a moment in book history
The book now spans both print and screen formats. Close attention to this circumstance of mixed delivery options reveals a surprisingly complementary and interdependent relation of affordances and a third stance going forward.
Enclaves of library preservation, academic book studies, and studio book arts are moving beyond contentions or “tipping points” to a fulcrum position of interaction between print and screen books. Other, wider sectors of publishers, educators, authors and information technologists are also assembling a composite stance.
Here are a few recent works that begin to establish the composite stance.
SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION: Transferred Illusions, Digital Technology and the Forms of Print, Marilyn Deegan and Kathryn Sutherland, 2009.
BOOK STUDIES: The Book in the Renaissance, Andrew Pettegree, 2010 and Divine Art, Infernal Machine, The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending, Elizabeth Eisenstein, 2011.
DESIGN FOR READING: How the Page Matters, Bonnie Mak, 2011 and Breaking the Page, Transforming Books and the Reading Experience, Peter Meyers, 2012.
What if lively interaction between screen and print is, itself, the future of the book? So far this has been true! Screen books and paper books define each other as they diverge in genres, display and connectivity. Synchronized divergence reveals the self-authenticating print book a counterpart of the self-indexing screen book.