futureofthebook.com

on the road

“During the next six months, with support from the Mellon Foundation and outside experts, the iSchool faculty will embark on a planning process and budgetary review of our certificate program. Current students will continue their programs as we move to our new facilities this summer. Please watch for progress in this planning process on our web site and check back for further details on future admissions.”

The Preservation/Conservation program has already outgrown one library school and it can outlgrow another. There is no reason not to consider relocation if only to unlock options for program development in Texas. The GSLIS at Illinois provides just such a foil where there is “Groundbreaking research to advance preservation of and access to information in both traditional and digital libraries and in the many settings outside of libraries where large amounts of critical information are collected”

sustainability

The measures of sustainability include not just closed cycle production and operation efficiency but also sustainable discard. My three year old computer went “blue screen” and I was given another. I was overdue for up-grade anyway.

There must be 500 computers in the library building and I wonder where they go. 500 books could go into the river with no lasting effect. Or, if the books are kept, they will not need replacement, every three years, to remain readable.

pbi soliloquy

FotB offered presentations on comparative 1 and 2 Kindle fulfillment and on a retrospective of the future of the book. We also provided a cartonnage and free leaf investigation of the design traits of papyrus book making, a tutorial on post digital sewn boards binding and a take-home exemplar of the mobility of the book at the close of the wooden board era. That was during the Paper and Book Intensive, 2009, at OxBow.

historical printing anchor

This press is being re-assembled at the University of Iowa Center for the Book. It will be a resource for a new historical printing course. It looks ugly. It came apart with a little tap, tap, tap Amtrak hammer.

lively zombie

“A full-colour UV printer, the EagleJet C4200 has been developed for on-demand commercial print markets in China. Production flexibility enables duplex mono and two-colour printing simultaneously, and duplex four-colour printing with a tandem configuration. The precision imaging capability of the industrial-strength Xaar 1001 printhead produces amazing print results (1080dpi apparent resolution) across the 420mm paper web width at speeds of 25 metres per minute.”
Digital Print

Printing technology is advancing as quickly as in the 19th century. All the implications of web feed, simultaneous duplex and color are in continuous advance.

presence

Screen reading advocates find print books inconvenient when they should understand them as essential. Screen reading is counterpart to print reading; they derive from each other and feature surprisingly counterpart and interlocking attributes. Why is this obvious interlock invisible? It is not improbable that automotive travel engendered road maps or gps devices, but that print books engendered screen books as a counterpart development is frequently overlooked.

At if:book the print book is conceded to have “presence” and so its continued role in context of digital delivery is explained and dismissed. But beyond presence, specific print attributes of fixity, navigational and haptic refinement, materiality, and reliable re-access across time, all pair nicely with screen attributes of immediacy, automated search, electronic delivery, and live content. Another crucial pair of inter-functioning print and screen attributes is revealed by the self-authenticating nature of the print book contrasted with the self-indexing nature of the screen book.
Just such factors are relevant to the future of books. Forget about legacy and what has gone before; now the issue is assimilation of screen books and print books into a single transmission mechanism. Let’s go directly to the
work ahead.

new kind of science

Steven Wolfram, author of the self published, self designed and awesome compendium of science
yet to come that visualizes time and space as dimensions of information, will now engineer the
next generation Google engine.

“The thing that truly sets Wolfram¦Alpha apart is that it is able to do sophisticated computations for you, both pure computations involving numbers or formulas you enter, and computations applied automatically to data called up from its repositories.
Why does computation matter? Because computation is what turns generic information into specific answers.
To give an amusing example, every school child has at one time or another written a report on the moon, and they probably included the wrong figure for how far the moon is from the earth. Why wrong? Because the distance from the earth to the moon is not constant: it changes by as much as a mile a minute.”

fotb to pbi

We will participate in the 26th session of the
Paper and Book Intensive sabbatical. We will investigate the four P-modes of the book: papyrus, parchment, paper and phone.

canticle for kindle

“Congratulations on your purchase and welcome to Amazon Kindle 2.
We built Kindle 2 with the goal of creating an exceptional and hassle-free reading experience. Kindle Team

It is interesting that the Kindle 2
prospectus includes a critical, one star, review. Evidently the auto-review postings are unmoderated. (see Gadget Queen at the bottom of the scroll). Anyone prompted to a one-click purchase is quickly dissuaded.

This must be a post-apocalypse advertising world as in “Canticle for Leibowitz”. The 1959 futurist novel visualizes rudimentary cultures mystified by the accidental survivals of paper documents. Since post electrical life would certainly have no evidence or suspicion of digital culture, the antique visualization is still authentic.

worlds made words

Anthony Grafton, co-author of Christianity and the Transformation of the Book, concludes his latest book with a dangling chapter about the Codex in Crisis. He presents many nuanced expressions of the attributes of paper and screen books and many nuanced expressions of the worth of libraries. But each is studied as a separate topic without a single suspicion that paper and screen books maybe fulfilling counterpart and interdependent roles. And there is no indication that libraries are the implementers of this cohesive transmission ecology. The interlock between self-authentication of paper books and self-indexing of screen books is not even suggested.

uncanny valley

“I
discussed
TTP (turn the page) book models in the context of the so-called “uncanny valley” -
this is the theory that as robots become more and more human-like,
they reach a point where we become disgusted by them – they are too
much like us and yet we understand they are not us. I’m not sure how
the comparison holds up but I think it’s an interesting and perhaps an
important point. TTP models are designed to be “true facsimiles” of
books, but they’re really just generic computer models with images
attached to them.” Dot Porter

A more and more comprehensive simulation of a manuscript book, either a digital or a physical facsimile, exists in an uneasy relation with the original. While the simulation can be authentically delivered, it lacks the defining capacity of self-authentication inherent in the source.

Curiously, a capacity of self-authentication begins to emerge only as a simulation distances itself from a unique original and begins to present a model or prototype of a more abstracted simulation. Then it begins to present unique characteristics all its own.

like life

“Fly into
Rome as it looked in 320 AD.” If not diverted to Indianapolis for refueling, we expect to land at our destination on time. Google Earth is providing options to this expectation. Their flight to late Antiquity Rome swoops down into town for a look around. Soon we can wander about as avatars not quite like life.

But we will spend real vacation time. Are we tourists or are we being toured? Some simulations suspend disbelief and visitors become natives. Perhaps there is time to write a book on papyrus.

new historic and artistic works

“The book is an ingenious invention. Compact and portable, it has been the primary means of transmitting and preserving mankindís accumulated knowledge for hundreds of years.Throughout that time, printers and bookbinders have used a wide variety of materials and structures. Some have proven to be remarkably durable; others have been vulnerable to chemical deterioration and mechanical stress.”
AIC

lightning expresso

“We see the Espresso Book Machine as an innovative and exciting way
for publishers to get their books out into the market,î said David Taylor, President of
Lightning Source. ìThere is clearly a place for the
in-store print on demand model in the
emerging landscape of globally distributed print.î

It is remarked that desk-top printers increased, rather than diminished, production of paper in the “paperless office”. The Expresso machine will do the same, sidebar to print, for digital books.

“The EBM marks a new era for publishing and book retailing. It will enable publishers to cut out supply chain costs, match consumer demands and therefore eliminate unwanted returns. The EBM also removes the need for transportation, adding green credentials to the already impressive list of benefits saving on CO2 emissions and the pulping of unwanted books.

Blackwell predicts the EBM will increase shop sales due to being able to provide a far greater variety of books and popular titles to customers. Books neednít be out of stock again and the need to wait for books to arrive from a publisher should be a thing of the past. In addition, the EBM is able to bring rare texts back into production. As a committed supporter of small & independent publishers, the EBM allows Blackwell to provide a distribution channel for smaller publishers and hopes to attract a new audience of eager, budding authors and self publishers keen to see their work in print.”

Notice that there is no reluctance to imagine print as a future delivery format. Regardless of any increase in retail of screen delivered books or Google simulation of books, print format will continue to hover at 98 to 99 percent of all titles delivered.

end of the university

“I continue to believe that young people who have a hands-on understanding of the traditional book crafts, but are also skilled at book making using new digital tools, are a necessary element for keeping the codex book format alive and healthy.” Lance Hidy

When I read the Marc Taylor NYT editorial on the end of graduate education I was struck by the decompression of the concept from an assumed future to a complete disconcertion .sort of like the disappearance of GM. The realign to float departments of Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water is certainly appealing, especially since book studies subsumes eight of the twelve domains.
Lance Hidy and
Lorcan Demsey also were taken with the editorial which certainly crosses two horizons of expert opinion.

The sudden collapse of the finance sector is probably a blip in contrast to the collapse of other sectors such as education, politics, social norms, ecologic consciousness, tourism, humanist research, on-line shopping and religion.

Peru

We can admire any of the imperial invaders of Peru for the energy needed to travel and communicate across the most awesome landscapes and seascapes. It is similar to an uninhabited, earthlike planet somewhere else. The only familar feature is the old library.

As we complete two weeks of projects here in Arequipa there is a sense that more will follow. The Convent of the Recoleta is hospitable to an ongoing base for book studies and book work. The San Pablo University has hosted a well attended workshop. And the
INLIBI connections are facilitating donations and logistics.

certification

The CLR work of certification and assessment of Portico and Haithitrust as digital repositories is to assure the same persistence and delivery dependability of digital resources that is familiar with print.

An interesting aspect here is that the print collections were self-certifying for persistence and dependable delivery through the simple act of acquistion into a research library. Digital simulations of print do not provide this assurance and to some degree may not be capable to do so.

The CLR agenda includes co-ordinate acquisition of digital with disposal of print providing “last copy” repository for physical print to provide the needed back-up, mastering and source authentication for the digital simulation. Certainly such an agenda should include certification of the last print copy as well as the digital copy. The digital copy should be certified for persistence and delivery dependabilty. The print copy should be certified as back-up, master and source authenticator.

So it comes to this; we are now certifying the reality of the physical collections. Only overt dependence on digital resources could result in such oddness.

people of the mirror

We can look to the features of the screen as a new reading mode and a new culture with its own religious views. While religious cultures keep a book at hand, a newer culture will be reading from the mirror of scripture. A culture of the screen will discard its scripture every five years and redraw it every few seconds. This new culture and its religious concerns will be known as ìpeople of the mirrorî.

peru

We are back at work in the
library of the Recoleta, Arequipa. The 17th century library and its later acquisions are now one year older. We have advanced from a preservation focus to a book studies agenda with visions of exchange and research. Another test case for the future of the book where the past is already bizzare, momentous and alluring.

A new goal will be design, curation and reinstallation of the central exhibit ìBooks in the Recoletaî with sub topics; ìHistory, Art and Technologyî. Thirty six case displays will be illustrated with items from the collection. Another goal is promotion and instruction based on the new exhibit. There will be on-site interpretation for young learners, tourist visitors and others.

A more developed facility for book conservation and library preservation will be established at the Recoleta. Instruction sessions on bibliographic description of the library of Recoleta and the role of books in Arequipa will be associated with the opening of the new exhibit. In 2011 there will be an institute for specialists and a sustainable education program. The institute will draw on existing organizations in book studies, book arts and book and library preservation to provide participation from the region, country, and the Americas.

late age

The Late Age of Print by Ted Striphas, 2009, proposes a pivotal role for physical books in the ìdensely mediated landscapeî of communication media today and concludes that “books and book culture (are) at the forefront of contemporary historical process.î

The wobbly mediation of academic book study with skills of book making can use the Striphas concept of a ìsingle bibliographic economyî, familiar to neither camp. This is an economy of sustainable production, controlled consumerism and vocational and domestic familiarity. Both camps, academic and craft, need to share advocacy of transmission via physical objects and the alluring possibility that print libraries are mechanisms for culture transmission in the future.

double your pleasure

The CLR project to
certify digital repositories will link that effort to disposal of “redundant” print. Perhaps the project should also look at distinctive functions of print (back-up, mastering, source authentication) relative to digital delivery. The immediate targets may be serials, but there is already speedy termination of print in preference to screen delivery. The wider prospective linkage of growing digital resources with disposal of print resources needs more careful mediation.

open library

“We are excited to announce a new program to allow users and patrons to “scan-on-demand”. It’s simple to use: just search for a public domain book on OpenLibrary.org and, if it’s at the Boston Public Library and hasn’t been scanned yet, there will be a “Scan This Book” button on the left-hand side.

When you click the button and follow the steps to confirm, we’ll have a librarian go and get the book from the stacks, bring it to our scanning center, and have our team of scanners digitize it page-by-page. When the scan is completed, you should receive an email follow-up with a link to the newly-digitized copy, complete with PDF, online flip book, full text (using OCR technology) and more, all thanks to your request!”

Scan on demand will further confirm the continuing role of the print collection as back-up, master and source authenticator. There is also the possibility that libraries will stumble on an entire transmission ecology based on machine reading.

ethiopian culture in italy

Carlo Mori has sent this aventurous link http://www.nigrasum.org/ “sacro e bellezza dell’Etiopia cristiana

flight of the condor III

“Arequipa is considered the most beautiful city in Peru, in itself a good reason to relocate, but for my purposes as a librarian, of equal importance is that it is an almost perfect locale for books. Apart from periodic earthquakes which dump entire collections to the floors in a few seconds, the climate is moderate and dry and the altitude at 8,000 feet discourages all nature of pests. Arequipa is, in historic terms remote, and marauding soldiers such as those from Chile which plundered Lima of much of its bibliographic patrimony in the War of the Pacific of 1879-84, bypassed this high plains community. In like manner Arequipa has been outside the normal traffic of urban culture and its libraries have not suffered the damages which can be wrought by
marauding librarians. Rather, grand collections from Europen and Latin American publishing centers have been well protected from all such incursions. The padres, who have been guarding their collections for almost 400 years, are also a formidable bulwark.” Helen Ryan

The FotB team is off again and beyond the reach of electric media as we know it. Rather we will be establishing workshop book studies in the Convent of the Recoleta. This flight of the condor will be a reverse course into the future with focus on book studies rather than library preservation.

Arequipa is a great place for book studies. Cultures of Antiquity exemplified by Greek and Roman empires and indigenous cultures exemplified by empires of the Americas were both transformed by evangelistic Christianity. This great drama is recorded in the historical libraries of Arequipa. This is also a perfect place to study historical technologies of the book including calligraphy, hand papermaking, vellum making, letterpress printing and hand bookbinding and to discover historical book that was not imported but made in Peru. Another attribute of Arequipa is its community of specialists in library and book history. So there is a convergence that includes key people, organizations and motivations.

template

“To me, the most interesting factor is the way instant communications lead to unconscious conformity. Youíd think that with thousands of ideas flowing at light speed around the world, youíd get a diversity of viewpoints and expectations that would balance one another out. Instead, global communications seem to have led people in the financial subculture to adopt homogenous viewpoints. They made the same one-way bets at the same time. Banks got too big to manage. Instruments got too complex to understand. Too many people were good at math but ignorant of history.” David Brooks

It is always exciting to experience how little awareness the IT sector has of print collection usefulness. They are focused on the current transaction and on-line traffic. There is no regard for sustainable, long term access. The current financial collapse may be a template for other system wide reverses in governance, sciences, social cooperation or libraries.

duh

“Dag Spicer, curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, says: ìData rot refers mainly to problems with the medium on which information is stored. Over time, things like temperature, humidity, exposure to light, or being stored in not-very-good locations like moldy basements, make this information very difficult to read. The problem, strangely enough, is not so bad on the older stuff, but quite bad on the more recent stuff. So we can read tapes here at the museum that are 50 years old. With a CD or a DVD, if thereís an error, often itís nonrecoverable, and youíve just lost all your information.î “

“It was, I think, a titanium disk about the size of a long-playing record, and it was supposed to last 10,000 years. But then they realized that there were some assumptions that weren’t right, and that it would not last 1,000 years, it might only last 20. Otherwise, as far as I know, no one is working on this problem.”

covers with no books

As research libraries project management of print collections there is some hurry to disregard their role in screen delivery from print sources. These print collections continue to serve as back-up, master and authentication source (each distinctive functions) for their screen simulations yet there is an inclination to regard their role as over. (Virtual libraries will easily provide sustainability and the overhead of print collection storage must certainly be more than digital preservation!!)

In a recent post
Lorcan Dempsey mentions a facsimile publication of Raymond Chandler novels that could not locate the original cover art. This is a small instance of the continuing role of print to enable subsequent recapture from a print master. This example of books without covers is strangely related to covers without books. These are the color cover thumbnails used to retail black and white Kindle titles. It appears that the package is even more useful when the product is an electronic transmission.

wily coyote moment

“Most attention is paid to the cost of scanning (photographing the pages and processing them), but I cannot emphasize enough that the greatest costs of building a digital library are those borne by the brick-and-mortar libraries. Libraries spend billions each year building, curating, and maintaining their collections. So, the real value, and costs, are in the books and the libraries. This aspect is too often overlooked and undervalued.”
Open Content Alliance

Advocates for digital research and screen reading are oblivious of the functionality of physical books and print libraries.

epiphani

Nicholas Carr at
Rough Type is adventuring among simulants with wonderful insights. I have purged my watch list down to authentic content of Carr, Demsey and
Woods.

not one url

The awesome
bibliography of G. Tom Tanselle presents 370 pages of citation without a single url. FotB received two citations well undeserved in the company of the others.

busy original

Back-up, copy master, and reality check; the source original is always busy. Library digitizers snicker that physical copies are inaccessible and never used but they don’t appreciate the dependence of screen simulations.

Physical originals back up the screen simulations providing a low cost mirror of digital content. They also stand ready as the source for re-simulation. The old saw of a “one-time capture” is increasingly inept in context to changing research needs and churning access technologies. Finally, physical originals are the only format that will sustain deep authentication. Only the real thing will withstand the forensic and intellectual pursuit of evidence of provenance and the intentions of authors, publishers, producers and readers.

affordances

“JW: If you could wave your magic wand, what are the top 2 or 3 features you’d love to see Amazon add to the Kindle?

Second, I would love to have a device with a much bigger screen. I mean big enough to show at least two pages at once. Because then you could do a lot of productive cross-referencing. This is important when you’re reading something like an O’Reilly programming book. You need to be able to cross-reference the table of contents, the index, and multiple chapters really easily. Until then, I’ll keep buying print copies of books on software programming.”
Kindleville Blog

The Kindle is not a transformer that can take on the visage of a superhero or battle destroyer. Kindle is a reading device, just like a book. Physical books are not mutable either. The difference is the grasp, manipulation and hand-off of content. Here the paper book affords a persistent performative space while the Kindle affords a momentary screen image.

long term access

“Clancy observed that these discussions need to be reframed. Weíre too stuck in the embodiment of today to understand what the future might be. He thinks libraries were about search, access and preservation. He thinks the crowd has become the authority, access will be dispersed to many places and the really unaddressed and scary problem is preservation. It is no oneís job right now.” (Dan Clancy is Engineering Director, Google Book Search)
hangingtogether

Screen information specialists consider permanence as a post delivery accessory. Print information specialists consider permanence as a developer issue. For long term access permanence must be built in before delivery dependence. Print, well refined for persistence, has a special attribute of default preservation.

It is refreshing to hear from someone who knows that Google Print simulations are not real and delivered in non-persistent arrays. It is refreshing to hear that the absence of preservation service is of interest and relevant to long term access. It is refreshing to hear that there is no IT sector awareness of who is to provide preservation and that there is dawning cluelessness.