Books On Books

Bookmarking Book Art – Guy Laramée

2013/02/162020/03/19Books On BooksLeave a comment

The form of the book, the book as technological artifact, each of the book arts (design and layout, typography, illustration, papermaking, imposition, printing, binding, preservation and restoration) and even the book as an objet d’art attract memes — ideas, gestures, behaviors, methods, devices and practices that have spread from clay to scroll, from scroll to book, from book to ebook and perhaps from ebook to “cloud book.”

As we try to preserve – with clay counters in clay containers, with 0’s and 1’s stored on floating disks in tablets – we have assumed we are progressing.

Guy Laramée is a book artist, a subversive book artist. His “artist statement” articulates the meme of erosion, entropy and the dissolution of culture and knowledge — what he calls the “cloud of unknowing.”

Laramee's Carved Books — Copyright © Guy Laramee.

Artist Statement

The erosion of cultures – and of “culture” as a whole – is the theme that runs through the last 25 years of my artistic practice. Cultures emerge, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones. With the vanishing of cultures, some people are displaced and destroyed. We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished. One might ask so what? Do we really believe that “new technologies” will change anything concerning our existential dilemma, our human condition? And even if we could change the content of all the books on earth, would this change anything in relation to the domination of analytical knowledge over intuitive knowledge? What is it in ourselves that insists on grabbing, on casting the flow of experience into concepts?

When I was younger, I was very upset with the ideologies of progress. I wanted to destroy them by showing that we are still primitives. I had the profound intuition that as a species, we had not evolved that much. Now I see that our belief in progress stems from our fascination with the content of consciousness. Despite appearances, our current obsession for changing the forms in which we access culture is but a manifestation of this fascination.

My work, in 3D as well as in painting, originates from the very idea that ultimate knowledge could very well be an erosion instead of an accumulation. The title of one of my pieces is “ All Ideas Look Alike”. Contemporary art seems to have forgotten that there is an exterior to the intellect. I want to examine thinking, not only “what” we think, but “that” we think.

So I carve landscapes out of books and I paint romantic landscapes. Mountains of disused knowledge return to what they really are: mountains. They erode a bit more and they become hills. Then they flatten and become fields where apparently nothing is happening. Piles of obsolete encyclopedias return to that which does not need to say anything, that which simply IS. Fogs and clouds erase everything we know, everything we think we are.

After 30 years of practice, the only thing I still wish my art to do is this: to project us into this thick “cloud of unknowing.”

ADIEU Guy Laramée Copyright 2013 — ADIEU (2013)
Guy Laramée

Is that the book’s evolutionary destination – in the “cloud”?

Bookmark for the “Used e-book, slightly foxed”

2013/02/102013/02/10Books On BooksLeave a comment

In “Used e-book, slightly foxed,” Nicholas Carr ponders Amazon’s widely reported patent on a method allowing the resale or giving of ebooks and other digital objects.

"Tiny Library Filled with Wee Books and a Deep, Dark, Secret," Artist, TheMistressT. Accessed 10 February 2013. — “Tiny Library Filled with Wee Books and a Deep, Dark, Secret,” Artist, TheMistressT. Accessed 10 February 2013.

Matthew Kirschenbaum might dispute Carr’s view that there is no difference between the new and used ebook however. In his book Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, he explores the nano-differences between masters and their digital copies, much as textual bibliographers have delved into the meaningful and revealing differences among print editions and even copies of the same print edition.

And with the recent publication of a W3C specification for Open Annotation of digital text, what might be inside that used ebook? As Baratunde Thurston, author of How to Be Black and founder of Cultivated Wit, writes:

What if you could download books that had been pre-annotated? I would pay extra to read Freakonomics with commentary by Paul Krugman,The New Jim Crow with notes from editors at The Nation, or the Bible annotated by the creators of South Park. A book could always inspire new layers of meaning, but now it can host that inspiration and a slew of associated conversations.

Thurston’s proposition though is more akin to the digital equivalent of the Norton critical editions or Robert Strassler’s oversized, beautifully enriched Landmark editions of Thucydides, Herodotus and Xenophon. Still, a pre-loved ebook is a different virtual matter and might be desirable to some hapless, non-haptic readers. No doubt, resellers of used ebooks will want to assure their customers that their digital goods are free of lesser annotators’ bytes of marginalia and the latest viruses and Trojan horses favored by vandals and hacksters. How will eBay cope, assuming it can come to terms with Amazon’s patent claim?

But to bring Thurston’s proposition and Open Annotation together suggests another market: the collectible ebook. Can there be such a thing as a rare ebook? Which libraries will be bidding for Clay Shirky’s ebook collection after he has shuffled off his digital coil?

The implications for DRM and copyright are delicious. Recall the hoax that Bruce Willis was considering legal action against Apple over his desire to leave his digital music collection to his daughters? If his collection’s metadata contained extensive annotations providing insight into the music or, more likely, the celebrity himself, why should iTunes’ Terms and Conditions override the family’s claim to the Die Hard star’s intellectual property that they could share (or not) with future celebrity biographers?

This year looks set to be one of important bookmarks for the evolution of the book: secondary markets for ebooks, Open Annotation, social reading and still more devices and applications for reading.

Bookmarking Book Art – Butterfly escaping Bertran de Born?

2013/02/102013/02/10Books On BooksLeave a comment

If only this were blood red (read), one might call it “Butterfly Escaping Bertran de Born.” Click to hear a reading of “Sestina Altaforte,” Ezra Pound’s attempt to dig up Bertran.

il_fullxfull.387056371_5xjc — From Joy at Etsy. Accessed 10 February 2013.

Bookmarking Book Art – Sarah Cohen

2013/02/102025/09/13Books On BooksLeave a comment

Blizzard Brings Contemporary Art

By massofglass9 | Posted 4 hours ago, 09 February 2013 | Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts

CNN iReport

Accessed 09 February 2013

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Not cold enough for you? Skate over to the artist’s web site for her stack of Ice Books. Sarah Cohen writes, “My books are usually made from ice and melt, referring to the melting icecaps, global warming, and the loss of books through newer technologies like the ereader. It’s all related. And just like ice, the snow books will also disappear over time- representing that permanence is always fleeting and that books may also disappear from contemporary culture.”

Another videomark — One for the history of book design

2013/02/052013/02/05Books On BooksLeave a comment

What do Chip Kidd and Hans Holbein have in common?

Bookmark for “A Brief History of Reading” (and a Revisit of “The Future of Reading?”)

2013/02/032013/02/03Books On BooksLeave a comment

LiveInk® cleverly demonstrates how the display of writing has developed by presenting the following quotation from Aristotle’s On Interpretation in the forms in which it would have appeared in the different stages of the A Brief History of Reading.

“Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience, and written words are the symbols of spoken words.” — Aristotle, On Interpretation

For example,

In 2000 BC, the Phoenicians developed the first methods to represent spoken language – an alphabet consisting entirely of consonants:

SPKNWRDSRTHSYMBL
SFMNTLXPRNCNDWRT
TNWRDSRTHSYMBLSF
SPKNWRDS.

LiveInk® must hope for a place on the timeline for its re-formatting process (Visual-Syntactic Text Formatting (VSTF), which breaks up blocks of traditionally laid out text (flush left, ragged right or justified) and presents them in a more readable form, reminiscent of 20th century free verse. The claim of increased readability is based on eye movement studies by Randall Walker, Charles Vogel, Stan Walker, Phil Schloss, Charles R. Fletcher, Youngmin Park and Mark Warschauer.

Last September, BOB picked up an article by Michael Kozlowski on the Kindle feature of synching an ebook with its counterpart audiobook and explored the question, “What can the physiology, neuropsychology and sociology of reading tell us about ourselves?” The research behind LiveInk® is worth bookmarking for the reading list (see below) concluding BOB’s September 2012 entry if only to experience the “melon twisting” that comes from trying to accommodate these disparate yet related perspectives on the act of reading.

Reading List

Vinall-Cox, Joan. Moving From Paper to E-Book Reading. eLearn Magazine. March 2012. Retrieved September 8, 2012.

Rollins, H.A. Jr., Hendricks, R. Processing of words presented simultaneously to eye and ear. J. Exp. Psychol. Hum. Percept. Perform. 1980 Feb; 6(1): 99-109. Retrieved September 8, 2012.

British Association for the Advancement of Science (2007, September 11). Reading Process Is Surprisingly Different Than Previously Thought, Technology Shows. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 8, 2012.

Association for Psychological Science (2010, August 30). Eye movements reveal readers’ wandering minds. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 8, 2012.

Florida State University (2012, February 14). How Do Children Learn to Read Silently?. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 8, 2012.

LiveInk® (four papers: jaltcalljournal, National Educational Computing Conference, Reading Online and IEEE International Professional Computing Conference)

Bookmarking the Index

2013/02/02Books On Books1 Comment

In 2003, at McGraw-Hill, we discovered something about making ebooks while working with Dr. Bill Detmer and Unbound Medicine to create Harrison’s On Hand. Don’t start or present through the Table of Contents; start with the Index.

Ten years later and the lesson’s being rediscovered. Read Hugh McGuire’s A Publisher’s Job Is to Provide a Good API for Books – Tools of Change for Publishing.

A Bookmark for February 2013 – from the British Library

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Calendar page for February with a feasting scene, from the Golf Book (Book of Hours, Use of Rome), workshop of Simon Bening, Netherlands (Bruges), c. 1540, Additional MS 24098, f. 19v

Are we over-thinking EPUB? – Tools of Change for Publishing

2013/01/192013/01/19Books On BooksLeave a comment

Are we over-thinking EPUB? – Tools of Change for Publishing.

The punning subtitle to this article indicates its subtext: “The future of the book is inherently linked to the browser.”

Can Print and E-Books Coexist? Ceci n’est pas un signet!

2012/12/262017/01/23Books On Books1 Comment

“So a video journalist goes into a bookstore …” and finds little to report. Beset by the BBC’s wallowing in non-events and the trivial, I am probably flailing out unfairly at the PBS’s “dog bites man” story or perhaps indigesting a bit of humbug this Christmas season. MediaShift . VIDEO: Can Print and E-Books Coexist? | PBS.*

At least one commentator (gfrost; Gary Frost?), however, points out what video journalist Joshua Davis and his interviewees failed to explore: “[M]issed is an inherent interdependence between print and screen books. An eerie complementary fit of the different affordances means that neither will flourish without the other.” Now there is a premise worth exploring, which Gary Frost does (see previous posting).

And what would Joshua Davis and his interviewees make of David Streitfield’s story in the NY Times that sales of e-reading devices seem to have reached a plateau? “Even as prices fall, though, the dedicated e-reader is losing steam. The market peaked last year, with 23.2 million devices sold, IHS iSuppli said in a report this month. This year, sales will be 15 million. By 2016, the forecast is for seven million devices — as opposed to 340 million tablets, which allow for e-reading and so much more.”

Streitfield’s story actually begins with “the dog that didn’t bark”: the prices for ebooks themselves have not fallen, despite the predicted result of the US Justice Department’s case against and settlements with six of the big publishers (five, now that two are merging). For Frost’s premise that neither form — ebook or print — will flourish without the other, does that raise the question of whether either will decline without the other’s declining? The rules of logic alone suggest otherwise, but consider Streitfield’s “more counterintuitive possibility … that the 2011 demise of Borders, the second-biggest chain, dealt a surprising blow to the e-book industry. Readers could no longer see what they wanted to go home and order.”

Perhaps the ebook and print are more intertwined than even Frost’s premise implies. Simba’s Jonathan Norris is quoted in Streitfield’s article: “The print industry has been aiding and assisting the e-book industry since the beginning.” Of course, someone needs to point this out with a cattle prod to the publishers withholding their ebooks from public and academic libraries. The site TeachingDegree offers a succinct collection of data (PBS take notes) on the topic in a sort of dialectical digital poster.

Perhaps the whole story is just “human reads book” and is not worth a bookmark, but then where would have been the fun of finding out in punning

Magritte-pipe

with Magritte’s painting that the French for bookmark is either un signet (digital) or un marque-page (print), and in English we can make no distinction?

*In fairness to PBS, readers should take a look at the series “Beyond the Book 2012.”

Still, Frost’s Future of the Book goes far deeper.