futureofthebook.com

growth industry

“…to understand the new questions that digital books or texts compel us to ask, students need to understand and value both the material existence of books and the history of books.” Allison Muri, Professor, “History and Future of the Book”.

Iowa Book Works produces the teaching aids needed for undergraduate learning within courses of book studies. The legendary Ethiopian book kits and comprehensive Historical Binding Teaching sets engage and compel learning of students who are otherwise more dependent on screen discovery. Years later these students will be amazed to realize their persistent understanding of the papyrus codex.

Suppliers such as Iowa Book Works are enjoying a flood of orders and educators report that during the last few decades the study of material texts has flourished in all fields of literary study. As with any surge, a compensating correction can also be anticipated as we see in the decline of the “scrapbooking” craze. It may be that these avenues of legacy format transmission are not fundamental to understanding a new environment of digital communications.

But as surges go, the book has already persisted across epics. That very resilience is worth many continuing actions of book studies.

growth industry 2

And what about the surge in weekend Book Festivals? Brooklyn, Baton Rouge, Madison, Austin, LA, DC, San Diego and Iowa City! What is so street ready about book writing and reading? These were rather quiet, solitary activities. Some feral behaviors of a disturbed ecology?

morphic resonance

“How long is print required for access following digitization? If not for reader access, how long is it required for other purposes such as re-digitization?” ITHAKA S+R blog

This question can be approached by asking another question; “How long will the digitization be needed?” Will the screen format have extended use for access or other purposes? While source and surrogate roles can be assigned to either print or screen copy, their interdependence and useful continuing roles follows from such relation.

Continuing interaction of source and surrogate can be outlined in terms of back-up, mastering and authentication. BACK-UP is capacity for regeneration of copy as may be needed due to systems failure, delivery or display compromise. (i.e. proprietary take-down, governmental censorship, copy right infringement take-down, device compromise) MASTERING is capacity for augmentation, enhancement or perfecting of faulty copy (i.e., adding missing pages, adding foldouts or color to Google book copy, adding a missing image of the book cover, or increased image resolution or other direct enhancement) AUTHENTICATION is capacity for resolution of forensic, production or provenance questions (i.e., distinction between copy and source faults, evidence of copy manipulation or sophistication, verification of margins and edges)

Some affordances, inherent in different delivery and display formats, can favor one or the other for a given access use yet all can complement each other. With the screen and print book it can appear that neither will flourish without the other. Such interdependence is especially apparent in scholarly monographs and research library access. At least the interdependence is apparent so far. ITHAKA S+R faculty survey reveals a simultaneous enthusiasm for both print and screen book formats. Perhaps this is not an ambiguity but a decisive understanding of the role of books.

A morphic resonance is at work and the role of print and screen books can be projected based on past performances. On one side this could explain the seeming low use of paper monographs as they fulfill rather seculsive uses, just as they have always done. Screen books fulfill expansive uses that transcend book format and conventions of book production, just as they have always done.

underground

Imagine that you must overcome a cable interruption or automotive dysfunction on our own without resort to tech support. Linotypes once had tech support, but this has disappeared. In a breakdown you can be on your own unless you can make contact with the underground cable repairpeople from “Brazil”. Even then these few gypsy Mergenthalers are using as much wit and wile as factory procedure.

Here we find Mary and Larry Raid and Beth and Dave Seat on call at the Homestead Rocket print shop. (strange Lulow sticks)

misconstrued materiality

Bibliographic study of the materiality of books frequently deviates into discussions of a “materiality” of reading. Such a skew is not about upholstery or lighting but about transactions of paratext interpretation. Typographic and watermark identification, edition status, collation features are examined as if they were physical features when they are abstract ingredients of legibility, reading strategies and conventions of text management.

Materiality does abide in the physical book copy. But for bibliographers such materiality converts to provenance interpretation and then transcends itself to configure the edition exemplar; all abstractions. Engagement with the physical binding, when it occurs, is skewed to generalization and evades experience of manufacture, use and manipulation of a physical codex.

One result of this deflection is an evasion the materiality that bibliographers wish to distinguish and define. Another implication is possible as well. That is the discount of the consequence of materiality as a compelling attribute of the physical book in a context of its screen display. Both materiality and immateriality may play lesser roles in a complementary interaction of source and surrogate.

Exercises in authentication use material evidence. Search, for example, has repeatable, overt result in a material book and a variable, immaterial outcome from bibliographic screen resource. The overt presence or overt absence of features in a physical book copies exercises its material nature.

academe

“Other information industries, from journalism to music to book publishing, enjoyed similar periods of success right before epic change enveloped them, seemingly overnight. We now know how those industries have been transformed by technology, resulting in the decline of the middleman — newspapers, record stores, bookstores and publishers.

Colleges and universities could be next, unless they act to mitigate the poor choices and inaction from the lost decade by looking for ways to lower costs, embrace technology and improve education.” NYT

There is that curious progression of sequence; some enclaves experience change before others. The pioneers are libraries. And libraries have more advisories for the larger information base. One is that patron services need to transcend patron desires.

Perhaps the last enclave to assimilate the screen book will be academe. Scholarly authors wish not to share their authorship with a software enclosure and, as they study and write for posterity, they wish not to flicker away.

fire

Ghostly white smoke and orange flames; at first I imagined something in the pot. But the eighty-year old Mergenthaler/Emerson motor was burning up. Tragedy was avoided but composition and line casting has been halted and the Homestead Rocket is delayed. It is a connectivity denial.

Keyboard prompting and mass media connectivity came in with the Linotype before the turn of the 20th century. Magazines, newspapers and directories were all set on Linotypes until well into the 1970’s. Microsoft is three decades old, Mergenthaler Linotype lasted almost a century.

What future ghostly white smoke and orange flames will signal the end of screen reading? Not imaginable? Not a relevant concern? We can only appraise the prospects for screen reading after it has un-docked from its parent templates of the print eras.

source and surrogate

Many and most people can get along without paper books. That majority can also do fine without original paintings or original photographs. The issue here is the different roles of source and surrogate.

Of course the source can be screen based. Think of all the newspapers that survive only on microfilm. More to the point, consider all websites. So one way of looking at the source and surrogate contrast is to consider what the combination of these delivery states offers and how the two options can be optimized and even how they can work together.

Screen delivery, source or surrogate, offers remote access, automated searching or self-indexing and a capacity for live revision and linage. Paper or print delivery offers electronic device and systems independence, content immutability and some curious, self-authentication qualities. There is a strange complementary aspect!

In the final appraisal we need to consider transmission of culture and information generally. Both screen and paper transmission are needed but, for responsible transmission, there may be preference for physical sources and virtual surrogates.

open source trilogy

“Bibliotheca, the leading global developer and supplier of technologies designed to enhance library efficiency and the user experience, is partnering with the library community to facilitate adoption of open source platforms for the delivery of electronic content.” Bibliotheca

News: Open source platforms for the delivery of electronic content and epub file format combine to provide library ebook access. ( This has not happened.) Unlike with paper book circulation, electronic book circulation divides display and storage into separate costs and separate services. Library ebook access now requires double transaction from multiple platforms to multiple devices; an impossible business plan.

A goal of open source storage and open source display is obvious for libraries but impossible from a publishing position excepting for independent, open source publishing or for electronic circulation of public domain books. A trilogy of open source production, open source storage, open source display sounds ethereal, but logical for libraries and their preservation role.

swan song

Bibliographers use a boundary to frame their studies. This is the turn of the nineteenth century. Those living in in the year 1800 could look back across centuries and be familiar with the daily routines of those before them. Likewise people of the 1800’s would be familiar with the changing routines of those in centuries to come.

This turn of the nineteenth century transition is arbitrary but the general shift from handcraft to industrialization, from domination of tradition to domination of science and from eternal to evolutionary constructs is apparent. Most fascinating is the hybrid experience of the nineteenth century itself; the leap between eras. Photo imaging, sound recording, mass media, instantaneous communications and the dot-dash of digital encoding all sprung up in that time of paradigm shifting.

Within such a perspective there is a somewhat nostalgic bent of current bibliographers in interests in materialistic aspects of books. Such qualities and affordances of physical books have not gone away, but bibliographers tend to shift their explanations to past performance rather than in a more recent context of interplay with the screen book. The attributes of performance of the physical book are much more relevant now, not as legacies, but as strategic complements of the virtual book.

(vertical rotary index filing from Progressive Filing, seventh edition, 1961)

in the cards

“As there is no authoritative reference to history, only one other strategy remains for proclaiming the product as an unconditional innovation, as a compelling break with tradition – in short as modern“. Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines, About Cards & Catalogs, 1548 – 1929

Digital data base utilities, as well as the entire domain of screen interaction, are frequently considered an “unconditional innovation” that came out of nowhere to revolutionize human behavior. All we know is that the digital revolution and history itself is the future.

Krajewski points out that the migration of information management from bound account books to card files and card catalogs produced an unquestioned business revolution at the turn of the 20th century. Typewriter entry then became punch entry cards. He records that this change over in business transactions neglected to reflect on its origins including that the card revolution derived from systems innovated in libraries.

The innovation of card cataloging was a challenge to the book format and invalidated the name of the profession of “bookkeeping”. At the turn of the 20th century card catalogs signaled the death of the book and the rise of digital classifications and atomized information. The sweep of modernization erased a more balanced perspective.

Perhaps it is again time to call on perspective from libraries. Here the digital revolution and its utilities have been in full swing for a half century. But this library revolution is interesting for the persistence of the book format as well. A transactional future of interdependent delivery formats, paper and screen, is in motion there.

out of print

It is said that screen books need never go “out of print”. This is actually unproven; even those deliberately curated and preserved may disappear in a half century. Constraints of both the Moore rule of doubling storage as well as a second law of thermodynamic that compels entropy or some incident such as a solar flare may yet impose mortality on screen books.

An out of print state for paper books also results in fates of disappearance. But an interesting feature of physical books is their admission of mortality up-front. When the standing type is melted down a print run from that “server” is impossible. Reprinting is possible from a surviving copy. The survival transaction is simple.

Screen books, however, are recopied in the sense of the pre-print manuscript era. That is they survive in hard-drive versions handed off to shifting network delivery systems and variable device displays via proprietary encryptions. With screen books there is a more complex survival transaction.

Digital dark ages are suggested except for the option of reprinting a screen book. Our current hybrid publishing to both screen and print provides this survival option. Screen books currently have a fall back; reprint survival transaction.

shrink wrap selector

We have used shrink-wrap in lieu of repair for the past ten years. The use driven selection scenario was to repair any book following its third re-wrapping. But these books are predominately brittle and repair is not satisfactory. As Bu, our reformatting specialist, remarks we produce shelf replacement copies instead.

High quality preservation copy facsimiles are a better, immediate collection response. Even where screen copies are present they can lack foldouts, color, and legible paratext features. A preservation photocopy on a well-chosen book paper stock can convey such features accurately.

This option also aligns with another preservation agenda. Following preservation photocopy facsimile production, the original volume is shrink wrapped and retired from circulation into our growing leaf master collection. The preservation function of the leaf master collection is rather overt; to assure a continuing back-up, re-mastering and authentication role of the source in a context of its simulations, both screen and physical.

The suggestion from this process is a working solution for the brittle book problem. And the eerie aspect of that is an inherent solution to the book problem itself. Perhaps all physical books are leaf masters.

ebook tv

“But, heck, Apple already has patents on 3-D gesture recognition using the iPad, so perhaps an additional accessory isn’t even necessary. ‘Apple can do a lot with the box they have in terms of disrupting and changing people’s expectations of what TV is,’ ” (prospect of Apple TV) WIRED

Book reading is leaking away from color LCD devices. Touch navigation is the doorway into all kinds of electronic delivery on all sizes of screens and attentive book reading is increasingly enclaved with hand-held, electrophoric black eink and, weirdly, circled backward to paper delivery.

future scenarios

“This report explores alternative scenarios, where the technology of the printed book does not disappear or become extinct, but occupies a different position in a technological ecology characterized by the proliferation of e-books and digital libraries.” David Staley

There is a new report from the ACRL titled Scenarios for the Future of the Book. The report is interesting as it considers future scenarios that include useful roles for print books within digital libraries. The report is also helpful as it describes more responsible methods for projection of the future of the book.

The report develops its scenarios using “Cross-impact analysis (that) is based upon the premise that events and practices do not happen in a vacuum and other events and the surrounding environment can significantly influence the probability of certain events to occur. Cross-impact analysis involves running each of the descriptors against each other.”

So the scenarios are composites of circumstances that tolerate or even catalyze each other. Features of these scenarios are derived from surveys of ACRL Directors. Four scenarios are presented, three of which include a flourishing future role for print books within research libraries. The projection is only a few years out to 2020.

Any librarian can imagine print books in 2020. Print publication and reader preference assure that future. The uncertainties derive from influences of hybrid print/screen services. From the FotB perspective the four scenarios presented all evade a useful path for cross-impact analysis that was impeded by survey bias. Directors were not surveyed regarding the persistence of the very interdependence of print and screen books that they now know.

What if print and screen books are the complements of natural library ecology? What if reader preference and technological advances will invigorate both delivery formats and neither print or screen books will flourish without the vigorous other? Such a scenario certainly confronts cross-analysis head on and, if Directors would agree, reflects conditions on the ground.

design matters

Design is important within the paratext overall. Well designed paratext; cover graphic and typographic option, indexing, title page, table of contents, page size, device morphology and so on are “read” just as is the narrative content. When we are interrupted or distracted in the course of reading, either of paratext or text, we “read” the interruption. That is what reading is; perceiving and interpreting all that delivery format provokes.

The cover can be a privileged component of paratext, in both screen and print books if that is the component delivered first and used as a first selector. Screen literacy has advanced our skills of quick deletion and, for example, we will not open every email. With emails we may delete from the address level alone. So the cover for screen books could be an even more crucial gatekeeper.