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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Future of the Book

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13:08 / 27.03.02

You see, that makes me wonder why a strong type-N would want to be a librarian anyway...

The Baker book is *full* of the most appalling tales (well, appalling to me at any rate) of people in charge of books cutting up old books in perfectly good nick in order to scan them onto dodgy microfiche... grrr. And it's interesting that most of the advocates of this sort of programme were officials high up in the CIA, with major CIA connexions, and with connexions to military information technology scientists - NOT archivists or traditional librarians.

'It's a librarian, Jim, but not as we know it.'

I suppose this is the historian in me coming out. The actual artefact is pretty important in itself, not just as a medium for content... x random book could tell us all sorts of things about the history of paper, binding, typography, school prize-giving, what people who annotated the text thought of it, how certain editions were abridged. Baker talks about how regional variations and different editions of newspapers get lost, because libraries across the country bin their bounds runs of papers in favour of the one microfilm copy; and about how the microfilm loses the colour pictures, a lot of the subtlety of the engravings, and makes it harder to browse through. Moreover, the microfilm itself seems to be even more brittle and prone to accidents than paper.

09:31 / 28.03.02

OK. I have just been looking more deeply at the 'Future of the Book' weblog I linked in the opening post, and the author talks about eliding E-book Systems' patented 'page turning' software (which simulates the visuals of a page turning over on the screen) with haptic technology ('CyberGrasp') which simulates the actual feel of turning the book's pages in your hand.

But why bother with this expensive technology? Especially when there is the possibility of publishing on demand... If we are so attached to the physical idea of reading that it makes sense for companies to consider developing this kind of technology, what on earth is wrong with yer actual book? Is it just that e-books and CyberGrasp are shiny?

(This is what Baker thinks happened with the microfilm projects - librarians and preservation officials seduced by shiny tech. and bored by the problems of storing bookform books and journals...)

11:52 / 28.03.02

I am sure the following will break you out into hives, but... at one time I was friends with a largish contingent of folks who had failed to write their dissertations & had to find other professions, one of these being library science. More than one person said chirply to me, "You know, being a librarian isn't about books anymore!" I think it was said that information is what it's about now, and that's N-talk for sure.

And yeah, people are like crows and like shiny things. That's a different kind of N-talk, New-talk.

I guess the good thing is: if you see this happening and if you think this is horribly wrong, then this could certainly give you a life-purpose. Save your life and some books at the same time...

goes off to think

12:14 / 28.03.02

Oh dear, yes, I don't really do shiny... perhaps I am posting on the wrong board - 'Barbelith: for shiny people'. I shall start a new one called 'Pedants-R-Us'.

But, yes, information. I agree; but I am not sure that some library techniques are the best way of keeping information or allowing people to access it (surely if you have lots of books you can service more people's info needs at one time than if you have fewer [because more expensive] microfilm/fiche/digital/e-book viewing machines?). Technically I suppose digitisation of texts should make them more accessible, but unfortunately I think that the expense of equipment will mean that information is yet another thing produced for the fortunate and denied to the less fortunate.

Which is why, I think, POD is a good 'between' idea - it means texts are accessible, for an outlay, but less of an outlay than would be involved with e-book readers &c. And hurrah for downloadable e-texts.

12:50 / 28.03.02

Of course, there are a number of problems with privilidging books as an information storage system. Not only is their the danger of fetishising the commodity nature of a book, but also it ignores the the originall manuscript from which the book is based...

13:03 / 28.03.02

But if you were to privilege the original manuscript then you could *only* disseminate copies through film/digitised media, surely?

13:48 / 28.03.02

don't get me wrong, i'm not suggesting priviliging manuscripts either, but i think its important not to get carried away in the apothesis of the book form at the expense of the plurality of the text.

13:59 / 28.03.02

But the book form *allows* for plurality of the text...

... having said which, I am not claiming primacy for the bookform (well, I am - but only for me, because I prefer them) - but I CERTainly don't think that books should be made obsolete in favour of other forms.

wembley can change in 28 days

14:47 / 28.03.02

I'm in the book-lovers camp as well. I wouldn't get used to any kind of e-book format for a long time yet, especially when those soft, off-white pages just feel so good to the touch. It's all about the tactile nature of the book, and its ease in personalisation. I have to spend a lot of time with a computer print-off before it feels mine, but a book is yours as soon as you buy it. In fact, I'd buy from any publisher that felt like packaging novels so that you still had to cut the pages on first reading.

I also don't create on-screen. My writing prof and I had a great discussion about this last week, about the difference between sitting down to a computer, or opening your notebook and getting out a pen. There's something about the brain to hand to pen to paper process that feels different from the brain to fingertip to keyboard to screen, and I have a hell of a time composing at a computer.

And if I'm a throwback, that's fine. Just make sure that when I'm first up against a wall, I've got a nice copy of some Dostoyevsky to pass the time.

06:08 / 29.03.02

I wouldn't get used to any kind of e-book format for a long time yet, especially when those soft, off-white pages just feel so good to the touch.

But what if an "e-book" resembled a book in every way except that the content could change. If soft, off-white pages are so important then research would go in that direction.
The point I am trying to make is that an "e-book" doesn't have to be a whirling, clicking robot from Lost in Space. We should try not to think in terms of todays technology, but in terms of the technology we would like to develop.

06:19 / 29.03.02

book fetishists unite!

but i think its important not to get carried away in the apothesis of the book form at the expense of the plurality of the text.

plural for whom is perhaps always the question, isn't it. developing the new technologies that buk's talking about will surely not be cheap, and will therefore, i suspect, be funded in one of two ways or both:
1) high text costs OR 2) advertisements. One thing: at least books are safe from having popup screens that click up every time you turn an ivory page with garamond font, slightly textured, edges rough cut....
(i better go off to a dark quiet room now...)

11:08 / 29.03.02

"developing the new technologies that buk's talking about will surely not be cheap"
We can't make that assumption though. In fact I would guess that the opposite would be true. An e-book reader system would cost less and if it didn't it wouldn't be commercially available. It isn't too hard to imagine a system that cuts out costs such as publishing and distribution.

The Return Of Rothkoid

10:28 / 31.03.02

Buk:
It isn't too hard to imagine a system that cuts out costs such as publishing and distribution.

I agree, it's not hard (or even preferable!) to imagine a system that cuts out publishing/distribution costs - but you're still going to be reliant on current publishers' pricing scales. ebooks aren't - as of now, I guess - setting the world on fire. So the investment isn't really going to be there - as long as the bookform has some kind of supremacy, the ebook will be dogged by crap support/interest from publishers, or high prices, or - as alas suggests - pop-up ads, the likes of which currently crap all over the net. Just as we can't suggest that the price of development won't be astronomical, it's foolish to suggest that it won't be. It probably will be, and that's why there's not something available that meets the book-fetishist's demands now. It's not viable yet. Admittedly, there might be a sea-change in publishing in the next ten years or so, but I really do not think that it's likely. Ergo, the justification for dumping huge amounts of cash into it, from a publisher's viewpoint - unless they're Penguin, I spose - just isn't there. Of course, if these technologies are developed in the context of university research - which is entirely possible - that may change the way the tech is accepted; if it spreads from university outwards, and is successful with students, then publishing world will probably adopt, rebrand and flog it themselves.

If it [the ebook revolution] takes on, as others here have suggested, it's probably going to be with the next generation of readers. In the same way that some (most?) of our grandparents aren't hip with computers, some of our children (or most of us, possibly) aren't going to take to the technology. I suppose that if kids are brought up with the ebook as the cheap, universal standard, then it'll be as common as the book is - but at the moment, the printed form is dominant if only because of its cheapness, and because you've got centuries of printing and mass-production behind it. We're tooled up for the printed page, currently, and I think that dismantling - even to a small extent - that behemoth is going to take a lot longer than developing the technology will.

10:55 / 31.03.02

How do e-books work? I am mostly curious about print on demand, which can't be free --can it be? Does it exist now? I know there are some free e-texts out there, the last I read was the Butler translation of the Iliad. Will POD --free or not-- be mostly used for "classic" out-of-copyright texts, or for contemporary books to a smaller audience than can be justified by a full press run? Even though you reduce the printing costs of such books, won't you need a whole lot more human editors, designers, etc. to get greater numbers of texts in the system? Is this a route for academicians whose role partly is to create demand for works that might otherwise languish, to actually motivate the production of, say, a Penguin paperback of the works of Pauline Hopkins?

In a way, and in a way that I guiltily like, POD reminds me of olden days when subscribers would buy into a small-sized run of a book & would get the printed pages that they would then have leather-bound. Being the crafty sort, I could completely see myself learning book-binding as a hobby. Only I'm not sure that the whole shebang will be any more affordable to the non-rich, of which I am, than it was way back when.

15:44 / 31.03.02

be sure to check out the bookwarez thread . . . it's got me thinking of how we pay writers for what they produce, and how the book industry both facilitates and hinders the spread of ideas...

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