futureofthebook.com

in the basket

The four color Ricoh aflicio is wirelessly networked through the Airport router to our three terminals. This is an infrastructure that a few decades ago only a publishing house could aspire to. Meanwhile authors of all kinds are becoming their own publishers. We put the rat’s nest of wires, modem and node in a handmade basket.

new economy

Meanwhile, in a down economy, health services continue as a fabulous growth sector. But care of our bodies hardly extends to regard for the well being of books. This inequity now exists at a time of new urgency for the longevity of books.

What has changed is that the conceptual works that librarians evaluate and organize are now more mortal than they are. This adds a futility to the work of librarianship. The churn and transience is regarded a virtue of electronic discourse, but, unfairly, the resulting distraction is allocated to librarianship. Next librarians will be blamed for biased enclaves of political action when the librarian’s objective and discipline-neutral approach to information is the antidote needed. Here, again, the allure of wide, global connectivity is attributed to the electronic discourse and any dysfunction is left to librarians.

paratext 3

“In sum, an index is a kind of a collection of pre-made searches: rather than diving headlong and unawares into a search oval’s do-it-yourself void, an index presents would-be searchers with an already assembled, alphabetized list of the 500 or so most common query items.” Peter Meyers, TeleRead

Curiously it is exactly paratext that screen book advocates intend to abandon or revamp. We should pause before dissolving or disrupting such an anatomy. For one thing it is a two-way bridge and disregard of book paratext could play out in derangements. This is an actual neurological scenario and Nicholas Carr has offered extensive discussion of that topic. We should also pause before dissolving or disrupting a premise of intermediation between those who work closely with physical books and those who work to assure their optimal screen delivery.

Don’t believe that paratext is the defining trait of the book? Try negotiation of a hypertext mystery, a Twitter feed novel, or book reading interrupted with e-mail, blog postings, absent pagination, pop-up live link, search or commentary. Paratext features of the book must be stretched across such new mediation and yet remain consistent with bionic needs of the reader. If patterns of comprehension are interrupted we will be reading interruption. Reading is like that.

paratext 2

“The codex is built for nonlinear reading — not the way a Web surfer does it, aimlessly questing from document to document, but the way a deep reader does it, navigating the network of internal connections that exists within a single rich document like a novel. “ NYT Review of Books

paratext

The entire editorial staff of FotB is currently assigned to the book; The Future of the Book; A Way Forward. So other postings may be few.

There is no lack of contention over the future of the book. There is presumption of sudden shift from print to screen by advocates as they await the digital rapture. At the same time there is also a persistence of the iconic role of the physical book as print advocates await their vindication. Such stand-offs can’t be productive. An option and the premise of this discussion is to look exactly between such stances at a tertiary identity for the book now.

Simple assumptions from both viewpoints have long been discredited; simple super-cession or exchange of print books by screen books has not occurred and assured persistence of print books in a context of their screen delivery has not arrived.

why write books?

A need to convey concepts out of body and into objects is a species characteristic. It proved advantageous to social evolution and even across the longer reach of species evolution. The current interplay of this out-of-body tactic of cultural transmission is interesting as a more traditional manuscript to print migration is now mediated by an intermediate state of manuscript to screen option that dissipates the transformation of ideas into objects.

long room battle

“The Trinity Long Room Hub is pleased to announce that it will host the 2012 conference of the Society for the History of Authorship Reading and Publishing (SHARP) at Trinity College Dublin in June 2012. The theme of the conference will be ‘The Battle for Books’. The conference will begin on the afternoon of Tuesday 26 June 2012 and end on Friday 29 June 2012.”

Also public symposium on the Future of the Book, October 18, 2011, Iowa City.

guess what?

FotB and its production arm of Iowa Book Works is going to produce a book; Future of the Book: A Way Forward.

“We are meandering into important moment in the history of the book. Popular expression has it that we are at a “tipping point” but we are more likely positioned at a fulcrum. Just beyond the trivialities of polarized advocates, the distinctive features of screen and print books have suddenly come into in plain view as the formats actively define each other. Eventually a synthesis will emerge to obscure such origins but it is too early for that. Synthesis has occurred before as with manuscript and print. But for now, between print and screen books, it is a weird moment.

For now we can look exactly between the screen and print book. We can observe interplay and teetering. We can confirm an old adage of media studies that new mimics old and old begins to mimic new as inter-players anticipate a synthesized transmission role together. Other interplays of scroll and codex, manuscript and print, print and paper or electrophoric and phosphor display all present this pattern of synthesis. The advent of literacies and exchange of folded correspondence first dramatized the continuing saga of interplay between scroll and codex. Cycles of manuscript and print continue and a swing from Latin cannon to vernacular genre energized the synthesis of printing and paper . An interplay of display adapted best to daylight or dark offers a mini-epic for book reading devices today.

Trivialities are everywhere. Print book advocates always mention the smell and feel of books and screen advocates always mention a good story or the disembodied content and they disdain digital rights management or other obstacles to free content. Each grasps at distinctive affordances of their favorite medium, but those affordances deserve much better definition. Some specialist communities have capacity to provide such definitions. For example the library preservation community is one of the few that can actually explain the continuing role of print books in a context of their screen delivery.”

book watching

What about book reading device mobility and portability? The trend has been to smaller and evermore connected devices. This trend may reflect our own physical and mental mobility while it also suggests consequences of books acting as out-of-body conceptual works.

Paper books have a tendency to become sessile. As they accumulate in small or large amounts they become immobile and non-portable and the student backpack load drives promotion of the screen textbook. Early book reading devices were scaled as dictionary weight items, but miniaturization took over trending all the way to wristwatch format. A strange implication being that books can be so mobile and portable that they disappear.

Mobile computing generally has both a futuristic and passé connotation, but what is the implication for books? Size, weight and connectivity associated with book display could be a zone of special influence of electronic devices on the future of the book. Not that print books have not adventured far and wide with such factors, but that screen display will shift literary genres, episodic formats and reading opportunities in odd, new ways. Here mobility and portability of the screen book devices may prove more influential than hypertext, multi-media, or book searching or book enhancements together.

Stay tuned…

a suggested method

“Annotations created this week are likely very consistent with annotations created last week, etc. But as we learn, we can’t really go back and resolve earlier inconsistency. We have a constant struggle to maintain consistency between the online database, the print edition, and InfoHawk.” Special Collections Curator

Various inconsistencies haunt descriptions of book bindings. Many terms are ambiguous (i.e., hinge and joint or spine and back) and, if taken altogether, represent vocabularies of different practices (i.e., bibliographic description, book trades, preservation practice) and language origin. Different incentives (i.e., treatment report, catalog description, book sellers prospectus) complicate correlation and consistency of definition (i.e., case binding, publisher’s binding) is lacking.

Annotations of bindings in the online database could be encumbered by these obstacles. To advance efficiency of use and entry consistency we should determine objectives of any such annotation. No collection is primarily a collection of historical book bindings but it is reasonable to augment the description of rare books with a description of the provenance of its material state. Such description can aid research as it positions each copy in a context of initial and subsequent uses by past readers. Examination of the book binding can do just that.

Here is a suggested outline method for description of the material state of a bound book. (1) determine if the book is extant in its initial binding. (This would be the book’s first binding contemporary to the production of the imprint.) (2) determine if such an initial binding has been modified by a range of re-fabrications including repair, recovering, restoration, etc., (3) determine if the book has been rebound at a subsequent time.

Such a method immediately constrains enumeration of physical features except as direct evidence of the initial or subsequent binding state. It limits and implements the working vocabulary of terms. It offers consistent and comparative information for the library user.

Three words; kerf, edge and crop all prompt field observations of the initial, disturbed or subsequent physical structure of a book. These are the quick keys that indicate the presence or absence of an initial binding and its possible relation to the period of production of the imprint. Kerf refers to the evidence of previous sewing stations and their patterns, edge refers to the clues of edge trimming methods and re-trimmings and crop refers to evidence of missing annotation and margin.

Bindings subsequent to the initial binding of a book cause damage to evidence from the period of production including disruptive collation, association of disparate works and outright damage to physical pages and delicate images. The damage is notorious both to the object and to its study. It can consist of re-sewing, fold gluing, hammer rounding and backing, edge trimming and cropping, bleaching and washing of leaves, over pressing, inflexible back linings and, the final insult, a fashionable, new cover.

a divide

“One writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader.” Joseph Conrad

This convenient divide also suggests the tangent of a more native screen book. It would be a book on the readers side separated from the process and closures of the publishing side. When a book is completed, its use is begun. The electronic screen book, in a future beyond print mimicry, will emerge, flourish and disappear within the reception of the reader.

prequel

Welcome to an elementary idea that the book now spans both physical and virtual delivery formats. I choose to name these two formats “print and screen”. Print in the narrow sense of printed format is not intended and screen in the narrow sense of e-book publication is not intended either. Print and screen are used in the widest sense to encompass all physical books and all screen based access to books.

We will adventure in a wonderland of the changing book. Specialty enclaves such as library preservation, academic book studies, and studio book arts are all shifting to adapt and readapt to the advent of electronic resources. Wider sectors of publishers, educators, and information technologists are also being moved. The new electronic resources with their infrastructure of connectivity and user engagement are beginning to displace the role of physical books.

The implementation of the new interplay of print and screen books has been commerce and enterprise driven. For example, Google has pre-empted academic agendas and modified study habits side stepping millennia of teaching and learning methods. Information technologists have been no less influential instilling urgency and de-installing even recent formats. History itself is now viewed as a process about to occur.

Was the enterprise of printing and papermaking at the turn of the 16th c. also shifting an installed scholastic and religious infrastructure? Did an entrepreneurial incentive reveal that the future would be vernacular genre rather than Latin classic? Perhaps we are again at a moment in transition of books. If so book readers are a test bed for evaluation. Almost everyone is aware of the churn of the identity of books.

product disguise

It is frequently mentioned that very early printing for books mimicked manuscript composition. Printing was so novel then that it is possible to imagine that in the first few decades printing could be mistaken for hand writing. Less mentioned is the mimicry of parchment by paper as used for 15th c. book production. Here the product of paper was already known, but again book makers wanted to emulate the established quality standard. Another book product disguise never mentioned is mimicry of earlier wooden board binding by the newly industrialized and modernized 15th c. binding. Here all features of the wooden board structure were redesigned for both decorative appeal and economical production.

As a template for media history, the product disguises of 15th c. book production can also be extended forward to note the more realized products of printing, paper and binding that followed. These finally departed from decoy and deception to authentic new product. Both paper and printing merged including web feed and automations as well as distinctive genres of print production. Binding too crossed the threshold to case construction, cloth covering and paper boards and on to automation.

So imagine a parallel course for screen books. First is a period of disguise and mimicry of the previous product. That would be followed, as markets and new literacies provoked transition, by authentic electronic books.

job printing

i-pad menus are now the atms at restaurants.

haptic

I was innocent at the kiosk getting a spool of pink linen thread when a distracted book arts maven dashed up. “Do you have a dictionary? I need to look up a word.” “No, what is the word?” asked the cashier. “Haptic”, she said.

“The study of touch as a mode of communication.”, I offered.

This word has legs. Elaine used it a half dozen times in a talk on materiality of the book at the Tallahassee conference on the future of the book. As it transitions from the Greek and German it will be interesting to see what coverage it captures in English. I worry that it will take on too much, or even less, take on wrong consequence.

taking off

“Can you imagine that? Potentially 30 million new e-ink e-book readers could be manufactures by the end of the year using screens from just this one company. Hard to believe that just a few years ago we were all wondering if e-readers would ever take off.” Chris Meadows, TeleRead

Over the decade the old trope was that e-books are forever taking off. Long awaited adoption of electrophoric e-ink readership has arrived, or left the ground.

reporting live

FotB is on location at the Book Art Biennial. Here we will discern the future (if any) of linkage between book arts and the screen/print book destiny. I did attend a great gala for the presentation of the 2011 MCBA Artist’s Book Award. I imagine this is a contest for artists, not for bookbinders, but the winning work, by Sarah Bryant, featured a double cover Coptic (sewn boards) structure.

As for the future of the print book in a context of screen book delivery, the tropes were fairly consistent. Much scrutiny of either print or screen, but not much looking in between at the interplay. Duplicities are easy but trilogies, both in theology and book arts, are more difficult.

future of libraries

Prospects for research libraries had a good review at the FSU Future of the Book conference. Excellent librarian presentations mapped the terrain of pacing the reader with relevant and helpful services and outpacing the shifts in university directives for the library. The identity of the library in the university will shift as its brand of books is dissolved. Then library services will evermore infiltrate instructional roles and librarians will become research collaborators and “thinking partners” with students and faculty. Librarians will become so embedded in departments and their research projects that the library may disappear as it flourishes.

Curious also the identity of Special Collections will be supplanted as it prospers. The identity of collections as “special” is actually an anachronism of contrast with other collections as “general”. Now all print format collections, both last copy repository of general print and the unique research materials will merge together into a “source” collection of print in a context of its own screen delivery.

Which research library will be first to rename its Special Collections” as its “Source Collections”? We need a more descriptive name and more central (less special) strategic role for these physical collections.

field report

“…librarians, scholars and book-lovers alike acknowledge the uncertain future of the physical book as they witness the emergence of technology-driven alternatives. There are many possible futures.” Julia Zimmerman, Dean of Libraries, Florida State University.

Technological determinism at play was not the deeper topic at the Future of the Book conference in Tallahassee. A shift from network book to social book was more apparent as the book rides across popular fashions of connectivity. Bob Stein along with his clips of Marshal McLuhen, provided excellent perspective on pre-cursive electronic books. Bob also brought us up to the next thing as his team is about to release the browser based learning platform named Social Books with wonderful automated moderation of group annotation and enclave engagement.

Bob Stein is certainly a pioneer of the screen book. He noticed early that the book is distinctive in reader control and he visualized that screen interaction could, possibly, fulfill similar dedicated engagement. He has tried all the previous media and their navigational routines and produced screen books in each era. He will not be satisfied short of the wonderful experience and excellent legibility as achieved by the best print books. Bob Presented a higher goal in the face of the commerce of the e-book.

We also heard from outright print book advocates. In the book studies field the reflexive nature of the studies turns learners and instructors toward craft rehearsal and retrospective exposition and elaborate investigation of materialist features which does not result in much visualization of the future of the codex. Lacking is an opened space for futurist projection. Activities in such a workspace would call on skills acquired but would allocate them to a distinctive practice of examination of future prospects for books.

Specialists could examine emergent network and social enclaves for book reading, emergent technologies of display and storage of books, fulfillment of self-publishing desires, prospects for paper and screen books within new economies and green constraints, academic rigor projected to the cloud and crowd, prospects for Zine and Manga and graphic novel genres, future of keyboard prompting, and so on.

Both the scope of prospective analysis and the ever-shifting economic and cultural roles of books would lend sustainability, relevance and attraction to any future of the book event. Further, as an odd influence, real focus on future of the book, both print and screen, would immunize established book history and book arts topics from an excessive intrusion and distraction of future prospects that they now endure.

This last slight point of managing futurist distraction may be more and more significant. Even well established disciplines such as medieval manuscript study, craft bookbinding or forensic bibliography must now straddle a wild interplay of screen based methodologies and competitions. Relieving even a slight distraction from such study topics would be helpful and responsible.

industrial spy

We are off to Tallahassee for a Future of the Book conference at Florida State University. That will be followed by our attendance at another hosted by Minnesota Center for Book Arts. Looks for exclusive and skewed reports here.

I did meet Bob Stein at the Tallahassee conference. Here is a link from him that the UICBers will enjoy. He alerted the audience that we were meeting together to discuss the future of the book on the 100th anniversary of the birth of Marshal McLuhan.

presence of an absence

“The printed page is giving way to the networked screen. The Institute for the Future of the Book seeks to chronicle this shift, and impact its development in a positive direction.” Fotb. org mission statement

Academic influence on the future of the book remains ambivalent and defaults on the distinction of print and screen. Popular book commerce is loaded with enthusiasms for the advance of screen book publication, and, at the same time, enjoys surreptitious growth of print publication.

Lacking is concerted influence on the future of the book as a cohesive screen/print transmission system. Here academic perspective is muted while popular commerce of the book breeds a disarray of obstacles, intimidations and consequences from continued growth of both screen and print.

Academic surveillance of this juncture in the future of the book remains conflicted and the Institute for the future of the book has withdrawn from postings. Meanwhile TeleRead, representing the popular commerce of books, continues to scroll and its transactions rage on.

linkage

It is interesting how troubled the market share for Sony readers has been. This is an accomplished consumer electronics company yet Amazon, Barnes & Noble and, now, Google have all secured growing segments of the device market. Could it be that there is a helix relationship between the reading format and the content provider? Is this the lurking premise of publishing?

If so another question is how does Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Google each and collectively represent publishing enterprise? Framed this way many realizations leap into view. These “publishers” outsource to publishers yet provide alluring and efficient channels for publishing success and new readership markets.

There is also the quirky surprise that the screen as a most disembodied delivery format for a book may present a very embodied product as a physical device. Here is a distinctively new product in the codex line; a thing that is not a book alone but a well packaged, well advised and well admired thing pure and simple. It many even be possible to sell them everywhere and frequently!

That Sony finds it difficult to invade such a device market is weird, returning to the publishing empire connection and the stranger linkage of device publishing.

explorable explanations

This essay by Bret Victor provides an excellent profile of “active reading”. It is striking how format agnostic this theme can be: that the active reader engages all means of investigation.

persistence and display

Persistence and display functions of print are fused together. Output to paper halts revision, fixing the display and storage format in a single manifestation. This severe constraint has long optimized editorial, format, and typographic control. It has engendered strict disciplines of book design, book printing, bookbinding and print publishing. Mistakes and errors in print are overt and persistent.

Another side effect of the display/storage fuse is that each print book is constrained to display and store only a single conceptual work. Print libraries are really huge warehouses of dedicated reading devices and that constraint of display and storage linkage assures a capacity of each given object to sustain continued forensic and bibliographic investigation. There is an overt, unique disposition between shelved books and, curiously, the presence of an absence of books missing or not yet authored.

Screen books, on the other hand, disengage persistence and display. This unlinking compounds delivery scenarios, disrupts editorial control, disturbs typographic refinement and multiplies the separated display and storage costs.

Without linkage of persistence and display functions a single screen device can display tons of titles. Aside from a curious annoyance of inability to reference to two or more books at the same time, the loaded device can also bring on longing for a more embodied book collection. Leveraging this longing, e-book commerce promotes continuing purchase of more devices. Such commerce, not of books but of reading devices, may lurk behind projection of the “death” of the physical book. The semblance of personal possession and personal connectivity as epitomized by smart phones and hand-held readers is deceptive since we replace them without a pause.

library of the future

“We believe that having materials close by enhances their use, and that storing them remotely will do the opposite,” she says. “By not providing ready access to materials, we de facto reduce their value, and we impact research in ways we wouldn’t want.” Judith Nadler, University of Chicago, Mansueto Library

“We’re in a hybrid culture at the moment,” says (Adrian) Johns, professor in history and chair of the Committee on the Conceptual & Historical Studies of Sciences. “Part of the skill of being a good reader is knowing how to juxtapose these two media effectively.”

What do smart people know? Perhaps there is a cohesive double helix between print and screen books and it is best to keep them in proximity. The research library trend as indicated by shared print repository movement is making print evermore remote.