futureofthebook.com

paperbecause

“All around the world, researchers and experts in literacy, memory and cognition, verbal learning, neuroscience and human communication are examining the question of whether information is better assimilated by reading on paper or on screen. Jakob Nielsen, a web usability expert noted that: “The online medium lends itself to a more superficial processing of information, you’re just surfing the information; it’s not deep learning.”1″ paperbecause.com

This website is loaded with reference and logic presenting the continuing role of paper in a context of screen reading. It is especially rich in evidence of the role of paper in education and instruction. The site is produced by Domtar which is the largest integrated manufacturer and marketer of uncoated freesheet paper in North America and the second largest in the world. The site is also useful for comparative life cycle costs for print and screen publication. A real resource for advocates of the future of the paper book.

swan song tutorials

As I rush toward retirement I have decided to do some swan song tutorials (regardless of staff interest). I just want to review how exocentric my stance on book conservation is. Here is the schedule.

October, 27, “Terminology and documentation for book conservation”
November, 24, “Historical prototypes for conservation book work”
January, 26 “Principles of sheet mending”
February, 23 “Principles of book repair”
March, 30 “Principles of conservation rebinding”
April, 27 “Specification of book conservation treatment”
May, 25 “Equipment and Tool Maintenance

parody

“Perhaps really cheap single-use e-book readers will be intentionally flimsy things, made mostly out of cardboard (like the disposable cardboard cell phone someone came up with back in the early ‘00s) and meant to be used for a week or two until the battery runs out, then recycled.” Chris Meadows at Teleread (pre-paid phones and implications for e-readers)

When reading devices become as omnipotent, prolific and disposable as paper books there will be a certain odd parody. Then we could focus on parody of the works conveyed; will book reading simply migrate from one delivery system to another or will screen reading transform book themselves?

That future should already be apparent with cell phone reading. There traditional fiction reading has a niche, but a very small one. More prevalent reading could be styled as place based reference and situation based learning on the fly. The book as wiki or commonplace repository may actually echo the origins, but not the canonic, of the book format.

news of the weird

It is mentioned that screen content scatters and distracts but our response to the connectivity is very attentive. The on-line person is absorbed, perhaps, because the engagement is layered with navigations and expressions that previously inhabited individual consciousness. Before electronic connectivity we talked to ourselves more. We still do whenever we look away from the screen.

…duh

“B&N has found that ebooks and pbooks don’t seem to compete. Nook buyers have actually increased their physical books purchases by 21%;” from Teleread

slippery slope

“The NookColor is latest strike in an ongoing price and hardware battle among e-reader manufacturers — and a bold move away from E-Ink, the technology Amazon and other booksellers insist makes for a better reading experience. E-Ink boasts a backlight-free display and reflects light like regular paper does. It’s more comfortable to read for hours, but it’s far less flexible and much slower than a traditional touchscreen display.” CNN

Screen books are doomed if they too closely mimic print and doomed if they cross over to multifunction reading. The cross over is inevitable as i-Pad illustrates. Next is there the cross over of the book itself as the digital rapture unfolds? The two different literatures, print and screen, have been anticipated for a long time.

“Touch the future of reading”

future of the linotype

The turn of the twentieth century was moment of amazing technological advance that saw the advent of airborne transportation and the production means for mass media. Wrights’ airplane and the Mergenthaller’s line caster both have traits of insight, logic and determined development that have always enabled fundamental technological advance. Many other insane and misguided attempts to mechanize flight and type composition were attempted at the end of the 19th century. They lacked disciplined application of science and engineering principles but equally they lacked an ingenious logic of real invention. Such a logic frequently departed from established approaches and could appear bizarre but after successful realization that same logic seemed inevitable.

The Wrights deliberately developed and mastered mechanisms for powered flight control. These included control of pitch, yawl, and roll. Mergenthaller deliberately developed and mastered the automation of three functions of typesetting which were type founding, type setting and type distribution. He reconceived type setting as assembly of reusable die mats and thus integrated previously separated type founding into his machine. He included mat distribution to a supply magazine that then dispensed from keyboard prompts to assemble new lines of copy. This whole cycle was automated by a train of cams; hard software. Both Wrights and Mergenthaller also utilized new technologies of internal combustion and electrical drive to power their inventions. These power choices also display ingenious grip of a comprehensive mechanical logic as well as an intuitive grasp of the future.

A certain perspective on the turn of the twentieth century and what followed is provided by our position following the turn of twenty-first century. The airplane developed to fulfill many roles and the Linotype did as well. In some sense the propeller airplane and letterpress printing have been eclipsed, but airborne transportation and mass media communication are more dominant than ever.

The Linotype is an ingenious computer hybrid with its analog cam set automated cycles and over-rides as well as its seven-bit, binary, mat redistribution. Perhaps an analog nature, exemplified by the Linotype’s infinitely adjustable cams, jaws, trimmers, space bands, mat measures and channel paths, will contribute to post-binary programming, but even more strategically, print and print production may prove itself critical to screen based reading. A continuing interdependence between print books and on-line books; one self-authenticating and another self-indexing, could glance back at the role of the Linotype.

book cloud

The University of Iowa Center for the Book is newly situated on-line with its fabulous NEW website. This is more than a promo. This screen displayed vision better situates the Center for the Book among the centers for literature and situates the production of the physical book as consequential among the inflections of its meaning and continuing role. The Center for the Book welcomes the future of the book.

negative entropy

Can we quantify the negative entropy, the organized order and re-playability, of specific media types? A negative entropy index as innovated by the IPI Preservation Index could be derived from direct monitoring of the course of entropy in the materials themselves and project the eventual threshold of demise of re-playability. What factors quantify the informational NEI? Simplicity vs. layered complexity of material fabric, inert vs. volatile substrate, dense or lean content, attenuated or sudden threshold of playability, external factors such as encoding and playback equipment, and so on.

Perhaps there is a reframe here, watching the informational media in the physical world and observing, not deterioration, but, conditions of re-playability in context with natural entropy. Transient air conditions and the play of seasons and interior space counter-play become the back story.

We know that library media do not advance toward more assured re-playability. They move with an inevitable dynamic toward shorter and less resolved re-playability. Let’s look directly at that rate of change; pH, light activations, and all organization changes in the physical items and situate these among ambient and energy driven environments in which they exist.

back story

The Library of Congress has just hosted the 25 year celebration of the accomplishments of the RIT Image Permanence Institute. What a monumental service to the preservation cause it has provided! A-D strip indicators for film stock monitoring and PAT photo activity test strips for enclosures, have all required the IPI research and intensive scientific advance. The IPI has also mobilized entire scientific disciplines to advance understanding of the course of entropy itself as it progresses in cultural media. And the Climate Notebook system is a momentous advance not only for understanding dynamics of storage environment but also for providing leverage for active preservation policy.

The back story is monumental as well. The IPI has an independent stature that can shift strategies of huge industrial sectors. The IPI moved the huge color photography industry to achieve greater permanence of their products. Now IPI has taken on the even larger industrial sector of digital imaging and reprography. Here again the cultural record is threatened and the IPI scientists are countering that very threat.

Finally, dear to the heart of FotB junkies, Jim Reilly gave us a humor and insight laced presentation augmented by a single Power Point projection. The single image projection presented the cover of the beautiful commemorative PRINT publication; “From Silver Image to Silver Anniversary”. Get a copy!

different deaths

In a recent interview Nicholas Negroponte, in a single breath, contends that the print book is dead but the Web is not dead. Curious, Web content is evermore diluted and diffused while print just stays there. Maybe dead is not the best defining state for either.

Nicholas is sending laptops loaded with e-books to Africa. He should reflect that that is where books came from, and reading animals too.

swan song

Sunset Tucson Guild meeting of book workers was mellow. I enjoyed the sessions and the honor of a lifetime achievement award and wondered how the whole experience of a century of book craft passes so quickly.

Intermetric

Everyone knows there is a restaurant at the end of the universe, but what is at the center?

In all the universe, a most disparate field is encountered in the evaluation of satisfactory or adverse storage conditions for library media. A universe of rate related processes are transpiring within the items, the items are accumulated together, and energy driven systems modify the air of the interior environment while seasons play outdoors, and medium playback is sustained or not.

For evaluation of such conditions of collections storage an intermetric approach is suggested. This approach would link and correlate isolated metrics of pH and rH, light levels and their materials activation, and seasonal air fluctuations and materials moisture content fluctuation.

The challenge here is not especially correlated graphic display, but comparison of the derived data in comperable units. Then monitoring of transient environment can be directly compared with monitoring of aging of collections and interactions can be observed across time. The transient conditions of the ambient air is another augmentation of the driver monitoring of entropy of the physical materials of media themselves.

off to the guild

Not since smoke filled back rooms (Old Town Pub on 18th street) in New York, before the advent of chapters, have we participated in the Guild sessions except one occasion in San Francisco. Now we are happily off to Tucson.

photocopy template

Look to momentum well established and well sustained to project the future. Just such momentum powers photocopy now a some fifty years old and still churning out PDFs, wikis and Google finds in university libraries. Is it the photo or image reprography or the copy production providing personal print-out or both of these affordances that assures the persistence of copiers?

And note the subtle shift from simplex to duplex and note the subtle merge from a given scan to both print or screen delivery. Note the assimilation of the codex with face-up, face-down or edge-on capture. Note the subtle transition from wet to dry ink and silent advent of four color. And note the enhanced resolution and graphic quality of photocopy reprography that is light years beyond internet display. And note the immense installed base and immense user access. Photocopy is definitely not just a transition technology.

Perhaps copiers suggest part of the interdependence of print and screen to come. Today the students were lined up eight deep behind one of the high speed copiers. There are four machines running in that one lab of 29 such printer labs on campus. Fifteen pages for every screen hour logged.

suspicion

There is always the suspicion that fans of screen reading have no idea of the nature of book reading and are the least reliable sources for projections of the future of the book. The constraints of print are its attributes when it comes to transmitting books and we do not evermore desire automated emendations of meaning. Book reading is not intended to addict us to endless pop-ups.

Real book reading is also not intended to addict us to a consumerist agenda based on format obsolescence. The rush to the latest Kindle 1, Kindle 2, Kindle 3, i-Pad 1 and so on, always discarding the previous device, is a distraction from attentive reading and disruptive of library building. In the print environment small books and large books, cheap and pricy, visual and text formats have all proven sustainable together.

And then there is the hubris of screen reading; all the books, all the time, instantly as if that star field will explain everything. The displeasure over constraints of DRM as if the constraints of print; one language, one font size, one title per device, has proven a failed transmission medium. And then there is presumption of print super-cession and digital culture ascendance all based on the most ephemeral medium of the screen.

What can be a more productive stance? Let’s consider the suggestion that print and screen reading are interdependent and each, self-authenticating print and self-indexing screen, will continue to advance the future of the book together.