Teleread and an employee of Readmill have begun a bookmarkable conversation about an important feature of books that must translate into the digital world: shareable annotations.
To share annotations in a print book, you have to lend the book or photocopy the relevant pages. Currently, our e-incunabula thrash about in the barbwire of a three-way no-man’s land: between publishers and librarians, between anti-DRMists and pro-DRMists and between the ebook as a licensed good and the ebook as a sold good to which the “first sale” doctrine applies. We haven’t brought sustainable peace to any one of those fronts yet, although there are fleeting signs of olive branches on the battlefield.
Penguin experiments with the New York Public Libraries, Bilbary has pulled together a collection of over 400,000 works (including Random House ebooks) to make available to US and UK public libraries, the Douglas County Library in Colorado continues its purchase-only effort.
Small and large publishers have been and are going DRM-free or nearly so. In 2009, Liza Daly of Threepress Consulting started a list of DRM-free publishers and stores. Today, she can add among others Springer, Tor/Forge and Pottermore (with effects addressed in interesting detail by Mike Shatzkin).
As Matthew Bostock argues,
“Translating the act of annotating physical books to the digital experience is all good and well, but isn’t there more we could do? Isn’t there more we could dream about? We’re talking about e-readers here—small devices that are connected to something that has the potential to truly evolve the entire concept of digital reading. I’m referring, of course, to the web. … If we share what we highlight with other people, and bring a discussion right into the margin of a book, what do we have, and what have we done? We have added value to the digital reading experience. And looking at annotation in this way, there’s a clear reason why we should give it a little more thought.”
See Matthew’s mini-manifesto on annotations on Teleread:
No doubt known to Matthew, but there are forces at work to nudge us toward his vision. The standards world has not been sitting on its hands: the W3C and NISO both have initiatives underway to address the minimum required technical specifications for a standard on shareable annotations.
For the past 25 years, Chip Kidd has made a name for himself as a top book designer. His designs have helped transform books into visual icons.
With the disappearance of the dustjacket’s original function — to protect the binding of the book — is it imaginable that the book cover will no longer be needed as the book evolves?
Imaginable, yes. Likely, no. As long as the imagination of Chip Kidd and his like bring their passion to publishing.
The possiblility of building up the thumbnail cover across the pages/screens of the ebook or giving it a functional role in the narrative may mean we come to judge a cover by its book!
“The Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a leading U.S.-based trade association representing the entire book supply chain, announced today the publication of a new Policy Statement endorsing EPUB 3 as the accepted and preferred standard for representing, packaging, and encoding structured and semantically enhanced Web content — including XHTML, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file format.”
For the record and from the Library of Congress:
“The Open eBook Publication Structure or “OEB,” originally produced in 1999, was the precursor to EPUB. Version 1.0 of the Publication Structure was created in the winter, spring, and summer of 1999 by the Open eBook Authoring Group. Following the release of OEBPS 1.0, the Open eBook Forum (OeBF) was formally incorporated in January 2000. OEBPS Version 1.0.1 [OEBPS_1_0], a maintenance release, was brought out in July 2001. OEBPS Version 1.2 [OEBPS_1_2], incorporating new support for control by content providers over presentation along with other corrections and improvements, was released as a Recommended Specification in August 2002. EPUB 2 was initially standardized in 2007. EPUB 2.0.1 was approved in 2010. EPUB, Version 3, was approved as an IDPF Recommendation in October 2011. It is substantially different from EPUB, Version 2, both in using only a single form for textual content and in having support for audio, video, and scripted interactivity (through Javascript). No longer supported are the EPUB_2 formats for text content, one based on the Digital Talking Book [DTB_2005] format and a second form based on XHTML 1.1 compatible with OEBPS_1_2. A single new encoding for textual Content Documents is based on HTML5/XHTML and CSS3, despite the fact that both of these W3C standards are still works in progress. SVG is supported for graphics and it is possible to have an EPUB_3 document whose “pages” consists [sic] only of graphics, for example for a graphic novel. Several legacy features are deprecated. Some legacy structures may be included for compatibility of EPUB_3 documents with existing EPUB_2 readers. EPUB_3 readers are expected to render publications using version 2 and version 3.”
Coincidentally, Amazon UK reported today that it is now selling 114 Kindle ebooks for every 100 print books it sells.
The EPUB format is not natively readable on the Kindle device or in the Kindle application. Customers can add conversion apps easily to their devices to make EPUB readable on a Kindle, but as consumers seek the advantages of an industry standard, how will Amazon respond?
Feel free to suggest new additions to the timeline!
Added 20120806.
Ebook Timeline Updated – 20120725
As we are still in the Age of e-Incunabula, what better than a trip half way around the world to Japan to see one of the world’s largest collections of Western incunabula — and an excellent site to bookmark?
The National Diet Library’s site refers to itself as an exhibition based on the book “Inkyunabura no Sekai” (The World of Incunabula) / written by Hiroharu Orita, compiled by the Library Research Institute of the National Diet Library. Tokyo: Japan Library Association, July 2000 (in Japanese).
The exhibition provides a timeline of incunabula from the second half of the 4th century when the shift to the codex occurred to 1980 when the British Library began entering data on its collection of incunabula into the ISTC. The site provides much more than this chronology.
Images from the collection, statistics on the type fonts used, coverage of design and how the quires (sheets of paper folded, forerunner of book signatures and files in EPUB!) were arranged, and the binding process — all are covered straightforwardly and often in entertaining detail. Look on this site and consider how far we have to go with our ebooks and apps!
Added 20120725.
Ebook Timeline Updated – 20120719
Not as interactive as the Counterspace timeline for typography below, but certainly as densely informative, and it extends to typography online.
Added 20120719.
Ebook Timeline Updated – 20120717
Another timeline, this one focused on bookbinding. Is .zip the binding for an ebook?
Added 20120717.
Ebook Timeline Updated – 20120710
On the heels of the question above comes an outstanding interactive infographic on a critical element of the book and ebook: typography.
Added 20120710.
Ebook Timeline Updated – 20120706
Yet another ebook timeline, and this one is broken down into interpretive categories, “The Age of Writing” and “The Network Era,” which is thought-provoking. Are we in “The Age of the Tablet”?
Added 20120706.
Start of the Ebook Timeline
In 1936, “Chronology of Books & Printing” appeared in its revised edition, published by Macmillan in New York. In 1996, Cor Knops picked up the torch and started a Book History Timeline from Sumerian clay tablets (he could have started with the caves at Lascaux!) through to 1997 with the first issue of “Biblio Magazine” but with little acknowledgment of ebooks.
Now in 2012, looking back to 2002, we find this journalistic stab at a timeline for ebooks.
Forged together, the chronologies would have to include “As we may think” by Vannevar Bush in 1945, Ted Nelson’s coining of “hypertext” in 1963-65, the Apple Newton in 1993 (how many publishers and authors have kept track of the free downloads of their Newton ebooks?) and much more.
Another extension of the ebook timeline appears in this book by Marie Lebert, which fills in important gaps, misses others and offers more than a few overemphasized continental developments. Her timeline takes us through 2009, which means that the signal events in 2011/12 of ebook sales’ outstripping those of print in some markets are still to be added.
The Bodleian is offering a prize draw to attract participation in its crowdfunding for the digitization of its First Folio.
“Dr Paul Nash, an award-winning printer, will reprint Leonard Digges’s poem in praise of Shakespeare from the front matter of the First Folio. It will be printed on a folio bifolium of English, hand-made paper and printed in the Bodleian Hand-Printing Workshop at the Story Museum. The text will be composed by hand, using types first cast in the 17th century, with ornaments. Each sheet will be printed with a title and colophon, sewn into a paper cover.”
They call this “kickstart” the “Sprint for Shakespeare” in conjunction with the cultural and sports Olympics events going on this year.
Yesterday, Claire Kelly caught up with Travis Alber. Today, Philip Jones of FutureBook, a digital blog from “The Bookseller,” caught up with Bob Stein. Social reading serendipity?
See on Scoop.it – Books On Books
Travis Albers interviewed by Melville House’s Claire Kelly on social reading. Alongside Bob Stein (Institute for the Future of the Book), the founders of ReadMill and a handful of other “future-designers,” Albers and “ReadSocial” partner Aaron Miller have put a convincing case forward for how social reading touches a segment of the book’s DNA and how the book and our reading may evolve.
See on mhpbooks.com
A book published earlier this year by an Argentine firm raises questions about the desirability of indelible ink and trackable data, writes James Bridle…
The title of Bridle’s item in “The Guardian” — or “The Groaniad” as it is fondly known for its ponchant [sic] for typos — is “Ebooks: do we really want our literature to last forever?” It’s hard to tell at first whether Bridle has his tongue partly in his cheek.
He introduces his theme with William Gibson’s collaboration with Dennis Ashbaugh — “Agrippa (a book of the dead)” — which is covered in the July 20 post below. Though he mentions the competition to reverse-engineer the cryptography that encrypted the poem on its floppy disk at the playing of its first reading, he doesn’t mention the site (http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/) dedicated to archiving the event of that first reading.
But as Bridle notes, the physical might have now accomplished the disappearing act the digital could not. He refers us to “El libro que no puede esperar|The Book That Can’t Wait,” which its publisher Eterna Cadencia just released in print with ink that disappears in two months. Bridle’s contrarian view to the negative press greeting this instance of print-performance-art is “the persistence of books is a myth in any case: … One of the advantages of ebooks might in fact be that they are easier to move on from, to delete, to forget, preventing us from getting bogged down in bad books and past selves, and, as Eterna Cadencia want us to do, move on and discover new things.”
That may be a clever Heraclitean spark — or Zen cone as “The Guardian” might have it — disguising a marketing ploy. But that very clamor for attention and the clamor of the self-publishing remind us of what is really at stake: time.
Our ebooks may be “reading us,” but perhaps we are the ephemera in this case. Long after we have ceased being tracked, some of those ebooks and books — like the illuminated manuscripts this March at the British Library’s exhibition “Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination” — will mark the human effort to prove the myth that our words and images will last.
On her blog “Felt & Wire,” Alyson Kuhn shares her foray into the origins of the word “colophon.” [Search for this link on the Wayback Machine]
In ancient Greece, Ionia to be precise, the city Colophon stood on a summit. The colophon, the final page stating the title of the work, who made it, when it was made, how it was made, for whom it was made, etc., stands at the summit of the book, justifying its being named for that city. It is the maker’s signing off from the summit of the foregoing text. That “signing off” can be construed as the “finishing touch,” which might refer to the reputation of the Colophonian warriors for being the deciding factor in many a battle, hence the phrase of Erasmus ‘Colophonem adidi’ – ‘I have put a finishing touch to it.’
The name of Kuhn’s site — “Felt & Wire” — reflects her passion for paper. She tag-lines it as “Impressions from the Paper-Obsessed,” which explains why her entry does not go back as far as the first appearance of colophons on clay tablets — nor ahead as far as their regular appearance in websites (an example of which can be found here).
But there is a functional logic for going back as far as those biblical “colophons.” They are recurring phrases related to the “toledoth“passages that appear in the Genesis tablets. Toledoth is Hebrew for “generations” as in “These are the origins [or histories] of Noah,” which a convincing group of Hebraic scholars translate in the possessive. As in “The foregoing book relating these stories belongs to Noah” or “This is Noah signing off.” So the toledoth perform some of the same finishing functions as colophons.
There is also, according to the Edenics site, an etymological reason for going back to the Hebrew. The word “colophon” itself has its roots in the Hebrew word “Gimel-Lamed,” meaning “wave” and “a prominent man-made heap.”
Certainly many books fit that etymological definition (a prominent man-made heap) and deserve a colophon whether they have one or not!
Looking forward, though, it is endearing that so many websites bear the colophon device and, in doing so, raise the questions, “Should we think of these websites as books?” “How might the use of traditional parts of the book in websites or ebooks tell us what the book will be beyond the Age of e-Incunabula?”
From what better vantage than the colophon to look back for the origins of the book and forward for its future?
Pew Internet’s latest report on e-reading offers librarians ten valuable lessons on how they can increase the usage and demonstrate the value of their collections.
The 11th corollary — there are “herds” of ebook readers out there whose watering holes are here:
These are only five among several to watch. Most of these reader apps are available for the iPad, and even Amazon has introduced the facility to share annotations and comments via Twitter and Facebook in Kindle Fire 6.3.
There is also a new kid on the block: Zola, one to watch if only for its ambition to compete with Google Play and Amazon.
Now, if Overdrive were to enhance its recent acquisition Book.ish with this social reading facility, then …!
Caveat: Michael Kozlowski has this to say about the phenomenon: “In the end, social media in electronic books is severely lacking. … Having more embedded social functions in an e-reading indie app or mainstream company taking [it] to the next level will only help the industry grow and spurn [sic] more companies to offering competing or better options.”
And that’s where the 11th corollary comes in. Librarians might be able to make a difference — introducing (or following) their patrons into the social e-reader experience, making the global more local, sparking local reading groups and reading lists, providing a local human interaction in helping readers find books and answers about them.
If the companies mentioned have not already reached out to the library community and publishers to push this possible next step in the evolution of the book, perhaps the librarians should reach out to the social ebook readers and the publishers?
Anyone up for grafting on some branches to cover Queen Anne’s Statute (1710), the German forerunner of the mass-market paperback (1867), the introduction of the English modern paperback (1935), the introduction of standards (ISBN, EPUB), the start of the Google Print/Book Project (2004/2005), the month and year ebook sales overtook print sales at Amazon (May 2011), the appearance of the first book app … ?
“The Book Industry Study Group (BISG), a leading U.S.-based trade association representing the entire book supply chain, announced today the publication of a new Policy Statement endorsing EPUB 3 as the accepted and preferred standard for representing, packaging, and encoding structured and semantically enhanced Web content — including XHTML, CSS, SVG, images, and other resources — for distribution in a single-file format.”
For the record and from the Library of Congress:
“The Open eBook Publication Structure or “OEB,” originally produced in 1999, was the precursor to EPUB. Version 1.0 of the Publication Structure was created in the winter, spring, and summer of 1999 by the Open eBook Authoring Group. Following the release of OEBPS 1.0, the Open eBook Forum (OeBF) was formally incorporated in January 2000. OEBPS Version 1.0.1 [OEBPS_1_0], a maintenance release, was brought out in July 2001. OEBPS Version 1.2 [OEBPS_1_2], incorporating new support for control by content providers over presentation along with other corrections and improvements, was released as a Recommended Specification in August 2002. EPUB 2 was initially standardized in 2007. EPUB 2.0.1 was approved in 2010. EPUB, Version 3, was approved as an IDPF Recommendation in October 2011. It is substantially different from EPUB, Version 2, both in using only a single form for textual content and in having support for audio, video, and scripted interactivity (through Javascript). No longer supported are the EPUB_2 formats for text content, one based on the Digital Talking Book [DTB_2005] format and a second form based on XHTML 1.1 compatible with OEBPS_1_2. A single new encoding for textual Content Documents is based on HTML5/XHTML and CSS3, despite the fact that both of these W3C standards are still works in progress. SVG is supported for graphics and it is possible to have an EPUB_3 document whose “pages” consists [sic] only of graphics, for example for a graphic novel. Several legacy features are deprecated. Some legacy structures may be included for compatibility of EPUB_3 documents with existing EPUB_2 readers. EPUB_3 readers are expected to render publications using version 2 and version 3.”
Coincidentally, Amazon UK reported today that it is now selling 114 Kindle ebooks for every 100 print books it sells.
The EPUB format is not natively readable on the Kindle device or in the Kindle application. Customers can add conversion apps easily to their devices to make EPUB readable on a Kindle, but as consumers seek the advantages of an industry standard, how will Amazon respond?
Added 20120806.
As we are still in the Age of e-Incunabula, what better than a trip half way around the world to Japan to see one of the world’s largest collections of Western incunabula — and an excellent site to bookmark?
National Diet Library’s site refers to itself as an exhibition based on the book Inkyunabura no Sekai (The World of Incunabula) / written by Hiroharu Orita, compiled by the Library Research Institute of the National Diet Library. Tokyo: Japan Library Association, July 2000 (in Japanese).
The exhibition provides a timeline of incunabula from the second half of the 4th century when the shift to the codex occurred to 1980 when the British Library began entering data on its collection of incunabula into the ISTC. The site provides much more than this chronology. Images from the collection, statistics on the type fonts used, coverage of design and how the quires (sheets of paper folded, forerunner of book signatures and files in EPUB!) were arranged, and the binding process — all are covered straightforwardly and often in entertaining detail.
Look on this site and consider how far we have to go with our ebooks and apps! Added 20120725.
Feel free to suggest other timeline entries!
Previous:
Not as interactive as the Counterspace timeline for typography below, but certainly as densely informative, and this infographic extends to typography online. Added 20120719.
Another timeline, this one focused on bookbinding. Is .zip the binding for an ebook? Added 20120717.
On the heels of the question above comes an outstanding interactive infographic from Counterspace on a critical element of the book: typography. Added 20120710.
Yet another ebook timeline, and this one is broken down into interpretive categories, “The Age of Writing” and “The Network Era,” which is thought-provoking. Are we in “The Age of the Tablet“? Added 20120706.
INCIPIT (i.e., where the scoop started earlier in July):
In 1936, “Chronology of Books & Printing” appeared in its revised edition, published by Macmillan in New York. In 1996, Cor Knops picked up the torch and started a Book History Timeline from Sumerian clay tablets (he could have started with the caves at Lascaux!) through to 1997 with the first issue of “Biblio Magazine” but with little acknowledgment of ebooks. Now in 2012, looking back to 2002, we find this journalistic stab at a timeline for ebooks.
Forged together, the chronologies would have to include “As we may think” by Vannevar Bush in 1945, Ted Nelson’s coining of “hypertext” in 1963-65, the Apple Newton in 1993 (how many publishers and authors have kept track of the free downloads of their Newton ebooks?) and much more.
Another extension of the ebook timeline appears in this book by Marie Lebert, which fills in important gaps, misses others and offers more than a few overemphasized continental developments. Her timeline takes us through 2008, which means that the signal events in 2011/12 of ebooks sales’ outstripping those of print in certain months are still to be added.
Books On Books 