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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Future of the Book

  
  

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Kit-Cat Club
12:11 / 22.03.02
In Nicholson Baker's Double Fold, he writes about the destruction of printed material by librarians; not involving loss of data, but the data is put on microfilm so that the actual artefact is lost. He tells the story of how he rescued the only copies of Pulitzer's 'New York World' and the Chicago Tribune from the British Library (which was selling it off for shelf space - it isn't obliged to keep actual copies of things published outside the UK). There's an article about it here:
quote: But microfilm hardly lived up to the wild claims of the 1950s futurists who envisioned a time when it would be as ubiquitous as toothbrushes. It blurs the pages, it may turn brittle itself, it eliminates the possibility of browsing, and it kills the vibrancy of newspapers such as the World that were experimenting with multicoloured pictures many decades before Eddy Shah's Today. "In black and white, it's like seeing people in an old movie, walking jerkily. When you look through the original papers you realise it isn't a long time ago - these people who did whatever they did, dropped a bomb on Japan, they are really very similar to the way we are."


Technology makes so many differences to the way information and texts are stored - quite apart from the different ways one reads from a screen as opposed to a page. It is possible to envisage a number of different futures - one could have a sort of iPod for books with a screen, for example... but it seems unlikely that the printed book will ever become obsolete. You can't really read e-books in the bath...

What the web can do is allow peer review on texts (and other developments such as copyleft, which Nick posted a thread about a while back), and it can give people access to texts which are difficult to get hold of IRL (especially as public libraries these days, esp in Britain, are hamstrung by financial limitations and measures of 'success' such as income generated by charging to order books in... I know several librarians who find they have to chuck older books in order to make room for chicklit etc - because they get higher issue figures for the latter...) - and manuscripts which no one but scholars would normally be able to use...

There's also the possibility of 'publish to order', in which a text is printed and bound to your order (well, duh) rather than in print runs which may be too large or too small - this is possible because of digitised publishing, and would cut out much of the need to buy expensive and intractable technology which you'd need to use ebooks (readers and so on... all of which would probably incorporate may on the problems that people are having with digital media at the moment - they own the content but are unable to use it in any other context than that in which they bought it, because of the hefty copyright laws and protective technology used by record companies...).

But this would reduce the need for bookshops to carry a wide range of stock, and would also reduce the status of the book as an artefact. Would we see a substantial change from 'books' to 'texts'? Would you say you were a textlover rather than a booklover? Is Baker right to mourn the loss of printed materials as artefacts? Or will POD and e-texts usher in a bright new era of availability for all?

These sites have a lot of interesting links on these and other matters:

Acme book news
futureofthebook.com
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
13:07 / 22.03.02
I don't think I'm all that keen on the whole idea of etexts. It's fine in a work context (actually, sloping off from coding to check out 17thC lit is pretty neat) or if you're online all the time, but I like to read for relaxation, often - and a computer screen doesn't really put me in that mindset, even a laptop. PDAs aren't - as yet - as satisfying as a book is - they can't be dogeared, and don't exhibit the traits that well-loved books do. (ie: cultivating a state of almost-decrepitude that's really quite endearing.) But the appeal of them may change as the technology gets better. I still want a PDA: I just don't feel enthused about the prospect of reading books off one.

As you suggest, market research in print audiences usually finds that by and large, people like to have something to hold in their hands. It's portable, you can drop it in the bath and not have to spend hundreds on a replacement (unless you habitually read first-editions in the bath). So it's pretty resilient; you can leave a book on the bus and not worry about it too much, but you can't do that with a PDA or an etext reader.

So in short: I don't know what the future holds for booksellers, except that there's probably more to worry about with chains overpowering indies than there is from the rise of the "new book: I'd imagine sales will continue much as they are. The ability for people to get access to texts they wouldn't otherwise get (in PDF format, or whatnot) is indeed a good thing; but until the ability to bind them at home for an inexpensive amount comes along, it'll remain of limited attractiveness - unless you like hauling a stack of one-sided-print A4 sheets around town, that is.

Arse. I've replied largely from the reader's perspective. But I think I'm gonna stay in the booklover's camp. Hmm.

I do think, though, that the increased rate of electronic distribution with on-demand printing facilities becoming cheaper is really important and good - though it'll mostly be of use to niche-interest people. Mainstream fiction will probably stay as it is, but we could see some really exciting sharing-of-older-works stuff going on. If you could print-and-bind novel-sized works, or old magical texts, or scientific studies at places like Kinko's, that'd be fabulous.
 
 
Ethan Hawke
15:53 / 22.03.02
Sort of related:

Malcolm Gladwell on the Strange Persistance of Paper

In this article he talks about how paper is superior to the screen for certain cognitive tasks, and why there won't be a "paperless" office anytime soon.

What's this got to do with books? Well, one of the reasons I like books is that you can write in them, annotate, customize.
 
 
Fist Fun
07:56 / 23.03.02
At the moment e-books are completely unworkable for me. I just can't read a VDU for any sustained amount of time, same goes for palmtop readers.
However, that doesn't mean the idea is bad it just signifies that the technology hasn't developed yet. Basically paperbacks are damn near perfect for reading purposes. Cheap, portable, and immensely readable. For an e-book to offer a realistic alternative it is going to have to at least match those qualities and throw in a few more of its own.
I don't thinking it is stretching the imagination too far to conjure up an e-book reader which resembles an actual paperback right down to feel of the paper and image quality. Give it some memory and wireless network connectivity and you could change the 'book' that the reader displays with a touch of a button.
So yeah the e-book is going to be the future just not with the technology we have right now.
 
 
sleazenation
07:56 / 23.03.02
the problem of digital over analogue data is that digital almost inevitably requires some sort of reading device and storage system and these can and do become obsolete.

Remember the doomsday project?

in the 11th century William the 1st comissioned a catalogue of all he owned in england- a modern egivelent was done in the 80's and today there are few places that can actually red the modern version where as the 11th century edition is still as accessible as ever...[/LIST]
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
12:25 / 25.03.02
Yes, exactly...

Actually, almost relevant: some of the people on the Girls' Own list have been talking about libraries being forced to throw out books, and how as a result many collections of children's books are being depleted, with older/less popular titles kept in storage - so that, in effect, nutcases like self who are prepared to shell out for disgusting old school stories, or pay through the nose for first editions, are keeping the books and, in many cases, the texts (these things tend not to be reprinted...) in existence outside copyright collections. It sounds almost noble until you realise that these are books called Dimsie of the Lower Fourth...

I'm rather curious as to what kind of reader could simulate the feel of a paperback, Buk... how do you envisage this happening?

I can see that an e-book would be very useful in some contexts - say, an academic could add layers of notes to a text without rendering it unreadable with biro. But the horror if the system crashed!

For me, personally, I like books as artefacts, and I like to have them around. In fact I like to have lots of them around... I doubt I would ever feel quite the same about an e-book reader and a bundle of photocopied texts. But then I am an irremediable geek about books, so perhaps I am doomed to stay behind the times in this respect.

Customisation (Todd) is interesting, and reminds me of one good thing and one horrid. The horrid is the copy of Herodotus in The English Patient, which whatsit carries round with him all the time, and annotates and customises. The good thing is Tom Phillips' A Humument, which if you haven't come across it, is an old Victorian book called A Human Document which Phillips uses as his medium for an entirely new story and is GREAT. I will find a link in a mo. I have often wondered about trying this myself, but I think I could only do it with a book that I didn't really want to read again; my own annotations in books usually just irritate me becasue they are so inane...
 
 
sleazenation
13:30 / 25.03.02
Well, Kitkat- your experience with the girls school stories echoes my attitude to my comic collection... comics are not collected by the british library, only graphic novels thus there is no central collection/repository for comics...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
13:42 / 25.03.02
Link toA Humument

And I'm interested that you bring him up in this context, Cat, as I'd always thought of him as a visual artist, possibly there's something in the altering/customising of books that demans a more multidisciplinary approach?

[ 25-03-2002: Message edited by: Lick my plums, bitch. ]
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
14:05 / 25.03.02
Well, I thought of him because he customises the book to make a different story over the top - you know, the story of Toge - so there's a double layer of text and meaning leaved in with the visual aspects (without which the Toge narrative wouldn't exist).

I think I thought of him because he doesn't engage with the book as an artefact (like the German artist, pushface, can't remember, deals with burnt books and the Holocaust) but becasue he engages with both the artefact and the text, and comments on them both - and that is definitely a way of 'using' a book which would be impossible with an electronic text, and a way of engaging with it which values the book and the experience of reading the book as much asthe text... if that makes any kind of sense...
 
 
sleazenation
14:18 / 25.03.02
i disagree kit kat- surely the annotated texts you describes would still be reproducible as electronic texts using any number of means - think would scans of these books not produce the same effect? - since the meaning narrated is still not inherant in the object,
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
14:23 / 25.03.02
But you see, with Phillips I think the object *is* just as important as the text. Though since A Humument is published in paperback in several editions I am clearly talking wank. Hmmm.

I suppose you *could* use photoshop on electronic texts to much the same effect, actually, but I don't know enough about computer graphics to say. I must oil my creaking brain.
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
15:13 / 25.03.02
There are a couple of programs out there (both standalone and plugin) that allow users to "annotate" webpages, in much the same way as the "revise" function of Microsoft Word works. This is usually shared only by people who have a) the software or b) the permissions to see the edited pages. Some are graphical and some are textual (like this one) but they all exist to provide some idea of cross-reference: in a way, the whole web is an annotated work, given that you could read the links in and out of pages as bearing some kind of innate importance to the text displayed on that page.

PDFs been around for a while now, and seems to have widespread government/private sector support, so I don't imagine it'll be going away anytime soon. Adobe, the key developers, are pretty big, and I doubt that it's the sort of thing that's going to sink without a trace like some of the other datasharing initiatives might've done/will do/whatever. I think the idea of obsolete technologies is going to be primarily physical, not software-based from now on - emulators and the like are going to be able to access whatever format data you have, provided it's on media that's accessible to that system. Given that the internet's more widespread now than at, say, the time of the Doomsday Project, I really think that the "lack of translation" argument is rapidly losing ground here. If you can play Acorn games on your computer today, I doubt that any text-preservation initiative started now is going to fall by the wayside, really.

Sleaze; I don't think that photoshopping PDFs or otherwise-digitally-captured texts will have the same effect as a printed work. Or, rather, as a bound text. You could, in theory, scan A Humument (which I too think rocks) into a computer, but presented as individual JPEG files, it loses its punch - that's certainly what I get from the bits of it that I've seen online. It's not like holding a book in your hand, a book that's disfigured so as to become something else. I'd argue that the meaning in Phillips' case is entirely communicated by the change in the original object - though this could be because that text in particular works on the idea of transgression, of finding things that "shouldn't" be there - much like a student's scrawls, annotations and bored-classrom additions to textbooks worldwide.

Perhaps, though, this is because of a fundamental difference between digital methods of communication (like HTML) and the printed word? We expect the net to be liquid, to be ever-changing - while once something's printed out, it becomes stuck in amber?

[ 25-03-2002: Message edited by: The Return Of Rothkoid ]
 
 
Persephone
16:14 / 25.03.02
A few weeks ago I got this idea of the 21st century equivalent for the epistolary novel id est the UBB novel. Imagine, you'd have a bunch of different threads in different forums. Ficsuits would be characters. The posts in the threads would have an order to them (read top to bottom), and possibly the author could suggest what order to read the threads in. But ideally the story would be constructed so that the reader could jump in and out of threads/forums & form hir own impression of who these people are & what they're on about.

Anyway, I thought this because I was thinking about the decline of the epistolary novel probably having to do with the decline of letter-writing & how new technologies create new areas of reality... if you think that that's what a novel does, mirror reality.

I remember... when I was in college and taking a comm course, the instructor was trying to get across the idea that computers might change the way humans think. The parallel was the transition from an oral tradition to the literary transition, which encourages among other things linearity of thought. Anyway it's stayed with me that the class was intensely hostile to the idea & to the instructor for having the idea... but lo, I think it is coming to pass already with the Internet.

On a whole different tack, I won't even use a PDA for my agenda. I designed & copied off my own calendar pages & have them in a notebook. One of the things I don't like about e-texts and the like is, the inner workings of the technology aren't available to just everyman; I think it fosters dependence on other people thinking for you. I could be a dying breed, but I won't give up pencil and paper ever. I don't even use mechanical pencils.

All this is to say, I feel lucky being on the verge between old and new. Illustrator in one hand, colored pencils and construction paper & scissors in the other hand. I'm glad I don't have to be one or the other.

Going to look at that Malcolm Gladwell piece now...
 
 
alas
17:54 / 25.03.02
[i'm a fountain-pen-and-paper girl.]

I want to believe that there is more than nostalgia to my own interest in keeping the paper form of the book. i was reading an article in a print magazine this morning about the devastation wreaked in a short time in southern iraq after saddam hussein came to power and the US switched tactics and went after him. in short order a city in a developiing country that had had electricity, water and sewage, universities, schools, libraries was destroyed.

is it paranoia to believe that our electronic dependence might be a huge problem in certain scarier versions of the future? having even just one or two books salvaged from the wreckage might mean a kind of sanity, no?
 
 
Trijhaos
22:33 / 25.03.02
Bah. Who cares about the future.

You see, I'm gonna be the eccentric man that has all those books in that room he calls a study. No, no, not normal books. I'll have...paper books.

What a funny man. Why would anybody devote an entire room to reams of paper when books can just be downloaded from the Net into our handheld readers.

My paper and my pencil will have to be pried from my cold dead fingers. Computerized books won't have that old book smell. You won't be able to go into a used book store and come across that book you've been looking for. Everything will be right at your fingertips. That's no fun. Reading is a hobby and as far as I'm concerned hobbies should be fun. Searching for some musty old paperback? Fun. Going to some internet site where everything's been archived and searching for that text? Not fun.

[ 26-03-2002: Message edited by: Trijhaos ]
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
06:59 / 26.03.02
I am actually reading Double Fold right now, so will report back when I have finished. It is cracking, but it is also rather like the scene in Titus Groan
in which Steerpike burns Sepulchrave's library. Except worse.

Trijhaos - but what about using internet sits to help you find that book you've been looking for for yonks? Like bookfinder, or Bibliofind, or ABEbooks...

We should probably also consider the fact that information on the net isn't there permanently, and so texts kept online are at risk of being lost or mislaid in the same way that rare paper works are... I seem to recall a recent report suggesting that increasing use of the internet might lead to 'black spots' in some areas of history. See also (and have mentioned this elsewhere) David Mamet's Wilson: a consideration of the sources.
 
 
Trijhaos
06:59 / 26.03.02
quote:Trijhaos - but what about using internet sits to help you find that book you've been looking for for yonks? Like bookfinder, or Bibliofind, or ABEbooks...


Those sites are great and I've used them to make sure that some book I've been looking for wasn't a figment of my imagination when Amazon didn't come through on a search.

But, they won't ever replace that feeling you get from finding a book in a used book store, goodwill, a thrift store, or what have you.

You know the feeling. You're going through as you usually do looking at the books and although you know it won't be there you look for that one special book. You look and, what's this, it's there! You pick it up reverently and just stand looking at the cover. You have it! Your search is over. You run your hand over the cover and flip through the pages. You happily skip up to the cash register, plunk down the book and some money, and laughing like a maniac run out of the store with the object of your search.

No internet site will ever capture that feeling. All you do is type in the name of the book you're looking for and it's there if it exists.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
06:59 / 26.03.02
Yes, yes, blah, the finding of the long-lost book, we've all been there. BUT - if you don't mind using the net to confirm that a book exists, why should you really object to using it to download a text that you can't get anywhere else (and I'm not talking about recent paperbacks here, I mean books that you can't access outside libraries - old grimoires etc if you like) - ?

In this case we're really talking about using the net as a tool rather than a medium, I suppose. I have a feeling it will be more successful that way - reading a full-length text off a screen would ravage one's eyes.

Persephone - what were the new forms of thought that your lecturer was proposing?
 
 
Fist Fun
10:53 / 26.03.02
One of the main arguments for paper books is that they are, you know, quite nice. Nice to have around. Nice to build up a library. Makes the study look good.
Ok, fair enough, if that is what you prefer for your own personal use then no one should stop you. The key point is that books are not just for personal, leisure use and that if there is a way to improve on the book 'metaphor' then there are many areas it could prove useful.
Take for instance education. An effective reader and e-book system has the potential to greatly cut the cost of buying books for schools and universities.
As far as the technology goes then I imagine an acceptable e-book reader would resemble a book. Same dimension, same lightweight pages to turn. The difference would a fluid page content, able to change at the touch of a button. Books are just pages of patterns. It shouldn't be too hard to develop technology to change that pattern on a page.
 
 
Persephone
11:01 / 26.03.02
To answer your question roundabout, I think the reason that most of us object to the substitution of the computer/Internet as a reading appliance for the good old book is twofold: one, we were raised on books & have an attachment to them as objects, and two, the computer/Internet has not yet found its own form that fully exploits its own structure or possibilities... and, possibly, will not until someone like my nephew (age 5), who knew how to sign on to AOL at age 2 (genius), enters the scene with his slightly different brain. I say "slightly" because devoted auntie continues to provide him with olden-style books.

Living in a literate culture has set certain, er, settings in our heads--e.g., we read left to right, then top down, then we turn the page (though of course not all written languages follow this convention, this is just a dominant example).

Right now, websites tend to follow this convention mostly too --a case of technology has to adapting to psychology. A lot of website, if you look, are designed just like newspapers: masthead across the top, index-thingy in a column on the left, and main body area to the right of that.

Thing is, it's a poor approximation of a newspaper. For one thing, a newspaper is a lot bigger.

So it's interesting that Kit-Cat you say that the Internet is good as a tool, not as the objet itself... because that's what the Internet does well, search and compile and so forth. On the Internet, you can go in all directions all around & that's suited for searching but isn't the way we read... yet, maybe.

The theory is that computers and the Internet will get us off this linear way of thinking, perhaps the metaphor is more of "multitasking" way of thinking. Or "surfing," I'm not sure.

So the real revolution will come, presumably, when we are old grannies & some kid raised on X-box writes a "book" that jumps all around... a reading experience that you could *not* at all reproduce on pages bound between covers.

See, but then, I just don't know. Computers are linear themselves in their brains, aren't they? Not to mention binary, all those 0s and 1s?
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:04 / 26.03.02
Is this the case, then, that e-books are going to be read on devices with pages, where the content of those pages is changeable? I had assumed that an e-book reader would function rather like a PDA - in other words there wouldn't be any pages to turn, you'd click or scroll to the next page like you do on a computer screen...
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:25 / 26.03.02
Thanks, Persephone, for that - that got a lot of stuff I had knocking around in my brain out into the open...

I find it hard to read in a sustained fashion when I'm reading a text online because the action of scrolling interrupts my thinking a great deal more than turning a page does - that's probably more because I'm not used to it than because it's an inherent fault. I also find that when I have several browser windows open I jump from one to the other, getting quite jittery, and often don't finish reading the information, because my mind can't settle on it (but then I am not a multi-tasker - I can't read and listen to music at the same time).

Yet I can see that, say if I was checking a number of references for a paper, it would be bloody useful to have several windows open with a different text in each, so that I didn't have to have stacks of books open all over the shop. It's just that I can't process information or texts in that way. I'm sure that's why I see it as a tool, and that's why I can't get with the idea of the net as a medium for long texts.

[ 26-03-2002: Message edited by: Kit-Cat Club ]
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
11:31 / 26.03.02
quote:Originally posted by Persephone:
when we are old grannies & some kid raised on X-box writes a "book" that jumps all around... a reading experience that you could *not* at all reproduce on pages bound between covers.See, I figure that stuff like this is already being produced, or has been produced: The Dictionary Of The Khazars by Milorad Pavic seems to fulfil the definition there. It's on a printed page, but it can't really be read the same way as a normal "book" is - you have to jump through its different parts in order to get meaning out of the book; cross-reference is inbuilt, and it's only through this that you get a rough idea of narrative. In a way, I spose, the Choose Your Own Adventure books were an early version of this.

Also, I think this discussion's slowly tending more towards a consideration of narrative structures rather than physical storage/virtual storage concerns; in some of these instances, the printed-book format is a necessity, some of it it's not - but this is a different kettle of ligatures from the original question, which is more about stockpiling and keeping texts, I spose. It's interesting, where the idea of archiving crosses over with the idea of creation, but I think there's a big area there that can lead to confusion. Are we talking about new modes of textual creation, or about preserving those we currently have? And will the preservation process change the way the texts are examined? I think that's the important thing here - and to be honest, aren't new textual processes are worth their own thread? I just think we're getting a little cloudy here.

I'd posit - though I don't think you were headed this way - that it would be equally limiting to consider that the future of texts is solely predicated on a new form of storage or a newer narrative process. Those are important considerations, yes, but perhaps not the most important?

Or I could be talking arse. Which is quite likely.
 
 
sleazenation
11:33 / 26.03.02
The other thing about current virtual book tech is that cathode ray technology does not lend itself readily to the kind of intense study required by reding- staring at cathode ray monitors all day tires out the eyes and until alternative tech such as LCD diusplays become more widespread the display quality is also going to be a hinderance on the prevelence of virtual texts...
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
11:38 / 26.03.02
quote:Originally posted by The Return Of Rothkoid:
Are we talking about new modes of textual creation, or about preserving those we currently have? And will the preservation process change the way the texts are examined?

Thread on new textual processes definitely sounds like a good idea.

My original purpose in starting the thread was to examine grey areas around the book as artefact and as text, and how a shift from bookform books to online texts might affect that relationship (between the artefact and the text) - as well as questions about availability, conservation and 'preservation'. I was expecting it to take in some points on how people read, so am happy with current direction...
 
 
Persephone
11:52 / 26.03.02
Rothkoid, how about this:

If we're talking about preserving the texts that we already have, then I think that the preservation needs to include saving the physical objects that contain the texts. Because the physical object, the book, has value in itself. More esoterically, because the very physical form was an element of the text-creation, and is in a sense part of the text & I mean that on a lot of levels. Putting old newspapers on microfilm doesn't preserve a whole part of what makes it a newspaper.

(Side note: does anyone else get motion-sickness scrolling through rolls of microfilm? I do, bad.)

So I have a dubious theory that the form that a text is created for is the ideal form for it to be preserved in, which includes the idea of later access. That's where text-creation comes in, the texts that are created in an electronic form would be the first legitimate candidates for electronic preservation.

But overall, tons of factors at play. There's technical factors, but also psychological-logical and emotional ones. I do not know which is more important... I would not discount the emotional, for one. I would think that some sort of triangulation is always at work here.
 
 
sleazenation
07:14 / 27.03.02
To disagree with Marshal McClure, the medium is NOT the message, the message is the message. Yes your experience of reading transmet in issue format might be different from reading the trades, but the story is the same. The format of a book affects its value as a mass produced comodity not the merit or otherwise of its content.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
07:19 / 27.03.02
But you can't really divorce your experience of the content from the medium through which you approach it, so in that way the message is always filtered through a medium; and the way you relate to the medium might affect your take on the message...
 
 
sleazenation
07:29 / 27.03.02
does it substantually alter your perception?

will you love a film at the cinema but hate it on the small screen?

the medium is at best a metanarrative.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
07:36 / 27.03.02
Well, I dunno about substantially altering perception of the message... but I don't think you can experience the message without the medium and so, yes, I do think you might find a film different on the small screen. But that example's a bit easy, because the message of a film isn't just about text but about cinemtography, sound and scale... it's harder to make a case for books. But I would say that I have spoken with several people who say that the first edition of a book they read did affect their perception of the text, and that they have definite preferences as to the editions they want to read a text in. Which is totally illogical, really, but then I'm not sure it's a logical thing.
 
 
sleazenation
07:54 / 27.03.02
which sounds more like an ambiant thing- like the decision to read a text in a park or snuggled up in bed...
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
08:41 / 27.03.02
Sleaze:
will you love a film at the cinema but hate it on the small screen?

You betcha. I think that in some cases, especially film, altering the scale/presentation of something makes a crucial difference. Perhaps not in terms as grandiose as love/hate, but certainly in terms of the effect it has on you, and your willingness to see something again and again. Example: Swordfish was great blow-shit-up bigscreen spectacle - on the small screen, it's tawdry hokum because the scale isn't there. In Lynch On Lynch, which I don't have to hand at the moment, David Lynch talks about the difference in working on cinema and TV - he makes some good points about the fact that they are very different mediums, and that the audience has different expectation for each. THere's different limitations and benefits to both, which affect the way that one perceives the message - I think he cited the difference in feel and perception of the Twin Peaks film and tv-series. Both shot with the same (largely) actors, same director, same locale, same writer - but both had very different results, due to the medium and the different perceptions of them. This, of course, could largely be a film thing, but I don't thinkso.

Illuminated manuscripts reduced to matchbox-size wouldn't work either. The reading experience of Tintin books differed from me when I read the collections (a much smaller size) as opposed to the standalone books, which were bigger. Simple stuff, really, the resizing of paper, but it can be responsible for big changes in the perception of a work. I think the medium plays more of a part than you're giving it credit for.
 
 
Cavatina
10:23 / 27.03.02
Posted by Kit-Cat:

"Well I dunno about substantially altering perception of the message... but I don't think you can experience the message without the medium and so, yes, I do think you might find a film different on the small screen. But that example's a bit easy, because the message of a film isn't just about text but about cinemtography, sound and scale... it's harder to make a case for books. But I would say that I have spoken with several people who say that the first edition of a book they read did affect their perception of the text, and that they have definite preferences as to the editions they want to read a text in."

Kit-Cat, I think that such preferences arise because publishing conventions - covers, titles, bibliographic info., tables of contents, acknowledgements, prefaces, glossaries etc. - are very important as notational frames for our practices of reading, and for setting up contracts with the reader regarding the *genre* of the text.

As a quick example, I think of Ruth Park's 1930's novel, Poor Man's Orange (help someone - how can I get italics, now?) which was originally published with an illustration of a dole queue on the cover. It was received as a documentary novel about the Great Depression in Australia. When, decades later, it turned up on senior secondary English syllabi, it was repackaged with a young girl on the cover as romantic adolescent fiction, thus altering readers's perception of it considerably.
 
 
Cavatina
11:06 / 27.03.02
So I'd argue that, although the screen and the book may offer the same string of words, the circumtextual frame enclosing them is so different that a different set of assumptions will underlie the significance of those words for the reader.

For a start, I think that if the printed page is supplanted by e-books, our perception of any book's particular history will be radically altered, flattened out. Our sense of the depth that is a book's past is represented in an important way by both the artefact itself and the physical accumulation of various editions of it on library shelves. Looking at records in a database of a book's publication will remove this sense of chronology, its dimension in time.
 
 
Persephone
12:02 / 27.03.02
You know what though, I think it's subjective as to whether and to what degree any person specially responds to the book as an artifact or as a mere text-delivery device.

trotting in favorite old hobby horse

In Myers-Briggs terms, it may depend on whether a person falls on the N-S measure. N stands for iNtuitive, and is sort of the tendency toward abstract thought. I'm not sure what S stands for... maybe Sensitive, which is more like a preference for tangible things. This is a gross reduction, but you see what I'm getting at: a person who, say, can do math in hir head or visualize whole word-strings or even pictures is likely to experience a book in a different way than a person who, say, gets a charge out of touch, sniff, taste (maybe), the sound of a page flipping, the look of an oldstyle font on thick paper, etc. And not that a person is always one or the other...

The M-B thing is endlessly fascinating to me... you supposedly can predict using M-B whether you're the type of person who will be turned on by M-B. But regarding the future of the book, theoretically certain M-B types tend to fall into certain occupations, social positions, etc., and theoretically, certain societies on an aggregate tend toward their own M-B types. Though overall I think it's always push-pull going on. But you can see anyway, if you had a strong-N in the position of a head librarian, out go the old newspapers for that library. And strong-S Nicholson Baker, buying them up. And so on and so on.
 
  

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