrity rather than traffic is old-fashioned, but surely it isn’t completely unheard of even in this age of rapid communication and utility when things are apt to be ‘consumer goods’ more than embodiments.” Harry Duncan

first impression

My first impression of the i-Pad came from the Contacts icon. Its a perfect depiction of a book binding featuring the correct shadows of the tail edge and case construction release of the spine from the back at the perfect set-back of the joint. Also the perfect corner miters and endbands. But best, I noticed a perfect half square of the papyrus book…but then I accidentally tipped it and the horizontal transformed to medieval proportion 5:7.

Now I wander between nodes to keep it refreshed. It does seem perky and lighter than my e-Books. Will it will allure us from the old nooks and Kindles? “Although born of a completely different heritage, one of the devices that best represents the completion of the Internet appliance vision is Apple’s iPad. Press a button and the device is instantly on and with one more push of a finger one is on the Web in seconds. The Kindle, meanwhile, shows how the Internet can be used, almost invisibly, for a single purpose, such as buying and reading books. (CNN)

convergence not yet deciphered

(emailed to PreScan ) The convergence not yet well deciphered is that between library preservation at ALA and library preservation at AIC. The alien appears to be emerging first in the library preservation sector and it may be that neither organization wishes contamination or distraction of its larger membership. Both agendas, the art conservation agenda (AIC) and the administrative agenda (ALA) have been unable to contain the surge to digital research and screen based communication. Separately they have both been somewhat unsustainable in library preservation specifically.

the web is so over

The web is so over as a serious reading platform. This came up in the RIT Future of Reading conference as well. Magazines, understanding their print attributes of dedicated reader experience, periodicity and formal structure, have moved to the new paradigm using recent i-Pad generation devices.

“This is not a magazine or an app or a digital version of a magazine,” Fiber Division vice president and publisher John Bolton says. “Quilting Arts Magazine readers have been accustomed to digital issues of our print magazines for several years, but this is an entirely unique digital product unlike any we’ve been able to deliver before.”

And print is not standing still. Wired print has had its best year ever and April was exceptional generally: “Adult Hardcover Show a Marked Increase of Nearly 50% for the Month and 16.2% for the Year. New York, NY, June 16, 2010— Book sales tracked by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) for the month of April increased by 24.8% percent in April to $629.8 million and were up by 11.8 percent for the year through April. The Adult Hardcover category was up 49.2% percent in April compared to last year with sales of $142.9 million; sales through April are up by 16.2% percent. Adult Paperback sales increased 19.6 percent for the month ($128.2 million) and increased by 19.4 percent for the year.”

E-Book sales (still working their zero based trend lines) are up triple digits. But no one is looking at the back side of e-books driving print.