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.
Bookmarking Book Art – Butterfly escaping Bertran de Born?
Bookmarking Book Art – Sarah Cohen
Blizzard Brings Contemporary Art
By massofglass9 | Posted 4 hours ago, 09 February 2013 | Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts
CNN iReport
Accessed 09 February 2013
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
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?”)
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
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
Are we over-thinking EPUB? – Tools of Change for Publishing
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!
“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
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.
(A general indifference?) Towards the Digital Divide
How might we explain the ascent, pervasiveness and popular appeal of digital art?
From A few months ago, Greg Smith, a Toronto-based artist, reviewed Claire Bishop’s “Digital Divide” (Art Forum, September 2012). The review and Bishop’s article touch on a recurrent theme in Books On Books: the materiality and immateriality of books.
http://www.scoop.it/t/books-on-books/p/2540958720/a-bookmark-for-letters-outside-themselves
http://www.scoop.it/t/books-on-books/p/2204732117/bookmarking-a-forthcoming-title
http://www.scoop.it/t/books-on-books/p/2123229496/to-see-a-world-in-a-grain-of-sand-or-tobacco-leaf
http://www.scoop.it/t/books-on-books/p/2082258113/post-artifact-books-and-publishing
But the review and Bishop’s article resonate with some more recent and popular seismic tremors in the world of ebooks. With all but Macmillan caving into the US Justice Department, we are still left wondering where and when the consumer benefits in cheaper ebooks will be handed out. The prices on e-reading devices have plummeted, but in the world of ebooks, a slight unease about the inevitability of e-readers is creeping in as tablets and mini-tablets seize the imaginations of some with the loudest digital megaphones. “Are e-reading devices doomed?” And by extension – given that tablets are far more than ebook devices — “Is the trajectory for ebooks leveling off?” While the post-Xmas sales analysis will be more assiduously examined for the “evidence” than the equally predictive gizzards of our Xmas fowls, as Greg Smith paraphrases Julian Oliver, “the New Aesthetician”: material or immaterial, “we should all just keep focused on making stuff.”
Related articles
- Can Print and E-Books Coexist? Ceci n’est pas un signet! (books-on-books.com)
Bookmarking Book Art – What is “Manuscripts Online”?
Elsewhere I have commented on this JISC-funded project rising like a medieval cathedral from busy hands at the universities of Sheffield, Leicester, Birmingham, Glasgow, York and Queen’s (Belfast) will warm the enlightened taxpayer’s cockles. It is now coming to a summary conference to be held at the University of Leicester on 11 January 2013.
Everything about this ambitious project to enable full-text searching of literary manuscripts, historical documents and early printed books owned by libraries, archives, universities and publishers and now online is transparent and open to public scrutiny as it happens.
The researchers’ plan is to enable users to generate visualised search results using maps of medieval Britain, add their own annotations to the data for public consumption and contribute to a knowledge base that will surround and suffuse an outstanding body of primary sources: Manuscripts Online: the resources.
You can follow the Project Plan and meeting minutes, preview site designs and the scholars’ tweets about the work and witness what appears to be a project run “by the book.”
