futureofthebook.com

so what?

Felting, embossing and layering; components of production of papermaking, letterpress printing and bookbinding are somewhat equivalent. However their relation with content is different.

Printing has a closer relation with content. This has expressed itself in bibliographic study of books. Even reading and transmission efficiencies are closely associated with the manner of book printing. Book printing, not paper making or bookbinding, is actively debated as an agent of widespread social change.

Another indication of imbalance of influence among somewhat equivalent components of book production is the status of display over device or delivery in screen books. It is also apparent in print where copier quality, not paper or binding, is considered first in print on demand production. Is there a useful contention that the image of the text is more relevant to the story than either substrate or envelope?

So what? Well the underlying issue is that the interaction of all production components is needed for readable content. Paper is as vital to the influence of books as is printing and bookbinding is required for use of printed sheets. Screen books accentuate the content or story and are linked to a drama of reading behavior modification. Much screen book display debate figures over page vs. infinite canvas projection and these transactions are directly linked with content influence. Device and delivery options are less connected to content. So, arguably, the production components of screen books are differently privileged in their connection with content. That’s fine, try book production without their integration.

so what 2

All music and books are experienced in the present. What is odd is that they come to us from other periods near or far off. This very diversity of experiencing now and sourcing across time and cultures adds to meaning. Sometimes you can tell by a turn of phrase or rhythm that the encounter is displaced. A physical format can authenticate your suspicion. If you care.

so what 3

The pictographic origin of writing was well dismissed by Denise Schmandt-Besserat decades ago. The whole story is in her book How Writing Came About. Archaic counting prompted by clay counting tokens provides a plausible alternative for the origin explanation. Five thousand years of archeology of the tokens came before the earliest writing.

The back story adds an even more profound implication. As the counting token interpretation suggests, writing did not originate with either pictograph or phonetic construct. We tend to interpret the origin of writing as a conceptual construct because we are the products of writing. Rather, writing is an inadvertent effect derived from manual pinching and forming of small wedges of clay. As neurologist Frank Wilson has proposed, human dexterity and a curiosity driven by manual investigation and manipulation induced a side effect of conceptualization. The hands prompted the mind.

So what? Perhaps we should be wary of literary transmission exclusively conceptual without reference to an origin from physical clay. And it is not just a heritage ritual, but a futuristic potential that the physical book may provide the origin of new conceptual side-effects like writing.

wonder works

Iowa Book Works is producing the new 2012 editions; Future of the Book and Adventures in Book Conservation. These wonder works are still $10 each and $3. Send no money, just your shipping address. Pay only after rapture.

more books

Thomas Peters in his essay, “Libraries as Zones for Content Creation, Indie Publishing and Print on Demand”, in No Shelf Required 2, visualizes authors and readers as a binary and the their struggles and enthusiasms as an enchanted cause of librarians. Librarians provide hospitality, editorial decor, physical and virtual space and regional and local recognition. Libraries will move from purchase of books to creation of books.

The book production will increase locally to become more proportional to readership. Another proportionality is that authors will become their own readers and the reverse.

Peter Meyers Breaking the Page will come to phased completion in June. The first three chapters are already posted and there is a very useful explanation of the project by Peter.

This work promises a transformative view of the screen book. The approach is from a perspective of reading experience and a shift from page to infinite canvas. The Meyers visualizations are quite real and loaded with actual developments and yet I have an eerie feeling that the new ocean is a classical mathematical construction. The tangential reading space feels like defense department designs for electronic instruction manuals or Stephan Wolfram diagrams.

And this new screen reading adventure must depart from the known station of print pages and spreads. That very reflexive will haunt the reading pathways to come.

death of e-ink

I recall that screen reading advocates projected the death of the book. This death precept is now extended to dedicated, e-ink book devices too. This tells us something; (1) that screen book advocates fear market stabilization, and (2) that these advocates also fear displacement of book reading within the LCD tablet market.

E-ink book readers are dedicated simulants of print and as such will shadow a market associated with print books. What ever those markets may become they are not disappearing.

LCD tablet market cannot suppress multifunction uses and inherent multi-media production and display unrelated to books. In that ever expanding market we could almost project a death of book reading. As Peter Meyers mentioned the “glare” is still distracting and hybrid display may prove impractical.

Expansive notions of the future of the book are not withstanding. Look what happened to newspapers and magazines where tablets enabled new media rather than simulations of print models. We will need to define these new media without use of their previous names. (link from TeleRead)

advent of the codex

The Robert Kraft annotated 2008 version of the Roberts and Skeat The Birth of the Codex, 1987 provides the perfect opportunity to re-read this classic. The sources are the most fragmentary survivals and these survive without binding structures. Yet scholars and bookbinders cannot resist study of the momentous advent of the modern book.

Can overt directives ever be confirmed in the transition from scroll to codex? Did genre or did format initiate the transition? Do hypothesis of the transition drivers fully encompass the possibilities? How impossible is it for our modern sensibilities to imagine the role of books in Antiquity? Whatever the possibilities, the whole investigation must be influenced by format constraints if the anomalies of evidence are to be interpreted.

One obviously topic is codex impositions. There is knowledge of the impositions of folded papyrus letters and these may relate. However the basic distinction of single and multiple quire codex imposition is loaded with implication and that discussion is missing. Unaligned tacket stations apparent in suspected single quire leaves would contrast with aligned stations of multi-quire sewings. Single quire constraints of multiple seatings in a single fold would eventually force multi-quire accommodation.

Even thick single quire works could benefit from alternative muli-quire structure. Another factor would be content determinants where a single tractate may be accommodated but a collection of works cannot. Gospels acting as exemplars could be bound together and dis-bound as needed if contained in discrete quires.

There is also a world of structural distinction between the single and multiple quire codex. This distinction is apparent in different cover-to-text attachment and contrast of a covered and uncovered structure and those relations to protective enclosures. The advent of the multi-quire codex, in a context of the pre-cursive single quire codex, is almost as consequential as the transition from scroll to codex.

librarianship

When all the media are deployed, the remote and local collections mapped, and the services allocated there will be a pause to look exactly between these commodities. What conflict and what enhancement occurs between print and screen, what readership personalities arise, and are libraries a place of a state of mind? Nothing other than librarianship is needed here. How dumb it was to disparage the “l” word.

presence

The Associated Colleges of the Midwest conference on the “Past, Present and Future of the Book” was well organized and well conducted. The scope and coverage was also admirable, but the concurrent sessions meant that only one third of the program could be attended.

This was a stage set for book art and book studies advocates. In each of the Colleges book activists are instigating their programs. Just as crucially an enrollment draw suggests that students, who are activists of digital research, smart phone communication and screen learning, are also looking for the larger contexts.

In the trilogy of past, present and future, I took away a new sense of the present moment. Students are shifting from semester to semester and suddenly wish to do their education on phones. We are experiencing a shift equivalent to classical transitions but one not occurring across centuries; this is happening as we watch.

A larger context of learning and skill building is needed now. One such context is book art and book studies.

unstable text

A number of thought provoking posts have scrolled by. One on text stability addresses a perennial topic; what is stability of text as conveyed to different print and screen display. Advocates on both sides can argue both sides. The entire planet is spinning and we are individually unstable. All we can hope for is momentary pause in the context of comprehension of a given work of literature.

The issue is if such a pause can be repeated. This repeat, not reproduction, can only be interpreted archeologically in the presence of the same print book.

past. present, future

“The explosion of new digital book technologies has paradoxically energized more traditional studies of the book.” Now we will consider the future of the book at an Associated Colleges of the Midwest conference.

divine art, infernal machine

Like the Amazon take-down of the Kindle 1984, there is some consequence and some implication of printing quality for a book on the influence of printing. This is notoriously true if the work in question is the new Eisenstein study; Divine Art, Infernal Machine, The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending.

As soon as the first off-set printing was exhausted the continuing demand was met with print-on-demand production. The difference is day and night. The POD production is blotched high-speed copier work with blackened, bold text, dithered illustration, and a glare of fuser. Sweeps of different toner density run in the machine direction. It would be easier to read on an e-ink screen.

The off-set version presents crystal clear illustration and sharp and even text. It is a pleasure to read and a pleasure to contemplate. If ever there was a stark contrast between dry and wet ink printing, this is it. And the consequence is accentuated beyond legibility. How will print convey well in the context of its screen delivery if it does not sustain its own special affordances? Even more disturbing is a violation of reader expectations in context of such a masterly work on the consequence of printing!

poise

“Nobody seems to have touched on one relatively simple explanation for why the percentage of e-book resistant seems to be growing—it’s that more and more people already have an e-reader, so the number of people who don’t want them makes up a greater proportion of those who don’t have them yet.” Chris Meadows

This thought accords with some others in publishing that there is a natural balance of print and screen book interaction yet to be realized. Something like an equilibrium between print and television. The equilibrium would not be based on units sold but on market saturation for each delivery/display method. This could end up with multiple magnitudes of screen units per print units sold yet each sector becomes fully sustainable and neither restrained from full market presence.