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.