futureofthebook.com

links

“How does this fit into bike shop news? Most directly, I (Cody) recently began the certificate program at the Center and spend my days madly dashing between bikes and books. Less directly, there is a deep rooted connection between the authentic experiences of riding a bike and reading a book, between the technologies of self-propulsion and analog information dissemination.” 30th Century Bicycle

lament

The ebook revolution was not consumer driven, it was industry driven. There was no inherent market for screen books. Among industry calculations was an intention to provide a shopping device. The book reading simulation is something of a decoy.

Only now are consumer laments emerging. Black electrophoric e-ink and button navigation did provide a reasonable simulation of book reading. Industry agendas are now moving away from book dedication toward multifunction entertainment. The color phosphor screen and touch screen navigation is the path of least resistance of a large installed base. Color e-ink development has faded.

The lament is among dedicated book readers over the eclipse of the dedicated black device. The ebook revolution continues to be industry, not consumer driven. Consumers read on their phones.

real future

Digital technologies have advanced the paper book as much as the networked screen book. Advances in the physical book include new book papers, inks, adhesives and covering materials made possible with digital automation of manufacturing. As significant, competition presented by screen books has prompted identification and accentuation of exclusive paper book attributes. Some of these attributes are constraints difficult for screen book advocate appreciation. For example each paper book conveys only a single title. This obvious limitation has, never the less, enabled organization, reorganization and visualization of libraries, engendered an economic base for publishing, and validated academic and literary achievement.

Another seeming limitation of the physical book is its fuse together of the storage and display functions. This integration, so disordered with the screen book, has long proven a sustainable and cheap assurance for cultural transmission. Screen books decouple storage and display breeding multiple, uncertain and recurring costs.

Another positive outcome of competition of the screen book has been focus on the future of the paper book. The paper book has not rolled over and played dead. There has been functional clarification of its roles. While displaced from some reference genres, the paper book has accentuated its role in academic monograph as print on demand has extended its reach. Illustrated books for sciences and arts have advanced as they benefit from digital pre-press design and editing. Partextual features refined for paper magazines, newspapers, journals and books have proven variously difficult or impractical to migrate to the screen. These amenities of reader expectations have prompted major reinventions for the screen including, for example, touch-screen navigations. But at the same time print has an advantage of a highly refined “installed base” of book paratext including such almost invisible fundamentals as pagination, recto/verso duplex, and efficient two page spreads.

Digital technologies have advanced the paper book as much as the networked screen book.

hasta lo que viene

“The book in Spanish is the second largest publishing market in the world and one of the most dynamic in translations. Each year, FIL Guadalajara brings together the most important book-publishing offer in this language through 1,900 participating publishing houses from 40 countries.” FIL

I am just back from the International Book Fair in Guadalajara. This is an annual exposition of Spanish language publishers. This entire publishing sector is still print based. Various factors other than outright conservatism are at work.

As regards infrastructure agility electrostatic printing is growing and extending the reach of printing in general. This print-on-demand is extending to retail installations with Espresso and similar gear. Here the Hispanic world is different as banks, corporations and restaurant chains are significant publishers. There is also a very modern Mexican paper making industry specializing in copier papers.

I did encounter e-book developments with dedicated devices and utilities. These and Spanish e-listings elsewhere may also have a backside with walk-in print-out.

As a generalization, Hispanic culture is intensively visual and book work is dominated by high design and color printing. There is a grounding of the book as a physical work. It is unclear how such traditions will convey to the screen.

gringo

For the gringo the Mexican book arts scene feels like cartels without violence. Famous organizers and their disciples manage markets and cultivate elite addictions. Behind it all a working class of street printers and crafts people survives. Behind the salons, diplomatic concourses and captitolism presumption a small garage, with a quiet, immaculate Intertype keeps the socialist revolution alive.

The gringo can suspect that both enclaves need each other. Haunting melodies of piano cascade as the player reads the obituaries or the gaunt architecture of vaults and a dome with streaming sun stands up before a visual furnace of “admiration and horror” of Orozco frescos. It is scary; the swirling man of fire.

Where are the weaknesses? Much too much elite book art is just work of graphic design folded. Complexity of codex format is circumvented. Calligraphic line brings motion to design but no mobility to reading. There is no link to the legacy and presence of bookbinding.

meanwhile

US mass market paperbacks fell 54% in September and trade paperbacks were flat. Hardcover sales were down 18%. Ebook sales doubled and were up 137% for the first nine months of 2011.

publishing discovery

“If we believe that convenience reading is moving at light speed over to e,” Mr. Schnittman said, using the industry shorthand for e-books, “then we need to think about what the physical qualities of a book might be that makes someone stop and say, ‘well there’s convenience reading, and then there’s book owning and reading.’ We realized what we wanted to create was a value package that would last.” NYT

paper browser

We are off to Mexico. Here the revolution between the network and paper browser rages on. We anticipate a conflict within a conflict as print advocates scroll their touch screens and popular culture finds print futuristic. FIL (International Book Fair, Guadalajara) provides a surprise peaceful landing of Europeans in the Americas.

mise en page

“So habituated to its operation, we often overlook how the page sets the parameters for our engagement with ideas.” Bonnie Mak

How the Page Matters by Bonnie Mak is a great work of book study and book materiality with layers of expert interpretation. Many works address the role of paratext and yet stumble over physical features that enable the paratext to operate. Not this. There is a wonderful description of papyrus, for example. Of especial interest is her skilled explanation of page mechanics across all the display formats, including screen.

“The histories that are constructed upon the digitally encoded page are histories of the digitization, not of its exemplar. Every digital page has a specific materiality and therefore matters in its own way. Suffused with individual circumstances of production, circulation, and transmission, each page is witness to and participates in its own social history, even in the digital present.” Bonnie Mak

drone

In a larger context of automations and robotic displacements the military drone appears to be displacing large varieties of manned missions. This transition offers a suggestive trope for the screen book as a displacer of manned print books. Will the skies be purged of a manned presence? …er, no, the book space will just be more crowded.

pap(e)r

The Print Archive Preservation Registry (PAPR) will coalesce records of holdings of shared print repository. There will also be validation processing but the reason why may not be as apparent as it is compulsive.

The removal of books from research libraries is now underway. Savings, from diminished costs of on-site print, are remarkable even while such saving will be diminished by full costing of the repository operations. Administrators perceive that the move to shared print should not be justified by operational cost savings or reclaimed space alone. The strategic justification is transition toward a more agile and wider service in support of screen based instruction and research. There is also the credible issue of buffering the legacy collections from future risks of wholesale purging by future administrations.

All these changings are being managed on-the-fly. Conventions of the dichotomy of Special and General collections are transcended even as they are jointly dragged forward to determine access, curation and research function of the shared print. Evidently an entirely new status of print collections has emerged without prior operational routines.

Also in limbo at the moment is the actual function of stored print. This is a collection referenced to a simulant collection of screen equivalents. This shadow or phantom identity is itself challenging to understand. The back-up, mastering, and authentication roles are not yet detailed or extracted from their library specializations. And faults are not of the mirror, but of the vanity of perfection. Library print collections copies are well known as imperfect.

being infrastructure

“Preservation is, in fact, one of the library and archive community’s big goals, and digital preservation is relatively well supported. Still, we should always remember that the technical aspects of preservation that we talk about on these lists are merely synonymous with preservation as it appears in our institutional mission statements.

A lot of preservation work (in digital preservation especially) is speculative, asking questions about how long the present state of affairs will continue, what will be necessary for that continuation, and how changes can be made gracefully. As a result, I would suggest that the only realistic conversation to have about preservation management is how to manage risk in a situation where preservation will always be a primary institutional goal, but a secondary operational priority. If you find that paradoxical, I agree, but I think it has the advantage of being an accurate assessment.”
Jake Nadal, UCLA Library

“These girls from Smith College came by and made this print, which still makes me giggle.” Kyle Durrie, Movable Type

feral emu

The overt content of a book results in diversified and variegated meanings as interpreted by different readers. That common observation can obscure an underlying mechanism of diversified meanings. Each reader also presents a different perspective lent by a unique composite of books previously read. Add to this disposition a unique expectation applied to any unread book.

This accentuated display disparity, similar perhaps to the naturalist’s bionic diversity, sets the stage for niche and enclave refuge. Among readers such refuge is found among genre addiction, book club synchronization, and device favoring. Even odd reader behavior could be interpreted using this ecologic approach. Rarified letterpress book fans or, more commonly, specific author readerships take on a protective stance in the wider world.

Such circumstance motivates book consumer services. The alluring Amazon suggestions and emerging retailer systems that “curate” customer behavior open new avenues for reader domestication. But watch out for the feral emu.

paratext super-cession

The new newsstand apps (i-pad, Kindle, Nook) collide paratext conventions of newspapers and magazines. Such a amalgam could then collide with paratext conventions of the book. Experimental booklet “singles” could be a precursor of such convergence. When all such conventions of paratext identity are smashed together the screen publication will have achieved autonomy. That includes autonomy from print publications.

vocabulary

Common words can be specialist terms. Here are some suggested for that subsequent use.

book -format with a speciated paratext expectation
cloud -inherent content of unopened books
convenience-presumptive affordance of screen reading frequently compromised by navigational mis-prompt
connectivity -personal intercession by a higher power
constraint -attribute enabling attentive reading
embodiment -associated material narrative of reading devices
enlace -transpired interdependence of print and screen
interplay-transactions between print and screen
print -paper based display
screen -phosphor or electrophorus display

reading an old book

I recently participated in a study session of an un-cataloged manuscript. It is a collection of sermons and other works attributed to Bonaventure (1217-1274) and it was produced in a German region around the turn of the 15th century.

Two expert paleographers and medievalists investigated the overt and inadvertent paratext and speculated on both exemplar formats and useful life of the manuscript. Various scribes divided the work using quires of fine paper. They copied the Latin and made remarks and asides in medieval German. “This is done and now I need a drink.”

It was suggestive that this examination of the manuscript also required readings by a papermaker and bookbinder. Each of these specialists also had stories to relate and observations to ponder. The object conveyed just as much material text and paratext as the literary manuscript and this information was equally authentic. There was no screen; everything was there in the room.

The transmission potential was huge. It encompassed not only the features apparent, but the whole compilation of evidences, narrations and validations and the specialist readers as well did readings in their own era and yet were transported another. The manuscript was almost knowingly acting as a mediator

revolución

The IBW is off to Guadalajara to join the codex revolution. The scene will be the announcement of the Mexican chapter of the Codex International. A manifesto is already prepared. This will be a side enclave of the International Book Fair.

The question is if this revolution has been pre-empted. There are many book making apps out there. Can the artisans really compete? Or can there be a one revolution within another? Stay tuned.

sidebar

“Eliminating hyperlink distraction. I can’t be the only one out there who finds the mere presence of hyperlinks distracting. Even the majority of times when I don’t follow the links, I find myself struggling to ignore the noise of the unknown: What awaits if I follow that link? Why did the author put the link here and not beneath some other phrase? My mind wanders when what I really want is to focus.
Enabling link evaluation. Sometimes all we readers need is a bit more info about what a link points to. Then we can make better decisions about whether the click or tap is worth our time. In the original excerpt I posted, a curious reader can right-click the link to expose the URL — that at least reveals a citation’s source. But is it worth taking the time to do so? And do most readers even know that trick? I think that simply adding a smidgen more info — for example, what I added in my sketch — could help readers quickly judge the value of the target.
Offering the possibility of adding “read later” tools. Most people know about “time-shifting” reading services like Instapaper and Read It Later. They’re great for scooping up worthwhile reads that we don’t have time for during a busy day. I think it might be interesting to implement a similar service in a document-specific way. That is, give readers a quick way to say, in effect, “that linked article looks great; please hang onto it and give it back to me when I’m finished reading this piece.” I didn’t add that feature to the sketch, but doing so would be a relatively simple matter of adding in some kind of “read it later” icon next to each link.” Peter Meyers from TeleRead

If our reading is interrupted we will read interruption…that is what reading is. These proposals of optional constraint of screen text present a rare affordance of electronic text that enables attentive reading.

reader gift book offer

Special offer! For fifteen dollars ($15) and three dollars ($3) shipping you can get the TWO books; “Future of the Book A Way Forward” and “Adventures in Book Conservation”, both by the emeritus staff of futureofthebook.com. Enjoy 150 action packed pages with illustrations and informative paratext. Email request with subject: “two book offer” to iowa.book.works (at) mchsi (dot) com. Supply shipping address and book will be sent with invoice enclosed. Offer good to 2012. (books available separately for $10 each)

scraped

“Beautiful books. Made by you. Start tonight.” (on your computer)

Our Coralville scrapbook store and workshop is closing. Another closed, too. The independent scrapbook retail industry has suddenly collapsed. Just a few years ago there were over 5,000 stores nationally, now there are only a few hundred. This was once a paper converters dream, a two billion dollar a year side-stream. A bit of printing, cutting and packaging provided a huge markup and the retail outlets cultivated consumption of paper and product. Gone now.

Gone as well, perhaps, the practice of documenting family history on paper. No more. Photographs, typescripts, drawings and scrapbook arrays; they are all history. We are technically more advanced now. Eclipse of the remaining paper market away from independents to discount chains is an issue as well as a general migration to digital scrapbooking. It is estimated that half of domestic photography may be printed but in another sense 100% of it is not and may be consumed on screen.

ibw

Iowa Book Works, a local of the International Book Workers, has risen up again in the annals of codex destiny. This little workshop of book craft and digital printing is now participating in the new economy and busy every day. There is a mood of prosperity.

We make Ethiopian kits with Mahdar, perfect for Occupiers and other activists. There is also an adventure series on new book economies. These are sold on-line where we join a movement of epiphany bookmakers and book craft suppliers. Watch the video. In addition to Epiphany other long-time book kit makers that continue to prosper include Green Heron and Volcano. We are at Iowa Book Works.

the scene

The scene is set in an old Thompson Café. The floor is terrazzo and the wall behind the booths white tile. At one time you could look through the window lettering and see streetcars passing, but they are gone now. Regulars once smoked in the back booth and you can still see silhouettes in smoke tar where generations have leaned.

She returns to exchange devices and remarks; “I notice that you are reading the Frost book too.” “Yeah, it was assigned in my class.” as he looks up and notices how equivalent they seem. “Did you believe Quixote in the print shop? It sounded like a misunderstanding.” “Oh, I don’t know, it sounded plausible.” An older lady, further down the counter looked up from the meatloaf special. She began to watch the exchange itself.

Elizabeth Eisenstein discusses such moments in her new book; Divine Art, Infernal Machine; The Reception of Printing in the West from First Impressions to the Sense of an Ending. She illustrates that early in the history of book printing the proliferation had already produced “bewilderment and melancholy”, overload and scarcity. The advancing technology became something of an opposite of a determinant. Power agendas, theological positions and social ideologies were all conflicted and institutional strategies dissolved. Attitudes toward printers and the power of print were distinguished by extreme ambivalence.

(excerpt from a new IBW thriller)

neither either or

Dr. Stephan Füssel, chair of the Gutenberg-Institute of Book Studies and spokesperson for the Media Convergence Research Unit at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. “This study provides us with a scientific basis for dispelling the widespread misconception that reading from a screen has negative effects,” explains Füssel. “There is no (reading) culture clash – whether it is analog or digital, reading remains the most important cultural technology.”

This is the same Dr. Füssel who introduced e-ink and “haptic” affordance at the 2001 SHARP session on the future of the book. The study is reported at Science Daily.

books in browsers

Internet Archive and O’Reilly Media will stream a two day conference (tomorrow) on ebook prospects. Abstracts present a useful overview of the transactions. “Ignite talks are special format where each speaker has just five minutes to share their personal and professional visions in 20 slides, auto-advancing every 15 seconds.” Also go through the live links of ebook innovators.

Brewster Kahle: Open Library
Rochelle Grayson : BookRiff
Henrik Berggren : Readmill
Eli James : Pandamian
Hugh McGuire : Pressbooks
Mogens Nielsen : Flatleaf
Miral Sattar : BiblioCrunch
Ricky Wong : Mobnotate
Justo Hidalgo : 24Symbols
Mikkel Ricky : Systime iBogen
Michael Morgan : Re-Vinyl

This conference presents the fourth estate; innovators of ebook publishing and the larger industry of book publishing. The other domains are research libraries, book art and craft disciplines and academic book studies. There is still insularity and self-reference of these perspectives concerning the future of the book, but it is interesting that each are now looking ahead with conference proceedings. Content processors, historical investigators, studio transformers and reader mediation diagnosticians; the enclaves of ebook entrepreneurs, book artists, book researchers and librarians are all participating in a time of new incunabula.

We have given consideration to enclaves of research libraries, academic book studies and book arts and crafts. These are each constituents in the future of the book. We have also given glancing notice to another constituent even more influential than the others. This is the enclave of ebook innovators and its surrounding industry of book publishing. Taken together these stake holders should have some sway over the destiny of the book but they are all clinicians of the most influential group of all; book readers.

And yet, put every interested group together and we can notice that the destiny of the book is beyond manipulation. This has been demonstrated with episodes such as transitions between scroll and codex, or the advent of printing, or the influence of technologies of word processing, or reflexive courses of reformation and counter-reformation. As with the Linotype, the past tells us more about the future.

futures of the book

“The Past, Present, and Future of the Book, Friday-Saturday, February 3-4, 2012, Cornell College, Mount Vernon, Iowa. The explosion of new digital book technologies has paradoxically energized more traditional studies of the book. This conference, to be hosted by the Cornell College Department of English and Creative Writing in Spring 2012, aims to advance cross-curricular work and to foster on-going collaborations in scholarship and teaching by bringing together scholars, artists, and librarians from multiple disciplines who are interested in the past, present, and future of the book. Interdisciplinary break-out sessions will identify and develop pedagogical best practices and may lead to team-taught courses or publications in scholarly journals. Participants will leave with innovative plans for scholarly collaboration, new courses and assignments related to the book.”

FotB will participate with a review of future of the book conferences and seminars. It can be observed that a topic central to media mediation still requires face-to-face transactions.

verge of an episode

We are on the verge of a different episode in the history of the book. Responsible approach must include serious regard and practitioner focus on issues and a measured response and mapping of the study of the future of the book. We can favor working seminars in the early stages both to tease out the scope and topics. It is amazing how much ground is out there. What is driving the continuing enthusiasm for scrapbooking? What is self-publishing if not a quirk of manuscript tradition? How embedded are paratext expectations? What is the book reader’s stake in touch-screen haptic? And so on…

de-dedication

Kindle8 now supports html5. Among the prospects for de-dedication of the black book reader is the mash-up of genre paratext structures. The comics panel composite, the childrens’ pop-up and animation, the newspaper side-bar and inset, and the march of cook book paratext are all due for a make-over display. Reader expectations will be mushed together.

The identity of the book as embodied in paratext of headers, pagination, page design, index and so on will be dissolved followed by dissolve of book genres and book reader expectations. Meanwhile all books will be displayed on a single device as a fundamental dissolve of the state of a book. The devices are the decoy allure to this eclipse.

Does anyone doubt that print will persist if only to offer context for this metamorphosis?

hott blog

Professor Elaine Treharne of the History of Text Technologies posts comments of interest for the future of the book at her blog.

emeritus prospectus2

…er, another book, a fabulous adventure also ten dollars plus three shipping. Just send your mailing address with subject “book order” to iowa.book.works (at) mchsi (dot) com.

Adventures in Book Conservation

This is an album of various investigations of interest to the specialty of book conservation. There are short studies in book structure history and various narratives of book conservation methods. Whatever your own interest in books, I hope you can find some enjoyment and germinate some questions.

All the best,

Gary Frost
Iowa Book Works
Coralville, IA

Book Structure History
Advent of Case Construction Book Binding
Paper Binding: Advancing the Codex
Sewn Board Book Binding More Than a Thousand Years Later
Scenes from U.S. Book Production in the Mid-19th Century
Future of Wooden Board Book Binding

Book Conservation Method
Adaptation of Sewn Board Structure to Book Conservation Practice
18th Century Pamphlet Rebinding
Sized Papers and Augmented Adhesives Using Gelatin
Structure and Action in Book Binding
Swan Song for Book Conservation

abstract

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.

Specialty 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.

Components of the composite stance include continuing print book roles of back-up, mastering and authentication in a context of its own screen delivery. Interplay between screen and print emerges in complements of storage and display, navigation and device access. Persistence and display functions of print are fused together while screen books disengage persistence and display resulting in distinctions of costs, editorial management and reference transactions. Navigational interplays mingle codex manipulations and touch screen prompts each with different implications for neurology and comprehension. Print and screen devices interplay fulfillment services, connectivity and portability. Gratuitous linkage of screen convenience with print displacement is examined as well as other risks to reliable transmission of literary culture.

Projection of a continuing interdependence of print and screen book as a longer-term future for the book is offered. Research agendas, conference reports and a bibliography of publications concerning the future of the book are provided.

prospectus emeritus

For ten dollars and three dollars shipping you can get the book; “Future of the Book A Way Forward” by the editorial staff of futureofthebook.com. Enjoy 90 action packed pages with illustrations and informative paratext. Email request with subject: “book order” to iowa.book.works (at) mchsi (dot) com. Supply shipping address and book will be sent with invoice enclosed.

last laugh

“A newspaper is tactile, engages all the senses, and leads to more immersive reading than what people might do online.” Arun Gupta, OWSJ

Occupied Wall Street Journal has put out a second issue. This paper newspaper is a polished graphic work with Thomas Paine essay copy. Its Kickstarter project funding is wildly successful. OWSJ is another pilot of a new economy where the product is given away while the underlying advocacy is sold. People wish to consume in support of causes that they believe in. It’s a new economy

Meanwhile the street demonstrations feed the news cycle and the media searches for the motive or agenda of the rabble. The actual demand is for new economies beyond and outside the collusion of corporations, banks and politics. Only a good newspaper can express, distribute hand to hand and document for the future such a revolution.