futureofthebook.com

lu viii

Every word and each line of type made in metal. No shadows or phosphors, but metal; molten, frozen and cast into fixed meaning before the composition goes ahead.

So the Linotype University rendezvous for 2010 is over and we return to the world of screen reading. Old hands from England, Australia, the town of Kansas Oklahoma and parts East gathered in Denmark Iowa for eight straight days of shop and memories. The old (106 years) model five (as shown) would not second justify and tricked the machinists into nightmares and epiphanies. Meanwhile Ruth, the fastest living, composed away (on one of the last model 31s) in the din.

augmented reality check

The academic, library and book arts communities are overly relaxed as screen simulations eclipse the role of print. Academic communities watch the overhaul of university presses as print editions become subservient and expendable. Library communities are transfixed as acquisitions budgets tip overwhelmingly from print to electronic resources. Book arts communities wander onward with handmade works while students move to the expressive allure of the screen.

What should be the action item? The three communities should now be actively advocating for the logic of the interdependence of print and screen. The eerie compatibility of the two transmission methods now needs its own promotion.

johns at madison

“Far from being writers – founders of their own place, heirs of the peasants of earlier ages now working on the soil of language, diggers of wells and builders of houses – readers are travelers; they move across lands belonging to someone else, like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy themselves.” Michel de Certeau

Adrian Johns presented a fabulous lecture titled “How Readers Became Poachers: Modern Media and the Sciences of Reception”. He described an increasing importance of reader surveillance and the social sciences and commercial agencies that emerged to analyze reading audiences. His focus is on the mid-twentieth century in England as broadcast radio began to infringe dependence on newspapers. (He has a forthcoming book on the topic.)

During the 1920’s the Daily Mail sold 30 million copies daily. Adding other newspaper circulations an average of two newspapers were delivered daily for each person in England. This physical publication empire tabulated a wealth of circulation statistics and letters to the Editor to analyze reader reception of the news.

As radio broadcasting began to augment this print medium it became apparent that monitoring listening patterns and listener reception of programming presented an entirely new challenge. The immaterial broadcast was transmitted to an immaterial audience. Local and demographic program preference and time blocks of the program day needed differentiation. Johns went on to outline the methods of monitoring a listening audience as a new social history of media emerged. Economic factors arose and patterns of product consumption played into the agenda. Advertising agencies emerged. Add to this, by the 1930’s, the BBC was being provoked by pirate broadcasters such as the IBC (International Broadcasting Company).

Radio broadcasting prompted new social history and theory. The monopoly of the BBC was studied both as an influence for moral and educational advance of the working class as well as an instrument of mass persuasion. The listener was positioned as if a self-appropriating print reader, independent and somewhat inscrutable. But if the listener continued to be a “poacher”, new “game keepers” were also developing.

Here the Johns model of the reader/listener conveys forward to a reader/looker relation as suggested by the i-Pad exemplar merge of textual and visual literacy. He mentioned the increasing role of the game keeper as represented by Amazon data mining of customer preference and reader response.

The Johns lecture was laced with humor and entertaining comments. He described an early pirate broadcaster who tried to transmit from off-shore but the transmitter was too heavy for the available ship so he skirted the beach with loud speaker programming. In a less light comment, he mentioned the stymied U of C History faculty that could not define its method of study of non-textual literacy and immaterial media. Christine Pawley added a similar note when she announced an October 20 forum to discuss insertion of a new word into the name of the School of Library and Information Science. The new word is “digital”. (My guess is that the L word can be eliminated.) SDIS

letterpress

Step in out of the rain and sense a rumbling and syncopation and escape of steam; the huge, flat-bed newspaper press is running full speed. Machine tenders on top and below are doing their graceful sheet feeding and take-off and then onto the folder. The Printers’ Fair at Mt. Pleasant is one place you can be away from the e-book. The old Linotype operators are perplexed over a little ornamental rule in-sert to a casting block. For some reason, out of hundreds and hundreds, they have never before seen this particular one. They cast it and still only half believe it.

12 pt primer with italic

Teleread has begun posting draft of an introductory guidebook to explain e-books to a larger audience. The comments are filling out and redirecting the copy. Its a perfect fulfillment of the screen as a manuscript environment.

in the nook

“Mr. Riggio’s biggest challenge remains grappling with the Internet, and he argues that digital bookselling is the biggest opportunity since the paperback revolution. Barnes & Noble’s e-reader, the Nook, has been making headway in sales, he said. (The company says it controls about 20 percent of the e-book market, based on information from publishers.)” NYT today

I like the nook. Its the most amorphous device with a bit of LED color touch navigation, a bit of electrophoric print mime, a bit of traveling connectivity and a solid in-store experience. I love being in-store with the nook with coffee and a stream of book shoppers and the companionship of self-up-grades and bakery coupons. Not i-Pad or Kindle can synthesize that composite. Its a friendly device with, by far, the best accessory line.

embodied book

Medieval Association of the Midwest
Materiality of the Medieval Book
Friday, September 17, 2010

Fans of the old fashioned paper book frequently mention their love of its “feel and smell”. This euphemism plays to the embodied nature of the physical book; how it is manually navigated and physically inter-shelved in libraries. E-book fans, on the other hand, play to the nature of screen display. They always mention the importance of a “good story” or the pure content of a book. They wish books to flow freely between devices and even wish books to be free of cost. Screen reading advocates situate the book in a disembodied state.

What can be made of a contrast between an embodied and disembodied book? In context of Western medieval society we encounter the enigma of “the Word made flesh” evoking two innovations of concept and medium as the exemplar codex becomes a manifestation of God. This transubstantiation is evoked by the Lindisfarne Gospels described as a physical door or portal to prayer.(1.) Such scripture was more used than read.(2) Actions of medieval book making also convey from manual craft to miraculous event and such transcendent quality is anchored in a metabolic book. This anchored book persists through medieval times evolving from liturgical roles to a personal possession. (3.)

Screen displayed books, common today, achieve separation from physical embodiment. That escape was already underway with the advent of the disposable paper book but it has now extended to the immateriality of libraries in the cloud. Even the semblance of personal possession as epitomized by cell phones or hand-held readers is deceptive; we replace them without a pause. The book has been revamped to be delivered in the mirror of a fulfillment device. Any longing for a more embodied e-book only addicts the reader to an endless series of simulations.

Certainly a larger appreciation of the book is needed. All of us can be amazed that a surviving Medieval text will continue to engage all curiosities, confirming either the resolution or overt irrelevance of our questions. This physical artifact is somehow self-authenticating. Similarly, we can be pleased that digital technologies of screen access and screen discovery of books, so crucial to scholarship, have emerged to assisted learning and enjoyment of reading. These self-indexing search routines of the screen are a perfect counterpart to the self-authenticating print. An excellent interdependence of print and screen is in the making.(4.)

So it must be disconcerting when screen reading advocates project the “death” of the physical book. They offer a tirade of death to the paper book, death to print publishers and death to long form reading. This appears as a hubris of immortality projected onto the most ephemeral medium. Was the practical paradox of transmission of conceptual works via physical objects once better understood in the Medieval era than it is now.(5.)

References

(1.) Brown, Michell P., The Lindisfarne Gospels, 2003.
(2.) Cormack, Bradin and Mazzio, Caria, Book Use, Book Theory, 1500-1700, 2005.
(3) Jager, Eric, The Book of the Heart, 2000.
(4.) Deegan, Marilyn and Sutherland, Kathryn, Transferred Illusions, Digital Technology and the Forms of Print, 2009.
(5.) Myrvold, Kristina, ed., The Death of Sacred Texts, 2010.

(see also)

iowa book works at work

We participated in two panels and produced a four hour workshop teaching 21 Omaha middle school teachers three book art templates. They learned how how to use the innocent handmade book to express the dire issues. The event was at Kaneko Library.

…er,.

The keyboard array is an interesting topic . It relates to arbitrary circumstances of spelling frequency and alphabetic order. All of these, the lay of print cases, and keyboards of composing machines and typewriter/computers, relate to writing, not to reading although it is a great question as to how habituated manipulation relates to reading and to interface of hand-held devices.

For the direct connections between composition and reading you may want to look beyond spelling frequency and alphabetic order. More direct connection would be in punctuation, line length, word spacing and hyphenation. This is in the array of words, not letters. Punctuation was invented and elaborated with the advent of printing. Remnant letter ligatures crossed the transition, but it was the formalization of type sorts for such as periods and parenthesis and space material that have had a more pervasive effect across both writing and reading.

Digital technology has intensified the influence of punctuation across the writing/reading divide with innovations such as the delete key or embedded spellers or grammar check. Curiously we have not yet advanced beyond the letterpress composer’s skill at hyphenation or line justification.

Asian printing does involve type cases and keyboards of words and this was even tried in alphabetic newspaper keyboards. Visual and diagrammatic literacy also utilizes special conventions of punctuation.

Manipulative navigation plays a role in haptics of touch screen prompting and every indication is that the visual touch keyboard will not work. So I would not be too concerned that the template of habituated keyboard skill will necessarily be a useful trope for projection of writing/reading efficiency. Modification of linear writing/reading path could overwhelm textual comprehension and make keyboard inefficiencies irrelevant.

recalibration

Collection storage environments are monitored in terms of relative humidity and temperature. Collection response to environment is then surmised based on those recordings. Another approach is to monitor collection response directly and correlate those recordings with ambient air recordings.

Effective instrument probes and analogous metrics are needed for direct recording of collection response to environment. Such configuration is suggested by measure of free moisture content in collection items. Trends of aspiration and absorption, driven by out-door and indoor events as well as by seasonal cycles of heating and cooling, will influence free moisture content.

Initial evidence from such an experimental recording program illustrates elegant seasonal fluctuation in paper based collections. Further instrumentation with metrics as discrete as those of air rH and temperature monitoring is needed. This may permit tracking of lags or other relations in the two recording programs.

At issue is the possibility that some types of collections are self-buffering while other types are not as they experience fluctuating air tempered environments. By extension some types of collections, such as those of non-paper media, are a greater risk from seasonal drift and sudden shifts. By extension a monitoring program based on direct response of collection commodities can better prompt protective actions in terms of risk.

FotB for credit

The Future of the Book seminar is marching on. The first and second sessions addressed the future of reading and the future of book identities. Book readers are diversifying as delivery formats diversify, but the hardware of this diversity has a beginning and an end. The hand held reading devices, starting with the papyrus book of later Antiquity, appears to have completed its service for book reading with the dedicated “black” devices such as the Kindle and nook.

Likewise in the second session, the book identities have been allocated to print or screen. Embodied books, of single titles directly projected to corporal display, identify print. Advocate print readers mention the smell and feel and the consequence of knowing which stranger is reading what book on the subway. Un-embodied books, projected to momentary display on screens, are advocated by readers who look at the story or content alone. They disparage digital rights management since the story should flow freely across devices and they disparage cost since e-books should be almost free.

Cody discussed the connection between zines and bicycles to illustrate embodied conveyance. No one offered a similar simile for the screen. Two more sessions will follow. They are the future of book production technologies and the future of book mediation by authors, librarians and publishers. This University of Iowa course on the Future of the Book may be a first. It is given academic credential as book studies, history of 21st century media. It is a history of the present moment. We are 11 students for credit and as many auditor participants.

prairie books

We are off to an Omaha LitFest for a workshop “Story of the Book” to assist teachers who want to use book making projects. There will also be two panel discussions of topics of book arts and book futures. Something about the book influx or in flux.

book identities

Two popular euphemisms, one used by advocates of print books and another used by advocates of screen books, declare but also disguise underlying differences.

Print book advocates frequently mention their affection for the “smell and feel” of the print book. This remark reflects their deeper appreciation of haptic functionality and the ergonomic of comprehension engaged as the hands prompt the mind while using a mechanical and tactile device.

As a counter move, screen book advocates frequently mention their affection for the “content” of the screen book and they disdain digital rights management that inhibits the flow of content to all devices. They focus on the intellectual experience of reading and see Google Print as a fungible exchange for print libraries.

These perspectives can also be transposed.

On the screen side there is affection for the device and their design and aesthetics are highly charged issues with screen advocates. There is also a pronounced allure toward the next device that may enhance design and aesthetic. And a whole manual skill of touch screen navigation is emerging. So there is a haptic appreciation at work here as well.

The print advocate also has high interest in the intellectual experience of reading. But here the impediments of DRM and interface control of intellectual experience are strangely resolved; each experience of content has its own delivery device.

This embodied nature of the content with the print device is a counterpoint to the dis-embodied nature of electronic delivery. So to restate the popular euphemisms; the print reader advocates the embodied book and the screen reader advocates the dis-embodied book, but both are accentuating features of a single transmission medium of the book..

still print, both ways

The Oxford Companion to the Book, edited by Michael Suarez (RBS Director) and H.R. Woudhuysen, 2010, is IN print. (I see no electronic edition) The weight of the two volumes is over 11 pounds not counting the installed red ribbon place markers. Particularly exciting, no definition is provided for “e-book” in the 1,300 page dictionary/encyclopedia. “Tablet ” is defined, but evidently fell into decline in the 6th c. BC.

Michael Suarez will also deliver the concluding paper at the Perils of Print Culture conference next week in Dublin. The title is “The Future of the Book in a Digital Age”.

third sex

“We will spend hours holding it, caressing it, stroking its magic surface, watching it. The feel of its surface, the liquidity of its flickers, the presence or lack of its warmth, the quality of its build, the temperature of its glow will come to mean a great deal to all of us.” Kevin Kelly on tablets (quoted in Wired, 18:4)

The book is a conceptual work conveyed by a physical object. So, in some ways it fits our own precondition of consciousness as a by-product of isolation within a corporality. But books are not conscious; they are something even weirder. Books are constructs of our own consciousness migrated out of our body. If books are constructs of our own consciousness migrated out of our body then the book is a fit for other vectors.

A premise of the neurological perspective on consciousness is that we own our own minds and that the reader of a book will be engendering individual owned and insular constructs of what is being conveyed. But restraints of traditional gendered roles can inhibit the reading. To some extent these confining roles are passé, but book studies, in vogue with gender studies, continues a focus on sexual duplicities, struggling with the skews and conflicts inherent. The future requires a new trope to project the book as companion of both sexes. This can be accomplished by renaming books as a third sex.

Such a re-engendered book will accommodate the compulsions of book loving scholars. It will also reserve a special relationship for avid and devotional readers. Best of all, the third sex of books will invite the particular interactions of both bionic sexes as these lovers of books will then transcend their gendered roles.

A tertiary or third sex is possibly one of the few last cards that we have to play in the game of evolution. At the moment we are pitted against the wily simpletons of bacteria, viruses and fungi on the one hand and the wily neural networks of synthetic consciousness on the other. We need to use every innovation and surprise. This next evolutionary step can entangle the masculinity of rigid, linear text with the suppressed, the earlier feminine oral/visual web now re-emerging. The very tumbling and churn of these interactions can be transcended and humanity can possibly develop inter-operative gender drives and balanced governance.

Books already exhibit masculine and feminine character so simultaneously that it induces a third behavior of sexuality. The alluring aspect is a transcendence of duplicity; not a teetering relation of couples, not a contest of either-or, but an alien abduction of a third kind. Books abduct humans of either sort and subject them to a tertiary experience. The individual reader suddenly appears center stage standing as if bolted in place. There is a pompous masculine narrative and a lusty lady lurking in the same person. There is a cool stare and smile of the third gender. The reader is re-sexed.

The relationship can be between the persona and its own affections. It can be between a pair without regard for similarities or dissimilarities. Or the individual could have a relation with some kind of pair or two solitarians could collide. Or the tertiarians can find happiness. No templates prompt behavior and no arbitrary gender roles restrict the prospects. The focus is on a novel affection of a book engaging the rapture. Eric Jager, “The Book of the Heart”, U of Chicago, 2000, provides a wonderful study of the book as a mechanism of self definition for the reader.