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.